Donald Trump visited California to view prototypes for his Mexican border wall, and spent the time talking about another place he wants to guard: space!
In a speech to service members in the Marine Corps Air Station Miramar near San Diego, Trump mentioned that he’s looking to create a military wing to bring warfare to outer space.
“My new national strategy for space recognizes that space is a war-fighting domain, just like the land air and sea,” Trump said, as the Washington Post reported. “We may even have a Space Force. We’re doing a tremendous amount of work in space, and I said, maybe we need a new force. We’ll call it the ‘Space Force.’”
Trump didn’t elaborate on what the Space Force would do, exactly, or who it needs to fight, or exactly where it would fight them, or how. But if Trump wants a “Space Force,” there’s a lot of inspiration he could get from popular culture.
He could start with Marvel’s “Guardians of the Galaxy” movies. The Space Force in those films is made up of a sentient raccoon, a sentient tree, a super-strong gray guy, a super strong green woman, and a dude with laser pistols, admittedly a high bar for recruitment.
We concede however that a Space Force would be handy for fighting giant bugs like in “Starship Troopers,” though we lack psychics like the one played by Neil Patrick Harris in the 1998 film.
One definite to-do item is to make sure there’s enough water up there, so the Space Force can take out M. Night Shyamalan’s spooky creatures from “Signs” (they’re allergic to water).
Or maybe Trump wants to be prepared for an “Independence Day” scenario, since one of the first targets of the interstellar aliens invading Earth in that movie is the White House. (Although there’s an upshot for Trump: If the aliens show up on a weekend, they probably won’t think to blow up Mar-a-Lago.) Similarly, he probably wants to avoid the fate President Jack Nicholson met in “Mars Attacks.”
Trump could look elsewhere for inspiration and mend fences with the video games industry at the same time by checking out the “Call of Duty” series, which two years ago jumped to the far future and featured a war between humans who colonized Mars and the ones left behind on Earth. The game even featured Jon Snow of “Game of Thrones,” Kit Harington, as its evil Martian bad guy.
All great ideas. Trump only has to get around a few roadblocks, not including technological advances necessary to make space-based military installations possible.
One is Newtonian physics — Whomever fires a gun will propelled away from the bullet with the same force expelling it; also the bullet will just keep going until it hits something
Another is the fact that the U.S. signed the 1967 Outer Space Treaty that prohibits states from placing weapons of mass destruction in Earth orbit, establishing military bases on the moon or other celestial bodies, or testing weapons;
Still another is the current state of NASA. America’s space agency hasn’t had a permanent administrator since Trump was inaugurated, and is about to lose its acting administrator to retirement.
But once we have all that figured out, get ready outer space.