Biden’s Platform Lies Outright That He ‘Supports Project Artemis’

July 25, 2020 (EIRNS)—The just-released presidential platform of the Democratic Party and its candidate-in-the-basement Joe Biden, as reported on Space.com today, lies outright in claiming support for NASA’s space exploration objectives. Specifically, the platform claims Democrats have supported “our continued presence on the International Space Station”; and says, “We support NASA’s work to return Americans to the moon and go beyond to Mars, taking the next step in exploring our Solar System.”

In fact, the Obama Administration in which Biden was Vice President for eight years, attempted to cancel the human exploration spacecraft which were supposed to replace the Space Shuttle in taking astronauts to the International Space Station. Development of these NASA vehicles was so long delayed that eventually the SpaceX company, encouraged by the Trump Administration, was able to develop the rocket and crew capsule which succeeded in ending an eight-year drought, during which American astronauts had to rely on Russian Soyuz rockets to get to the ISS.

The next step, NASA’s current mobilization to return human presence to the lunar surface by 2024 and to start settling and developing the Moon by 2028—known as the Artemis program—is opposed by the Democrats’ committee leaders in both the House and Senate, who want to put a first lunar return off until at least 2028, simply by withholding the necessary funding NASA is requesting for Artemis.

As Space.com very politely characterized this lying of, by and for Joe Biden, “The document, however, does not explicitly reference the agency’s goal of landing a crewed mission on the Moon by 2024 (the goal of NASA’s current Artemis program) and lists no timeline or deadline for these moonshots.”

For what NASA is actually doing on Artemis this week, the Democrats will not even feign support. The Department of Energy on July 24 formally requested bids to build a nuclear fission power system for the surface of the Moon, and eventually to produce power on Mars. This advanced reactor will be a small modular reactor (SMR) and the designs will be developed under the direction of the Idaho National Laboratory, which is also leading the development of SMRs and other “fourth-generation” reactors for use all over this planet. To quote coverage of this NASA/Energy Department initiative by Associated Press: “The goal is to have a reactor, flight system and lander ready to go by the end of 2026.”