With President-elect Donald Trump set to reenter the White House on January 20, his affinity for space is likely to play a prominent role once again.
Trump signed a bill into law creating the Space Force in 2019, and now, about five years later, he will assume the presidency with the ability to further the objectives that prompted him to pursue the creation of the department. Trump was repeatedly mocked for creating the military branch, and it culminated in a short-lived series on Netflix starring Steve Carell and John Malkovich.
But a lot has changed since then, as U.S. adversaries have pursued anti-satellite capabilities and other offensive space-based weapons.
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There is the possibility that with Trump returning to the Oval Office, his pet project from his first term could finally be given the support it needs to stand on its own.
Separating Space Force from the ‘Mother Air Force’
With Trump’s return, one policy position he may pursue is to separate the Space Force from the Air Force, which it falls under, similarly to how the Marine Corps is within the purview of the Department of the Navy. Making it a completely standalone service branch was debated when the department was created during his first administration, but it did not ultimately come to fruition.
Todd Harrison, a senior fellow with the American Enterprise Institute, has previously warned that the Space Force “has relied on ‘Mother Air Force’ for core functions — arguably to its own detriment.” He contends that by doing so, the Space Force is always a second priority.
When asked by the Washington Examiner if it could become a standalone entity this time around, Harrison said it’s “a real possibility.”
“There is value in it that will actually help the Space Force in the way it manages its own resources rather than having the push and pull fight with the Air Force over every dollar,” he said.
Similarly, Clayton Swope, the deputy director of the Aerospace Security Project, told the Washington Examiner that there may be some benefits for the Space Force having “independence of the air domain,” but stressed the importance of understanding “what problems that we are trying to solve when we talk about the need for an independent secretary of the Space Force.”
Domain has changed for the worse
On a more technical level, while the U.S. remains the world’s preeminent space power, according to Swope, the domain is no longer a peaceful one focused on exploration, and the U.S. military needs to further develop both its offensive and defensive space capabilities.
“China and Russia already possess the full suite of counter-space capabilities, everything from missiles that can shoot down our satellites and create tons of space debris to non-kinetic forms of attacks like GPS jamming, satellite communications jamming, and even things like lasers that can blind the sensors on satellites,” Harrison explained.
The incoming administration has to “continue to accelerate the Space Force’s efforts to build more resilient systems,” Harrison continued, adding that they also will need to “double down on investments in our own counter-space capabilities so that we can fight back effectively.”
The U.S. has sought to deepen its space capabilities with the help of allies, as well.
In early December, the Space Force activated its first unit in Japan, the U.S. Space Forces — Japan at Yokota Air Base. It falls under the leadership of Space Forces Indo-Pacific. U.S. Space Forces Korea was activated in December of 2022.
“Demonstrating on a daily basis with your allies and partners that you’re prepared to fight and win a war, should you need to, is really the ultimate way to deter a war; so that’s really important,” Brig. Gen. Anthony Mastalir, USSPACEFOR-INDOPAC commander, said in October during an event at the Mitchell Institute for Aerospace Studies.
Putting Space Force troops in South Korea and Japan is a part of the military’s broader Indo-Pacific strategy of bolstering its regional alliances to counter Beijing’s growing influence and hard power.
The Combined Space Operations Initiative Principal’s Board is made up of 10 countries, and they have collaborated over the last decade on how to meet the evolving challenges in space security.
Representatives from those countries — Australia, Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, New Zealand, Norway, the United Kingdom, and the United States — met in Italy in early December, and a joint readout from the meeting said the group is “becoming more agile, resilient, and interoperable; ready to seize the opportunities of the rapidly evolving space sector and able to address the challenges presented by a competitive, contested, and congested space domain.”
Spending — and the role of DOGE
Defense spending will be another hot topic with the new administration. The defense budget has continually risen in recent years and Pentagon comptroller Michael McCord told lawmakers earlier this year that it is “inevitable” that the budget will eclipse a trillion dollars eventually.
The Pentagon announced last month that it failed its seventh audit in a row, though McCord said the department “has turned a corner in its understanding of the depth and breadth of its challenges.” Defense officials say they’re committed to achieving a clean audit by 2028, as mandated by the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act.
The sentiment contradicts that of Trump’s decision to appoint Tesla CEO Elon Musk and businessman Vivek Ramaswamy to jointly lead the Department of Government Efficiency, and their mission is to root out government waste and excess spending. They could have their target set on the Department of Defense, which has a budget of roughly $850 billion. Musk has already indicated that the F-35 fighter jet is in his sights, calling it “obsolete,” especially in the age of drone warfare. It’s possible, though, that Musk and Ramaswamy could offset spending for Space Force by identifying cuts elsewhere in the budget.
Musk is also the founder of SpaceX, which has several government contracts related to the government’s space efforts. The entrepreneur spent more than a quarter of a billion dollars in the lead-up to the election to boost Trump’s campaign, and it has already paid off for both of them.
Bryan Clark, a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, noted that SpaceX has made it cheaper to get objects into orbit, which he argued has the potential to be significant given how expensive it used to be “to put something in orbit that you had to make it work and be right the first time.”
The U.S. can send a system into orbit for a “relatively short period of time, and you can see how they work, and then send something else up later,” he told the Washington Examiner. “So it can be much more like we see in terrestrial innovation, where you try something out, if it doesn’t work, you can try something different with your next iteration.“
Space National Guard
Another lingering question over the military’s space policy is whether to create a Space National Guard, which is something Trump said he supported on the campaign trail.
Trump told the National Guard Association in August that the “time has come” for a Space National Guard. “As president, I will sign historic legislation creating a Space National Guard.”
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Members of the Air and Army National Guard are part-time reserve service members who can be federalized in specific instances but are normally under gubernatorial control. Specific units within the Air National Guard focus on space.
There was a push earlier this year to fold the Air National Guard troops who focus on space into the U.S. Space Force instead of creating a separate Space National Guard, but governors are the heads of their state’s National Guard, and they uniformly disagreed with the Air Force’s proposal.