Ret. General Robert Spalding: Moon Landing Couldn’t Happen in Today’s Deindustrialized America

Spalding continued, “When you look at America today, we have no telecommunication equipment manufacturers left that are American companies. When China entered the WTO in 2001, from that time period to 2017, we lost 78,000 factories. We unemployed 3.4 million manufacturing jobs. In the same time, we spent trillions in the Middle East.”

“We fell into this trap of believing that open markets lead to wealth, and wealth leads to democracy, and, therefore, if we just open ourselves up to the world, that the world would automatically democratize,” noted Spalding. “In the space of that 20 years, we essentially deindustrialized our entire country to the point where we almost can’t manufacture any of the things we need to defend ourselves.”

“We even have F-35 circuit boards that are manufactured by Huawei,” noted Spalding. “We’ve gone from being the most sophisticated industrial countries on the planet to being one of the least sophisticated. There’s this fallacy and belief that Silicon Valley is this great engine of innovation in the United States. All they really build are business models based on software. All the hard sciences, all the hardware, all the real science and engineering is going on in China, right now.”

A revamped Space Program may provide the national focus necessary for a revitalized national industrial policy, speculated Spalding.

“If we want to get back to that, we need to have a [national] focused effort. Maybe it is to go to the heavens. Maybe it is to go to Mars. But more importantly, when I got to the White House, all my colleagues that came from the Commerce Department and the Treasury Department said, ‘The United States doesn’t do industrial policy.’ I’ll tell you what: the countries that are actually creating the things that drive the world today do industrial policy.

I suppose it matters where your door is.

There’s nothing natural about concrete sidewalks and asphalt streets... The fact that you are walking out a door at all makes your environment artificial. It’s a difference of degrees.

“Remember, you’re fighting for this woman’s honor, which is probably more than she ever did”

‘that woman is my wife; you should be ashamed...
if that woman is your wife, you should be ashamed...’

It was an enormously expensive undertaking

"Enormously expensive" is a relative term.

The entire Apollo program from 1960 to 1973 cost $28 billion.

Meanwhile, the US spent $28 billion every 3 months in 1969 for social welfare programs.

Let's let that sink for a moment - one of the greatest achievements in man's history, an achievement that continues to have a profound impact on our current-day technology and which inspired untold numbers of children to become interested in science and engineering, cost as much as three months of social welfare programs, many of which were misguided or counter-productive, a few of which actively helped break up families and destroyed communities.

Apollo was an enormous bargain, if what we're focusing on is monetary cost. There are arguments to be made that space exploration should be privatized - I agree, but there is a national security component to space exploration and settlement which means the US government must remain involved and active with its own programs. There are also arguments to be made that robotics and automated exploration should lead the way - again, I agree completely that AI can and should be used, but in the short term it's insufficient. In the long-term, I don't think we want to become a nation of bloggers looking up occasionally to see Mars Rover-quality pictures from the surface of Mars, where the Chinese and others will be setting up manned bases.

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