NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine touted President Donald Trump’s plan to create a separate U.S. Space Force as a sixth military service and said it is not too ambitious to have it up and running by 2020.
Bridenstine made his comments during a Friday interview on Fox News' “Fox & Friends.”
“No, I don’t think it’s too ambitious at all,” he said. “In fact, a lot of these activities are already being done. They are just being done inside the Air Force on inside the intelligence community.
“Really, what the president is saying is that we want to take these amazing capabilities and we want to elevate them, if you will, to its own military service so it gets the same representation on the Joint Chiefs of Staff eventually, maybe having its own service secretary, so it's not subordinated to the air domain within the Air Force.”
Bridenstine noted NASA does not get involved in space security.
“That's not what we do,” he said. “We do discovery and exploration and science. What's important to note is we have hundreds of billions of dollars worth of activity in space plus our American astronauts. It's also true that on top of that, the annual economy for space activity is $350 billion annually. Now, that's a big economy in space.
“And President Trump is really doing the right thing by making sure that it’s secure, which is necessary.”
Vice President Mike Pence has said Space Force is needed to ensure America’s dominance in space amid threats from China and Russia.
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