The U.S. Space Force is complaining about its budget. Vice Chief of Space Operations Gen. David Thompson, who retires this week, said that as the Space Force takes on new responsibilities and missions, it needs the resources to match. “The budget needs to grow because there are still more missions that are migrating to space,” Thompson told C4ISRNET in an interview. “The challenge is, in this environment, defense budgets are likely not to grow significantly in the near future the way they have in the recent past.”
The Space Force’s budget has already doubled from $15 billion in 2021 to a request for $30 billion in 2024, but that’s still not enough. This is attributed in part to mission growth, that is, the Space Force is taking on missions that have traditionally been done by the other services which are now migrating some of their missions to satellites. “Some of these missions that have been done in a benign environment or in environments where we have air superiority, they have to move to space,” Thompson said. “All of that is mission growth.”
