The Pentagon said Thursday the cost of creating a new Space Force could be less than $5 billion but would certainly be far below an Air Force estimate leaked in September, which projected that creating a separate branch of the military would cost $13 billion over five years.
The $13 billion figure was immediately derided as vastly inflated by proponents of the Space Force, a pet project of President Trump.
Rep. Mike Rogers, R-Ala., accused Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson, who initially opposed the plan, of “gold-plating” the proposed Space Force in an effort to kill it.
“There is two things we are watching for. And that’s gold-plating and slow-walking — that’s what you try to do when you want to kill something and you can’t stop it, you slow it down until you can figure out how to kill or you start throwing out numbers that make everybody go, ‘Oh, well we can’t afford that,’” Rogers said.
[Opinion: The Space Force is no joke – in fact, it’s really needed]
Speaking to reporters at the Pentagon Thursday, Deputy Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan said the latest update on the estimated cost of starting up the new service was a “single digit, not a double digit.”
When pressed, Shanahan said the number was between $5 billion and $10 billion but could be lower.
“It might be lower than five, it could be lower,” Shanahan said.
The Pentagon hopes to have a commander of the new U.S. Space Command, which would eventually be part of the Space Force, nominated and confirmed by the Senate by March 2019, and it hopes to name someone to lead the new Space Development Agency before the end of the year.
Creating the Space Command and Space Development Agency does not require congressional approval. But creating an entirely new branch of the armed forces does.
