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“When it comes to defending America, it is not enough to merely have an American presence in space. We must have American dominance in space,” the president declared in the White House East Room in a meeting of the National Space Council. “Very importantly, I’m hereby directing the Department of Defense and Pentagon to immediately begin the process necessary to establish the Space Force as the sixth branch of the armed forces.”
“We are going to have the Air Force and we are going to have the Space Force: separate but equal, it is going to be something so important,” he said.
The initiative, Trump explained, would protect American interests in space through monitoring commercial traffic and debris and would be “great not only in terms of jobs and everything else, it’s great for the psyche of our country.”