Most reporting on United States President Donald Trump's 2018 Space Force announcement was framed as another rant-filled word salad served up to military personnel attending the event at Marine Corps Air Station Miramar, in California.
In a post-event tweet, Trump called the Marine Corps the "Marine Core". The spelling mistake set social-media platforms ablaze with scorching Space Force and spelling-related one-liners. Even the Marine Corps Times, a publication that serves a US military audience and traces its roots to the 1940s, focused on the tweet.
But Trump wasn't joking. Neither are US allies or adversaries.
On Thursday, 17 months after the initial announcement, Trump and Vice President Mike Pence are set to preside over a White House ceremony that will "stand up" the US Space Command.
Security analysts not only see this as the first major step toward establishing a new US military branch, but a signal that the US, its allies and its adversaries could break with decades of international security norms and militarise the space above Earth's sky.
What has changed in space?
"For a long time, space was a bit like the high north, or the Antarctic. A quiet area. There was a UN treaty going back to 1967 to prevent the militarisation of outer space," said Jaime Shea, a former deputy assistant secretary-general for emerging security challenges at the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), and now a senior fellow at the think-tank Friends of Europe.
"Everybody more or less played ball," Shea told Al Jazeera. "There was a genuine recognition that nobody had any interest in interfering with other people's satellites. But recently, that kind of gentlemen's agreement on space being a quiet zone is gone."/BBC news