U.S. Space Force

The U.S. Space Force (USSF) is the sixth and youngest branch of the United States Armed Forces, established on December 20, 2019, when President Donald Trump signed the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020. It sits under the Department of the Air Force in the same way the Marine Corps sits under the Department of the Navy, and it is charged with military operations in the space domain — satellite operations, missile warning, space situational awareness, GPS, and the defence of U.S. assets in orbit.

In the Wheel of Heaven framework the Space Force is a deliberately modest entry. It is a documented piece of mainstream military policy, not a pillar of the canon, and the Raëlian source texts — written in the 1970s — say nothing about it. What earns it a place here is timing: the branch was stood up in the middle of the 2017–2024 wave of U.S. government UAP disclosure, and the corpus notes that coincidence for context while taking care not to inflate it.

Establishment and mission

The Space Force did not create a new military capability so much as elevate an existing one. The United States had operated in space for decades — through the Air Force Ballistic Missile Division in the 1950s, through Air Force Systems Command, and above all through Air Force Space Command, established in 1982 at Peterson Air Force Base, Colorado. For some thirty-seven years Air Force Space Command ran the country's military satellite constellations, missile-warning systems, and space surveillance. In 2019 that command was folded into the new service, so the Space Force is best understood as its promotion to an independent branch rather than as a capability built from nothing.

The legislative path was short. Trump floated the idea publicly in a March 2018 speech, directed the Defense Department to begin planning that June, and signed Space Policy Directive 4 in February 2019. The branch was formally created that December inside the annual defence-authorization bill, which passed both chambers with bipartisan majorities. General John "Jay" Raymond was sworn in as the first Chief of Space Operations in January 2020; the first recruits enlisted directly into the service that September; and in December 2020 the branch adopted "Guardian" as the name for its members, alongside the Army's Soldiers, the Navy's Sailors, the Air Force's Airmen, and the Marines. A distinct service dress uniform, unveiled in 2021, and a slowly forming service culture followed — early markers of an identity still only a few years old.

The work is organized under three commands: Space Operations Command (SpOC), which runs day-to-day operations; Space Systems Command (SSC), which handles acquisition and development; and Space Training and Readiness Command (STARCOM), which trains Guardians and writes doctrine. The principal missions are:

• Satellite operations — running constellations such as GPS (roughly 31 operational satellites), the Space-Based Infrared System for missile warning, and military communications satellites.
• Missile warning — detecting ballistic-missile launches and feeding the wider missile-defence system; this is the branch's clearest contribution to U.S. strategic deterrence.
• Space situational awareness — tracking the tens of thousands of catalogued objects in Earth orbit and warning operators of possible collisions.
• GPS — maintaining the constellation that supplies positioning and timing to military and civilian users worldwide.
• Offensive and defensive space operations — protecting U.S. satellites against anti-satellite weapons and, in a largely classified mission set, contesting an adversary's use of space.

The Space Force is by a wide margin the smallest U.S. service — on the order of 8,400 uniformed Guardians in 2024, supported by a comparable number of civilians — because its missions are technical and operational rather than centred on projecting large forces. Its budget nonetheless grew quickly, from about $15.4 billion at its 2020 establishment to roughly $30 billion by fiscal year 2024. That growth spanned the Trump, Biden, and second Trump administrations, and the continuity across those transitions is the clearest sign that the branch reflects settled national-security policy rather than the initiative of any single president.

An international pattern

The United States was not acting alone. A cluster of national space commands appeared within a few years of one another: Russia consolidated its space troops into the VKS Aerospace Forces in 2015; China created the PLA Strategic Support Force the same year, reorganizing it into the PLA Aerospace Force in April 2024; France established its Commandement de l'espace in 2019; and the United Kingdom stood up Space Command in 2021, with Germany, Italy, Japan, Australia, and India developing comparable organizations. The near- simultaneous timing is itself telling — anti-satellite weapons tests such as China's 2007 Fengyun-1C strike, which scattered roughly 3,000 trackable pieces of debris, and Russia's 2021 test made plain that orbit had become a contested domain, and every major power responded by giving space its own military command.

This pattern matters for reading the Space Force. It places the branch inside a broad international trend driven by growing dependence on satellites and by great-power competition in orbit, rather than treating it as a uniquely American — or uniquely mysterious — development.

The Wheel of Heaven reading

The framework's engagement with the Space Force is light, and honest about being light.

It is mainstream military reality first. The 2019 establishment, the command structure, the congressional appropriations, and the parallel foreign services are all ordinary, well-documented facts of defence policy, and the corpus reads them as such. The mainstream account of why the branch exists — satellite dependence, orbital competition, the elevation of space to a war-fighting domain — is well supported, and the wave of foreign space commands created on the same schedule is strong evidence that the founding reflects a general trajectory rather than any hidden cause.

The timing sits inside the disclosure wave. What connects the branch to the corpus at all is chronology. The Space Force was established on December 20, 2019 — roughly two years after the December 2017 New York Times article that disclosed the Pentagon's AATIP program, and about four months before the April 2020 official release of Navy UAP videos. That places its founding in the middle of the 2017–2024 transformation traced in the military cover-up of exobiology entry. The framework treats this as a genuine coincidence of dates worth noting, not as a causal link: nothing in the documentary record shows the branch was created because of the UAP question.

There is a real mission overlap. The Space Force's space-domain-awareness mission — watching everything that moves in near-Earth space — does technically intersect with the detection of unidentified anomalous phenomena, and Guardians and the affiliated All-Domain Anomaly Resolution Office have engaged the UAP question in official settings. The overlap is mundane rather than revelatory: an organization built to track objects in orbit will inevitably record objects it cannot immediately identify.

