A Tale of Two Spacecraft

On Tuesday, June 25^th, 2024, the official media channel of the Chinese Chang’e-6 mission announced that the unmanned lunar probe has landed in Xizhiwang (Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region in northern China), delivering two kilograms of lunar samples, collected for the first time in human history on the still mysterious, hidden side of the Moon. The unmanned mission, openly planned, announced, and covered – but with minimal fanfare, by American standards – has been carried out and completed strictly as planned.

Previously on Friday, June 21^st, NASA – the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration – made what has become a depressingly all too familiar announcement about the Boeing Starliner – long planned as the partner or twin US manned shuttle/cargo mission system to the International Space Station (ISS). Its return flight to earth carrying highly experienced and certainly courageous US astronauts Barry “Butch” Gilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams has been delayed yet again.

Boeing, the prime contractor on the long-delayed and troubled spacecraft along with NASA continues to troubleshoot a bewildering batch of problems on the maiden flight up to the ISS. Four of the Starliner’s 28 boosters failed to operate because of software foul-ups. All these were allegedly resolved. But a fifth booster cannot be fired properly at all and Boeing/NASA engineers have openly admitted they do not know what to do about it.

Also, first one, then two helium valve leaks on the Starliner have now expanded to five separate ones. NASA and Boeing continue to insist that the leaks are so small that they pose no significant risk to the astronauts on the return flight – whenever that will be.

Starliner’s first crewed mission to the ISS will not be returning to Earth at least until July – almost a month later than planned – if then.

When Starliner blasted off from Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, on June 5, with its human crew at last, the mission was seven years behind schedule and $1.5 billion over budget. The contrast with Elon Musk’s SpaceX spacecraft could not be starker.

To date, SpaceX, which has a fraction of the resources of enormous and mighty Boeing, one of the largest defense contractors in the world, has recorded 50 successful missions to the ISS and back to earth. All human crews and unmanned cargo missions have been completed successfully and safely. Yet SpaceX was only founded in 2002 and has none of the experience of Boeing.

Boeing’s $1.5 billion bumbling with Starliner – and NASA’s continued coddling of it – are even more striking when compared with Chang’e-6. The level of complexity involved in successfully soft-landing an unmanned spacecraft was mastered by China first four years ago when Chang’e-5 successfully landed on the familiar side of the Moon facing Earth, gathered rock samples and then smoothly and successfully flew them back to earth.

Four years later, NASA sought to replicate Chang’e-5’s achievement with its Odysseus mission in February this year. The mission was of course heavily publicized in advance as a triumphant stepping-stone to the still endlessly delayed Artemis program to return US astronauts to the Moon later this decade. Chang’e-5’s four-year priority in not just landing on the lunar surface but successfully returning rock samples to Earth was ignored.

But Odysseus went wrong. The spacecraft landed and several of its software programs continued to function. However, it fell over on its side – one interpretation claims rather hopefully it only “tilted” – making any mobile experiments impossible. More importantly, had the mission been a manned one, the crew would have been killed.

NASA is an enormous sprawling bureaucracy with multiple directorates and a bewildering number of programs, and many of its priority unmanned missions continue to work well.

So far, the James Webb Space Telescope operating more than a million miles from earth has indeed been a triumph, already delivering a treasure trove recording about ancient, never-before-seen galaxies and phenomena behind all previous viewing ranges that predictably make a mockery yet again of NASA and US uniformitarian models of the way the Universe operates.

For all these are still deeply rooted in the old pre-1950s radio telescope dumb-mechanist realm era (Think Isaac Newton as tinkered with by Albert Einstein and nothing more radical). The work of brilliant Russian astronomers and theoretical analysts such as the late Sergei Vsekhsviatskii, for decades director of the Soviet Union’s Kiev Observatory, remain totally ignored. US scientists do not know enough even to despise and reject them.

