Is a Space Force Necessary? | Thoughts from an Engineer

Hello Steemians!

Alex G. Orphanos here, your science communicator. I have talked with a lot of folks both online and in person about the idea of a Space Force, and whether or not it is necessary to create a brand new branch of the military to deal with the domain of space. I also wanted to challenge the idea that space is solely a “war-fighting” domain.

I hope you enjoy the episode! Please follow up in the comments on what you think and let’s get the conversation started! Watch the video below, listen on #ApplePodcasts, or read the transcript below!

Spread love and spread science!

Transcript:

Hello and welcome to the show. I am your science communicator Alex G Orphanos and it’s about time for another episode of thoughts from an engineer.

A lot is going on, especially in Space. The global dust storm is clearing on mars and we’re waiting for opportunity to wake up and respond to us. Elon musk is thinking of making Tesla a private company like SpaceX and pulling it off the publicly traded market. The Parker Solar Probe launched successfully aboard the ULAs Delta IV Heavy Rocket. And to top it all off the commercial crew astronauts were announced for both SpaceX’s Crew Dragon and Boeing’s CST-100 Starliner beginning the incredible journey of two developmental American commercial spacecraft launching aboard American rockets on American soil for the first time since the Space Shuttle was retired.

There’s so many things to talk about! So while I gather my ideas for those future episodes, I wanted to share some my thoughts on the evolution and changes in my life and with this show, as well as some continuing thoughts on the space force, and the exploring the idea of looking at space as a war-fighting domain and the idea of the United States ‘dominating’ space.

But first, let’s do a little bit on my own evolution and all the changes in my life and with the podcast. It’s been almost 5 years of podcasting for me, 4 years with today in space coming up in November. For those of you who don’t know, today in space won first place in independent audio/podcasting production in the United States for public access television. We were given the hometown media award from the alliance of community media which is an organization housing most public access for town, education, and government broadcasting in the country, including things like NASA TV. So it’s a really big honor and I want to thank every listener of this podcast for subscribing and being a part of it, including telling your friends and family about us. I also want to thank Norwood Community Media for allowing me to put the show on public access television and for believing in the show enough to submit it for the competition. Thank you for helping us spread love and spread science! This is such a cool award - I’m wicked excited and truly honored.

We are also moving locations! Over the next few weeks I’ll be moving to my new place which means we’ll have a new studio and a dedicated space for both today in space and AG3D printing. There’s lots of really amazing things to come in the near future, so make sure to subscribe to stay up to date.. We’ll make sure to hang up the award in the new studio, as well.

Speaking of change, let’s get back to some space topics shall we? There has been some change in the development of a space force and I’ve had a lot of questions about it recently. Even though I definitely recommend checking out the first episode we did on the space force, I’d like to go further with it in this episode. The last episode was really discussing what the Space Force was at that time, a new branch of the military, like the air force. We also covered the latest NASA space directives, which outline the direction NASA will take the next four years. But seeing as the Space Force has developed a little bit further I want to touch on a few things and share my thoughts as usual.

Our exploration of thought will revolve around the idea “Is a space force is necessary?”. I’ll introduce some ideas to get the conversation started, but the whole idea of this is to get us to think past the general clickbait headlines and binary thinking of this partisan, political, yet also national defense thing called a space and ask whether or not a space force is even necessary.

I would recommend you check out Vice President Pence’s recent speech, outlining more direction for the Space Force. There is also the Department of Defense paper that overviews that actual breakdown of how the Space Force will actually operate.

But what I want to talk about is whether or not we should see war as a space fighting domain. I agree that it is inevitable, because it has happened in the land, sea, and air - that we will inevitably have conflict requiring military intervention in space. Space will not be a utopian peaceful endeavor - our sci fi has covered that pretty thoroughly and we start the ‘space race’ after sputnik was sent into orbit. So yeah, there will need to be a military presence.

But if we do, I think our best path forward, the thing that gives us the best roll of the alternate universe dice for a space future is by focusing on prevention of space war. There’s an alternate universe where there’s a giant space industrial complex and there’s oppressive intergalactic kingdoms in charge. But going full lock down defcon 5 into space dominance gets us to that space industrial complex the quickest.

But we’re not at war in space. We won the space race, and have been the dominating presence in space since then.

