Space has become as integral to military operations as it has for anyone who uses an iPhone to get directions through GPS or an up-to-the-second weather forecast. “Our military now is completely dependent on space,” said Todd Harrison, director of the Aerospace Security Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, a Washington, D.C.-based think tank. “We can’t fight without fighting through space. When we put a bomb on a target somewhere in the world, did that bomb come from space? Not physically, but the bomb would not have gotten there without our space capabilities. So it is a space-enabled bomb.”

The idea for a new service devoted to space is not new, and support for it does not break down along partisan lines. It first gained currency in 2000 as a recommendation from a military-reform commission headed by Donald Rumsfeld, who was then a retired ex-defense secretary and White House chief of staff under President Gerald Ford. A year later, Rumsfeld would be recruited back to government as George W. Bush’s defense secretary and set about to overhaul the bureaucracy of the Pentagon—a reform that might have included the space corps. But the attacks of September 11, 2001, and the launching of long wars in Afghanistan and Iraq sidetracked that effort.