As Man Returns to Space, He Returns to Sanity

The recent spectacular developments in Korea result from the publicized and unpublicized meetings among Presidents Trump, Xi Jinping of China, and Putin of Russia, along with other world leaders in Japan last week. Their collaboration on this and other burning questions should constitute a decisive turning-point away from the prospect of war, and instead towards joint, high-technology economic development of a world still, even today, rife with poverty and hunger.

But how can that outcome be insured? For one thing, we need good leaders—and Presidents Trump, Xi and Putin are the indeed best leaders we have seen at the head of those nations for many years. But something else is even more important. It was recognized by the brilliant intellects who founded the American republic on this day in 1776, and by their contemporary, the German “Poet of Freedom” Friedrich Schiller. It is the moral-intellectual character of the citizen. This is the dilemma with which Shakespeare opened his “Julius Caesar.” Deep corruption, ignorance and superstition among the population will cause any leadership, even the best, to stumble.

Now it is time to face the hard fact that Western Europe and the United States, the trans-Atlantic sector, has been living in a true dark age since the last decades of the Twentieth Century (and actually longer). The great, just-departed American scientist and statesman Lyndon LaRouche, detailed the deeper philosophical reasons for this, and its seesaw motions, as the outlook of Americans was inspired by the recovery programs of Franklin Roosevelt and by his aspirations for the postwar world, and then debased under Truman. The moral ebbs and flows partly mirrored the periods of decay and those of leaps forward in science and physical economy (rather than the stock market). Kennedy sought to revive the Franklin Roosevelt direction and impulse. But after Jack Kennedy, Martin Luther King, and Bobby Kennedy were killed, no recognized national leader picked up the torch. Richard Nixon’s folly in destroying the Bretton Woods system in August, 1971, marked a decisive turn from an economy of real physical production to the “post-industrial” junkheap we have become since.

All this can be encapsulated as follows. Mankind sent the first humans to another heavenly body on July 20, 1969, and the last in 1972. From 1972 until today, we have lacked the capacity as a species to even repeat what we did under Kennedy’s Apollo program. The industries have been shuttered. The labs and the university departments have been closed. Indeed, the dies used to manufacture the Saturn V booster rocket, still today the most powerful ever made, were broken. The leader of the team which made that rocket, Wernher von Braun, was removed from his Huntsville, Ala., facility, to languish uselessly in an office in Washington.

Now we intend to go, not back, but forward to the Moon again. As NASA Administrator Bridenstine has said, the Artemis program now under development will be a still bigger step for mankind than was Apollo. It will lead to a permanent presence to industrialize the Moon, not for its own sake, but as a necessary stepping-stone Mars—and eventually beyond. Lunar resources, featuring the fusion-power fuel helium-3, will be extracted and processed for the Mars missions. And as John Kennedy proposed to the United Nations in 1963, and the Trump Administration has echoed it, this must be a fully international program. Along with leading space powers like the U.S., Russia, China, India and Japan, there will be areas in which scores of other nations can contribute as well.

This program will revolutionize our economy. As Lyndon LaRouche detailed in a series of pioneering studies in the 1980s, the new technologies we will spin off from the space effort will exceed the ratio of the 1960s, when the U.S. economy gained more than $10 from every dollar invested in NASA.

This space program will be the center of a new world Renaissance. Just imagine, for example, what U.S. classrooms will look like when students are being prepared for the new, unprecedented challenges of space exploration—compared to the drugged-up boredom we see today. Where Roosevelt built CCC camps to rehabilitate youth, we will build CCC camps for space, as Helga Zepp-LaRouche has said.

The man who will have made this possible is the late Lyndon LaRouche. Were it not for the tangible changes which his ideas have made in the world over the past 40 years, none of the progress we have seen around the recent Japan G20 meeting would have been possible. Now LaRouche must be exonerated from the false charges for which he was framed and imprisoned in 1986-89 by the same Robert Muller who tried to frame Trump, so that President Trump and others can openly and freely make use of his enormous legacy.