I think that we shouldn’t be focusing on having a war in space, we should be focusing on preventing war in space and creating a world where humans can travel and explore space for explorations sake, for scientific research, and not for war. Obviously, you have to prepare for the scenario where an act of war occurs in order to prevent it, but any further than that I believe will only stoke the flame of starting a real war in space. Freedom and access to space for everyone will in my opinion douse that flame of war and allow for exploration to occur. Military intervention and restricted access to space keeps us on the Earth and unable to explore. No one wants that.

But, there are also other realistic reasons I see the military being necessary and why a space force might make sense. For example, we will probably need a military presence when we start mining asteroids for rare earth metals. They’re called rare earth metals for a reason, because there really isn’t a lot on the planet and we probably got our supply from an asteroid impact. The good thing is there are lots of these rare metal asteroids in our asteroid belt, waiting to be prospected and mined for their orbital ores. And we’re not talking about billions of dollars, not even trillions of dollars. There are early asteroid value estimates in the quintillions of dollars. You’ll need some kind of police force to make sure we don’t have humans sending pirate spaceships to commandeer or pillage your astroid for it’s valuable materials. We need to set the precedent properly on how we approach this kind of inevitable interaction in space.

Because whenever valuable resources are involved it’s almost inevitable there will be some kind of war to gain control of them. And if we look back at alot of wars over resources, it’s because they were limited. And this is just an idea, but we could change that trend if we bring an asteroid back so massive it completely oversaturates the amount of a metal like titanium and makes it value drop, there might not be a place for war. Think of the salts wars that have happened through human history, that’s right, humans went to war over salt. It was a necessary resources to make sure your food lasted even remotely long. Salt was the only thing that kept food long enough to sustain a population and enable humans to not have to hunt every single time they needed more food. In part, the invention of the refrigerator leveled the value of salt, and I think the same thing could happen with the introduction of unheard amounts of space titanium. There would be no more scarcity and a practically non-limited supply, especially if space mining becomes routine.

I don’t see wars happening in the scouting of asteroids, or even in the retrieval of these asteroids. Where I do see intervention happening is on location in orbit where these asteroids will be kept to mine the rare earth metals. Intervention could also occur on the return trip after the mining has already been done. In both those scenarios I do see the need for something like a space force, or simply training the military branches like the Army Navy and Air Force for such missions. But if it makes more sense to have one dedicated branch of the military to deal with the space domain, then yes space force is necessary. Another example of why it would be necessary comes from our interview with Brian stofiel of Stofiel Aerospace which I highly recommend you listen to. Here's one company that’s able to 3-D print rockets out of plastic and launch them within a week. It’s not large payload, but it makes access to space frequent and without limitations of launch sites. So we’re gonna have to figure out how to defend and moderate these launches and make sure someone doesn’t just strap something to 3-D printed rocket and launch it wherever. A Space force could help with dealing with the ambiguity of a new type of launch architecture and obviously to deal with overt threats that could find develop by those wishing to do harm

To me any kind of preparation we can do for the future we should do. Is there a good time to create a space force? Probably not until it’s too late, which would be exactly the time we need to use a space force. I don’t have any problem with preparing for the future, in fact I think it something we should do. Asteroid impact defense is something we desperately need, because we don’t really have a good way to defend, never mind find or alert us of such impact with enough time to do anything about it. There’s no need to send Ben Affleck and Bruce Willis to the asteroid if a space force is monitoring them and managing threats of future impacts. My point is, there are plenty of other things, other than focusing on war-fighting that a space force can be instrumental in. Our space force will have to fight our asteroid impact enemies, both orbitally foreign and domestic, that attempt to annihilate us in a cruel game of orbital roulette that would decimate us just like the dinosaurs. We are war with nature in space more than we’re at war in space with any other country.

But, do I think the idea of a space force has been sold as this political football? Do I think that many people see it as a partisan issue? Yes, yes I do. But that’s not any different than any politics in the past, so instead of focusing on picking a side I wanted to make sure we had the conversation and at least got to touch on some other ideas you might not get elsewhere. So with those thoughts, please let me know what you think either in the comments below or by reaching out to us on Twitter at today in space pod, using the hashtag today in space, or by emailing us at today in space [email protected].

I am your science communicator Alex G. Orphanos hoping you spread love and spread science - thanks for joining in for another episode of the award-winning space science podcast. Have a great week, and stay safe.