NASA Chief Says Space Force Would Aid US Security

NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine (L) speaks during a meeting of the National Space Council at the East Room of the White House June 18, 2018 in Washington. Alex Wong/Getty Images

NASA administrator Jim Bridenstine is showing his support for President Donald Trump’s executive order to create a “Space Force” as the sixth branch of the U.S. armed forces.

“Every banking transaction requires a GPS signal for timing,” Jim Bridenstine told Bloomberg news. “You lose the GPS signal and guess what you lose? You lose banking.”

Bridenstine also told Politico in a recent interview on Space Force that “I’m for it.”

“A lot of Americans don’t know this, how important space is to their everyday lives,” he said. “The way we navigate, the way we communicate.”

He noted that if GPS was shut down, it would have a domino effect that would end banking, then commerce and supply of basic goods in the market, leading to “civil unrest, the likes of which we haven’t seen before.”

“And the challenge here is you’ve got some of our near peer competitors, namely China, building their own GPS constellation at the same time they’re developing anti-satellite weapons that now go all the way up to geostationary orbit,” Bridenstine said.

“And it’s not just anti-satellite weapons, it’s co-orbital anti-satellite capabilities, jamming, spoofing, hacking, dazzling,” he said.

Under Trump’s executive order, the U.S. military is preparing for the creation of the Space Force.

Brig. Gen. Tim Lawson, deputy commanding general for operations at the Army Space and Missile Defense Command, said during a recent conference, “Do we want to be part of the Space Force? That is yet to be determined. I think there’s a lot more to come, and the Army is part of this planning process.”

A June 22 note to clients from Morgan Stanley said that Space Force could create a $1 trillion economy, noting “Our conversations with various actors (current and retired) in the U.S. government, military, and intelligence communities overwhelmingly indicate that space is an area where we will see significant development.”