Welcome to Axis ProRata, a podcast that takes just 10 minutes to get you smarter on the collision of tech business and politics.

I'm Dan from Mac. On today's show, the tech startup bubble blows even bigger and why we may be seeing a major role reversal between the U.S. and China.

But first, the Space Force.

Yeah, this might be an actual thing now.

President Trump last week directed the Pentagon to create a sixth military branch that would oversee all defense missions and operations above the Earth's atmosphere.

Here's how Vice President Pence described it during a speech.

President made it clear that our ultimate objective is to create a new branch of our military

that's separate from an equal to five other branches.

The Department of Defense will release a report outlining the first stages of our administration's

plan to implement the president's guidance and turn his vision into a reality.

Now, there are lots of critics of this plan, but let's begin with the thing most people

seem to agree on, which is that there are some actual national security threats related

to space, particularly as we send more and more satellites up to enable what we do on

Earth, satellites that manage everything from military operations to our communication

systems to even our Wi-Fi.

And countries like China have

been developing capabilities to shoot down satellites. So having some sort of protective

structure does make sense. Where folks differ, though, seems to be in the organization,

since most space defense operations to date have been handled by the Air Force and actually

have been since the 1950s. And a lot of folks in the military and some in Congress think there's no reason to rock that status quo.

Plus, Trump mentioned how Space Force would give the U.S. what he called dominance in space, which makes a lot of people uncomfortable, particularly those of us who in the last couple of decades have grown to view space as a place where kind of

superpowers work together on things like science and discovery, not a battleground. The bottom line

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