Pentagon says China will beat America in new space race

OPINION:

Sitting on a launch pad, waiting for permission to launch, America’s past, present, and future came into being with NASA’s abortive Artemis rocket mission. A heavy-lift rocket designed—supposedly—to get us back to the moon within a decade, the great machine did not work according to plan. Fear of a malfunction captured the minds of NASA’s bureaucrats and they “scrubbed” the much-ballyhooed August 29 mission. 

“Better safe than sorry,” wrote someone on a Facebook group that I am part of that tracks American space launches. And if that mentality didn’t capture the current zeitgeist in the United States today, I don’t know what does. NASA is struggling to do that which it readily used to do, with great ease, in the 1970s: Get Americans safely to and from the lunar surface. 

Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s tiny (in comparison to NASA) continues plunging ahead with its goal of building a rocket capable of getting to Mars. In what seems like an almost weekly occurrence, Mr. Musk’s SpaceX is constantly launching its new Starship rocket… and giddily watching it explode. With each explosion, SpaceX’s engineers learn something new; a vital new piece of information they will need to perfect the technology that will ultimately get Americans to the surface of worlds in our Solar System beyond the Earth. For its part, NASA spends our hard-earned tax dollars, entrusts it to bureaucrats who lack all vision for our future, and ultimately refuse to risk damaging their new toy.

NASA used to represent the best of both America and its government. It was the place where John F. Kennedy placed his greatest hopes—his vision of an America paving a New Frontier in Outer Space—and where so many Americans were brought together on that fateful July day in 1969 around their televisions; when Americans, and indeed the world, looked with wonder as the hearty American astronauts staked America’s flag in the moon’s regolith and proudly declared a victory both for freedom and humanity. 

It was America, not the totalitarian states of Eurasia, that had made it to the moon. The Soviet Union, America’s great rival during the race to the moon, once had a superior space program. But by 1969, the Soviet space agency had become mired in the kind of sclerotic and stifling bureaucracy that was once the hallmark only of communist regimes. 

Today, sadly, NASA is coming to symbolize all that is wrong with government. It is slow to innovate. Bloated. It is poorly managed. And NASA lacks the kind of vision that once drove the storied agency to historic heights. How is it that a tiny space startup, like SpaceX, understands that space exploration is messy and inherently risky? That the path to innovation is not found on drawing boards but discovered in the practical experimentation and real-world application of the concepts found on drawing boards. 

No other institution besides NASA can lay claim to the fact that they’ve placed humans on the surface of another world. Yet, NASA cannot seem to reliably do so again, many decades later, when the technology to achieve this herculean task exists to make it even easier to get back to the moon.

SpaceX and other private space startups are doing God’s work. Or, at least, they’re doing the work that NASA seems incapable and/or unwilling to do. Yet, SpaceX and these other startups are too small to make the kind of impact that America needs in space right now. You see, NASA, like the rest of America has become complacent with the country’s status as the world’s sole remaining Superpower. 

Since the end of the Cold War, America has dithered and deferred decisions on several critical policies simply because we could. To us, history was over; the United States achieved everlasting dominance when the Soviet Union fell. Of course, history is not over and new chapters are always being written. 

Today, the United States is challenged as never before. China and Russia represent the greatest strategic challenges to the United States in decades. Their Rogue State proxies, such as Iran, also threaten America.

The Defense Innovation Unit (DIU) has released its “State of the Space Industrial Base” report and it is a nightmare. The DIU talked to 350 experts in space and concluded, “While the United States space industrial base remains on an upward trajectory, participants expressed concerns that the upward trajectory of the People’s Republic of China […] is even steeper, with a significant rate of overtake.” 

In other words, the United States is losing. NASA’s recent failure to launch what should be old technology to them is just another reminder of how far gone we are.

So, what is the solution? 

In typical Washington fashion, the bureaucracy is right to point out the problems we face going forward. Yet, our leaders are wrong about the timetable of our potential defeat in the new Space Race by China. At the rate we are going, given how dedicated China is to knocking the Americans out in the new Space Race, Beijing may enjoy historic gains over the Americans before the decade is over. What’s more, the solutions offered by the DIU report are far too small-scale to be of any use, if the situation is as dire as the report indicates (it is as dire and may even be more than what the report says).

What’s needed is a bold strategy to ensure the United States remains the dominant space power and can expand its presence and its foothold in the strategic high ground. Beyond protecting America’s essential satellites and placing key defensive weapons systems in orbit, the more than $1 trillion burgeoning space mining industry will determine who rules humanity’s future. As this industry develops over the next 50 years, the country and companies that dominate this key area will dominate the world. And China intends to control this industry. The flag will always follow trade. So, as the space economy grows and becomes increasingly essential for our lives, the nation that is controlling this industry will become the center of the world. 

Only Space Dominance, a hegemonic model for securing the cosmos, will offer the country that implements such a strategy total security. Since Washington, D.C. is throwing money around like there’s no tomorrow, it’d be nice to see our leaders actually invest in the future. A $1 trillion investment over the next 5-10 years into all areas of space policy, from military applications to space to commercial and scientific pursuits, will accomplish this task. This is precisely what the Chinese are doing and it is exactly why they are beating the Americans. Until we get serious and our leaders publicly outline such a bold strategy, we will lose the new Space Race—and will have ceded the future to the totalitarian Chinese Communist Party. 

Do our leaders understand this? The recent DIU report indicates that they understand the problem, but our leaders are too cowardly to make a bold, heroic strategy for preventing defeat. What’s more, do they have what it takes to lead us to victory in this new war? 

Until they start talking about Space Dominance you should be skeptical—and worried.