(Jacob Bruns, Headline USA) The Pentagon announced that it is partnering with Elon Musk‘s company SpaceX to research dropping in soldiers from space using the company’s technology.
The United States military will also work with Musk’s company in a variety of other capacities aimed at strengthening the military’s ability to manipulate situations abroad.
Musk has worked with the Pentagon in the past, previously securing a contract worth $160 million to create and produce missile tracking devices, the Epoch Times reported.
The draft of a Cooperative Research and Development Agreement released earlier this week suggests that Musk and SpaceX will partner with the Pentagon “to collaboratively investigate commercial space transportation capabilities as a transportation mode to expedite global delivery of Department of Defense (DoD) material and personnel.”
But not everyone is hopeful that the agreement will lead to fruition. William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute, expressed frustration at the grandeur of the plan despite what he believes to be its impracticability.
“What are they going to do, stop the next Benghazi by sending people into space?” he said.
“It doesn’t seem to make a lot of sense,” Hartung continued, suggesting that even if dropping troops via rocket were possible, it might not even be desireable.
“If a mob’s attacking an embassy and they dial up their handy SpaceX spaceship, it’s still going to take a while to get there. … It’s almost like someone thinks it would be really neat to do stuff through space but haven’t thought through the practical ramifications.”
In Hartung’s opinion, this may just be another round of “fantasy weapons” that the Pentagon likes to imagine and spend big money on, without any payoff.
Kaitlyn Johnson, deputy director of the Center for Strategic and International Studies’ Aerospace Security Project, agreed with Hartung, suggesting that rocket evacuations would be remarkably slow.
“My two cents are that it’s unlikely that they would be able to evacuate anyone quickly via rocket,” she said.