Speculative readings are labelled as such. A separate ufological literature goes much further, casting the Space Force as cover for a "secret space program," as preparation for an official disclosure event, or as proof of recovered non-human technology — claims associated with figures such as the hacker Gary McKinnon. These readings are speculative. They rest on inference and assertion rather than on documented programs, and the 2024 AARO Historical Record Report found no evidence for the reverse-engineering programs they presuppose. The corpus records that this literature exists and engages it descriptively, but does not adopt it, and keeps it firmly distinct from the sourced facts above.

The canon's own answer lies elsewhere. For the Wheel of Heaven framework the resolution of the disclosure question is not a military branch at all but the Embassy — the ground that Message from the Designers asks humanity to prepare for open, diplomatic contact with the Elohim. Against that, a satellite-operations service is peripheral. The Space Force belongs to the ordinary machinery of a spacefaring Age of Aquarius; it is context for the disclosure story, not a chapter of it.

Mainstream and critical perspectives

Nothing about the Space Force is contested as a matter of record. It is an openly legislated, openly funded reorganization of capabilities the U.S. military already held, and it operates within the Outer Space Treaty of 1967, which bars weapons of mass destruction from orbit and reserves celestial bodies for peaceful use. The Space Force's missions — satellite operations, warning, surveillance, navigation, and conventional counter-space work — fall within those limits.

Skeptics of the ufological readings make the straightforward point that a documented military bureaucracy needs no exotic explanation, and that the burden of proof for any "secret space program" claim has not been met. The framework agrees on the essentials: it distinguishes what is established — a mundane military branch, founded for stated and sufficient reasons — from what is speculative — any covert UAP mission — and it declines to let the second borrow credibility from the first. That discipline, reporting the documented and flagging the speculative as speculative, is the whole of the corpus's interest in the Space Force.

See also

• Wheel of Heaven
• Ufology
• Military cover-up of exobiology
• Astrobiology
• Drake Equation
• Crop Circles
• Ancient Astronaut Hypothesis
• Age of Aquarius
• Raël
• Raëlism
• Message from the Designers
• Embassy
• Plurality of Gods

References

Principal Raëlian source

Vorilhon, Claude (Raël). Message from the Designers. Tagman Press, 2005.

USSF establishment and operational documentation

U.S. Space Force. Official website. https://www.spaceforce.mil.

National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020. Public Law 116-92. December 20, 2019.

Space Policy Directive 4. February 19, 2019.

Office of the Chief of Space Operations. Spacepower: Doctrine for Space Forces. Space Capstone Publication, June 2020.

U.S. Government Accountability Office. Space Force: Information on Personnel Strength. Various reports.

Congressional Research Service. The U.S. Space Force and the Department of the Air Force. Various reports.

Historical context

Spires, David N. Beyond Horizons: A Half Century of Air Force Space Leadership. Air Force Space Command and Air University Press, 1998.

Walker, Stephen, et al. Air Force Space Command: A Historical Overview. Air Force Space Command, Office of History, various dates.

Lambright, W. Henry. Powering Apollo: James E. Webb of NASA. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995.

McDougall, Walter A. ...the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age. Basic Books, 1985.

Outer Space Treaty and international space law

United 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.

Lyall, Francis, and Paul B. Larsen. Space Law: A Treatise. 2nd edition, Routledge, 2017.

International space-military context

Klein, John J. Space Warfare: Strategy, Principles and Policy. Routledge, 2006.

Bowen, Bleddyn E. War in Space: Strategy, Spacepower, Geopolitics. Edinburgh University Press, 2020.

Pollpeter, 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.

Harrison, Todd, Kaitlyn Johnson, Joe Moye, and Makena Young. Space Threat Assessment 2024. Center for Strategic and International Studies, 2024.

UAP disclosure intersection

Cooper, 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.

Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Preliminary Assessment: Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. June 25, 2021.

Elizondo, Luis. Imminent: Inside the Pentagon's Hunt for UFOs. William Morrow, 2024.

Alternative-ufological engagement

Dolan, Richard M. UFOs and the National Security State: Chronology of a Cover-Up, 1941-1973. Hampton Roads, 2000.

Dolan, Richard M. UFOs and the National Security State: The Cover-Up Exposed, 1973-1991. Keyhole Publishing, 2009.

Cold War space-race context

Burrows, William E. This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age. Random House, 1998.

Siddiqi, Asif A. Sputnik and the Soviet Space Challenge. University Press of Florida, 2003.

Cosmism tradition

Hagemeister, 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.

Young, George M. The Russian Cosmists: The Esoteric Futurism of Nikolai Fedorov and His Followers. Oxford University Press, 2012.

Web resources

"United States Space Force." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Space_Force.

"Air Force Space Command." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_Force_Space_Command.

"Russian Space Forces." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_Space_Forces.

"People's Liberation Army Aerospace Force." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Liberation_Army_Aerospace_Force.

"Commandement de l'espace." Wikipedia. https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commandement_de_l%27espace.

"Space Command (United Kingdom)." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Command_(United_Kingdom).

"Outer Space Treaty." Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outer_Space_Treaty.

U.S. Space Force. (2026). Wheel of Heaven. https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/us-space-force/

"U.S. Space Force." Wheel of Heaven, 2026, https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/us-space-force/.

"U.S. Space Force." Wheel of Heaven, 2026. https://www.wheelofheaven.world/wiki/us-space-force/.

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