Donald Trump’s popular and bold vision of returning to manned exploration of the Moon and, from there, voyaging to Mars, implemented as Project Artemis, has so far survived the change of administrations. But the two projects—one which celebrates the human mind and its ability to discover physical and universal truths at the frontiers of science, the other based on a vicious anti-human myth—are hardly capable of co-existence. Hence, my image from the last article of Biden manically shooting rockets into space which are tethered to the earth. So ensconced are the Luddites that Biden/Harris established a brand new position in NASA, that of Senior Climate Advisor. It is led by the fanatical climate modeler, Dr. Gavin Schmidt. Schmidt is also current director of the Goddard Institute for Space Studies, having occupied that position under Obama while playing a key role in Obama’s radical environmentalist agenda.

Aside from the Obama fiasco and the current pressure from the Luddites, NASA endured such a reversal of its science driver national mission in favor of a Malthusian population reduction agenda once before. The end of the Apollo era was marked by just such a policy and that takedown in turn signaled the wholesale deindustrialization of the United States and its transition into a service and consumer economy. Preventing a repeat of this disaster involves demonstrating the economic benefits of a crash program on the frontiers of science, like Apollo, versus the co-existent Green New Deal which will actually lower the technological and population potential of the physical economy.

Some may recall a 1976 study by Chase Econometrics, which estimated that for every $1 spent on the U.S. space program, $14 was returned to the economy. But, how were these rates of returns measured? Were these mere monetary values? No. The Apollo program was one of the greatest science driver crash programs ever imagined. There were advanced scientific and technological breakthroughs made in almost every sector of our national economy, from agriculture, medicine/health, transportation, and most emphatically, and importantly, in education as men and women sought to go where no one had gone before, discovering the very means to do so as the project itself advanced.

Unlike today, the educational policies that led to the successes of the Apollo program were not steeped in critical race theory, or the idea that math is racist. NASA, during the Apollo era, provided resources for college and graduate level students to pursue careers in science and engineering. The national mission outlined for NASA under the Apollo program of President Kennedy led to an increased interest amongst young people in joining the space industry and a genuine thirst for new scientific discoveries. The popular imagination was similarly lifted and inspired. The returns from the Moon landing missions were not simply immediate, short lived returns, but ones that are impacting the economy, with spins-offs from the program even today.

Now can the rates of return brought about under the Apollo program be measured in the same way if NASA’s mission is proceeding in two opposite directions—one aimed at the universe, the other tethered to earth and going backwards into more primitive modes of existence? Do NASA's policies to fight against climate change result in technological and scientific breakthroughs that increase the productivity of the economy and its labor force?

Consider the climate agenda’s spin-offs. Beer for example, could be made much less an alleged threat to the environment if brewers are given the capability to capture CO2 in a recovery system from the fermentation process. Cows might be similarly outfitted with methane capture devices. Use of a remote sensing technology called EDAR for vehicle emissions, will monitor vehicle exhaust emissions and collect data on various gases. None of these “breakthroughs,” obviously, will increase the productivity of the society. Electric cars replacing cars driven by internal combustion engines is a hugely costly endeavor which represents nothing new in terms of science or advanced energy sources, it simply reshuffles the present deck at enormous cost to society.

Moreover, the climate change apocalypse agenda has bred enormous pessimism about the future with young adults actively discouraging each other from bringing children into this world. Instead of a growing birth rate and an increasingly full and complex division of labor, the gig economy and surveillance state, based on limiting alleged insults to nature, while policing and limiting human thought, results in a declining population increasingly hobbled by drugs (which are being legalized), homelessness, and mental illness.

Real economic value in an economy rests on the development of a constantly expanding productive labor force. Real profit stems from the development of the creative powers of the human mind. Alexander Hamilton, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, John F. Kennedy and Lyndon LaRouche understood this. Hamilton invented the unique American system of economy enshrined in our Constitution and Declaration of Independence; Lincoln and Roosevelt used it to win the nation’s future by winning the Civil War and World War II. Lyndon LaRouche, uniquely, invented a measurement for fundamental economic progress based on the same principles.

Do the activities of the economy result in an increase in what LaRouche termed, “the potential relative population density” of a given land area? In order for productivity to grow, economic activity has to overcome resource depletion by the invention of new and more advanced resources while producing for the needs of an expanding population under advanced living standards. There must also be a density of such discoveries in fundamental science rapidly translated into new technologies. If you see in this exactly what the Apollo program produced in physical economic, rather than monetary terms, you are beginning to see the picture.

Contrast this with the policies now governing our nation in which the labor force and the future labor force is being depleted through a zero-growth agenda—offered a guaranteed minimal income to compensate for the complete lack of extant and wide-spread productive and fulfilling jobs. The inevitable result is the mass suicides, drug overdoses, homelessness, dumbed down education, and collapsed birthrates we see today.

In order to lift our population from its present atomized and pessimistic state, it is essential to inspire and challenge them with a collective mission which inspires the human spirit at the deepest levels. We need an economic and spiritual driver, one that advances new scientific breakthroughs and organizes the whole of our national economy. Apollo did that. President Kennedy challenged the entire population with that national mission because it would, as he said, “serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills,” and that it did.

President Donald Trump was the first President since Kennedy to call for the renewing of our national space exploration program. Project Artemis puts the first woman and next Man on the Moon by 2024, while driving for permanent presence on the Moon and Mars. Under President Trump, investment in advanced nuclear technologies was revived, in programs like NuScale reactor modules for use in commercial nuclear power plants and the engineering of nuclear power for space exploration. Windmills and solar panels, obviously, will not get you to Mars or provide any new fundamental discoveries about the universe which advance humanity’s existence on the earth and beyond.

Alexander Hamilton located the fundamental purpose of an economy as “to cherish and stimulate the activity of the human mind.” Lyndon LaRouche, in Hamilton’s footsteps, outlined a program for Moon-Mars colonization over thirty years ago, broaching it as the next step in advancing human development on the earth and beyond, HIs program, like Artemis, stands for the the invention of whole new energy sources, such as advanced nuclear and fusion power to power that mission—advanced energy sources which can instantly transform entire underdeveloped areas of the earth into new productive platforms. The synthetic environments we will construct on the Moon and then Mars will lead to massive medical breakthroughs, both through experiments in microgravity and in understanding the dynamic systems of the human body. We will have to learn to modify the weather and to invent whole new modes of agriculture in order to sustain human existence. More than that, we will expose ourselves to the great unknowns concerning life and human existence, with major discoveries only limited by our imaginations.

This month we commemorate the 60th anniversary of the first Human in space, Yuri Gagarin, and the first American in space, Alan Shephard, followed by the vision outlined by President Kennedy 60 years ago this month, of launching a man to the moon and returning him safely to earth before the end of the decade. Will we advance on this mission, fulfilling our human destiny? Or, as the Biden collective demands, will we take a giant step backwards, cowering like animals in a world obedient to their wholly invented and mythical iron laws of “nature.”