“If God had wanted man to become a spacefaring species, he would have given man a moon.”

—Krafft Ehricke

Imagine that the first human had set foot on Mars in 1984, as was planned by the people who put man on the Moon just 15 years earlier. Imagine that the rocket that took the first crew there was constructed in lunar orbit by a team based in a large orbiting space station—one of several—from which the crew and their rocket departed. Imagine that robust mining and manufacturing operations on the Moon had provided some of the key structural components of that rocket, and that the trip to Mars was powered by a nuclear rocket engine.

Imagine where we as mankind could have been today, 30 years later, had we achieved those goals. Would we be facing something so juvenile as the existential threat of economic collapse and world war that hangs over our heads today?

Those who have adopted the outlook of empire, such as the criminal occupants of Wall St., or the green ideologues who cry “limited resources!” will disagree; but they are wrong.

Man is Not an Animal

As the great space visionary Krafft Ehricke said in his 1957 “Anthropology of Astronautics”:

1. Nobody and nothing under the natural laws of this universe impose any limitations on man, except man himself.

2. Not only the Earth, but the entire Solar System, and as much of the universe as he can reach under the laws of nature, are man’s rightful field of activity.

3. By expanding throughout the universe, man fulfills his destiny as an element of life, endowed with the power of reason and the wisdom of the moral law within himself.

Man creates his own future through discoveries of higher and more powerful principles than those he wielded before. Compared to mankind of the middle ages, or of the 18th century, we as a species are a mighty geological force, with powers to cause change and development, and to sustain human life which simply didn’t exist before.

What this means for us today, if we want to survive, is that a new paradigm must take the place (and is already) of the collapsed British Empire system, based on cooperation among nations for shared great achievements which advance man’s mastery of new fundamental physical principles, and their implementation in the form of new technologies. That is the only legitimate basis for an economic system.

Man’s Future Lies in Space

The space program must lead the way to the future, beginning with the farside of the Moon.

Mankind has never landed anything—robot or human—on the lunar farside. Yet that location promises to tell us more about the history of the development of our Solar system with its unique geology than anything we can access on Earth; and as a radio astronomy observatory, it will give us a glimpse into features of the Solar system, Milky Way galaxy and far distant galaxies which are simply impossible to see from Earth or Earth orbit.

What new discoveries about the principle of our galaxy, and of galactic systems in general, will originate from the first teams of scientists stationed on the Moon?