To keep a better check on the expanding channel of interplanetary traffic, America’s newest military service, such as the California Highway Patrol, intends to establish a Cislunar Highway Patrol System, or CHPS, for short. There’s a lot of profit to be gained from the moon and its surrounding space. Lunar ice may be utilized to create water, oxygen, and liquid hydrogen that can be used to power expeditions further into space.
The AFRL (Air Force Research Laboratory) revealed in a clip how the US is expanding its outreach in interstellar space from 35,400 kilometers, “With new U.S. government and non-governmental activities moving into cislunar science, the area of attention will widen to 272,000 miles and even beyond, a more than twofold capacity and 1,000-fold increase in service volume,” the Air Force Research Lab stated in its opening. The planned new highway enforcement system demonstrates how rapidly this field is evolving and how much additional work the US military will have to perform to stay up with it.
According to the AFRL, expanding space travel to the moon several times over the next few decades will ensure the harmonious growth of space and the security of missions. The AFRL keeps adding in the video that “the liable utilization of space and immediate access to the space technology arena guarantees obstacle detection, on-orbit logistic support, communication, navigation, and maneuverability, all of which are crucial to the United States and allied space industry, science, and expansion.”
The AFRL also declares in the video that it seeks to deliver technologies to “guarantee safe space research, keeping a watchful eye on enemies, and providing helpful national defense systems to the Moon and well beyond.” As per AFRL website, CHPS is “a spaceflight project aimed to show basic space field skillsets in the cislunar zone.” As a portion of the CHPS program, the lab will create the spacecraft. The spacecraft will subsequently be purchased by the United States Space Force for use by the United States Space Command, which controls military involvement and activities in space.
The AFRL video highlights NASA’s attempts to return to the moon’s surface and other “interstellar places” as part of the initiative to expand the military’s monitoring capabilities to cislunar space. According to the video, these operations to the moon and beyond would “multiply space travel to the moon several times over the subsequent decades.”
