SPACE...THE LAST FRONTIER
When I was growing up, I always liked science fiction movies, books and tv shows. In college, I got hooked on Star Trek and have been a follower of good Star Trek type movies ever since. I recently watched a tv series called “For All Mankind”. The story involved a race to the moon and later a race to Mars by NASA, Russia, and a privately owned high-tech corporation. Through difficulties, trials, rescues and mere lucky circumstances, NASA gets to Mars only to find out that North Korea has gotten there first. Good for a television drama but not so good in all reality. |
We are probably unaware that this same scenario is too close to the truth, except China would replace North Korea in the story. How could this be true? Sure, it was Russia that made the space race heat up in 1955. They bragged that they would launch the first satellite after the US announced that they planned to launch one. Then Russia successfully launches Sputnik 1 in October of 1957. They then became the first to launch a living organism into space, a dog named Laika. On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space and completed one orbit around the earth. A month later, Alan Shepard was the first American to fly in space but only for 15 minutes. In 1965 the US sends a satellite to Mars. The US Apollo I became the first human-crewed spacecraft to reach and orbit the moon and return to Earth in 1968. Six months later, the US landed on the moon and two astronauts walked on the surface. This marked the end of the “Space Race” to the moon, but not the interest in the moon, Mars and beyond.
In the past several years, more countries have developed space programs. Israel and India tried in 2019 to land spacecraft on the moon. Last August, South Korea sent a spacecraft that reached lunar orbit in December. In December of 2022, ispace, a Japanese company, launched a lunar lander toward the moon on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket. |
But the country that is of greatest interest — and concern — to the United States is China, which has begun to erode the technological lead that Americans have held for decades. In 2019, China landed a spacecraft on the far side of the moon, a historic first. In 2021, it landed a rover on Mars, becoming the only country besides the United States to successfully deploy a vehicle on the Red Planet. It also has assembled a space station of its own in Earth orbit at a time when the International Space Station is aging.
Today’s space race is far more dynamic than the one that took place 50 years ago. Instead of just reaching the moon, the United States and China want to mine it, laying claim to the water that exists in the form of ice and other precious resources, such as metals and even oxygen stored in the lunar soil. |
While the US led the world in the total number of space launches in 2022 with China coming in second, a new report calls China the winner for the most defense-related payloads. “China is replacing Russia as the No. 2 space power,” Jonathan McDowell, an astrophysicist at the Harvard and Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics in Cambridge, MA reported. For specifically defense-related satellites, the report finds that China orbited 45, the US 30 and Russia 15. China’s space funding has increased markedly in recent years, to $8.9 billion in 2020, but it still spent a mere fraction of the United States’ $48 billion. The United States is not falling behind in the space race, so much as China is steadily catching up after having started so far behind. |
Well, we don’t have to fear Klingons yet, and in all reality, we don’t have to fear the Chinese yet either. Yet. The Chinese don’t have to spend more money or build more space vessels to apply pressure to threaten the USA. The fact that they are “in the race” will cause enough fear that Congress will give in to more demands for funding and we will continue to pay for people’s fear. |
Yes, I am a patriot. I love this country and I would like to see us “make America great again,” but we have too many “little foxes destroying the vines” right here on Earth. All the great GREEN ideas are killing whales, dolphin, eagles, and African children digging for cobalt and copper for US electric cars. Just think how much damage they could think up for the moon and Mars.
Conservatives need to stay informed and hold their representatives accountable for problems here. Don’t we have enough issues? Can’t we mend the riff? Start in your house, your neighborhood, your county, your state and hopefully your country. We have a “kingdom” to establish and then....we can “live long and prosper”.
KLN
Conservatives need to stay informed and hold their representatives accountable for problems here. Don’t we have enough issues? Can’t we mend the riff? Start in your house, your neighborhood, your county, your state and hopefully your country. We have a “kingdom” to establish and then....we can “live long and prosper”.
KLN