The U.S. Space Force (USSF) is the sixth and youngest branch of the United\nStates Armed Forces, established on December 20, 2019, when President Donald\nTrump signed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020. It sits\nunder the Department of the Air Force in the same way the Marine Corps sits under\nthe Department of the Navy, and it is charged with military operations in the\nspace domain — satellite operations, missile warning, space situational\nawareness, GPS, and the defence of U.S. assets in orbit.
\nIn the Wheel of Heaven framework the Space Force is a deliberately modest entry.\nIt is a documented piece of mainstream military policy, not a pillar of the\ncanon, and the Raëlian source texts — written in the 1970s — say nothing about\nit. What earns it a place here is timing: the branch was stood up in the middle\nof the 2017–2024 wave of U.S. government\nUAP disclosure, and the corpus notes that\ncoincidence for context while taking care not to inflate it.
\nThe Space Force did not create a new military capability so much as elevate an\nexisting one. The United States had operated in space for decades — through the\nAir Force Ballistic Missile Division in the 1950s, through Air Force Systems\nCommand, and above all through Air Force Space Command, established in 1982\nat Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado. For some thirty-seven years Air Force Space\nCommand ran the country's military satellite constellations, missile-warning\nsystems, and space surveillance. In 2019 that command was folded into the new\nservice, so the Space Force is best understood as its promotion to an independent\nbranch rather than as a capability built from nothing.
\nThe legislative path was short. Trump floated the idea publicly in a March 2018\nspeech, directed the Defense Department to begin planning that June, and signed\nSpace Policy Directive 4 in February 2019. The branch was formally created that\nDecember inside the annual defence-authorization bill, which passed both chambers\nwith bipartisan majorities. General John \"Jay\" Raymond was sworn in as the first\nChief of Space Operations in January 2020; the first recruits enlisted directly\ninto the service that September; and in December 2020 the branch adopted\n\"Guardian\" as the name for its members, alongside the Army's Soldiers, the\nNavy's Sailors, the Air Force's Airmen, and the Marines. A distinct service\ndress uniform, unveiled in 2021, and a slowly forming service culture followed —\nearly markers of an identity still only a few years old.
\nThe work is organized under three commands: Space Operations Command (SpOC),\nwhich runs day-to-day operations; Space Systems Command (SSC), which handles\nacquisition and development; and Space Training and Readiness Command\n(STARCOM), which trains Guardians and writes doctrine. The principal missions\nare:
\nThe Space Force is by a wide margin the smallest U.S. service — on the order of\n8,400 uniformed Guardians in 2024, supported by a comparable number of\ncivilians — because its missions are technical and operational rather than\ncentred on projecting large forces. Its budget nonetheless grew quickly, from\nabout $15.4 billion at its 2020 establishment to roughly $30 billion by fiscal\nyear 2024. That growth spanned the Trump, Biden, and second Trump\nadministrations, and the continuity across those transitions is the clearest sign\nthat the branch reflects settled national-security policy rather than the\ninitiative of any single president.
\nThe United States was not acting alone. A cluster of national space commands\nappeared within a few years of one another: Russia consolidated its space troops\ninto the VKS Aerospace Forces in 2015; China created the PLA Strategic\nSupport Force the same year, reorganizing it into the PLA Aerospace Force\nin April 2024; France established its Commandement de l'espace in 2019; and\nthe United Kingdom stood up Space Command in 2021, with Germany, Italy,\nJapan, Australia, and India developing comparable organizations. The near-\nsimultaneous timing is itself telling — anti-satellite weapons tests such as\nChina's 2007 Fengyun-1C strike, which scattered roughly 3,000 trackable pieces of\ndebris, and Russia's 2021 test made plain that orbit had become a contested\ndomain, and every major power responded by giving space its own military\ncommand.
\nThis pattern matters for reading the Space Force. It places the branch inside a\nbroad international trend driven by growing dependence on satellites and by\ngreat-power competition in orbit, rather than treating it as a uniquely\nAmerican — or uniquely mysterious — development.
\nThe framework's engagement with the Space Force is light, and honest about being\nlight.
\nIt is mainstream military reality first. The 2019 establishment, the command\nstructure, the congressional appropriations, and the parallel foreign services\nare all ordinary, well-documented facts of defence policy, and the corpus reads\nthem as such. The mainstream account of why the branch exists — satellite\ndependence, orbital competition, the elevation of space to a war-fighting\ndomain — is well supported, and the wave of foreign space commands created on the\nsame schedule is strong evidence that the founding reflects a general trajectory\nrather than any hidden cause.
\nThe timing sits inside the disclosure wave. What connects the branch to the\ncorpus at all is chronology. The Space Force was established on December 20,\n2019 — roughly two years after the December 2017 New York Times article that\ndisclosed the Pentagon's AATIP program, and about four months before the April\n2020 official release of Navy UAP videos. That places its founding in the middle\nof the 2017–2024 transformation traced in the\nmilitary cover-up of exobiology entry. The\nframework treats this as a genuine coincidence of dates worth noting, not as a\ncausal link: nothing in the documentary record shows the branch was created\nbecause of the UAP question.
