Congressmen Propose a New Military Branch: The 'US Space Corps' (gizmodo.com)

An anonymous reader quotes Gizmodo: This week, the House Armed Services Committee voted 60 to 1 in favor of the creation of a new military branch to be called the United States Space Corps... The United States Space Corps would be the first new branch of the military since 1947, when the Air Force was formed. The current proposal would classify the USSC under the Air Force in a way that mirrors the Marines classification under the Navy. The Space Corps' chief of staff would be ranked as equal to the Air Force chief of staff and would report to the Secretary of the Air Force...

According to CNN, the Air Force's secretary and chief of staff are opposed to the plan. One reason is that we already have the Air Force Space Command and the military believes that the creation of the Space Corps would just cause more complications. Secretary Heather Wilson told reporters that "this will make it more complex, add more boxes to the organizational chart, and cost more money."
The bill charges the division of the military with providing "combat-ready space forces," though CNN adds "There are still plenty more congressional hoops for the Space Corps to jump through before it would become official. But, hey, at least the name sounds cool." And Gizmodo's reporter thoughtfully weighs the pro's and cons before concluding, "Yeah, this is probably stupid."

Comments

Re:Didn't we have treaties against space weapons?

[Dracos]

Yep. This would almost certainly violate the 1967 Outer Space Treaty.

Re:Didn't we have treaties against space weapons?

[thrich81]

Here is some math comparing the energy of orbital speed vs nuclear weapons. First of all, think about it, if you are going to drop something from orbit, first you have to put it into orbit, which will take more energy to do than the ultimate energetic yield upon reentry (discounting the even more far fetched ideas of redirecting asteroids...). The Saturn V could put 140,000 kg into low earth orbit. So the total energy, kinetic and potential, of 140,000 kg in earth orbit is less than the fuel energy contained in a Saturn V. The Saturn V was big, but would be considered very small as the equivalent of a nuclear weapon (the launch spectators were only a few miles away, in the open).
          Now for the math. At the speed of low earth orbit (7.8 km/s) the kinetic energy of 1 kg is 6.1E7 joules (1/2 mv^2). The conversion from nuclear yield in kilotons to joules is 1 kt = 4.184E12 joules. So to equal a small nuke (using the approximate yield of the first one at Trinity) with a yield of 20 kt would require about 2.8E6 kg in low earth orbit to dissipate all of its kinetic energy as destructive yield (that's 2800 metric tons). I've ignored the potential energy of the mass in orbit as it is much smaller than the kinetic energy (about 2E6 joules/kg). The mass of the ISS is 420 metric tons. Not many nukes are as small as 20 kt anymore. I'd guess that the operational ones are closer to 500 kt, though operation weapons with yields of a few megatons (2000 to 3000 kt and up) have been fielded in the past and maybe still are. So now we are talking orbital masses of around 70,000 metric tons to equal one typical nuke. There is a LOT of energy in a nuclear weapon.
So dropping things from orbit does not create city flattening yields or big earthquakes, cracks in the earth, etc.
Anyone can feel free to check my math, I did it in a hurry. I got all my starting numbers from Wikipedia.

Re:Didn't we have treaties against space weapons?

[BeerCat]

The Saturn V could also put around 31,000kg into high orbit (high enough to go for lunar orbit) (combined launch mass of Lunar Module and Command Module), at a velocity of 11 km/s. Kinetic Energy of 1kg at escape velocity is around 6E7 joules (though my back of an envelope calculations could be out).

Enough to be scary for those on the ground, but there, as you point out, easier ways to achieve the same aim.

Though kinetic weapons conveniently don't violate any existing treaties (Outer Space, Non-proliferation, SALT, START etc)

Re:Didn't we have treaties against space weapons?

[blindseer]

I'm not so sure. The Wikipedia summary of the treaty does say that conventional weapons are allowed, only what they deem weapons of mass destruction would be prohibited.

Re:youve got to keep that ball rolling.

[Sarten-X]

disclosure: american here.

I am an American as well, but with a different perspective.

our Department of Defense is funded to the tune of more than 500 billion dollars.

Our GDP is almost 18 trillion dollars.

It employs close to three million people.

That's 1% of our population.

This doesnt count the literal millions of people whom are employed as military contractors

One. Literally one million. A quick search shows that adding up the top 9 contracters is under 900,000 people, and a large portion of each of those companies actually sits outside the defense industry. For simplicity, let's round up to a nice single million. That's not even enough to bump our percentage beyond statistical error.

providing everything from catering to private security and transportation (our troops fly commercial aircraft frequently.)

Their contracts are included in the DoD's budget. Our troops fly with paid tickets, most often coming out of that DoD budget as well.

we helped ourselves to the war chest during WW2 to get out of a crippling depression fueled by unregulated credit markets.

That's a nice story that resonates well with today's economic fears, but it's only partly true. When the stock (not credit) market crashed, it triggered a period of deflation. That in turn led to a drastic cut in spending, including the spending on new credit. Then Europe started to default on its credit that we had extended during World War I, and due to political instability, did not have much hope for recovering. That froze the credit market, as well. That would probably have not been so bad, except that a century of bad agricultural practices had crippled the Great Plains farmland, and a series of droughts decimated the recovery efforts.

When World War II began, the economic recovery was well underway, with the GDP back up to pre-1929 levels, but confidence was still low (much as it still is today after the 2007 recession). While the war brought us a huge new market for defense technology, it didn't bring much funding. Instead, the massive bond program led to what was essentially a crowdfunded war effort. In a curious turn, the war bonds effectively boosted the consumer confidence, because they offered a future income as well as inspiring patriotism.

Then the paranoia of a generation led us to stumble into central america, the middle east, and southeast asia.

To be fair, the paranoia was mostly warranted. During World War II, the Soviet bloc also recovered well from their own economic troubles, and their economies had led to political expansion that cut off emerging markets for the United States. The Soviet Union also gained a significant amount of territory in Europe through the war, and they maintained exclusive control, apparently fueling the Soviet economy at the West's expense.

Now, the US military is too big to do anything but sustain, or get bigger.

Or it could actually get smaller, as its budget did after 2010. It's ramping up again, but slowly.

rolling back the defense budget is not an option in a nation that makes nothing anymore.

Again, our GDP is almost 18 trillion dollars. That's a lot of "nothing" we make. Our defense budget is only about 3.3% of that. For supporting 1% of the population, it's a little disproportionate, but not unreasonable.

So, we pick our battles and fight the wars we have an overwhelming supremacy in waging.

Again, in the interest of honesty, there are very few places where we don't have an overwhelming supremacy. We have nukes, if we chose to use them. Of course, nukes are bad. So is carpet-bombing. So is a fu