Time To Get Off the Planet and Back Into Space
The British Empire’s entire global system is heading for a train wreck, politically and economically, in the short term. Exemplary of the former is the damn-the-torpedoes lunacy emanating from the liberal media and Democrats in the U.S., who insist on pursuing their suicidal course of trying to impeach President Trump in the aftermath of the public discrediting of Robert Mueller’s entire Russiagate gambit.
On their economic bankruptcy, the Federal Open Market Committee meets on July 31, amid increasingly shrill calls for more and more quantitative easing, which will only make the impending systemic blowout that much worse. At the same time, the United Kingdom and Europe are careening towards a hard, no-deal Brexit come Oct. 31, with unpredictable consequences for the thoroughly bankrupt trans-Atlantic financial system and its derivatives bubble, in particular.
It’s a good time to get off the Planet Earth and get back to space, to explore, colonize and industrialize the Moon and Mars, as proposed by the German-American space scientist Krafft Ehricke and the great American statesman Lyndon LaRouche. The true impulse for that needed lift-off is the wave of “Moon fever” optimism sweeping the planet on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the July 20th Apollo 11 landing on the Moon.
Such optimism is our most potent weapon, Helga Zepp-LaRouche stated in a discussion with associates yesterday. It endows us with the scientific and emotional tools needed to defeat the pessimism induced by the dying British imperial system, and the wars and economic devastation it is unleashing as part of its death rattle.
No better expression of such well-founded optimism than the May 2011 interview that Apollo 13 Astronaut Fred Haise had with elementary and high school students in Huntsville, Alabama, as broadcast on RCSpace Pioneers TV. Haise, the astronaut who was to pilot the Lunar Module on the 1970 Apollo 13 mission which was aborted by an explosion in the Command Module 200,000 miles from Earth, discussed why mankind must think millions of years into the future, to avoid the fate of the dinosaurs. The human species is uniquely capable of moving out into the universe to ensure its own survival, Haise stated.
The questions by the students were serious, and Haise’s answers equally so. A young, elementary school boy, for example, asked how they came up with the idea of the gravity-assist slingshot maneuver around the Moon. Haise told him, “We have to give credit to a fellow named Kepler,” the father of celestial mechanics. This was a known capability long before the Apollo program, he pointed out.
Asked if he thinks we need to go to Mars, and should we travel back to the Moon first, Haise demonstrated to these young people just how boldly a courageous scientist thinks:
“I think we ought to go, continually go, as far as we can go, based on the technology we have at hand. If you look very, very long range, and I’m talking maybe millions of years, the Earth is a dynamic body, as we’ve seen recently from what’s happening in Japan with earthquakes; I went through Katrina on the Gulf Coast, a fairly major hurricane recently...
“We are possibly going to someday be facing with a meteorite or comet. For whatever reasons, no one is for sure what happened, but by the fossil trails, five times on Earth all higher forms of life have disappeared, the last being about 60-70 million years ago with the dinosaurs.
“Now we’ve been around evolving about 2 million years, so I’m hoping that we get 200 million years like the dinosaurs before our turn.
“But I consider philosophically, we’ve been given divine providence. We uniquely are the first creatures that could plant this race elsewhere, someday.
“Right now we do not have the capability to do probably much more than go in our own Solar System, to Mars.
“I’m hoping that they will find a star with a friendly planet system, one of which may be livable, similar to our Earth, that eventually we can place people elsewhere. Probably, at least in my vision, with technology, probably the farthest that I can see is something in our own galaxy, the Milky Way, because—one of you is studying astronomy, and it’s a big place. It’s hard to conceive we might do much better than that. But who knows? We’ve gone pretty far in 2 million years. In fact, we’ve gone pretty far in the last 100 years. So I’m hoping that there will be a breakthrough suddenly in propulsion scheme that will enable us someday to do that.”