Although not one of its top twenty issues, the Trumpian Republican Party platform has found space for space, and, says a Space News op-ed, America has the right stuff to beat China (“GOP platform lays out aggressive space agenda to counter China,” Greg Autry and Alexander Salter, July 17, 2024).
One plank, as powerful as it is concise, calls for America to reaffirm and extend its leadership in a crucial area of geopolitical competition: the exploration and development of space.
Space rarely garners attention in party platforms, but it is an increasingly important arena of international competition, and potentially conflict. Once safely protected by two seas and secure boarders, America is increasingly vulnerable to threats from abroad, many of them celestial in nature. Oceans and border defenses are irrelevant to these new weapons. China and Russia have significant space capabilities and unsavory schemes for dominance. Russia is developing and perhaps deploying orbital space weapons. China is working hard to beat America back to the moon. We are once again in a Cold War with an accompanying Space Race.
China has been making substantial but largely imitative strides in space tech and missions. It has “an operating space station and has recently delivered on a series of impressive robotic lunar landings and sample return missions.”
But China’s nominally commercial space enterprises are adjuncts of the People’s Liberation Army and the Chinese Communist Party, and the designs offered by Chinese firms “are nearly always blatant copies of SpaceX hardware. One of these, a knockoff of the Falcon 9, was recently destroyed in a failed test firing so catastrophic it presented a serious threat to the public safety.”
The authors, a former Trump White House official and a professor of economics at Texas Tech, think that the United States can do better. There’s nothing in the economic landscape of China comparable to “our dynamic space firms,” they say.
The American way
“Renowned companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrup Grumman have always provided our nation with unrivaled capabilities and they support an unrivaled industrial supply chain. Disruptive new startups like SpaceX, Rocket Lab and Blue Origin are making these incumbents work harder while bringing astounding new capabilities to market.”
The relevant section of the 2024 Republican Party platform states: “Under Republican Leadership, the United States will create a robust Manufacturing Industry in Near Earth Orbit, send American Astronauts back to the Moon, and onward to Mars, and enhance partnerships with the rapidly expanding Commercial Space sector to revolutionize our ability to access, live in, and develop assets in Space.”
Also, there will be more capitalization.
