This article appears in the March 11, 2016 issue of Executive Intelligence Review.

CONFERENCE REPORT

There Are No Limits to Growth: Mankind Must Conquer Space!

by Ian Overton

[PDF version of this article]

March 1—On Feb. 27, 2016, at a conference held in League City, Texas, LaRouche PAC Policy Committee leader Kesha Rogers demonstrated to the people of Texas, and to the rest of United States, the quality of thinking and the quality of fight required to move America into the future.

Ian Overton Discussion continues after the Schiller Institute’s conference on the Extraterrestrial Imperative, held near the Johnson Space Center, Texas. Kesha Rogers is second from right. Megan Beets and Tom Wysmuller are facing the camera.

Under the theme, “There Are No Limits to Growth: Mankind Must Conquer Space,”[fn_1] an all day conference was held in the shadow of the Johnson Space Center under the auspices of the Schiller Institute. Rogers, who keynoted the event, was joined for a panel discussion by Tom Wysmuller, a member of the NASA Alumni Association and The Right Climate Stuff group, and Megan Beets of the LaRouche PAC Science Team.

In both 2010 and 2012, Rogers ran campaigns for U.S. Congress from the district representing the Johnson Space Center. She won the Democratic Party nomination in both races, campaigning under the slogan, “Save NASA, Impeach Obama.”

The courage and leadership that Rogers demonstrated in those races were apparent again at the League City event, where a lively discussion and dialogue took place between audience members and the speakers. This included useful insights by members of an audience which included NASA alumni and contractors, and other science-minded individuals, into how their own thinking had been challenged, and the way in which they had come to re-evaluate some of their own “fixed” beliefs.

Inaugurating the Age of Reason

“The question facing NASA,” began Rogers, “is not why was this or that program was cut, but why is our extra-terrestrial imperativeҼwhich Krafft Ehricke defined as the true nature and basis of mankind’s creative existenceҼbeing attacked? How do we restore this identity; how do we remove the limitations that have been placed on our imagination?”

To begin answering this question, Rogers quoted German space pioneer Krafft Ehricke himself, who said, “The world of modern industrial man is no more closed within the biosphere than it is flat. Human growth hinges on technology and its translation into industry. . . . The one underlying, unambiguous technology [that accomplishes this] is space technology.” Ehricke illustrated this choice between a growth paradigm of life and a no-growth paradigm of war, famine, disease, and death, in a flow chart demonstrating the necessary physical consequences of our daily choice of accepting one policy over the other (see Figure 1).

View full size Space Global/Krafft Ehricke Krafft Ehricke’s flowchart illustrates the necessary physical consequences of the choice between a paradigm of life and growth, and a no-growth paradigm of war, famine, disease, and death.

Society has lost its capacity to reason as true human beings, because the mission of the space program, and what it truly represents, has been taken away. The ability to create our future has been taken away, and the population has been reduced to the mental status of beasts. Thus, the purpose of this event was to unleash a new paradigm—The Age of Reason—where these limitations have been removed, and mankind is free to realize our destiny as mankind in the universe, and shed the last cultural residues of bestiality.

Wysmuller: Science Driver’s Systemic Effects

Following these opening remarks, Tom Wysmuller described how his work at NASA during the early 1970s—as one of nine people picked to be “executive interns” who would eventually replace other executives—uniquely provided him a top-down view of how NASA’s space technology contributed to Ehricke’s Growth Paradigm. Wysmuller presented a detailed overview of the cascade of technologies generated by our space endeavors, pointing out that nearly every job in the United States has been improved through our past science drivers—even that of the proverbial ditch-digger, who now uses a titanium-enhanced shovel blade and GPS to determine his dig zone.

“This kind of technological advancement should not be put at the whim of political opinions!” Wysmuller exclaimed. “If we had a Mars program, we would dramatically increase these technologies, we would give people on Earth a raison d’être.”

In discussing Mars colonization preceded by lunar industrialization, as the next giant leaps for human progress, Wysmuller repeatedly emphasized the need for global collaboration among the four major space powers—the United States, Europe, Russia, and China—and told the audience how he was personally corrected in his thinking on this matter by Wernher von Braun.

“At the time,” Wysmuller stated, “I opposed sharing docking technologies with Russia for the Soyuz mission. I did not see why we should give away our superior technology to our opponents. But I was wrong. Von Braun convinced me of this when he said, ‘Tom, if any of our astronauts happened to be in trouble, and the Russians actually had a bird on the launch pad they could send up, all they would be able to do is look out the window and wave as they passed by. They wouldn’t be able to rescue us; we could not be rescued, and we would not be able to rescue them.’ ”

The mutually beneficial win-win optimism of America’s two godfathers of space flight, Krafft Ehricke and Werner von Braun, struck a deep chord within the audience, and Wysmuller challenged his colleagues to rethink their current fear of collaboration with China and Russia, in light of what could be accomplished for mankind by such cooperation.

Beets: Political Mobilization—and Demobilization

Picking up on this theme, Megan Beets briefly described how Lyndon LaRouche developed this perspective of a win-win growth paradigm as the science of physical economy. Nations are able to collaborate and grow by making conscious, willful decisions, not simply by trial and error. Such a policy program has been officially adopted by China and Russia, as typified by the trajectory for growth that China has put into its space program as part of its One Belt, One Road policy with the BRICS group of nations and others. To survive, the United States must reject the willful and arrogant take-down of its “go it alone” manned space program by Obama, and join with China and Russia in realizing the common aims of all mankind.

