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.\u00a0 Pence\u2019s statement was a public reassurance that Trump\u2019s sudden announcement of the Space Force was not just another of the president\u2019s frequent sudden announcements that have no connection to reality.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
Links between the American space program and military have long been one-part open secret, and one-part open question.\u00a0 It has always been difficult to determine just how much of NASA\u2019s budget can properly be considered military spending.\u00a0 A few years ago while starting to work on a paper examining Margaret Mead and other anthropologists\u2019 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\u2019s famous 1988 essay on \u201cThe National Security State,\u201d in which Vidal\u2019s analysis of mandatory and discretionary spending revealed that the American military\u2019s budget was far larger than the meek 37%…<\/p>\n