President Trump has stated the mission clearly:
“It is not enough to have an American presence in space, we must have American dominance in space.”
He follows in the footsteps of previous presidents who looked over the horizon and set a course for America. Alexander Hamilton saw his infant agrarian nation as a manufacturing giant. Thomas Jefferson saw beyond the Mississippi and began our journey to the Pacific.
John Kennedy looked up and put the United States on the moon.
Now President Trump has set a goal of returning to the moon by 2024, with a permanent presence on the Moon’s South Pole four years later. NASA has confirmed the presence of water there (in the form of ice) that would support a permanent manned base and provide a jumping off point for Mars.
This lunar mission is essential for economic, scientific, technological and national security reasons.
Our economy has been living off the scientific and technological achievements of the mission to the moon for 50 years. Everything from microcomputers to medical advancements grew out of the Apollo program. Few envisioned those payoffs when the Saturn V rocket took off from Cape Kennedy in 1969, but then again no one imagined drive-through wedding chapels in Las Vegas when we signed the Treaty of Guadeloupe Hidalgo.
And the reality is our national security depends on economic and technological leadership.
We understand that, and so does China. That’s why it has set its sights heavenward. Space is the strategic high ground, and China wants to capture it.
The Defense Intelligence Agency reports, “Chinese and Russian military doctrines indicate that they view space as important to modern warfare and view counterspace capabilities as a means to reduce U.S. and allied military effectiveness. Both reorganized their militaries in 2015, emphasizing the importance of space operations.”
China is developing a heavy-lift launch vehicle, similar to our Saturn V rocket and our newer Space Launch System, to reach the moon and Mars.
It’s also developed smaller single-launch rockets to compete in the commercial space launch market.
China wants to capture the commercial space launch market just as they want to capture artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology and other strategic technologies, and they are using the same means to do it.
American commercial space firms, such as Space X, Blue Origin and Rocket Labs, find themselves competing against Chinese “commercial” space start-ups that are in fact either state-owned, state-controlled or an appendage of the Chinese People’s Liberation Army.
These companies, heavily subsidized by Beijing, offer to launch commercial payloads at 20 percent of the prevailing market rate. Besides taking business away from legitimate operators, these ridiculously low prices scare investors out of backing Western commercial space start-up companies.
China’s preferred tool for acquiring technology is theft. It is deploying “investors” – cat’s paws for the Communist government – to invest in U.S. satellite companies so it can then move the technology into Chinese hands.
President Trump’s drive for American leadership in space faces resistance not just from China but also from our own Deep State.
Part of the resistance comes from Capitol Hill. President Obama saw climate change as the greatest threat, and NASA’s Earth Science Division is geared to measuring ice caps, sea levels and cloud cover. The Green New Dealers, bless their hearts, prefer money be spent on a mission to Earth rather than a mission to the stars.
These naysayers find allies elsewhere in the federal bureaucracy who are pushing back against funding deep space exploration.
A robust space program ensures America’s technological, economic and national security. The president understands that. Now the Deep State has to get with the program.
