Space force

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Jump to navigation Jump to search

For other uses, see Space Force (disambiguation).

A space force is a military branch of a nation's armed forces that conducts military operations in outer space and space warfare. The world's first and, as of 2021, only independent space force is the United States Space Force, established on 20 December 2019. The Russian Federation previously had the Russian Space Forces organized as independent troops (rod) from 1992 to 1997 and 2001 to 2011, however it was not organized as a military service (vid).^[1][2]

Countries with smaller or developing space forces may combine their air and space forces under a single military branch, such as in the Russian Aerospace Forces, French Air and Space Force, or Iranian Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps Aerospace Force, or put them in an independent defense agency, such as the Russian Space Forces from 1992-1997 and 2001-2011 or the Indian Defence Space Agency. The People's Republic of China organizes its space forces as part of the People's Liberation Army Strategic Support Force, a combined information warfare service branch. Countries with nascent military space capabilities usually organize them within their air forces.^[3]

History

The first artificial object to cross the Kármán line, the boundary between air and space, was MW 18014, an A-4 rocket launched by the German Heer on 20 June 1944 from the Peenemünde Army Research Center. The A4, more commonly known as the V-2, was the world's first ballistic missile, used by the Wehrmacht to launch long range attacks on the Allied Forces on the Western Front during the Second World War. However the designer of the A4, Wernher von Braun, had aspirations to use them as space launch vehicles. In both the United States and the Soviet Union, military space development began immediately after the Second World War concluded, with Wernher von Braun defecting to the Allies and both superpowers gathering V-2 rockets, research materials, and German scientists to jumpstart their own ballistic missile and space programs.^[4]

In the United States, there was a fierce interservice rivalry between the U.S. Air Force and U.S. Army over which service would gain responsibility for the military space program, with the Air Force, which had started developing its space program while it was the Army Air Forces in 1945, seeing space operations as an extension of their strategic airpower mission, while the Army argued that ballistic missiles were an extension of artillery. The Navy also developed rockets as well, but primarily for Naval Research Laboratory projects, rather than an seeking to actively develop an operational space capability. Ultimately, the Air Force's space rivals in the Army Ballistic Missile Agency, Naval Research Laboratory, and Advanced Research Projects Agency were absorbed by NASA when it was created in 1958, leaving it as the only major military space organization within the U.S. Department of Defense. In 1954, General Bernard Schriever established the Western Development Division within Air Research and Development Command, becoming the U.S. military's first space organization, which continues to exist in the U.S. Space Force as the Space and Missile Systems Center, its research and development center.

List of space forces, units, and formations