WASHINGTON — There’s a turf war brewing in the final frontier.

House lawmakers on Friday approved a Defense authorization bill that would carve out the space mission from the U.S. Air Force and create a new branch of the military: the Space Corps.

The move is being spearheaded by Alabama GOP Rep. Mike Rogers who contends the department’s lack of focus on extra-terrestrial priorities has eroded the nation’s dominance in space.

The nation’s defense is being compromised because military satellites aren’t being deployed fast enough due to a bureaucracy that cares more about superiority in the air than space, said Rogers, who chairs the House Armed Services Committee’s subcommittee on Strategic Forces.

“We have allowed our primary adversaries, Russia and China, to gain peer status in just the last few years,” he said in an interview. "We have got to get more agile to get capabilities into space to respond to our adversaries and right now it's just not happening."

Rogers’ proposal, endorsed by his subcommittee's top Democrat Jim Cooper of Tennessee, would create a sixth branch of the military (joining the Air Force, Army, Marines, Coast Guard and the Navy). The Space Corps would be up and ready by 2019 and would still answer to the Secretary of the Air Force much like the Marines answer to the Navy secretary.

The Air Force was broken out of the Army in 1947, the last time a new branch was created.

Its main purpose would be to oversee the acquisition, development and deployment of military satellites and the ground stations that control them. It would not include intelligence satellites or the National Reconnaissance Office, the government agency in charge of designing building, launching and maintaining intelligence satellites.

The Space Corps also would not have direct oversight of missile launches conducted by the military.

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The proposal, coming two years after China took a similar step, is meeting with fierce resistance from top U.S. Air Force officials.

"The Pentagon is complicated enough,” Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson told reporters last month. “We’re trying to simplify. So to make it more complex would add more boxes to the (organizational) chart and cost more money. And if I had more money, I would put it into lethality, not bureaucracy.”

In addition, some senators are lukewarm to the idea.

Sen. Bill Nelson, a senior member of the Armed Services Committee and one of Congress’ foremost champions of space, called the creation of a new branch “premature” and unnecessary.

“It ought to stay with the Air Force until there’s a compelling reason to change,” the Florida Democrat said. “There’s no sense to go out and create another re-organization and all the disruption that comes with that.”

Rogers counters there won’t be any significant cost increase because the move largely would mean taking the existing work from the Air Force without adding more personnel or building more bases. The aim, he said, is to instill a new "culture" within the Pentagon.

The idea of a separate “Space Corps,” has been kicked around as far back as 1969, according to Howard McCurdy, a professor at American University in Washington and an expert on space policy.

But it took new life in 2001 when the idea was promoted by a commission headed by Donald Rumsfeld who served as President George W. Bush’s Secretary of Defense.

“National security space organization and management today fail to reflect the growing importance of space to U.S. interests,” the panel’s report read. “There is a need for greater emphasis on space-related matters, starting at the highest levels of government.”

Momentum for the creation of a Space Corps ebbed following the Sept. 11 attacks.

Other reports and advocates have pushed the idea over the past decade. In May, the Government Accountability Office — Congress’ watchdog arm — reported that “fragmented responsibilities have made it difficult to coordinate and deliver interdependent systems” and that creating a “new military department for space, may deserve a closer look.”

Rogers said he got involved a little more than a year ago when Defense firms approached him about their frustration with the Air Force in getting military satellites approved and ready for launch.

“Contractors started coming to us and saying: ‘This is awful. We can't get these assets up. We can't get anybody to talk to us. The Air Force keeps coming to us and saying can you do this can you do that.” And then they can't make a decision. They keep changing the requirements,' ” he said. “It was just a morass of problems.”

Rogers is concerned about Russia and China’s ability to quickly deploy their hardware that can jam or interfere with U.S. satellites while the Air Force takes as long as eight years to launch its own military equipment into space.

“When you’ve got 60 offices that can say no to a new acquisition and nobody can say yes, that's broken,” he said, referring to the Air Force bureaucracy.

Jessica Rye, a spokeswoman for Colorado-based United Launch Alliance, said the company would have no comment. ULA, a joint venture between aerospace giants Boeing and Lockheed Martin, is the Pentagon’s leading military satellite launch provider.

The creation of a separate branch of the military for space is not included in the Senate’s version of the Defense authorization bill, dimming the prospect of a Space Corps in the immediate future.

But key leaders in Congress, intelligence officials in the Trump administration and many independent military space analysts agree that if resources are not deployed more effectively national security could be threatened.

Todd Harrison, an expert at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, points out that about 90 percent of the military's space-based communication systems can be easily jammed.

And he thinks the Pentagon’s approach to space defense remains wrongly rooted in the Cold War because it's still buying small numbers of large satellites that are vulnerable to attack and can't easily be fixed or replaced.

The hope here is that if you have a Space Corps and a cadre of space people and a separate, protected space budget, the military space community could be more agile and adaptive and start fielding more resilient military space systems sooner, he said.

Senate Armed Services Chairman John McCain, has long lamented the Pentagon’s slow response to space threats from other countries, pointing to the reduction in Defense spending on space systems from $5 billion in 2009 to less than $1 billion last year.

“The Department of Defense has finally awoken to the reality that we must invest in the next generation of space capabilities,” he wrote in January. “Over the next five years, space must be a priority for additional funding to ensure that the United States maintains its space superiority and has the capabilities and capacity to deter and defend our critical space assets in future conflicts.”

The Senate's Defense authorization bill, passed by the Armed Services Committee but not yet on the Senate floor, proposed by the committee takes a different approach. Instead of carving out a new agency, it proposes the creation of a new Pentagon post — Chief Information Warfare Officer — who would be in charge of space systems.

"Information is central to modern warfare, yet it is treated as an afterthought in a department postured to man, train, and equip forces to operate in the land, air, and sea domains," the bill reads.

Harrison said 2019 is probably an overly ambitious deadline to create a Space Corps. But he thinks it’s only a matter of time — and is probably needed.

"You've got someone who wakes up in the morning and they think about space power," Harrison said. “Right now, there’s no central authority over all of that. And when it’s no one’s job, things tend to not get done in a bureaucracy."