Hans von Spakovsky - Why Did America Stop Going To The Moon?

America has finally returned humans around the moon but after more than 50 years, many are asking why the country stopped pushing forward in the first place. Critics argue decades of political decisions stalled U.S. space leadership and handed momentum to competitors.

Hans von Spakovsky joins the program to discuss the future of lunar exploration, the role of private companies like SpaceX, and whether NASA lost its mission for far too long.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:02

Welcome back to the Lawrence Larsen Show. It's a pleasure to be with you. Well, America just sends humans around the moon for the first time in 50 years. So what took us too long, and should NASA have ever stopped going to the moon in the first place? Hans von Spikowski joins me now, Senior Legal Fellow at the Ed Meese Institute for the Rule of Law at Advancing American Freedom. Hans, welcome back.

SPEAKER_00 0:25

Well, thanks for having me back. And I have to tell you, this is a special interest of mine because I grew up in Huntsville, Alabama, known as Rocket City, USA, where some of our first rockets were developed in the 1950s and where they were integral to the Apollo program and the shuttle program.

SPEAKER_01 0:45

Well, and so w I g I guess the thing a lot of us wonder about, I was a fan of the space program and followed it very closely. Uh and I remember staying home in the middle of a summer uh to watch men step on the moon for the first time. Right. It was summertime. And it was it was for me, it was a signature event. I had a uh there was a family friend of ours who worked for TRW, and they did did uh designs on the Apollo capsule, they did designs on suits, on the spacesuits, and things like that. I I was a big fan. I couldn't do the math or the science to actually try to go that direction, but I wanted to see America and preferably private sector companies start to do exactly what's happening now.

SPEAKER_00 1:27

Well, yeah, and uh look, that's the same feeling that a lot of Americans have. Um what happened, frankly, was that when the shuttle program ended, which was in 2011, uh, and Obama came into office, he basically crippled NASA's uh space exploration program. He diverted and told NASA, no, no, you need to work on things like uh the importance of DEI in science education and climate climate change. And what really uh re-invigorated uh, and by the way, put in just a horrible uh manager for uh NASA, what really changed things, frankly, was uh Donald Trump coming into office. Uh and in 2017, he issued a directive to NASA that basically said, get back into space exploration, quit wasting your time on all these other things. And I want to see a landing on the moon, development of a moon base, and then on to Mars, and that's what basically got the Artemis program really going. And the goal was uh a landing on the moon in 2028, and this moonshot was really the big step in that uh in that program. By the way, he also, as part of that directive in 2017, uh told NASA that it needed to partner with private corporations to get the private sector back into the space business. And they've been doing that. That's that's why there are companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin uh all now involved in this in the space program. And thank goodness, finally, NASA's back in what it was originally put together to do.

SPEAKER_01 3:27

And by the way, Hans, I want you to answer that. I'm not one of those who believes that this is a waste of time and money. There are people, though, who say, oh, you should be spending that money on uh more domestic concerns or concerns back here. I always point out to those the money isn't leaving Earth. You know, at most, we're throwing a few tons of materials in, you know, out off the planet that stays gone. But but the rest of it, all the developments and all the money is paid to people who are scientists and engineers right here. So how do we answer those people who are convinced there aren't enough side benefits to these programs to make them worthwhile?

SPEAKER_00 4:04

Well, first of all, the current NASA budget is only about, I think, three-tenths of one percent of the entire federal budget. And anybody who says that, uh, you should say to them, okay, uh, quit using the GPS system on your telephone to go places. Uh, quit paying attention to the now much more accurate weather forecasts we get because of satellite coverage. Um, I mean, it's just one thing after another like that that is uh the result of our space program. And I I don't think if you talk to the newest generation of kids wetted to their their uh cell phones and everything else, that they would agree that uh the developments that came from the space program were somehow not worth it.

SPEAKER_01 4:54

No, and in fact, Hans, I know that there are going to be people, they ridicule the idea. They say, Oh, we got Tang and Velcro. What's the big deal? You know, Hans, one day, uh probably 20 years ago, a guy called me up and he said, Hey, I work at a company and and they do uh heat cheering of metal, you know, for to make metal really strong. And I said, Okay, how does that work? And he said, Well, we have these ovens and we have to bring the heat of the temperature of this metal up to hundreds of degrees and then hold it there for a certain number of hours and then cool it at exactly the right rate. I said, Okay, what are you calling about? And he said, Well, he says, we've got this stuff that we just lined the inside of these ovens with, and it's the material that they came up with to protect the bottom of the space shuttle as it comes back in from orbit. It's that ablative material that has to bleed off all that heat. I said, Yeah. He said, we never could have developed this on our own, but because NASA developed it for one specialized use. He said, then the company that was making this stuff said, well, we can line brick ovens, you know, these ovens with it. And he said it cost some money to buy it. He said it paid for itself in 18 months because it was so good. And after that, all I did was save a lot of the energy that we had to pump into these ovens to make the things that we make. And I said, Oh, okay, that sounds sounds like a great development. But again, the kind of thing that nobody would have said, let's come up with a specialized material that'll that can stand 3,000 degrees of heat uh without cracking and breaking and all that. But NASA did, and then it had tremendous applications for people in the civilian world as well.

SPEAKER_00 6:32

Yeah, and that's just one of a multitude, a multitude of technological developments that have come out of the space program. And look, establishing a moon base, um look, there's already a lot of discussion of all of the rare earth minerals that we are probably going to be able to easily find on the moon, uh uh rare earth minerals that are now essential to all kinds of things being developed and designed and built um uh on the planet Earth, including, by the way, uh you know, all these lefties who just love their solar panels where and their l their lithium batteries, all of which use those kind of rare earth minerals, which these days we're getting from our one of our biggest enemies, communist China.

SPEAKER_01 7:23

Communist China. Hey, by the way, Hans, on an entirely different sus I I just saw this break. The Southern Poverty Law Center, the DOJ, is now taking them to court, accusing them of fraud. Uh, I don't know if you'd seen that or not. It's in the last couple of minutes. Any thoughts on that? Because I'm glad to see it happen.

SPEAKER_00 7:40

Well, yeah, they they've had all kinds of problems. Uh and uh uh they were being investigated for using paid informants to infiltrate uh organizations. So I think the fraud that may have occurred is probably connected to that.

SPEAKER_01 8:00

So in other words, yeah, I mean, if I'm reading that right, instead of going out and finding leg you know organizations that are legitimately bigoted or going out and acting in ways that that generate uh antipathy toward people of color and all that, that they were paying informants to go in and find the offenses so they could then go after them and bring the lawsuits. It sounds like that's what the SPLC was doing. And uh there might have been a time when SPLC went after groups like White Aryan Resistance War, uh, but I think lately they're just a giant moneymaker and probably a source of income for the folks on the left. That's Hans von Spikowski from the Edme Center at Amer at Advancing American Freedom. You've got the Lars Larison show.