In Hollywood at least, space weapons are a relatively simple concept. The good guys, from Captain Kirk and his crew in Star Trek, to Luke Skywalker’s rebel alliance in Star Wars, battle intergalactic villains with an array of colorful lasers and particle-beam cannons, then the bad guys get dispatched in a spectacular, explosive finale. The messaging coming out of the White House on the subject, by contrast, could not be more vague.
This week’s attention-grabbing revelation by air force secretary Troy Meink – that the US has deployed some kind of weapons in space – carried nothing in the way of context or detail, and left experts scratching their heads at exactly what Donald Trump has in his cosmic arsenal. And, equally importantly, what he intends to do with it. It could just be a building block, and the US is going to lay out more later with that.
To me that would make logical sense, if that was the plan.” What the plan actually is has never been made clear, and Meink, in his announcement, stressed it was unlikely ever to be. But as Russia and China, both US adversaries, have advanced their own aggressive outer space ambitions and agendas, Trump has responded by placing an ever-increasing focus on militarizing the heavens. During his first term of office, he created Space Force, the first new, separate branch of the US military in more than seven decades.
Last month, he signed an executive order designating the first US Space Academy, a proposed joint civilian-military institution modeled on the army and navy training academies at West Point and Annapolis, to be sited at an as-yet unnamed location. This week, Military Times reported plans to recruit and train 10,000 new guardians, as Space Force service members are known, to join uniformed ranks within the next five years. Gen Dan Caine, who as chair of the joint chiefs of staff is the country’s most senior military leader, told the Air, Space and Cyber Conference in Maryland this week, that the armed forces including Space Force must be “prepared to fight, endure and win … from the seabed to cislunar space”.
Added to a number of other maneuvers and bold pronouncements Trump has made concerning space in recent weeks and months, it is hard not to see the space weapons reveal by Meink – who holds a civilian position reporting to the US defense secretary, Pete Hegseth – as a further blending of the traditionally separate military and non-military roles of US space policy. In August, the White House unveiled a national space transportation policy that gives Hegseth, as head of the defense department, new responsibility and authority to determine with the chief of Nasa, Jared Isaacman, who manages all US space launches, and sets an ambitious, expansive federal target of more than 1,000 launch and reentry operations by 2030. The president, meanwhile, has made no secret of his desire for US astronauts to beat China and land on the moon before he leaves office in January 2029; and in March laid out plans, arguably rooted more in optimism than expectation, to invest $20bn (£15bn) on a moonbase to secure for the US the first permanent foothold on the lunar surface.
Some analysts see an almost sea change in the way the Trump administration has approached space in pursuit of its geopolitical goals, compared to previous presidents who upheld decades of separation between the government’s civilian and military needs. He continued: “There seems to be a tendency to pull them together more than we’ve seen in the past [and] the creation of the Space Academy is just another data point that suggests that at least within the eyes of this administration, the missions are very not just complementary, but very, very similar. Seen as an ally of Elon Musk, the billionaire SpaceX chief and former political acolyte of the president, Isaacman has proven a staunch Trump loyalist in social media posts and in public appearances.
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