The US air force admitted to deploying weapons in space. Don’t expect the White House to explain why

Troy Meink, secretary of the air force, speaks as JD Vance listens at the US Air Force Academy graduation on in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Photograph: Michael Ciaglo/ View image in fullscreen Troy Meink, secretary of the air force, speaks as JD Vance listens at the US Air Force Academy graduation on in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Photograph: Michael Ciaglo/ Analysis The US air force admitted to deploying weapons in space. Don’t expect the White House to explain why Richard Luscombe The revelation ‘left experts scratching their heads at exactly what Donald Trump has in his cosmic arsenal’ In Hollywood at least, space weapons are a relatively simple concept. The good guys, from Captain Kirk and his crew in Star Trek, to Luke Skywalker’s rebel alliance in Star Wars, battle intergalactic villains with an array of colorful lasers and particle-beam cannons, then the bad guys get dispatched in a spectacular, explosive finale. The messaging coming out of the White House on the subject, by contrast, could not be more vague. This week’s attention-grabbing revelation – that the US has deployed some kind of weapons in space – carried nothing in the way of context or detail, and left experts scratching their heads at exactly what Donald Trump has in his cosmic arsenal. It could just be a building block, and the US is going to lay out more later with that. To me that would make logical sense, if that was the plan.” What the plan actually is has never been made clear, and Meink, in his announcement, stressed it was unlikely ever to be. “Me talking about the details of what we’re doing would actually not benefit deterrence, so we’re not going to talk about the specifics of what we’re doing, whether we’ve tested it, not tested it, or anything else,” he said. View image in fullscreen A solider during a ceremony for US Air Force airmen transitioning to US Space Force guardian designations at Travis air force base in California on . Photograph: Noah Berger/APBut as Russia and China, both US adversaries, have advanced their own aggressive outer space ambitions and agendas, Trump has responded -increasing focus on militarizing the heavens. During his first term of office, he created Space Force, the first new, separate branch of the US military in more than seven decades. Last month, he signed an executive order designating the first US Space Academy, a proposed joint civilian-military institution modeled on the army and navy training academies at West Point and Annapolis, to be sited at an as-yet unnamed location.