Space Farce!

No. Just no. Donald Trump does not get to found Starfleet. I think it's fair to say that we've put up with a lot from this administration in the last year and a half, but this is too far.

"The line must be drawn he-yah!"

-Captain Picard referring 

to this exact moment

Sorry Tony Schwartz, I should have
said "author" of The Art of the Deal...

In what I can only assume to be some kind of desperate attempt to be known to historians as something other than the electoral college-ly elected President who puts children in jail, early Monday, Trump directed the Pentagon to create a sixth branch of the U.S. military. Yeah, just like that...which, I didn't know that that was how branches of the military became a thing either, but then I never thought the Republican party would be insane enough to elect the author of The Art of the Deal, but here we are.

Really? We're letting the former host of
The Apprentice establish a Space Force?
We're just letting this happen. Anyone
in the room want to say something? No?

So today, while waving his executive order around, complete with comically oversized signature, Trump announced:

"We must have American dominance in space. Very importantly, I'm hereby directing the Department of Defense and Pentagon to immediately begin the process necessary to establish the Space Force as the sixth branch of the armed forces. That's a big step."

-President Trump, just 

establishing things all willy nilly

But where does the Air Force end and
the Space Force begin? The troposphere?
The mesosphere? We demand answers!

He then went on to invoke Plessy Vs. Ferguson...for some reason. I mean, is he just putting words together or was that a deliberate reference to pre-Brown V. Board of Education school segregation?

"We are going to have the Air Force and we are going to have the Space Force: separate but equal, it is going to be something so important."

-Trump, nipping this in the bud

"How you say...duh?"

-Some Russian

space-guy

Apart from the bizarre phrasing, this was a weird move since exactly no one in the seconds after his crazy announcement was worried that there might be jurisdictional disputes between the Air Force and the Space Force he just made up. Weird and also terrifying. Not militarizing space has been sort of a tacit agreement between space-capable countries, and building a space military, regardless of what a 'big step' he thinks it is, flies in the face of that. Like, is there any way this doesn't prompt China and Russia to do likewise?

I mean, it's great that we suddenly care about space. It really is. What's not great is that we're turning it into another thing to fight over. But hey, at least we know that the Space Force will be separate but equal from the Air Force.

Yeah, but where does the Stargate Program fit into all of this?