However, what we already clearly see here is quite extraordinary. NASA is having enormous problems replicating a straightforward reliable second human service into LEO – Low Earth Orbit – that it first mastered with the Gemini program in 1965. And it has yet to recover the art of safe, soft landings on the Moon that it commanded – apparently effortlessly – from 1969 to 1972.

By contrast, China is slowly but steadily, thoroughly, systematically and successfully mastering all these technologies and techniques.

The conclusion is clear: China is going to beat the United States easily in the new race to establish a permanent human base on the surface of the Moon – certainly by the 2030s and probably much sooner than that, conceivably even before the end of this decade.

The reasons for this very clear – indeed, by now obvious – state of affairs would fill a library of books. But the most important ones are very clear, and have been for generations.

Boeing’s $1.5 billion bumbling with Starliner – and NASA’s continued coddling of it – are even more striking when compared with Chang’e-6. The level of complexity involved in successfully soft-landing an unmanned spacecraft was mastered by China first four years ago when Chang’e-5 successfully landed on the familiar side of the Moon facing Earth, gathered rock samples and then smoothly and successfully flew them back to earth.

Four years later, NASA sought to replicate Chang’e-5’s achievement with its Odysseus mission in February this year. The mission was of course heavily publicized in advance as a triumphant stepping-stone to the still endlessly delayed Artemis program to return US astronauts to the Moon later this decade. Chang’e-5’s four-year priority in not just landing on the lunar surface but successfully returning rock samples to Earth was ignored.

But Odysseus went wrong. The spacecraft landed and several of its software programs continued to function. However, it fell over on its side – one interpretation claims rather hopefully it only “tilted” – making any mobile experiments impossible. More importantly, had the mission been a manned one, the crew would have been killed.

NASA is an enormous sprawling bureaucracy with multiple directorates and a bewildering number of programs, and many of its priority unmanned missions continue to work well.

So far, the James Webb Space Telescope operating more than a million miles from earth has indeed been a triumph, already delivering a treasure trove recording about ancient, never-before-seen galaxies and phenomena behind all previous viewing ranges that predictably make a mockery yet again of NASA and US uniformitarian models of the way the Universe operates.

For all these are still deeply rooted in the old pre-1950s radio telescope dumb-mechanist realm era (Think Isaac Newton as tinkered with by Albert Einstein and nothing more radical). The work of brilliant Russian astronomers and theoretical analysts such as the late Sergei Vsekhsviatskii, for decades director of the Soviet Union’s Kiev Observatory, remain totally ignored. US scientists do not know enough even to despise and reject them.

However, what we already clearly see here is quite extraordinary. NASA is having enormous problems replicating a straightforward reliable second human service into LEO – Low Earth Orbit – that it first mastered with the Gemini program in 1965. And it has yet to recover the art of safe, soft landings on the Moon that it commanded – apparently effortlessly – from 1969 to 1972.

By contrast, China is slowly but steadily, thoroughly, systematically and successfully mastering all these technologies and techniques.

The conclusion is clear: China is going to beat the United States easily in the new race to establish a permanent human base on the surface of the Moon – certainly by the 2030s and probably much sooner than that, conceivably even before the end of this decade.

The reasons for this very clear – indeed, by now obvious – state of affairs would fill a library of books. But the most important ones are very clear, and have been for generations.

First, for the past 50 years the United States has abandoned the paths of protected industry and honest domestic industrial and agricultural development to raise the living standards of its huge population. It has instead turned to the worship of short, greedy profits and dividends in its financial system at the expense of cutting costs, workers, pay levels and living standards.

Fed by scores of millions of Third World immigrants both technically legal and palpably illegal, the US workforce has progressively become less technical and less educated. It continues to dumb down remorselessly. The experience of established engineers, designers, mechanics and skilled industrial workers is no longer cherished and has not been for generations: it is despised, scrapped and thrown on the scrap heap.

