Today in wistful skyward gazing:

So I was whiling away precious hours of my life watching videos on Youtube about nerds remembering video games from thirty years ago, when I came across this ad. You didn't click on it and I think we both know you never will, so I'll explain: it's a recruitment video for the United States Space Force.

So far they have a logo and this video,
so yeah, Space Force is really coming along.

The pandemic, white supremacists,
and four years of insane Tweets but I'm
 sure Space Force will be his legacy... 

No, not the critically shrugged at Steve Carell comedy series whose funniest moment was evidently when it beat the U.S. government to the trademark for the sixth branch of the military, but the actual sixth branch of the military. The one Donald Trump made up a couple of years ago in yet another fit of self-aggrandizement. Yeah, move over John Adams and your U.S. Marine Corps, the former host of The Apprentice just founded the Spaaaaaace Fooorrrce. Yes. You do have to say it that way. It's in the charter.

The video opens on a clean-cut all-American standard white male, standing on a beach at dusk gazing wistfully not only at the stars but also towards the future.

Pictured: a future American Space hero contemplating tomorrow
whilst almost certainly humming Faith of the Heart to himself.

Above: noted voice actor Morgan Freeman,
seen here being too expensive to narrate
a Space Force recruitment video.

Then a narrator with a pleasant, but not quite Freeman-level narrating voice says:

"Some people look to the stars and ask: what if? Our job is to have an answer. We have to imagine what will be imagined. Plan for what's possible while it's still impossible. Maybe you weren't put here just to ask the questions. Maybe you were put here to be the answer."

-the so-so narrator sprung for

by the U.S. Space Force

I mean, space isn't green, is it? Also is
wistful skyward gazing a job requirement?

Huh...maybe I was...but I have some questions. First of all, I don't want to be a jerk, but does the Space Force have actual rockets yet or just the low-texture polygonal ones? I know they're just getting started and I mean, the CG would be ok if this were a video game cut seen from 2015 but they'll eventually have real rockets, right? And why do the actors cast as Space Force personal wear camouflage? It seems like 99.9 percent of being in the Space Force is going to be on the ground in those sci-fi control rooms we see in the ad.

Speaking of the sci-fi control rooms we see in the ad, what's with that big room with the girders and blue squidgy lights even for? I get that this is supposed to be speculative, like what being in the Space Force might be like someday, but it's a bunch of people looking up (wistfully, one assumes) at a wall covered in holograms or something and I can't even begin to imagine what they're supposed to be doing.

What is this even for? A rave? A secret Stargate program? What?

"My mission statement is to attain
experience in the field of experience."

-Some college kid

Well, I guess that's the point then, imagination. Space Force is basically imaginary right now. It might be a real thing someday, but not anytime soon. It doesn't help that no one's really sure what it will do. The website says it's "...a military service that organizes, trains and equips space forces in order to protect U.S. allied interests in space and to provide space capabilities to the joint force." So the space force trains space forces? It kind of sounds like a college student trying to come up with something for a mission statement on a resumé. 

Even the ad doesn't know what the hell it is. The Space Force's job is to have an answer to "what if?" And to imagine what will be imagined? Is this a branch of the armed forces or the score from Man of La Mancha? Look, Donald Trump has pissed away plenty of our money (and international credibility) on racist border fences and golf trips for himself, but goddamn, shouldn't we be focusing on a vaccine or something? 

Is the vaccine in space? Because if it's not, this
kind of seems like a colossal waste of resources...