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The Moon’s Role in the New U.S. Space Force

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https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet...180970056/

EXCERPT: In a speech last week at the Pentagon, Vice President Mike Pence announced that the Trump administration is working with the Department of Defense to create the United Space Command. The idea [...] has drawn mixed reactions from politicians and left some space advocates perplexed. [...] In truth, space has always been a military arena. Many nations depend on sophisticated and expensive satellites to keep them informed and secure, and the satellites themselves require protection.

[...] now that we are planning a return to the Moon, the entire volume of cislunar space (a radius of 400,000 km) becomes a potential battleground. In 1998, a launch malfunction resulted in a very valuable Hughes communications satellite being stranded in a useless orbit. Hughes engineers ingeniously used the spacecraft’s reserve attitude control fuel to gradually swing the satellite around the Moon and bring it back down to its correct orbit. The maneuver resulted in the satellite approaching Earth from an unusual, “stealthy” direction—downwards from the Moon rather than up from the ground, the way we typically think of missile launches by aggressor nations.

This “oops” event turned into an eye-opening realization for military space experts: It’s very difficult to conduct surveillance on the entire volume of space beyond low Earth orbit. China also understood the implications of cislunar orbits, and in 2010 flew its Chang’E-2 scientific spacecraft to the Moon, orbited it for a year, then moved the spacecraft to a halo orbit around the Earth-Moon L-2 libration point (60,000 km above the center of the lunar far side). After loitering there for eight months, Chang’E-2 then took off for a flyby interception of the asteroid Toutatis. In a single mission, China demonstrated “space control,” or the ability to place any kind of satellite—friendly or unfriendly—virtually anywhere in cislunar space.

Such an ability would give any nation a decided edge in a future space-based conflict. Not only does the Moon offer a gravitational rallying point for changing orbits, stealthy spacecraft could hide at the libration points of the Earth-Moon system, nearly undetectable with conventional space tracking.

It is imperative that the United States be prepared for this new theater of engagement....

MORE: https://www.airspacemag.com/daily-planet...180970056/

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