The View from Texas
to the Far Side of the Moon
March 5—Megan Beets of the LaRouche PAC Science Team gave this report to the March 4 International LaRouche PAC Webcast.
I can tell you from my visit to Texas that at this moment, when the breakdown of the trans-Atlantic system is undeniable—we’re witnessing the complete malfunctioning and shutdown of this old system—we’re also seeing the reopening of the space program down in Texas.
Now the event that I was privileged to participate in with Kesha Rogers and Tom Wysmuller in Texas, represents a real beginning of a change of direction of the United States, a rebirth, so to speak, of the United States as a nation. Now, the requirement today is that the United States dump our commitment, our addiction, to this dead, dying trans-Atlantic system, and decide once again to take up a mission in the sense of purpose and contribution to mankind.
Now, you look around today. You look around at our citizens. You look at the heroin epidemic. You look at the death, the self-induced deaths from drugs, from suicide, from alcoholism. You look at the breakdown in cities like Flint, Michigan, the breakdown in places like certain counties of West Virginia that were once booming coal towns. There’s no reflection in the United States of reality.
Now, what’s reality? Look at the leadership coming from Asia, particularly from China. Look at the kinds of optimistic developments, the progress for humanity, that’s coming from the leadership of China and their space program, and in their commitment to development projects which are beginning to take hold and take place all across Eurasia. That’s reality. There’s no reflection of this yet inside the United States.
 Ian Overton
Speaking on the March 4 LaRouche PAC webcast, Megan Beets reported the necessity of a renewed Space program to restore the sense of purpose to the United States. China’s leadership in Space is providing progress for humanity. Beets was a participant at the conference to revive the U.S. Space program, held near the Johnson Space Center.
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And so, when we look around, it’s not just that the U.S. economy has disappeared. The United States has disappeared. There’s no sense of a unified purpose. There’s no sense of a unified mission for the existence of the United States as a nation, and there’s no sense within our people of what we, as a nation, will organize ourselves to contribute to the purposes of mankind.
Now you contrast that with the U.S. sense of purpose and mission under John F. Kennedy and his Presidency, and his leadership within the United States, and his dedication to the space program. Now, as anyone who truthfully remembers—and most especially, those people who were directly involved—can tell you, this wasn’t just a mission for the United States. This was a real mission for all of mankind. And this was reflected in some anecdotes at the Texas event last Saturday from some of the participants who themselves were engineers or otherwise employed in NASA during the Apollo missions.
In an anecdote, Tom Wysmuller said that he had disagreed with Wernher von Braun’s view that we should be sharing some of our technology with the Russians, and his mind was changed by von Braun. There was another former NASA employee who said that at first, in the 1990s, he disagreed with President Clinton’s sharing of U.S. space technology with the former Soviet Union—with Russia. But he said that once he started working with Russian engineers, he realized that our mission is mankind; it’s unified; it’s the same. And this was reflected throughout the entire event: the sense that our work during the space program was contributing fundamental developments and contributions, not to the progress of the United States, but to the progress of man as a whole.
Now, why? What is the space program? What happened during the space program in the United States?
Well, not only was the common, the general citizen transformed. Not only were there innumerable and immeasurable benefits from the economic spin-offs. But most importantly, the people were transformed. The astronauts were fundamentally transformed. The engineers working in the space program were fundamentally transformed, as we confronted problems in space, problems that forced us to overturn our assumptions about the principles which govern and control the Universe. And each of these problems that we confronted, we were to conquer. And you see that in the accounts of the people who were involved during that time in the space program: that we were able to pull together around a common mission, thousands and thousands of people across the country to confront these challenges in our knowledge about the Universe, and to conquer them.
And in that way, in a very short period of time, man began to rapidly transform himself and change to be a more powerful species. We began to progress into a species with more power and control over the processes in the Universe, to the point that we were able to land people on the surface of the Moon, which fundamentally transformed our ideas and our knowledge of what the Moon itself is, of what potential the Moon holds for a new platform of development for man, which was completely unknown until the accomplishments of Apollo.
Now this is what the Chinese are doing today with their space program. In 2018, just two years from now, the Chinese plan to land on the far side of the Moon. This has never been done before. The far side of the Moon has been imaged with satellites; it’s been seen by the human eyes of the American astronauts who orbited the Moon. But nobody has ever landed on the far side of the Moon.
Now, people may say, “Well, we know what the Moon is; we’ve looked at it. We’ve taken pictures.” But the fact is, the far side of the Moon is a completely unknown quantity to us. When we land there, for example, what do we think the far side can teach us? When we land there, we’ll have a chance to confront our fundamental notions about the formation of the Moon, the formation of the Earth, and possibly other planets in the Solar system, with the unique geological investigations that we’ll be able to perform there.
When we land there, and when we’re able to set up astronomical observatories in the very low radio frequency range, which is a band of the electromagnetic spectrum in which it is impossible to look at the Solar system from anywhere attainable to us besides the far side of the Moon; when we are able to look at the Solar system in this new range, we’re very likely going to discover that the planets, the interstellar medium, distant galaxies, different stars, could exhibit processes to us which were completely invisible before.
It’s this kind of potential for mankind to transform our powers, to transform our relationship to the Solar system itself, that’s being offered by the Chinese actions today. And it’s this sense of meaning, this sense of mobilization and commitment to progress for all of mankind, which is what we, in Texas, are reminding people of. It’s what Kesha is reminding people of—even people who participated in these great accomplishments 40 or 50 years ago, and who might have encountered now a sense of demoralization with the actions since that time. We’re drawing people out, back to a commitment to this mission. And Kesha is showing once again that the United States can, and must, commit itself to this kind of purpose for all of mankind.
In these beginnings that we are seeing in Texas, we find that people there still associate themselves with reality, and are now playing a leading role, with Kesha, in promoting the understanding that this mission for mankind is the viable option for the United States.
