"Nationalised search service" ... interesting thought. Legions of Librarians, finally compensated justly and lauded for their heroism. Wonder if they'd get uniforms and "be all you can be" recruiting campaigns too.
Something like DuckDuckGo operated like Let's Encrypt. If it can be done for key management, why not search corpus? What's the annual cost, $10MM? Maybe a bit more, but not crazy expensive. Someone with search experience (ChuckMcM or greglindahl) would be able to say with more certainty.
If you want to do something like DDG, proxying some other search engines results, a point of reference could be Ecosia, which publishes financial reports. It looks like they operate on somewhere in the range of 12M/year.
If money was not spent and they used an existing uniform to keep costs low, critics would complain that the uniform does not match the environment.
If money was spent to design a new uniform that matched the environment, critics would complain that money was wasted on uniforms and they would probably acknowledge the comicality of thinking that a uniformed soldier in space would care about camouflage instead of things like breathing and wondering why they're in uniform in the vacuum of space.
Either way, critics will complain and Space Force personnel will continue to exist in desks for the conceivable future, so uniforms should clearly have been optimized for comfort.
Not to get too off topic, but it's clearly a self inflicted problem, where nobody would complain about spending money on space force uniforms if space force's existence made any sense.
The question is whether the people in the Air Force who send stuff into space should have their own unit, or if the creation of the space force was just a rebranding stunt. The creation wasn't without cost; it gave talking points to other countries seeking to increase their militarization in space. It also increases bureaucratic overhead and might --- if they eventually become more independent --- cause integration issues.
Few dispute the military should have some people who do space stuff, many dispute that they should be on equal footing administratively to the rest of the military.
> For now, the 16,000 active-duty airmen and civilians who work at Air Force Space Command will be assigned to the Space Force, but nothing else will change. Uniforms, a rank structure, training and education are all to be determined, and for the foreseeable future, Space Force will continue to be manned by airmen...
> Meanwhile, U.S Space Command, which stood up in August, will continue to exist as a combatant command, similar to Cyber Command, Special Operations Command and others.
> Barrett will be the Space Force’s service secretary, as the service will be nestled within the Air Force Department, the same way the Marine Corps is part of the Navy Department.
> Eventually, she said, those services’ space commands will be rolled into Space Force, and those personnel will transfer branches. In the more immediate future, officials said, soldiers and sailors could be detailed to Space Force.
We had a bunch of international treaties to prevent war in space, which would be disastrous for humanity in a way similar to nuclear war. Our leaders now seem to have decided it's okay because they could probably win.
It's because as soon as people militarize space nobody can get anything done in space.
In space you are so much more vulnerable than in any conceivable environment on earth. Survival depends on others not having layers of other agendas, several of which may be to find ways to kill you.
Imagine how much space exploration will cost if not only do you need to get to space, but you need to bring defensive and offensive weapons as well.
the comicality of thinking that a uniformed soldier in space would care about camouflage
Consider that air forces throughout the world wear blue uniforms, yet no individual in uniform is ever going to attempt to camouflage themselves against the sky...
