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Military Space

Democrats Plan To Subpoena White House On #SpaceForce

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
November 12, 2018
Filed under

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

17 responses to “Democrats Plan To Subpoena White House On #SpaceForce”

  1. ThomasLMatula says:
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    Yep, must be part of President Trump’s plot to become the Galactic Overlord.? It looks like more and more like it will be two years of complete gridlock.

    • Terry Stetler says:
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      Dems look to be doing their usual – overplay their hand while simultaneously organizing a circular firing squad in the runup to the 2020 primaries. Meanwhile, 25% of Shchumer’s caucus will be campaigning for president so whipping votes will be interesting.

      • Bill Housley says:
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        LOL on the “circular firing squad” bit. Made my evening.

        A subpoena for Mad Dog Mattis to come to the Capital building and listen to clueless legislators make idiots of themselves asking him uninformed questions. Wow. I can’t wait. That’s a dog and pony show I won’t want to miss.

    • Bob says:
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      Look at all the lies for the past two years. The House has been elected to provide oversight, their job. The current Congress has abdicated their responsibilities. Than goodness for a system of checks and balances. May the checks begin. God bless America.

      • Terry Stetler says:
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        Neh. The establishment/corporatist Dems and Progressives will end up sniping at each other, then it’ll devolve into something like the establishment/corporatist Reps vs. Tea Party mess. Corporatists on both sides then play ‘Let’s Make A Deal’ with the Senate, starting with something safe like infrastructure. Progressives end up mad at most everyone.

        • fcrary says:
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          Which, in another country, would end up meaning a centralist Republican/Democrat coalition government with the Tea and Progressive parties in opposition. I’m not sure if that would be an improvement or not.

      • Bill Housley says:
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        If that’s all they do, it’ll be awesome. But they’ll be too busy making mountains out of mole hills so they can have better reach when they jump to conclusions to flail about grasping for straws.

        It’ll be like watching first-graders play make believe in a playground.

        That’s the problem with blind hate. It turns off people’s brains so that they look like idiots.

  2. Daniel Woodard says:
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    First, the whole Trump Space Force announcement was nonsensical.

    Second, the DOD apparently reminded the White House that the US Space Command was actually created in 1984 and inexplicably demoted to a USAF subunit in 2006, apparently at the direction of Dick Cheney. The unified commands, not the service branches, are the actual functional divisions of the DOD. I presume someone from the DOD suggested to Trump that if he wanted an independent Space Force, all he really had to do was revert Space Command to a unified command slot, and according to Wikipedia that was done at relatively minimal cost and is now in progress. The answer was just to go back to the solution we already had but forgot about.

    The House has oversight responsibility and I doubt they will be too concerned about an unusual case where reasonable compromise has actually occurred, if only because it occurred in 1984. There are more than enough real scandals to investigate.

    • David Fowler says:
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      USSPACECOM was cannibalized to form USNORTHCOM in 2002, not 2006. Regardless of whether that was a good decision or a bad decision, it was not “demoted.”

  3. ProfSWhiplash says:
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    M’eh…. I don’t know why the Demo’s are getting all up in arms about the WH wanting a “Space Force”. Everyone else seems to have one. Not just the Russians and Chinese — just look at that vintage film clip…. It shows a bunch of Frenchies in tights loading a ginormous cannon to shoot at a poor defenseless “La’ Lune”

    • fcrary says:
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      Please, that film clip is about the work of the Astronomic Club, a _private_ French organization, not a government “space force.” (And that movie was based on Verne’s novel, where the fictional Moon mission was also launched by the private Baltimore Gun Club.)

      • ProfSWhiplash says:
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        That’s true with the novel, but the clip is from the French take — though not clear where that cannon was sited in the film (novel had Florida, but here… it should be – but not likely – French Guiana)

        BTW, who says a private entity can’t have its own “Force”? In this case, its gun crew had sailor-uniformed “loaders”

        • fcrary says:
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          I’d have to watch the movie again to be sure, but I’m fairly sure it featured a private, French organization launching (firing) the capsule. Not the French government. Le Voyage dans la Lune came out in 1902, which was long before the era of major government science programs.

          • ThomasLMatula says:
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            Yes, the Astronomic Club with the astronomers who were members financing it. Must have been some really rich astronomers in France in those days ?

            As a side note, I wonder if Jules Verne ever saw it and if so what he thought of it.

    • chuckc192000 says:
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      We’re up in arms about it because the whole idea of having a “space force” was just to fire up the base and sell campaign souvenirs with the “space force” logo on them.

      • ThomasLMatula says:
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        The concept originated with a bipartisan bill sponsored by Rep. Jim Cooper (D-Tenn) and Rep. Mike Rogers (R-AL) so they probably need to start by investigation themselves ?

    • Bill Housley says:
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      The report that Mattis put together appeared to me to describe a situation where we don’t need a Space Force yet, but we will by the time we finish organizing one.

      It also doesn’t ask for permission. It does elude to some peripheral procedural legislation that can probably even wait until after 2020.