USSG

[tegyrius]

As a facet of some current freelance work, I've been thinking about the future of the US space presence - specifically, whether routine military operations in space will come to be dominated by the US Air Force (for its aerospace expertise) or the US Navy (for its competence with the systemology of large-scale, long-duration autonomous deployments). I hadn't really considered the development of a separate space regulatory and constabulary agency along the US Coast Guard model until this article wandered across my blogroll, but now it has me thinking.

The full article is fairly hefty. In brief, the proposal entails the creation of a United States Space Guard with the following aspects:

• Converting NASA to an exploration and research agency while moving its regulatory functions, routine launch operations, and infrastructure-related tasks to the USSG;


• Picking up the USAF's non-warfighting-related space functions, while maintaining the potential of wartime subordination to the USAF (similar to the USN/USCG relationship in WWII and, to a lesser extent, Vietnam);


• Assuming the Department of Transportation and Federal Aviation Administration's authority to regulate technical and operational aspects of spaceflight;


• Maintaining space debris tracking ("space situational awareness"), space weather tracking, and space navigation roles;


• Serving as the US government's primary agency for contracting government space missions from the private sector; and


• Future law enforcement and search, rescue, and recovery operations in space.

I'm intrigued. The full article (linked above) is worth a read if you're interested in an unconventional take on the future of American involvement in space.

Comments

[misterandersen.livejournal.com]

I have vague memories of some of the Aliens comics where the Coast Guard have responsibility for maintaining Earth's orbital debris field to acceptible levels. Naturally, they pick up the wrong bit of junk

[tegyrius]

So many of the Aliens storylines seemed to rely on human error as a major plot point.