Second, related to this, the United States has sought to compensate, as industrial England did after the abolition of the Corn Laws in 1846 by importing cheap food to keep its lumpenproletariat, its rapidly vanishing middle class and previously prosperous skilled industrial workers content in the short term. Let them Eat McDonalds’ hamburgers! Had Queen Marie Antoinette of France had access to the McD’s bacon cheeseburger to give the despairing workers and peasants of 18^th century France, she might have kept her head on her shoulders for another couple of decades.

Third, President Bill Clinton embraced the World Trade Organization – an act of economic suicide comparable to Richard Cobden’s universal free trade act for England in 1860. China, by contrast, very sensibly, adopted Abraham Lincoln’s protectionist-mercantilist model for the protection and growth of US domestic agriculture and industry that was the basis for the enormous expansion and success of the US economy in the century following the 1861-65 Civil War.

I explored these issues in my 2012 book, That Should Still Be Us, which refuted all the myths and orthodoxies of universal free trade. Not a single review of my book, not even a hostile one, ever appeared anywhere in the US media.

I could be easily ignored. But the remorseless working of the laws of trade and business, industry and capital protection and accumulation could not be ignored. As early as first few years of this century, The Economist magazine in London, while still – and to this day – worshipping at the altar of City of London and Wall Street financial supremacy, free trade and liberal imperialism acknowledged that the Workshop of the World – the leading concentration of industrial producing capacity on the planet – had irrevocably moved from the so-called Foundry region of the Northeastern United States to southeastern China.

Therefore, fourth and most crucial, the success and triumph of China’s lunar program in the Space Race of the 2020s is foreordained and inevitable for the same reason that US victory in the 1960s Space Race was foreordained for America. China today, like the United States then, commands the greatest concentration of human, industrial, scientific and applied engineering and other technical resources on the planet.

Faced with these Inconvenient Truths, US policymakers, administrators and industrial managers alike have retreated into fantasy.

Anyone who has sat through a single NASA and space-related press conference, Department of Defense briefing or House and Senate hearing on Industrial and military procurement shortcomings cannot escape the dead and absurd myths that prevent any realistic policies being carried out on every side. Managers, chief executives and engineers are routinely selected because they must be black, Asian, polka-colored, transgender, homosexual or preferably a combination of all of the above. The simple commonsense rule that experience, expertise and a successful track record should be the key factors in selecting, hiring and promoting have long since been totally lost.

Industrial managers in every area no longer even have the power or right to select their own specialists and workers across US business. Every significantly sized company instead has its own Human Resources (HR) department of colorless, anonymous bureaucrats who gravitate to the work because they are useless at everything else – and therefore at that too. The ability to maintain quality control and an elitist core of workers is therefore limited to a handful of tiny companies and projects which are therefore always also under relentless pressure to conform with the bankrupt orthodoxy.

There is simply no humane solution or “soft landing” for these problems – just as it is probably already impossible for the Artemis program to successfully soft-land any more US astronauts on the Moon. And it has already been Carved in Stone that these must include at least one woman and one person of color. The success of the mission and its ability to gather successful and applicable scientific results will always take a last place behind such crazed, obsessive Politically Correct inverse sexism and inverse racism.

Finally, the giant US defense contractors are neither all-powerful and certainly not competent or wise anymore.

They have been hollowed out from within. Their female, MBA-laden, engineering-ignorant, impractical, homosexual, transgender Asian, African American, diverse, inclusive, polka-dotted, and glib managers and mission directors cannot even get their software right and are at a total loss what to do with anything that requires riveting, welding, metals, wiring, plumbing, fluid mechanics, a screwdriver or a wrench to tighten bolts.

Making models from 1950s Meccano sets is now a long way behind them. As long as you plausibly model something on a computer screen – as in the endless-post “Star Trek” US movie and television fantasy series – that will always Do the Job. Except of course, in the real world, it does not and cannot.

As Isaac Asimov wrote in his original classic Foundation novel, the causes of the decline of empire are a massive thing and cannot be easily reversed – or eventually, reversed at all. For the United States, the moment is very late, and the Midnight Hour is already tolling. The Reckoning is Due.