This week Vice President Pence announced that the Department of Defense is beginning a planning process to establish a sixth military branch, known as the Space Force. Pence’s statement was a public reassurance that Trump’s sudden announcement of the Space Force was not just another of the president’s frequent sudden announcements that have no connection to reality. Pence claimed that this new Space Force military division will be in place by 2020, and while many in the media are reacting as if the militarization of space were a sudden departure from American policy, as with much of the Trump presidency, this policy shift is only a minor, more grotesque version of what our government has long routinely undertaken.
Links between the American space program and military have long been one-part open secret, and one-part open question. It has always been difficult to determine just how much of NASA’s budget can properly be considered military spending. A few years ago while starting to work on a paper examining Margaret Mead and other anthropologists’ work on a 1950s and 60s program designed to measure and shape US public attitudes about space (known as Project Man in Space), I had assumed I would find a basic critical analysis, akin to Gore Vidal’s famous 1988 essay on “The National Security State,” in which Vidal’s analysis of mandatory and discretionary spending revealed that the American military’s budget was far larger than the meek 37%…