Mike Pence
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Space Force announces its personnel will be called 'Guardians'
While Donald Trump said that at first he was “not really serious” when considering a Space Force branch of the military, it has become real, and has continued to progress despite the ongoing pandemic.
Senators ask Alphabet how it will protect COVID-19 screening site data
Alphabet's COVID-19 screening site might serve as a relief to those eager to determine if they need to get tested, but it's also raising some privacy concerns in Congress. Five Democratic senators have sent letters to Vice President Mike Pence and Alphabet chief Sundar Pichai asking if they've studied the potential for privacy and security holes in Verily's Baseline triage system. The politicians wanted to know if users will be asked to "forfeit" their data to participate, and if Google will be barred from either using the data for its own purposes or selling it to third parties.
US and Poland agree to rigorously evaluate foreign 5G equipment
The US and Poland declared today that suppliers of 5G network equipment should be rigorously evaluated for foreign government control. Vice President Mike Pence and Polish President Andrzej Duda signed an agreement to tighten guidelines of 5G network security, The Wall Street Journal reports. The deal didn't name Huawei specifically, but it's the latest move in Washington's attempt to exclude China from 5G networks.
The Trump Administration just revived the Cold War-era Space Command
Today, President Trump and Vice President Pence announced the return of the US Space Command -- a Cold War-era division of the Air Force that's been on a 17-year hiatus. The revival of the US Space Command is meant to "ensure the protection of America's interests in space," Defense Secretary Mark Esper said at a news conference Wednesday. But it could be confused with Space Force -- the sixth branch of the military that Trump hopes to create -- or the existing Air Force Space Command, which focuses on Air Force operations in space.
VP Pence wants US astronauts back on the Moon by 2024
Apparently, plans to put US astronauts on the Moon by the late 2020s weren't ambitious enough. Vice President Pence announced at the National Space Council that the US now planned to return people to the Moon by 2024, about four years earlier than expected. He argued that the US "must remain first in space" this century for the sake of the economy, national security and writing the "rules and values of space" by establishing a more permanent presence.