China Daily Wang Yaping teaches a class in space physics live from orbit to 60 million school children during the June 2013 Shenzhou 10 mission. Here, a small part of her audience at a Beijing high school.

A few months after China launched its first astronaut into space, in 2004, President Bush announced that the United States would return to the Moon, as a launch pad for getting to Mars. NASA laid out a detailed plan for getting back to the Moon by 2015, and to Mars by 2030.

“In reading this report,” Beets told the audience, “I was struck by how everything NASA had been doing was now being reorganized under a single mission. Even projects like New Horizons, which were begun years earlier, were reinterpreted to be part of this unified focus. NASA began to mobilize and regain what was lost after Apollo was cancelled.” The new Aries-1 and Aries-5 rocket launch systems, the Altair lunar lander, the Constellation vehicle, and the Orion crew capsule were developed with 50 years of science and engineering improvements to build upon,— yet the Obama Administration’s FY2011 budget cancelled all of this, declaring it over budget, behind schedule, and “lacking innovation.”

“Yet more crucial than the specifics of China’s mission objectives,” Beets concluded, “is the creation and development of mankind. That’s the ultimate mission. That’s why, despite the attack on our space program, a record 18,300 Americans have applied to NASA to become astronauts, more than triple the number of applications received in 2012. Whether it’s conscious or not, science is not a matter of tripping over a new fact, like a squirrel collecting nuts. As mankind makes discoveries of the universe, we redefine the universe, and that power is what we have to instill consciously into the people of the U.S.A. today. That will create the political victory for the Age of Reason.”

Audience Transformed

The audience of NASA alumni and contractors, teachers, and engineers responded enthusiastically to this challenge of the win-win strategy of the Age of Reason—so much so that one organizer noted that if this momentum keeps up, we may have to rename League City and call it Manhattan, Texas!

A rocket scientist spoke up, attacking the opportunistic politicians of our country. He said he is inspired by the idea of Helium-3, but is afraid of the Chinese as well. Kesha Rogers challenged him by showing that the source of the problem with our politicians is the corrupting influence of Wall Street, and Tom Wysmuller reminded him that the Chinese have repeatedly offered us a hand of cooperation on these ventures, yet these same politicians are the ones forcing them to go it alone. Later, that rocket scientist was to admit that he now had come to understand how his fears had been generated, and that he had to change the way he had been thinking.

A Chinese-American photovoltaic engineer asked the panelists to explain the root cause of the United States’ shutdown, since it is clearly not any lack of enthusiasm in the population. Megan Beets drove home the point just made about Wall Street. The cancellation of the Apollo Program occurred under President Nixon, a crony for Wall Street speculators, right after he destroyed the fixed exchange rate financial system. We are currently living with the effects of 40 years under a no-growth paradigm. People must recognize this, in order to stop being confused about why good projects are not allowed to happen.

[box: Highlights of China’s Space Program]

A contractor for NASA spoke against the way in which the scientific community tries to adapt to this “practical” budget-cutting mentality, by attacking the way the James Webb Space Telescope is being promoted. “People are talking as if it’s OK that the Hubble Space Telescope and the International Space Station are being decommissioned, and being allowed to burn up in the atmosphere. It’s not OK!” she exclaimed. “James Webb is not a replacement for Hubble because it sees in a different wavelength! They are complements, not substitutes. But it’s being sold this way because the money isn’t budgeted to keep them active. The problem is not their usefulness, it’s the way people think about money, as more important than science.”

A NASA alum who developed stabilization technology for re-entry vehicles gave personal testimony in support of what the panelists had been saying about the need to dispel the mask of fear used by those who would keep us from working together. “I opposed President Clinton’s decision to jointly build the International Space Station with the Russians, because of my experiences growing up in the Cold War of the 1950s,” he said. “But my experience of working with Russians on the structural integrity of ISS changed me.

“I met them, we ate dinner together, and I got to know them personally. I discovered that neither of us liked our leaders’ reactions, but we shared ideas as engineers and scientific minds. I’ve come to see that the cooperation approach is more important than ‘Us First.’ ”

Jin Liwang/Xinhua A younger component of Wang Yaping’s “classroom” of 60 million across 80,000 schools, during her live presentation from Earth orbit. President Xi told the crew that the mission “carries the space dream of the Chinese nation” and will “show the Chinese passion to reach for the stars.”

Other participants asked how to get more people to understand the importance of NASA’s accomplishments and how to get these scientists to stop being cynical about politicians and budgets, but instead exert their authority as scientists to make policy for mankind’s future. Rogers responded that this is precisely why she ran her campaigns for U.S. Congress and her 2014 campaign for U.S. Senate. “Scientists were surprised I came to their events,” she said. “But I told them, NASA is not just some country club, it is the nation’s organization, our science driver. We deserve for NASA to be able to organize the nation around the success we could be achieving.”

This provoked Wysmuller to call for a series of international brain trust conferences. “I am going to China soon, and I plan to help this along. We need free and open discussions to dispel prejudices. We have a world here. We need to work together. When the barriers get broken, everybody wins.”

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