The U.S. Space Force Affects Day-to-Day Life More Than We Know

hen he was named General Counsel of the United States Air Force in 2018, General Thomas Ayres L’91 embarked on the momentous task of creating a new subset of the American military, which had not been done since the establishment of the Air Force in 1947.

Working closely with then-Vice President Mike Pence, members of Congress, and congressional staff and space professionals across the Secretary of Defense offices, he made the United States Space Force a reality.

General Ayres, who retired as an Army Major General after 33 years, joined Voyager Space in June 2021 as Chief Legal Officer and Counsel. His active military career included the role of Deputy leader of the Army’s Judge Advocate General’s Corps in addition to several combat tours in Iraq and Afghanistan. He said navigating the bureaucracy of the federal government and getting all parties on board was the most difficult aspect of creating the Space Force.

“It was pretty easy to write the legislation — what we wrote was 20 to 25 pages, which is not that long,” General. Ayres said. “The interesting thing about the legislation is the number of policy decisions that had to be made.”

The Space Force was created for the maintenance and protection of satellites. It took years to come to fruition, but because fighter jet requests solely topped the Air Force’s budget list, an immediate benefit was that space funding needs were no longer sidelined, General Ayres said.

We have several big satellites the size of school buses worth over a billion dollars; they are pieces of very expensive equipment. We (the Air Force) built these things for defensive measures, but most people don’t realize they were designed for the military. The blue dot (for GPS) on your phone, ATM transactions, the way tractors work on farms — every financial interaction is enabled by those space capabilities. It’s a completely Air Force-run program for military benefit. In the late 90s, Congress mandated to provide for commercial use. That blue dot on your phone — 40 Airmen, now (Space Force) Guardians, run those satellites on a day-to-day basis. There are backup military ones as well.

After the Gulf War in ’91 … Russia started its own GLONASS navigation satellites, then China had its own dot called BeiDou and Europe launched Galileo — there are four systems out there. We’re entering a world where everything can be seen from space, and with enough data movement and enough processing with AI and quantum computing, even things like stealth fighters we spend billions of dollars on. If you can track those visually from a satellite and follow wherever it goes, it doesn’t matter if it has stealth technology.

Hopefully, we’ll launch a commercial space station before the decommissioning of the International Space Station in 2030. We’re hoping to be there by 2028. It will cost over two billion dollars to build. NASA is going to pay a percentage, and then for the rest, we have to attract commercial interests and other space agencies like Europe and Canada and others to try to pre-sell seats on our space station. It’s going to be owned and controlled by the United States.

For us, the prime focus for the space station will be research, and not only research but actual production. Zero gravity research on products like laundry pods; research on colloids is gaining traction, and another big thing we’re looking at is customized manufacturing in the medical and farming realms. Retinas are difficult to regrow in a gravity environment. In zero gravity, you can grow things in perfect symmetry. It’s a potentially multibillion- dollar industry of just retinas — then you think about possibilities for kids born without ears or noses that could be grown in space using their DNA.

Beyond the benefits of research, when you think about manufacturing, recall that our life inside the atmosphere is a real gift — how do we return Earth to its pristine nature? We can move a lot of energy generation outside of the atmosphere. All of our many acres of black solar panels also heat up the Earth, and if we could do that outside the Earth and then beam the electricity back down, it would change life on Earth for the better.

I think space is the future.