\nThere is a real mission overlap. The Space Force's space-domain-awareness\nmission — watching everything that moves in near-Earth space — does technically\nintersect with the detection of unidentified anomalous phenomena, and Guardians\nand the affiliated All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office have engaged the UAP\nquestion in official settings. The overlap is mundane rather than revelatory: an\norganization built to track objects in orbit will inevitably record objects it\ncannot immediately identify.
\nSpeculative readings are labelled as such. A separate\nufological literature goes much further, casting the Space Force\nas cover for a \"secret space program,\" as preparation for an official disclosure\nevent, or as proof of recovered non-human technology — claims associated with\nfigures such as the hacker Gary McKinnon. These readings are speculative. They\nrest on inference and assertion rather than on documented programs, and the 2024\nAARO Historical Record Report found no evidence for the reverse-engineering\nprograms they presuppose. The corpus records that this literature exists and\nengages it descriptively, but does not adopt it, and keeps it firmly distinct\nfrom the sourced facts above.
\nThe canon's own answer lies elsewhere. For the Wheel of Heaven framework the\nresolution of the disclosure question is not a military branch at all but the\nEmbassy — the ground that Message from the Designers asks\nhumanity to prepare for open, diplomatic contact with the\nElohim. Against that, a satellite-operations service is peripheral.\nThe Space Force belongs to the ordinary machinery of a spacefaring\nAge of Aquarius; it is context for the disclosure story,\nnot a chapter of it.
\nNothing about the Space Force is contested as a matter of record. It is an openly\nlegislated, openly funded reorganization of capabilities the U.S. military\nalready held, and it operates within the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which\nbars weapons of mass destruction from orbit and reserves celestial bodies for\npeaceful use. The Space Force's missions — satellite operations, warning,\nsurveillance, navigation, and conventional counter-space work — fall within those\nlimits.
\nSkeptics of the ufological readings make the straightforward point that a\ndocumented military bureaucracy needs no exotic explanation, and that the burden\nof proof for any \"secret space program\" claim has not been met. The framework\nagrees on the essentials: it distinguishes what is established — a mundane\nmilitary branch, founded for stated and sufficient reasons — from what is\nspeculative — any covert UAP mission — and it declines to let the second borrow\ncredibility from the first. That discipline, reporting the documented and\nflagging the speculative as speculative, is the whole of the corpus's interest in\nthe Space Force.
\nVorilhon, Claude (Raël). Message from the Designers. Tagman Press, 2005.
\nU.S. Space Force. Official website. https://www.spaceforce.mil.
\nNational Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020. Public Law 116-92. December 20, 2019.
\nSpace Policy Directive 4. February 19, 2019.
\nOffice of the Chief of Space Operations. Spacepower: Doctrine for Space Forces. Space Capstone Publication, June 2020.
\nU.S. Government Accountability Office. Space Force: Information on Personnel Strength. Various reports.
\nCongressional Research Service. The U.S. Space Force and the Department of the Air Force. Various reports.
\nSpires, David N. Beyond Horizons: A Half Century of Air Force Space Leadership. Air Force Space Command and Air University Press, 1998.
\nWalker, Stephen, et al. Air Force Space Command: A Historical Overview. Air Force Space Command, Office of History, various dates.
\nLambright, W. Henry. Powering Apollo: James E. Webb of NASA. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.
\nMcDougall, Walter A. ...the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age. Basic Books, 1985.
\nUnited Nations. Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies. January 27, 1967.
\nLyall, Francis, and Paul B. Larsen. Space Law: A Treatise. 2nd edition, Routledge, 2017.
\nKlein, John J. Space Warfare: Strategy, Principles and Policy. Routledge, 2006.
\nBowen, Bleddyn E. War in Space: Strategy, Spacepower, Geopolitics. Edinburgh University Press, 2020.
\nPollpeter, Kevin, Eric Anderson, Jordan Wilson, and Fan Yang. China Dream, Space Dream: China's Progress in Space Technologies and Implications for the United States. Institute for National Strategic Studies, 2015.
\nHarrison, Todd, Kaitlyn Johnson, Joe Moye, and Makena Young. Space Threat Assessment 2024. Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2024.
\nCooper, Helene, Ralph Blumenthal, and Leslie Kean. \"Glowing Auras and 'Black Money': The Pentagon's Mysterious U.F.O. Program.\" The New York Times, December 16, 2017.
\nOffice of the Director of National Intelligence. Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. June 25, 2021.
\nElizondo, Luis. Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for UFOs. William Morrow, 2024.
\nDolan, Richard M. UFOs and the National Security State: Chronology of a Cover-Up, 1941-1973. Hampton Roads, 2000.
\nDolan, Richard M. UFOs and the National Security State: The Cover-Up Exposed, 1973-1991. Keyhole Publishing, 2009.
\nBurrows, William E. This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age. Random House, 1998.
\nSiddiqi, Asif A. Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge. University Press of Florida, 2003.
