Star Wars, Version 2.0

Donald Trump, in two speeches to U.S. service personnel, has suggested that he is considering a space force to become the sixth branch of the military. Given his rambling style of delivering his words to an audience and the chaos of his administration, it is not clear whether this was mere filler or is set to be enacted right after that wall is built, but the idea, while easily mocked, deserves consideration.

As the title reminds us, this is not the first time that the idea of armed forces in space has been proposed. Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative came before, at a time when the technology allowed for special effects versions of combat satellites, but not much else. In the 1950s and 60s, physicist Freeman Dyson and others worked on Project Orion, an idea to use nuclear explosives to propel spacecraft. While that sounds crazy to the uninitiated, it could have worked. But the military took the research over, dreaming of having battleships in interplanetary space until someone realized that neither the Russians nor the Russian-inspired Klingons would be out there to chase.

Well, almost. Cosmonauts have been armed for a while, though not for belligerent purposes during their missions. Russian capsules have a…