Red (Chinese) Moon Rising — A Wakeup Call?
As a boy, I was in awe of America’s space program. The bigger-than-life vision of landing a man on the moon is what led me to study engineering and culminated in a high-technology career. Apollo inspired me and others of my generation to dream big dreams.
Now China has announced that, by 2017, it plans to perform a feat that a once youthful America achieved nearly half a century earlier (than this date) — to land a Man on the Moon. As is demonstrated by their recently successful manned space missions and heavy launch vehicle program, they are making great strides towards this goal.
Who cares if China lands a man on the moon? After all, America did it more than 35 years ago. Unfortunately, the first moon landings are now ancient history and a lost capability; America has squandered the ability to follow-up on the dreams of Apollo. We can’t even safely fly people to orbit, much less to the moon or beyond. Even were it a national priority, today we no longer have the launch systems to establish a presence on the moon. Although NASA has announced plans to return America to the moon by 2018, with the gap in launch vehicles and the huge demands on the national budget, this may well be a pipe dream.
Should we be alarmed that China strives to dominate the high-frontier? YES and for the same reasons that we could not allow Soviet dominion there. The Soviet communists were a very real threat and focused their energies towards trying to “bury” us. If they had been allowed to gain significant superiority in space operations, then today we would be living in a much different world.
The Chinese communists have many of the same ambitions as their Soviet predecessors, but follow a more clever and insidious strategy. First they use American business investments to modernize their industry and, in the process, destroy our industrial base by relocating it to a low-cost Chinese alternative. Next, they use the windfall profits of this increased industrial base to modernize their military. All of this is well underway. The question is: “Against what threat do the Chinese build up their military?”. Not all forms of government are benign; the communist system has never been benevolent.
China is already a regional superpower; their goal is to become a global one. They themselves threaten Taiwan. They are buying advanced Russian submarine and aircraft technology. They are building ICBM’s at an alarming rate — ICBM’s that target America. These are not the actions of a friend.
Against an antagonist with more than four times our population, superior technology may be the best defense that America has. By facilitating the modernization of communist China’s industrial-base — ultimately their military-industrial-complex; we are allowing our own companies to seriously erode our advantage. By helping China close the technology gap, we are funding the resurgence of the global communist threat.
Space supremacy by the Chinese could easily result in a militarized high-frontier which, if left unchallenged, would mean that their space-based weapons will be out of our reach. Communist control of space will translate into their dominance of earth — they will capture the world.
If atheistic communist China is allowed to dominate the high-frontier, then it will mean the apocalyptic end of America (and of the world) as we know it. Will we wake up in time?