\nHagemeister, Michael. \"Russian Cosmism in the 1920s and Today.\" In The Occult in Russian and Soviet Culture, edited by Bernice Glatzer Rosenthal. Cornell University Press, 1997.
\nYoung, George M. The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers. Oxford University Press, 2012.
\n\"United States Space Force.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Force.
\n\"Air Force Space Command.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Force_Space_Command.
\n\"Russian Space Forces.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Space_Forces.
\n\"People's Liberation Army Aerospace Force.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Liberation_Army_Aerospace_Force.
\n\"Commandement de l'espace.\" Wikipedia. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commandement_de_l%27espace.
\n\"Space Command (United Kingdom).\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Command_(United_Kingdom).
\n\"Outer Space Treaty.\" Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty.
\n", "extra": {"alternative_names":["U.S. Space Force","USSF","Space Force","United States Space Force"],"category":"Ufology","claim_type":"direct","editorial_pass":"2026-07","entry_type":"concept","infobox":{"bipartisan_continuity":"Established under the first Trump administration (2017–2021); maintained and expanded under the Biden administration (2021–2025); continued under the second Trump administration (2025–present)","corpus_position":"Documented mainstream military development, engaged descriptively; alternative-ufological 'secret space program' claims connecting the branch to UAP retrieval are labelled speculative and lack documentary support; the Raëlian canon does not treat the Space Force as principal content","distinguished_from":"NASA (the civilian space agency); the U.S. military branches that operated in space before 2019; the broader UAP cover-up-and-disclosure question (treated in the military cover-up of exobiology entry)","establishment_date":"December 20, 2019, through the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020, signed by President Donald Trump","fy2024_budget":"Approximately $30 billion (up from $15.4 billion at its 2020 establishment)","international_parallels":"Russia's VKS Space Forces (2015); China's PLA Aerospace Force (2024, reorganized from the PLA Strategic Support Force of 2015); France's Commandement de l'espace (2019); the UK's Space Command (2021)","parent_department":"Department of the Air Force (parallel to the U.S. Marine Corps under the Department of the Navy)","predecessor":"Air Force Space Command (1982–2019; subsumed into the USSF)","principal_commands":"Space Operations Command (SpOC); Space Systems Command (SSC); Space Training and Readiness Command (STARCOM)","principal_missions":"Satellite operations; missile warning and missile-defense support; space situational awareness; GPS operations; offensive and defensive space operations; space domain awareness","service_member_designation":"Guardians (adopted December 18, 2020)","status_in_framework":"A documented contemporary development with a light framework angle; peripheral to the canon, whose own answer to the disclosure question is the Embassy rather than any military branch","type":"Sixth and youngest branch of the U.S. Armed Forces; established December 20, 2019; operates under the Department of the Air Force; mission focused on military operations in the space domain","uap_disclosure_intersection":"Founded during the 2017–2024 UAP disclosure wave; its space-domain-awareness mission overlaps with UAP-detection capability, though the corpus reads the founding as ordinary military reorganization rather than disclosure preparation"},"lang":"en","lang_prefix":"","same_as":["https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q55088961","https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Force","https://viaf.org/viaf/40155563945613000194"],"see_also":[{"description":"The UAP cover-up-and-disclosure question the Space Force's founding sits temporally beside.","path":"wiki/military-cover-up-of-exobiology","title":"Military cover-up of exobiology"},{"description":"The field whose alternative literature connects the branch to the broader UAP framework.","path":"wiki/ufology","title":"Ufology"},{"description":"The science of extraterrestrial life the space-domain mission intersects contextually.","path":"wiki/astrobiology","title":"Astrobiology"},{"description":"The estimate of extraterrestrial civilizations the surrounding disclosure debate presupposes.","path":"wiki/drake-equation","title":"Drake Equation"},{"description":"The past-contact position the corpus reads alongside the contemporary disclosure trajectory.","path":"wiki/ancient-astronaut-hypothesis","title":"Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis"},{"description":"The framework placing this mainstream military development in the Aquarian-age context.","path":"wiki/wheel-of-heaven","title":"Wheel of Heaven"}],"timeline":["age-of-aquarius"]} }, "links": { "self": "/v1/wiki/us-space-force/", "canonical_html": "https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/us-space-force/", "index": "/v1/wiki/", "schema": "/v1/schema/wiki-entry/", "related": [{"slug": "military-cover-up-of-exobiology", "title": "Military cover-up of exobiology", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/military-cover-up-of-exobiology/" },{"slug": "ufology", "title": "Ufology", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/ufology/" },{"slug": "astrobiology", "title": "Astrobiology", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/astrobiology/" },{"slug": "drake-equation", "title": "Drake Equation", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/drake-equation/" },{"slug": "ancient-astronaut-hypothesis", "title": "Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/ancient-astronaut-hypothesis/" },{"slug": "wheel-of-heaven", "title": "Wheel of Heaven", "kind": "WikiEntry", "type": "see_also", "url": "/v1/wiki/wheel-of-heaven/" }] } }