Let Us Take Up the Mission

The City of London-Wall Street financial empire is coming unstuck, even as its rulers face an American President who may not agree to follow their instructions to try to bail them out again, as Bush and Obama did in 2007-09, when it collapses. If they are not able to throw him out during his first term, the British oligarchs are determined to deny President Trump a second term in office.

This defines the continuing British coup-attempt against President Trump. The coup attempt did not end with the fizzling-out of the Mueller investigation—it continues in other ways, some evident, some not, even as Attorney General Barr’s investigation moves towards its conclusion. One way is to trick President Trump into violating his campaign promise of “no more endless wars.” The leaked reports of former British Ambassador Darroch were quite open about his attempts to foment a U.S. war with Iran—which were aided by Pompeo and Bolton in various ways. On a broader scale, the British have always sought to pit the great continental powers against one another, to the point of war or beyond. Now they are able to line up huge, bipartisan majorities in both Houses of Congress to try to destroy U.S. relations with Russia, and often with China. These typical British-imperial moves are part of, or closely-aligned with their coup attempt against the President.

And what of today’s cacophony of racism-baiting of the President? Helga Zepp-LaRouche said today, in effect, that the dying system is responding by trying on every front to foster pessimism. Not just through “green” frauds like anthropogenic climate change. This has been going on over the long term, for over 50 years. The effort has been to change the paradigm, from the image of man for whom there are no limits to the reach of his imagination and his reason. To divert that into the race-baiting of Donald Trump. To make you look down into the gutter, one might add, rather than up to the stars.

Rather than do that, let us take up our mission.

To this end, we should note that Apollo 11 launched on July 16, 1969, to land on the Moon on July 20, so that we are already in the fiftieth anniversary—we are halfway to the Moon, in effect. It is our duty to achieve the utmost from the inspiration this is causing, especially when mankind is now heading back to the Moon—and far beyond. And not only are Americans going—far from it. NASA is going to the Moon in 2024 with international partners. But even more so, the subsequent mission of industrializing the Moon is far bigger than any nation; it is an enormous international mission, or, as Helga puts it, a task of the “one humanity.”

To begin by putting human beings on the Moon in 2024, as President Trump has directed, will not be “easy.” In President Kennedy’s words, it will be “hard.” It will require an intense science-driver program of continual innovations and discoveries, amidst a level of commitment and effort only seen in war, or in programs like the original Apollo program. There are problems and difficulties throughout. The rocket designated for the 2024 mission, the SLS, has not yet flown after many delays in testing. The Lunar Gateway satellite and the required lunar descent and ascent modules have not yet been designed. And NASA Administrator Bridenstine testified yesterday to the Senate that if Congress fails to agree on a budget and passes a Continuing Resolution for 2020 instead, essentially freezing appropriations, it would be “devastating” to the program.

We faced similar problems in May, 1961, when President Kennedy vowed to bring men to the moon within the decade. Back then, NASA would not be able to determine how it would get there (“Lunar Orbit Rendezvous”) for over a year, although thereafter it soon became clear that there was actually no other alternative. And the plan to build the Saturn V rocket was not announced until January, 1962. Everything had to be put together on the fly.

Our task is made harder today after a half-century’s savage wrecking of the US economy since the kill-off of the Apollo program in 1972. The factories, the labs and much else have been shut and abandoned. And as Lyndon LaRouche had already noted in 1986 in his “The Science and Technology Needed to Colonize Mars,” American society today is less fit spiritually to take on the challenge of space than we were in the 1960s—precisely one of the reasons we must now do so.

Nor can we beg out by saying that if we don’t make it to the Moon in 2024, we’ll simply get there a year or two later. Some great projects are only possible as maximum-effort crash programs—or not at all. One of the several reasons is what NASA Administrator Jim Bridenstine calls “political risk.” Think—if we had not made it to the Moon in 1969, could we have done it in 1971? In 1972? Probably not. Probably never.

The significance is, as the same President Kennedy famously said, that “Things do not happen. Things are made to happen.” The 2024 Moon landing—as the first step towards the industrialization of the Moon, and then the eventual colonization of Mars and beyond—will happen if and only if the American people, led by the most aware and courageous of us, make it happen. Equally important is that the plans and instructions of the late Lyndon LaRouche are the most important guideposts. In his many writings like the one mentioned above, and his video “The Woman on Mars,” building on the work of the great German-American space scientist Krafft Ehricke and earlier pioneers, Lyndon LaRouche laid bare the requirements and implications of this mission as a new stage of human evolution, as never done before or since. The declaration of this sort of Moon-Mars mission by an American President is a tribute to this great man, and one we cannot permit to fail.