Elon Musk is Right; "What the hell is going on?"

SpaceX aims to launch its first Mars cargo
missions in 2022 and the first crews in 2024.

This is where the jobs are. We have the opportunity being waved right in front of our noses but are too complacent to take advantage of it. While visionaries like Elon Musk push forward, other industrial behemoths wallow in last century ideology. We need jobs! Not only here, but globally.

The endeavors such as the moon and Mars colonization should be providing a lot of these jobs. Instead, we have industrialists moving facilities around the globe in search of the cheapest labor and leaving formerly employed (skilled) craftspersons competing for service jobs like phone tech support, restaurant, or department store floorwalkers. The end result of that is an overall lowering of the national skill base. If you don't use it, you lose it.

Jobs, my brothers, and sisters, jobs. NASA's FY 2011 budget of $18.4 billion represented about 0.5% of the $3.4 trillion United States federal budget during that year, or about 35% of total spending on academic scientific research in the United States. In 1965 NASA had a peak employment of 411,000 persons working on the Apollo program. Mr. Musk is totally right when he said, ""It's 2017; we should have a lunar base by now...What the hell is going on?" We should have all the jobs created too!

Jobs in manufacturing and the support jobs created for goods and services can be had. Right now there are roughly 10 million people working in the aviation industry. Before the Wright Brothers, there were none. They made the first controlled, sustained flight of a powered, heavier-than-air aircraft on December 17, 1903, four miles south of Kitty Hawk, North Carolina. People recognized the utility of this, and a paradigm shift in our civilization began to occur. Steamships and railroads were supplanted by aircraft as the preferred mode of transportation. Thus a new industry emerged employing many millions of people. Our new paradigm shift and the new jobs created by it are within our grasp. All we have to do is grab on.

Our government, and all the other space-faring governments, are not putting enough resources into outer space expansion of the human presence. Our government putting a mere 0.5% of the federal budget into NASA is laughable. It is doubly laughable when compared to the military budget. The budget for NASA is far too little and the military budget is far too much. If our government raised the amount devoted to space expansion to 5% it would usher in a new era for humankind.

All that space hardware has to have skilled hands to build. Hands and minds have to be brought to bear in order to accomplish the goal of raising our species to the level of multi-planet status. Design and engineering, planning and logistics, manufacturing and production all need to have a massive input of human talent. Talent that is now sitting idle, underused, and some in abject poverty.

Merlin rocket engine

We can turn all that around and employ all of those people in a new endeavor. "We (should) set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own.

There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 90 years ago, fly the Atlantic?

We choose to go to the Moon! We choose to go to the Moon not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win ..."

The last few paragraphs were borrowed and modified from the JFK moon speech of 1962. They are appropriate words because JFK too was a visionary. Now we have the tools at long last to carry out his vision. If we do, we will indeed be the winners. All of us will win in many ways. Just like during the years of Apollo, many hands will have to be employed to assemble the spaceships required to make the dream a reality. Just like in WWII when free people were fighting fascism by building thousands of ships, planes, and tanks, free people again would be tasked in mass to manufacture the new 21 Century multi-planet human civilization. If humans can muster the political will to devote the resources required to make this a reality, it would usher in a Golden Era of prosperity for humanity and the renewal of our biosphere.

New lands and territory could be opened up for the settlement of our people. New unlimited and clean energy sources would be harnessed. New unlimited sources of raw materials could be harvested without the damaging effects of Earthly resource gathering. New technologies would be created for our society. New wonders and adventures could be marveled at. New stories of adventures by intrepid explorers can be ours.

Don't listen to the neigh sayers! Don't allow them to stifle the push for off-world expansion by their short-sighted diatribe. Don't be frightened by imagined monsters or deadly risks. The monsters are all invented, and the risks can be overcome by human's clever inventions. Even the notion of overcoming deadly risks smells of more jobs. You can not touch on any aspect of moon and Mars colonization without the creation of more jobs. Indeed let your ears go deaf to the people who say we must solve our Earthly problems first. Ultimately, we will not be able to solve our problems on Earth unless we begin to utilize the resources of our planetary neighborhood.

We all need to get excited by the prospect. Think of yourself, or of one of your children, working in a manufacturing plant like SpaceX assembling rocket bodies. Contemplate the prospect of you or one of your children working on a CAD/CAM designing space hardware. Imagine yourself or one of your children piloting the spacecraft closing in on a multi-trillion dollar platinum asteroid. Picture your descendants owning land and a house in a thriving Martian metropolis or moon colony.

Falcon 9 Stages

All of this is entirely possible. We have human talent. We have the technology. We just need the will, and we have to put more than a paltry 0.5% of our federal budget into it. We have to pour our hearts and souls into it as a national priority project. We have to make it a matter of national pride. We have to work on the expansion of our species to the moon and Mars as urgently as we did in the work to defeat the axis powers in WWII.

There is even a comical aspect to this human cosmic expansion. We can finance it with borrowed fiat money, Then pay back the loans with precious metals mined from asteroids. I can see opportunities for helping the finance already. Let's use our imaginations. It is early in the outer space expansion endeavor years. I'm standing at the counter at the local convenience store buying soda pop. On the counter is a display holding small vials of moon rocks or dust for only $9.99 each. I buy one on impulse. It is things like that, and more, that will help to raise our economy to the next level. Prosperity for all.