The United States has deployed a weapon into Earth’s orbit for the first time to defend against ‘hostile’ action.
The Space Force, the unintentionally comedic wing of the country’s military created by Donald Trump, has been in operation since 2019.
It’s responsible for military operations beyond Earth’s atmosphere and for defending U.S. satellites from potential threats.
US Secretary of the Air Force, Troy Meink, announced at a conference on Monday that the force had deployed a weapon into orbit.
It’s unclear what weapon has been deployed, or what it’s defending against, but it marks the first time the US has publicly announced that a ‘space force weapon’ is in operation.
‘Space control encapsulates the mission areas required to contest and control the space domain – employing kinetic and non-kinetic means to affect adversary capabilities through disruption, degradation and even destruction, if necessary,’ the Space Force said.
‘These capabilities can be employed for offensive and defensive purposes at the direction of combatant commands.’
In April, Trump claimed that Iran was being surveilled by the US Space Force.
‘It is now, and has been, under very exacting Satellite Surveillance (Space Force!). Nothing has been touched since the date of the attack. We are, and will be, talking Tariff and Sanctions relief with Iran,’ he wrote in April.
It was unclear what kind of surveillance Trump is referring to in his post, but it likely involves the monitoring of Iran’s former nuclear sites, which Trump claimed to have destroyed last summer.
The Trump administration also unveiled a plan for a new US Space Command Headquarters in Huntsville, Alabama, which he nicknamed ‘rocket city’.
Alabama and Colorado have long battled to claim Space Command and the jobs it would bring after Joe Biden decided to keep a temporary HQ in Colorado.
Trump has repeatedly claimed that the US is losing the space race to China and Russia.
‘This will result in more than 30,000 Alabama jobs, and probably much more than that,’ he said at the time.
‘Most importantly, this decision will help America defend and dominate the high frontier, as they call it.’
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