As Apollo Rises Again, Time for Crash Programs To ‘Pick Up Where We Left Off’

Many tens of thousands of Americans have braved the summer’s heat to crowd Washington’s National Mall and events across the country, celebrating human beings’ first rise out of Earth’s gravity and steps into space 50 years ago. Those still alive who did this and/or know how it was done, agree that there must be cooperative “crash programs” among the spacefaring nations now, including using the Moon to step into the Solar System and take on the new powers of extraterrestrial mankind.

A recent Harris poll has been reported of children in grades 5-10 in China, America and the U.K., including the question, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” with five career areas suggested and the possibility to “want” more than one career. In China, 56% of the children wanted to be astronauts, 47% to be teachers, and 43% to be musicians. Least desired, was to be a video blogger/YouTube personality. In the U.K. and United States, the choices were reversed: video blogger/YouTube figure was desired most “when I grow up,” and astronaut, least.

Astronaut Edwin Aldrin, who stepped on the Moon after Neil Armstrong 50 years ago, was asked about the poll during a Fox News interview July 19. Aldrin said “I think it’s a tribute to the imagination of the people in China, wanting to do that. And if we’ve lost that, that’s why this ‘5 decades of Apollo’ is trying to inspire, [with] what this nation did 50 years ago, and we’ll get caught up again in being able to do things of that inspirational nature.” The previous night at a Washington event, Aldrin had said that America, Russia, China, India, Japan and the European Space Agency should form a “united space alliance” to return to the Moon; use “power—say, nuclear power?” to exploit the resources there; and send human beings to Mars.

Aldrin was right, and so was the former NASA Administrator Sean O’Keefe who wrote in The Hill July 20 that the Apollo Project crash program was “A Seismic Scientific Event that Multiplied the Pace of Technology.” O’Keefe, like Apollo 11 astronaut Michael Collins at a “50 Years” event the night before, stressed that Apollo was contested and not wildly popular with Americans until astronauts actually started to rise from Earth and head to the Moon; then the souls of hundreds of millions looked up. Until then, it was the mission—of Presidents Kennedy and Johnson—that drove the crash program that revolutionized technologies. That was a matter of leadership.

President Vladimir Putin of Russia was also right, to propose on July 9 an international crash program for fusion energy—among many other things, the propulsion that will take human beings through the Solar System at high speed. Putin called it the antidote to the false despair of “climate emergency” and its results of human poverty and death.

During the long decades when American leaders effectively abandoned NASA, Lyndon LaRouche kept alive the flame of the extraterrestrial mission of mankind, and endured the abuse and ridicule of media and “pundits” for it. His national television presentation “The Woman on Mars” of 1988 is still the most inspired and completely true call for the scientific crash program needed now. “We must pick up where we left off with the old Apollo program,” LaRouche said then. The crash program would be “creaky at first,” but then would revolutionize industries and productive powers. All through those decades LaRouche was right, and is now.