I don’t think that an actual absorption is the danger but that a similar philosophy toward our space assets is the danger.

It pains me to write that because Redstone Arsenal, Werner Von Braun and the Germans and all those other folks were mythic figures in my childhood. But, just because they put us on the moon nearly 60 years ago, isn’t an excuse for their engineering descendants to have a lifetime employment, especially when the systems they are working on are a dead end.

I think it would be a great idea to move the Executive Branch to the middle of Kansas – near Hutchinson, or wherever the salt deposits would allow underground facilities to be built for secure areas – and put the various agencies in non-urban-feedlot places where they are actually relevant. Turn DC into a city of museums.

And while we’re at it, how about spreading out Congress, back to their districts/states, and hook them up through secure teleconferencing from publicly-accessible studios in-district, so that their constituents can see them in action, and watch them carefully?

This would also increase the opportunities for those other than professional politicians to serve in those offices; not uprooting them from their home states makes it easier both to serve, and to return to private life after a few years instead of becoming the poster children for term limits and/or moving to pseudo-private K Street (though I do think term limits are still prudent, even with this TeleCongress).

We certainly need to relocate all of the above, out of the stew of collusion, corruption and realpolitik known as Washington DC.

Not to mention, DC is a prime target for a decapitation strike to come in from the ocean. We’d get a few more minutes of warning if the President was in Kansas.

The location may be pork, but the growth opportunity afforded by building from the ground up and abandoning the existing clique has much to recommend it. Easier to exercise bureaucratic demons that way.

Placing Space Force Command away from the center of that power may make it less vulnerable to corrupt influences.

They are at best investment speculators and not designers.
They offer prizes for ideas and provide cash for their chosen ones.

We do not base our navy at the ship yard. We base them at strategic places.

Since most of our space services will be needed in the northern hemisphere we have no real need to launch from close to the equator.
The greater need is security. The US desert area would be best for this, if your going to have a militarized launch facility.

Come to think about it we already have a great place. Groom lake.

Just guild an assembly building and a few launch towers.

The Pentagon built our existing space asset infrastructure which is great. But it is a fleet of 2 or 3 dozen battleship platforms that are expensive, relatively vulnerable, and slow to upgrade and evolve. Why didn’t they conceive and build Starlink before SpaceX? A constellation of thousands is invulnerable to easy attack, the latency, bandwidth, pervasive and persistent global coverage of the network etc. are ideal for military applications, and they are deployed at the rate of a batch a month so can continuously adopt and deploy new tech and capabilities. And how hard would it be to layer in electro optical sensors as part of the platform? Yeah, you need a few 3m class surveillance sats for super high res, but 5000 .5m scopes could provide A LOT of realtime asset monitoring!

My 2 cents anyway.

Jeff Wright: I’ve been to Marshall. Even gave a speech there. Lots of good engineers wasting their lives doing badly managed government make-work.

You need to visit Alabama, Robert. We don’t have horns.