Casualty of War:
Has NASA Lost Its Mind?
by Dennis Mason, LaRouche Youth Movement
There are those who have said that we should focus on the problems on Earth, rather than reach for the stars. The arguments go: It costs too much to hurl a bunch of junk into orbit; it would take too long to get to Mars; there are starving people here on Earth, and so on. It may well be that these people cheer the fact that we will have, upon the mothballing of the shuttle Discovery, no way to deliver a payload of any large size into space.
Losing this capability is one problem, but a larger problem exists: a problem termed "human capital," by a source we talked with, who works with NASA (the National Aeronautics and Space Administration).
We use rockets to deliver our science projects into space, he said, but NASA has realized that they no longer have a living science of rocketry. To try to amend this problem, several Apollo-era technicians, gentlemen in their 80s, were brought in with their old notebooks, and more importantly, their living knowledge of rocketry, to give interviews, and talk with the current engineering force. These interviews were recorded, as part of NASA's attempt to capture the knowledge that they know they should already have in their pockets, but have lost.
There is a similar program to try to head off the same sort of institutional amnesia in respect to the Shuttle scientists, as these guys head into retirement. According to this source, the number one concern right now at NASA isn't funding, but, the nöetic capacity of the program as a whole. They've recognized a loss of knowledge they used to have, and there are fewer and fewer new scientists coming in to take the place of the retiring Baby Boomers. The source went on to say that "the few engineers coming out of our universities are pretty messed up by the education system."
We can see that, as NASA represents the front end of the scientific machine-tool capacity of the United States of America, its loss of cognitive potential has dynamic effects downstream. The scientific programs of the university system, without any real mission objective, have clearly been withering away to Cartesian nothingness.
Our industrial operatives are stuck machining the same pieces over and over and over again. Without the science-driven optimism of a real, physical economy, we're on the verge of losing much more than our machine tools; we're losing the machining capability required to carry out the projects necessary to raise, once again, our potential relative population density above the actual population density.
This has been the British imperial plan. The convincing of the Baby Boomers of an "Earth first" ideology, of a so-called "green society," has had the result of a reversal of the policies of the American System, to the effect of destroying our United States both physically, and nöetically. The irony here, is that what is necessary to feed the 6.7 billions of people on Earth, in both body and mind, requires the upstream, ocean-voyage outlook that NASA represents. The problems of resource development, advanced agriculture, and water generation, among others, require the leading-edge institutional science capability imbedded in NASA, an institutional capacity that the British Empire has hated, and attacked, beginning with the Apollo Project of the 1960s and '70s.
The war being fought by the LaRouche Political Action Committee, against the British System, will determine the fate of humanity as a whole, for generations far into the future. The policies of Lyndon LaRouche are not just good ideas, but the necessary steps to take in order for mankind to leave its infancy, and take our rightful place as the gardeners of, not just Earth, but the universe as a whole.
