【2023 Archives】

Apparently the U.S. military isn't big enough023 Archives and it needs to expand into space.

During a speech at a Marine Corps Air Station in San Diego on Tuesday, President Trump said that the United States needs a "Space Force," because we obviously need to protect ourselves from the threats of the galaxy.

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Space Force?Yes, you read that correctly.

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"My new national strategy for space recognizes that space is a war-fighting domain, just like the land, air and sea," Trump told the military personnel in the crowd. "We may even have a Space Force."

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Trump appeared to have come up with the proposal for a space force on the spot.

"We're doing a tremendous amount of work in space. I said, maybe we need a new force. We'll call it the space force," he deliberated at the podium. "And I was not really serious, and then I said, 'What a great idea!' Maybe we'll have to do that."

Trump's speech inspired an flood of space-inspired reactions, and of course, memes.

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It's not exactly clear what Trump means by "Space Force." The Air Force is already intimately involved with spaceflight, a fact that members of his military audience probably already knew during the rally.

It's possible that Trump was referencing "Space Corps," a proposed idea that would effectively be responsible for military operations in space. As military use of space expands, some experts have said that the Space Corps is exactly the kind of thing that administrations need to consider when thinking about national security in orbit.

That said, funding for the Space Corps was left out of a defense policy bill at the end of 2017.

While the idea of a space war may sound pretty ridiculous, it's not out of the question. Plenty of things we use everyday -- like GPS and weather forecasts -- rely on space-based assets to function.

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Only one question: where can we sign up?

Additional reporting by Miriam Kramer.