Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) – The irrational, ignorant and often plain stupid cuts that rogue DOGE operatives of Elon Musk are making to the US government will endanger the health and well-being of American society for decades.
Musk himself is a giant contractor for the government and many of his moves may be intended to disadvantage his competitors and spew more billions of our tax dollars into his shitty companies. Although Musk’s myrmidons seem to be leaving the Department of Defense — the biggest black hole in the US budget and the most corrupt of US government agencies — alone for the moment, their actions nevertheless have dire implications for US national security.
The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) officials expect their agency to be gutted just as other key government departments have been. Trump is appointing a Space-X executive to run NASA.
Musk has attacked NASA for its plans to return to the moon, arguing for going to Mars instead.
Meanwhile, in the real world, the rising superpower of China is not headed by terminal nincompoops, and has several space initiatives on the books that could leave the US in the dust.
The idea behind China’s space solar array is that the planned 0.6 miles wide solar platform could beam microwaves straight down to earth, generating as much energy in a year as all 100 million barrels of petroleum that are produced annually.
Trump is putting all of America’s (pricey) eggs in fossil fuels and trying to derail the development of solar power in the US, and so there is unlikely to be a US solar space array. But that failure will lead to other setbacks.
Putting that kind of heavy equipment up into space is a challenge, but Chinese space officials and scientists think they have figured out a way to do it. They are developing a reusable heavy-lift rocket with a lift capacity of 136 metric tons.
They have named it the “Long March-9” (CZ-9). The title is a reference to the historic march in 1934-35 of guerrilla fighters of the Communist Party from their initial base on the Jiangxi-Fujian border in the southeast of the country, where they were being successfully besieged and attrited by the forces of right-wing warlord Chiang Kai-shek. Over 80,000 fighters broke through enemy lines and marched up 6,000 miles to Shaanxi in the northwest near the Soviet Union. In the aftermath, Mao Zedong, who had lost power in the early thirties, reemerged as the CPC leader. The Long March would be like walking across the United States from Washington, DC, to Los Angeles and then back again.
I wonder if the Chinese Communist Party feels besieged by the white nationalist oligarchy of the United States, and sees the space projects as a way to break out, just as their predecessors did in the 1930s.
“Solar Array,” Digital, ChatGPT, 2025
Not only can the CZ-9 rocket put up a huge solar array into geostationary orbit over several trips, but it can also spearhead the project of establishing a moon base only ten years from now. From now through 2027, the Chinese plan seeks to achieve needed technological breakthroughs in areas necessary to establishing a moon base. These efforts include using space robots to locate ice on the surface of the moon that can be mined for water for the taikonauts or Chinese astronauts.
In the second phase from 2028 to 2035, taikonauts will be landed on the moon and establish a permanent base on its surface.
Thomas Corbett and Peter W. Singer at Defense 1 point out that the Chinese plan is firm and advanced at a time when Elon Musk and others are arguing about whether the US should even bother to go forward with NASA’s own plan to go to the moon. They note that many other countries (including Pakistan) have signed up to help with the Chinese moon base.
China’s Chang’e-4 mission made the first landing on the far side of the moon in 2019, bringing back soil samples. It is a feat that America never achieved.
Already, taikonauts on the Tiangong space station have created rocket fuel and oxygen through artificial photosynthesis. This achievement could help with the plans for a moon base.
America’s own research and development in science is at the moment being crippled by various Trump measures, including slashing payments to universities for the overhead on scientific research, putting that research in dire peril. Where near-term breakthroughs in cancer treatment, e.g., had been expected, these may now never happen.
Elon Musk himself has never invented anything and does not understand science. He is just a collector of other peoples’ ideas and companies, at which he is admittedly very good. But a collector is ultimately pretty useless, and to the extent he takes useful things off the market for the sake of his quirks and ego, he can actually be destructive.
In contrast, the Chinese are starting to outstrip the US in science innovation.
Of course, those considerations will be made moot if the US population largely dies off from plagues and epidemics unleashed by the destruction of our health and vaccination infrastructure. The Chinese could just sit back, vaccinate and wear masks during epidemics, and watch the US dwindle to a shithole country, courtesy our addlepated, looney tunes old fool of a president.
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