New ‘Space Race’ Must Create a New Economy, and Prevent a New World War

American, Russian, and Chinese media are discussing many potential outcomes of the fact that by the end of this week, three major missions to Mars will have been launched almost at once to explore the red planet by February, with other missions to the Moon’s surface being prepared. Negotiations to avoid the nuclear powers making war in space are being held between large American and Russian delegations; but at the same time the American “Space Force” commander has just announced finalization of a new “military doctrine for space.”

A summit of the leaders of the five UN Security Council powers—United States, China, Russia, U.K., and France—is likely this fall, even while this potentially super-productive “space race” of competition and hopeful collaboration is underway.

All-out “crash programs” by multiple spacefaring nations at once, to finally start exploring the Solar System in person from settlements on the Moon, will be the “science driver” to completely remake the busted-out world economy. That “driver” will base reindustrialization and agriculture on new laser and plasma beam machine tools and advanced nuclear technologies. That—helped by Glass-Steagall laws to end the scourge of super-speculative giant Wall Street and City of London banks, and by other of President Franklin Roosevelt’s economic methods—has been the program of Lyndon LaRouche and his movement since the 1980s and his famous 1988 “Woman on Mars” national broadcast as a Presidential candidate.

The current pandemic disease, resulting hunger, and collapsed economies around the world, make it a necessity that just such a plan should emerge from the summit, soon, of those five nations. The LaRouche Political Action Committee has made it a worked-out program, “How To Reopen the U.S. Economy: The World Needs 1.5 Billion New, Productive Jobs.”

Commentators on the current missions racing to Mars see different scenarios. Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post today editorializes, “World Should Support China’s Mars Mission,” since healthy and peaceful competition among the leading spacefarers will produce more breakthroughs, faster, in space colonization. In the United States, one commentary in The Hill cites NASA Administrator James Bridenstine congratulating China: “With today’s launch, China is on its way to join the community of international scientific explorers at Mars. The United States, Europe, Russia, India, and soon the U.A.E. will welcome you to Mars to embark on an exciting year of scientific discovery.” But a Russian commentary, in Regnum magazine, goes deeper: If Democrats take the White House and Congress in November, NASA’s Artemis program to return to the Moon in 2024 will simply be defunded, and China will dominate lunar exploration and development.

Veteran space journalist Mark Whittington, also writing an op-ed in The Hill, cites a July 13 article from Ars Technica, which in turn was citing a Komsomolskaya Pravda interview with the director of Russia’s Roscosmos space agency, Dmitry Rogozin, that Russia would prefer to cooperate with China’s space program rather than continue the frequent and very productive cooperation with the United States over the last three decades, “where its best interests lie.” This identifies the real problem: The combination of Democrats likely defunding NASA’s Artemis program, and the London-based warhawk faction’s increasing threats of confrontation and war with China and Russia—including in space—place President Donald Trump in a difficult spot to carry out his Moon-Mars mission.

But carry it out he must, for the progress of the United States and the human species. That is the crucial purpose of the summit the Schiller Institute and LaRouchePAC have been proving the case for since January, among five heads of state, all of whom have expressed their respect for Franklin Roosevelt’s economic development policies. Space cooperation will “drive” the technologies for that development, and not allow the drift toward superpower war to continue.