© NASAThis photograph shows the Laser Ranging Facility at the Geophysical and Astronomical Observatory at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md. The observatory helps NASA keep track of orbiting satellites. DIA research explored other ways of tracking and defeating unknown objects in space, including using lasers.
A missile that can carry a satellite into orbit could carry a much deadlier payload to somewhere else on Earth. And so space became both a place to put early warning systems and the path by which weapons would pass through on their way to doomsday. In order to prepare for new threats from or through the great beyond, the Pentagon spent $22 million between 2007 and 2012 researching a number of speculative threats under an "Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program."
How speculative? One of the studies was called "Warp Drive, Dark Energy, and the Manipulation of Extra Dimensions."
On Jan. 16, 2019, the Defense Intelligence Agency released a list of 38 research titles funded by the "Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program," which includes the above title on warp drives, one on invisibility cloaking, and another about stargates. All three are technologies that have found a home in fiction, powering the spaceships of the Star Trek universe, the in-fiction specific weapons of the Romulans and Klingons, as well as the entire "Stargate" franchise. The research papers were just one part of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program, which also looked at unidentified flying objects, included recovered alloys of unknown origin.
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