I guess we shouldn’t be surprised that Donald Trump, the most belligerent of presidents, who sees every issue as a fight, from trade tariffs to a war on immigrants, eventually came to project his aggression onto the biggest canvas of all: outer space. From here on out, space will be known not as the final frontier, but as the ultimate sinkhole for Pentagon dollars, a vastness not to be explored so much as made to reflect worst of our president’s, and so humanity’s, impulses in the direction of dominance and destruction. The idea that Russian and Chinese militarization of space should be matched by the U.S. jumping on the bandwagon, rather than inspire efforts to head off a costly arms race that serves the people of no nation, seems to go unquestioned.
The problem is not a Space Force per se, or even Donald Trump's enthusiasm for a new military branch, but the general idea of militarizing space. We can only hope that the ludicrousness of the Space Force nomenclature will focus public attention on this larger travesty of the Pentagon finding our planet insufficient for its perpetual war-making, and now looks to the stars, or at least beyond the atmosphere, for fresh pastures.
It’s telling that the official announcement of a plan to create a Space Force is more outlandish than a related piece of out-of-left field space news: that Patrick Stewart will be reprising his role as Captain Jean-Luc Picard in a new Star Trek spinoff, an announcement that appears to have caught even Stewart off guard ("Set your phasers to stunned," as one CNN writer accurately observed). One can only wish that Donald Trump had watched a lot more Star Trek, and had spent a lot less time playing the part of the blustering tycoon, so that his ideas of space were more informed by the optimism of that show and less by the dark needs of his mangled psyche.
Canny observers are asking what business interests, including those who have contributed to Trump and the GOP, stand to benefit from the creation of a Space Force and militarization of space. But even as those questions are run down, the Trump 2020 campaign itself is already working to make money off the proposed new entity, with a plan to sell Space Force-themed merchandise, and an ongoing solicitation to Trump supporters to vote on the Space Force logo of their choice. It’s not clear whether this logo vote would also result in an insignia for the actual Space Force, in which case we would have the sorry phenomenon of only Trump supporters being allowed input regarding a public entity, and raising the possibility that the eventual winner will manage to incorporate references to “Crooked Hillary,” Benghazi, and the fine Trump line of luxury hotels.