Congress might create a new military branch: the Space Corps

(Image credit: NASA/The Associated Press)

published 8 July 2017

If your dream in life is to be a guardian of the galaxy, that may be an option sooner than you think. Representatives in the House Armed Services Strategic Forces Subcommittee are considering legislation to create a new branch of the U.S. military — the Space Corps — to organize space missions by 2019.

The legislation in question is an amendment to the 2017 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), the annual military funding and policy bill. The proposal would make the Space Corps an independent branch under the aegis of the Air Force, much like the relation of the Marine Corps to the Navy. But the Air Force is the proposal's chief critic, as senior Air Force officials have argued there is no current need to change from the present functionality of the existent Air Force Space Command.

"I think many people would recognize that at some point as military space capabilities continue to advance, space forces will need to become their own service," Todd Harrison of the Center for Strategic and International Studies told CNN. "The question is really one of timing and transition. The Air Force seems to think space is not yet a fully mature warfighting domain in its own right and does not need to be a separate, co-equal service."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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