Friday the U.S. military released 400 other names it considered for Space Force’s soliders (before settling on the word “guardians.”)
Politico writes that the names were “crowdsourced” from the U.S. military’s space workforce, and “Troops clearly had fun with their submissions, which included Space Cadet, Spacies, Anti-Gravity Gang, Homo Spaciens and Spacefolk.”
But the Space Force had more science fiction-inspired names it could have picked. Fleet Officer, Stormtrooper and Trekkies were both among the suggested names…
Many in the public still confuse NASA’s civil space mission with the Space Force’s national security focus, and a name like Ground-Based Astronauts or Apollonauts, harkening back to the space agency’s moon landing program, would not help… One suggestion was Skywalker, though members of the Space Force at least in the short-term will be Earth-bound to operate the nation’s GPS constellation and provide early missile warning.
Though the Space Force’s workforce is expected to be highly-skilled in technical fields, its members may not have taken kindly to one suggestion: Geek…
Others perhaps took the suggestion process too literally, with one suggestion just saying “nothing because you wouldn’t hear it in space anyway.”
The UPI reminds readers that the U.S. Space Force “is now a full military branch that was allocated $15.4 billion in the 2021 budget and enlisted 16,000 active duty and civilian personnel who were all reassigned from the defunct Air Force Space Command.”
White House press secretary Jen Psaki confirmed Wednesday that the Biden administration will keep Space Force… “They absolutely have the full support of the Biden administration. And we are not revisiting the decision to establish the Space Force,” Psaki said Wednesday at a White House news briefing…
Many experts were not surprised that President Joe Biden will keep Space Force as its own branch of the military because it would take an act of Congress to abolish it when it now has bipartisan support as a valuable tool in future military efforts….
The UPI also got this comment from a research associate with the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “The name is funny; it sounds like something that Trump just dreamed up,” said Young. “But it’s been talked about in national security circles for over a decade now. It’s something that’s just going to be important to have going forward.”
And a co-director of the Center for Security, Strategy and Technology at the Brookings Institution tells them bluntly that “The Space Force is a serious attempt to deal with a serious problem, and that problem is the deployment of anti-satellite weapons by countries like Russia and China.”
of this story at Slashdot.
Source:: Slashdot