Trump’s final frontier of warfare
“We will pursue our Manifest Destiny into the stars, launching American astronauts to plant the stars and stripes on the planet Mars.” These were the words US President Donald Trump used in his inauguration address in January to declare a new phase in the second Space Race. By invoking Manifest Destiny—the ideology of the colonisation of North America and genocide of the indigenous population—Trump is staking out the US’s claim over space against its rivals.
Trump’s second presidency has dramatically shifted towards the increased militarisation of space. The budget for the Space Force, a section of the US military under the Air Force established by Trump in his first term, increased by more than US$11 billion to almost US$40 billion this fiscal year. This is part of a US$113 billion increase in the overall military budget to more than US$1 trillion, which a White House budget summary document says is in part to “revive the warrior ethos of America’s Armed Forces”.
Even ostensibly civilian agencies like NASA are being drawn in. As with many other areas of government spending, Trump has savagely cut NASA’s budget—except in areas relevant to waging war. Almost everything else has had its funding eviscerated: funding for climate science has been cut in half, astrophysics by two-thirds, and public engagement is entirely gone.
Among the flurry of executive orders Trump signed at the beginning of his second term was one directing the Department of Defense to begin development of what would come to be known as the Golden Dome. This would be a network of projectile detection and interception infrastructure designed to destroy inbound missile attacks, much like Israel’s infamous Iron Dome and already existing anti-missile systems operated by the US military. Unlike the Iron Dome, the Golden Dome will not be based on the ground, but in Earth orbit.
In reality, it will be less of a dome and more of a sphere made up of thousands of satellites sweeping across the sky above anywhere and everywhere on the planet. The satellites will be equipped with advanced rockets, lasers or particle beams designed to destroy nuclear warhead-armed intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) as soon as they’re launched by enemies of the US empire, instead of later on in their flight path.
The idea isn’t new. An orbital missile “defence” system was first proposed in 1983 by then-US President Ronald Reagan in the form of the Strategic Defense Initiative, nicknamed “Star Wars”, but it was never realised. Now technology has advanced such that the prospect of American weapons literally hanging over all of our heads at all times is within reach.
Our planet’s orbit has been used for waging war for decades already. The US has had secret surveillance satellites collecting imagery of the Earth’s surface since as early as 1960, only two years after the first American satellite of any kind was put in orbit. Since then, satellite images have been extremely valuable intelligence for American wars around the world. Images from American satellites were shared with Israel as it executed its genocidal campaign of destruction in Gaza over the last two years.
The National Reconnaissance Office, the US’s secretive department for space-based surveillance, has been working on putting potentially over a hundred satellites in orbit that can see the same level of detail as the Hubble Space Telescope—the difference is that these spy satellites are pointed down at us instead of out into space. The cherry on top of this global panopticon is the involvement of Elon Musk and his company SpaceX, which provides orbital communications for the US military through its Starshield satellite constellation.
The militarisation of space is not uniquely American. Ever since the end of World War Two, the conquest of space has been seen as a vital element of global imperial domination.
Space Race One, between the US and USSR at the height of the Cold War, has been mythologised as a competition of exploration, culminating in putting humans on the moon and returning them safely home. The reality is that it was an intense arms race with a simple logic: if you can land a rocket carrying people on the moon, you can also land an ICBM carrying a nuclear warhead on your enemy.
Space Race Two is between the US and China. Both have plans to put humans on the moon in the next decade and have their sights set on even more distant landings. If they come to fruition, we will likely see humans walk on an extraterrestrial body again soon. But the main factor motivating these excursions to far-flung places is not so much the places themselves, but how they help the imperialist powers better dominate Earth.
China has its own constellation of intelligence-gathering satellites, and has also been developing its capabilities for space-based warfare. In January 2007, China flexed its muscles by successfully destroying one of its own satellites with a missile launched from the ground. The South China Morning Post reported in September that China has an operational prototype of a missile “defence” system similar to the proposed Golden Dome.
That there may be not only one but two planet-engulfing machines of observation and destruction is terrifying. It foreshadows how much deadlier an all-out war between the US and China would be than any previous war. Governments in all of the most powerful countries are dragging us towards such a conflagration with their exploding military budgets. The drive to war must be opposed wherever it happens: sea, land, sky or above.
