Reading
Starship Troopers (a zillion years ago) and we've got soldiers dropping from orbit. I went looking for pictures of such, but bupkis. Well, how about HALO jumps? They're not from orbit, but they can be jumping from 8 miles up, which has so little air you might as well be in space, and I found this image.
Why am I thinking about Starship Troopers? Because the Air Force is building a new missile base on Johnston Island:
Remember back at the beginning, back before the first
Starship prototype was even built, when
Elon was talking about how the Starship was going to revolutionize international travel? It was kind of a hair-brained scheme, but evidently someone at the Air Force was paying attention, because they realized it could be used to transport cargo as well as people. Any kind of commercial shipping isn't going to use a rocket, they use cargo ships because pound for pound, they are much cheaper. But if you have an emergency somewhere and you need to get a bunch of stuff somewhere quickly, a rocket is just the ticket.
But the Starship is designed to carry people. It's going to be a little tougher on people than an airliner, but soldiers are pretty tough, so it shouldn't be a problem for them.
Landing in remote regions occupied by enemy forces might be a problem though, so we might want to drop our troops in, like paratroopers. We don't have a technique for doing that from orbit, at least not yet, but Starship can manage reentry, and at some point it's velocity will be low enough that troops could safely exit the vehicle, so we would have Starship paratroops, i.e. Starship Troopers.
It's going to be a few years before we get to this point, but it's undoubtedly coming.
Johnston Atoll is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean:
