Suit Up, Space Cadets!

On at least two occasions, Donald Trump has called for the formation of a manned fleet of military space cadets to protect deep-space commerce in the form of mining and other similar activities.

The US Congress has also called for the formation of a similar branch of the military - a Space Command - for the purposes of both protection of commerce and mounting rescue operations.

Recently, Joseph P. Farrell speculated that this mandate sounds an awful lot like the US Coast Guard, which has nearly identical mandates within the nation's territorial waters, and that adding a line or two about space would easily expand the service into low Earth orbit and beyond.

In the past couple of months, "official" video and reports have "leaked" out of the Pentagon concerning an incident with the USS Nimitz carrier group that involved UFOs, USOs and at least a week or two of observations and engagement.

Trump Calls For Space Force - http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2018/03/13/trump-praises-military-calls-for-space-force-as-new-branch-armed-forces.html
House Panel Votes To Split Air Force Into Space Command - https://federalnewsradio.com/defense-news/2017/06/house-panel-votes-to-split-air-force-create-new-u-s-space-corps/
Joseph P. Farrell Speculates On Space Guard - https://gizadeathstar.com/2018/06/the-coast-guard-in-space-space-based-missile-defense/#comment-82313
USS Nimitz UFO Encounter - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Nimitz_UFO_incident
Pentagon Paper Confirms UFO Encounter - https://sputniknews.com/viral/201805241064765210-us-navy-ufo-encounter-report/

There are a number of significant issues and assumptions in play here, not the least of which are are propulsion, navigation and communication.

None of this is feasible with currently available rocket launches and chemical propellants on orbit (e.g. cryo, hypergolic, etc.). The expense, speed of launch preparations and their delicacy relating to weather, launch windows and the like, make this technology untenable for quick response to situations.

Even Musk's SpaceX Falcon requires several days turn-around - in theory, as it's never been tested at this rate of launches. Even so, at the moment NASA doesn't have a (public) functioning manned space capacity, nor does it allow Musk's fueling process for manned flight. Musk uses cryogenic hydrogen and oxygen that are loaded minutes before launch, when humans would already be atop the rocket. NASA policy forbids fueling while astronauts are on-board.

Even if the quick-launch capacity exists, it would require the ability to orbit some number of military personnel, presumably more than 3-7 armed individuals with ammo, gear and supplies for a multi-year operation (see navigation below), with sufficient fuel for whatever destination is the target and the return journey, all with a minimal 10% safety margin.

Plus, these individuals will need to stay fit in optimum fighting condition during the journey, which assumes some kind of artificial gravity, such as a spinning cylinder, which has never been built or tried outside of paper calculations and sci-fi novels.

Current Newtonian navigation means that pirates could take over a mining facility on an asteroid and be there literally for years while the Cavalry plots a circuitous intercept orbit that could take over a decade to reach the facility (see intercept orbit for comet 67P and Rosetta mission).

New Horizons, the fastest craft ever (publicly) flown by humanity, took 13 months to reach Jupiter at conjunction with an optimal flight path, and even then, it didn't carry sufficient fuel to slow itself into orbit.

The only way for a police force to be any deterrent is for it to be able to react within hours, not years.

It is completely unthinkable to have fleets of manned craft standing by for decades at strategic points throughout the Solar System. Stationing just four equidistant outposts in Mars' orbit, the asteroid belt and Jupiter's orbit (12 total), fully manned, armed and supplied using current technology is impossible. Maintaining seven personnel on the ISS just 350 kilometers above Earth is a major undertaking, much less 12 stations scattered across the Solar System with minimally 10 personnel each, requiring constant resupply with food, water, oxygen, and other necessities, with the ability to reach the stations within a year for each resupply mission is absolutely out of the question, not to mention re-crewing on rotation.

The supply lines are extremely long and vulnerable, susceptible to the very pirates this system is supposed to guard against. Furthermore, the orbital parameters (ephemera) are constantly changing, with optimal configurations being very rare - on the order of years to decades and even centuries apart.

Supply ships would have to be launched years in advance on a regular schedule with constantly changing ephemera, and if any disaster were to occur, the entire operation would shut down for several years of internal reviews and Congressional investigations, stranding a minimum of 120 personnel in deep space.

Then there's the communication issue. Speed-of-light comms make any kind of centralized command structure pointless. With round-trip radio time varying from several seconds (Moon) to hours, and sometimes even impossible due to orbital configuration (e.g. when Mars is on the opposite side of the Sun from Earth), there must be some kind of "subspace" comm link for even a small fraction of the distance beyond the Moon's orbit.

