Commentary: Neil deGrasse Tyson on 'space force' and the uneasy alliance between astrophysics and the military

Neil deGrasse Tyson showed up with a substantial backpack whose contents, he assured me, could restart the universe if necessary. It was certainly heavy enough to do the job; perhaps it was packed with a rare mineral - maybe osmium, twice as heavy as lead. Or maybe it contained copies of his new book, also substantial, called "Accessory to War: The Unspoken Alliance Between Astrophysics and the Military."

He wrote it with his longtime editor Avis Lang, and it charts the long courtship - sometimes willing, sometimes shotgun nuptials - between the practitioners of space science and the military defenders of the nation. His own thinking on this took an interesting trajectory too. And President Trump's "space force"? Not an original idea, Tyson says, but not altogether a bad one.

Q. How did nice astrophysicists like you wind up in a racket like this?

A. Nearly all of us are nice in the way that I think you're describing us. Astrophysics is perhaps the most humble of all sciences. When you look at what we do, we ascend to mountaintops and wait for photons to travel across the galaxy or the universe to hit our detector, and then we bring the detector to the coffee lounge and debate what happened to the detector.

We don't have direct access to what it is we study the way a chemist would, or a biologist, or any of the other sciences. We don't really interact with or interfere with what it is we study, and so we tend to be a peaceful lot.

We're overwhelmingly liberal, antiwar, I would say, and yet we are complicit with what happens in the military with regard to their inventions that we can exploit, or our inventions or discoveries that they can exploit.

For example, the military might employ a physicist to make a bomb,