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We're Not 'Racing China' to Mars; We're Racing Against a New Financial Crash

August 19, 2019
President Donald J. Trump talks to members of the press at Morristown Municipal Airport in Morristown, N.J. Thursday, Aug. 15, 2019, prior to boarding Air Force One to begin his trip to Manchester, N.H. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)
President Donald J. Trump talks to members of the press at Morristown Municipal Airport in Morristown, N.J. Thursday, Aug. 15, 2019, prior to boarding Air Force One to begin his trip to Manchester, N.H. (Official White House Photo by Joyce N. Boghosian)

The evidence is now clear and plentiful that there is a global industrial, manufacturing and trade recession underway which is not sparing the United States. As it deepens, the central banks of the major Trilateral countries have attained an unprecedented global monstrosity of below-zero interest rates. Their 11 years of continuous money-printing "stimulus" is finally producing the paralysis of an opium high turning into an overdose death. Productive investment is shutting down and another, terrible financial crash lies somewhere ahead.

In this crisis the only real stimulus is masses of credit by leading governments for crash investment programs developing frontier technologies and their accompanying industrial spinoffs. In other words, the only real stimulus is full-speed-ahead funding of missions, "science-driver" missions epitomized by the Moon-Mars space exploration mission and the development of fusion power and plasma/laser technologies.

If started immediately these can revive both scientific thinking and the industrial muscle which has been atrophying, grow productivity and productive wealth enough to prevent the crash followed by economic collapse which occurred a decade ago. They will also alleviate poverty as China's revolutions of new infrastructure have done in that country; such things as abandoning space missions to "help the poor down on the Earth" have never helped them at all.

The Trump Administration has bravely started with "Project Artemis," its accelerated Moon-Mars mission. Russian President Putin one month ago proposed a "international crash program" to develop fusion power. These are not yet funded -- and they will not be unless the leading carry them out together. The return to the Moon and its development in preparation for Mars travel -- which involves developing fusion power for space propulsion – is a 15-year all-out mobilization of hundreds of billions of dollars in investments, a task for all the leading spacefaring powers.

Such statements as came Aug. 16 from NASA's financial officer Michael DeWit, that "This is a race to Mars, and we want to get there first", is the worst kind of advice President Trump could get. What he needs is a true picture of what an international scientific crash program is, and can accomplish.

Schiller Institute president Helga Zepp-LaRouche put it in its true, broader scope in a just published article: "success in controlled nuclear fusion and other fundamental tasks would only be possible if there were broad international cooperation and exchange between governments and industry, where all researchers could contribute their various scientific schools and expertise. Technological progress must really become global and should not be monopolized. It is about creating better living conditions and opportunities for all humanity that could unleash their creative potential. Key to this is the mastery of new technologies that relate to actual processes in the universe, as is the case with the imitation of the nuclear fusion in the Sun.

"Another field of research that can only be truly successful through international cooperation is space, which uniquely establishes the true identity of humanity, its dignity as the only creative species known to date, and its potentially unlimited intellectual and moral capacity for perfection."

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