Radio signals between Earth and Jupiter take anywhere from 33 minutes to 53 minutes one way, depending on whether the planets are at conjunction or opposition. If Jupiter is behind the Sun, which it is for a week or so each year, then radio links are impossible without relay satellites posted at 90-degree angles to Earth in its orbit, much like the Stereo A and B solar observatories. In any case, round-trip comms take an hour to two hours, plus consultation time at each end. Add to that the comm time between mining facilities in the asteroid belt and the nearest Space Guard outpost and the formulation of an attack plan.

The outposts could be autonomous in their decision making, but that could easily become politically sensitive, depending on the flag of attacking marauders. This could lead to Earth-bound wars if military actions are not cleared with central commands and the usual diplomatic procedures are not followed.

Any one of these issues renders a Space Guard untenable, and even farcical if not outright deadly, but all three combined are deal-killers.

Imagine a radio response to the Vesta mining facility that arrives hours after the panic button is pushed, with the reply giving instructions to "hold on while we design and construct as super-fast rescue mission that will arrive in six and a half years, assuming no catastrophes," IF orbital configurations between Earth and Vesta are optimal!

Even if the launch capacity is 'off-the-shelf,' there's still training, gearing up, acceleration, deceleration, orbit insertion, landing operations, deployment, and all in the hopes that every variable is precisely predictable and execution is flawless.

Frankly, any group of space pirates worth their salt could invade a facility, operate it for at least a couple of years, and be long gone, hiding anywhere in the vast gulf of space, and that assumes they don't just land, kill everyone, take the ready inventory and leave again in a matter of hours. With a proper plan, these pirates could hit every mining operation in the asteroid belt and vanish before Earth even mounts a military response.

All of this can only mean that exotic forms of propulsion, navigation and communication already exist in order for a Space Guard to be worth even considering, much less implementing. All three considerations must be reliably and cheaply solved for response within hours, even if the emergency occurs when the facility is at opposition to Earth behind the Sun. And every operation must pass political and diplomatic muster before it can be initiated to avoid horrific repercussions back on the home planet.

Given the time it has taken to (maybe) get Kim Jong-Un and Donald Trump to a table in Singapore, one doesn't have tremendous faith in the speed of diplomatic solutions.

I don't know if anyone keeps up with the Electric Universe folks, but the models of Birkeland Currents - counter-rotating cylinders of plasma in an electro-magnetic field - sound amazingly like the Nazi Bell described in Farrell's books, and they have both repulsive and attractive forces (so-called anti-gravity) depending on charge and spin. Additionally, Birkeland currents are scalable from lab bench to trans-galactic, and could theoretically be produced using the solar wind (plasma) as "fuel," given the ability to generate a sufficiently strong magnetic field. Top speeds would be significant fractions of the speed of light, with both acceleration and deceleration capabilities by simply reversing the polarity of the current.

Navigation is related to the drive problem, since Newtonian orbits rely on gravitational "wells" and inertia. With a Birkeland Drive (I claim copyright), gravitational considerations are irrelevant and line-of-sight flight paths are easy to achieve, sheering months to years off a flight plan.

As for comms, quantum entanglement and computing allow for instantaneous connections between devices at cosmic scales, meaning time and distance are meaningless. Data entered into one terminal are instantaneously relayed to the other. This would include navigational data, as well as live audio and video, meaning any operation is in constant, real-time communication with central command, and ground operations can be monitored in real time, as well (think Aliens here).

Given the increasing tempo of "official" acknowledgements of UFOs, and the Congressional mandates and Presidential calls for a Space Guard, we could be in for some fun in the near future. The recent "leaks" of incidents aboard the US carrier Nimitz involving multiple UFOs and USOs observed and engaged over a period of weeks is a tacit admission that exotic craft and propulsion exist in the real world.

The "official" descriptions said the craft were "tic-tac" shaped, had no visible external form of propulsion, and could hover, accelerate and maneuver at extremely high speeds. In addition, they were said to interact with "something" in the ocean, implying that they are operational in any external environment, such as water, air or space.

It would seem that we are being conditioned, albeit slowly, to accept that not only is there some "entity" that is not "us" operating exotic technology in the real world, but that the conditioning is concurrent with the call for establishing some kind of "space command" that militarizes space for any number of reasons, as outlined by Farrell's Coast Guard comparison.

In this scenario, "we" already possess the same capabilities that "they" do, and in order to jump-start commercial operations within the Solar System, "we" must make public both the existence of "pirates," but also the ability to defend against them.

In other words, get your popcorn ready, the main attraction is about to begin.