The agency’s logo of a double-faced triangle triangle over the globe had to have been influenced by Star Trek, although the main mission of the Air Force Space Command was less to explore “the final frontier” than to watch for signs of incoming missiles from the Soviet Union and to ensure a superiority in space over them. It grew out of an effort the nation’s emerging defense and private space research, and in a slightly different incarnation still exists.

On this day, September 1, in 1982 the Space Command agency was established, renamed three years later to “Air Force Space Command” to distinguish it from the national United States Space Command founded in 1985.

The USAFSC still maintains its focus on munitions navigation: not only ICBMS but cruise missiles and other “smart bombs” that were heavily used in the the Yugoslavian civil war and in the two Gulf Wars. And it keeps in Colorado a “Space Warfare Center”, integrating space-age technologies into military equipment. What exactly goes on at their Space Battlelab is, of course, classified.