The 2024 Republican National platform is poised to be adopted at the ongoing 2024 GOP convention in Milwaukee. One plank, as powerful as it is concise, calls for America to reaffirm and extend its leadership in a crucial area of geopolitical competition: the exploration and development of space.
Space rarely garners attention in party platforms, but it is an increasingly important arena of international competition, and potentially conflict. Once safely protected by two seas and secure boarders, America is increasingly vulnerable to threats from abroad, many of them celestial in nature. Oceans and border defenses are irrelevant to these new weapons. China and Russia have significant space capabilities and unsavory schemes for dominance. Russia is developing and perhaps deploying orbital space weapons. China is working hard to beat America back to the moon. We are once again in a Cold War with an accompanying Space Race. To win, we must counter the space ambitions of aggressor states, while leading the free world forward to prosperity on the final frontier.
The Trump administration was aware of these issues and established the United States Space Force. Trump’s presidency also saw major advancements in space commerce. These were steps in the right direction. But the work is not done. History shows that in the long run victory goes to the nation that develops economic dominance in a new territory. Holding a region you do not settle and develop has proven expensive and futile.
The GOP space plank, at just 50 words long, reveals a determination to win Space Race 2.0 through economic competition, not military conflict. It calls for “a robust manufacturing industry in near Earth orbit,” sending “American astronauts back to the moon, and onward to Mars,” and partnering with “the rapidly expanding commercial space sector to revolutionize our ability to access, live in, and develop assets in space.” Again, the Trump White House understood the economic imperative and laid out the most comprehensive space civil and commercial agenda since the Kennedy years. Trump refocused NASA on returning to the moon with commercial partners and aligned the international community with that goal under the Artemis Accords.
America possesses one unbeatable advantage over her authoritarian rivals: our dynamic commercial space firms. Renowned companies like Lockheed Martin, Boeing and Northrup Grumman have always provided our nation with unrivaled capabilities and they support an unrivaled industrial supply chain. Disruptive new startups like SpaceX, Rocket Lab and Blue Origin are making these incumbents work harder while bringing astounding new capabilities to market. Elon Musk’s rockets have precipitated a revolution in orbital access, driving down costs and speeding access for satellites that deliver communications and geospatial intelligence. As recently as the early 2000s, it cost nearly $10,000 to put one kilogram into low-Earth orbit. By 2015, SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket could do it for $2,720.
Today, launching the same payload costs as low as $1,500. With intense market competition and SpaceX’s huge new Starship rocket, we foresee pricing below $1,000 by the end of the decade. The last time we saw such a combination of falling prices and improved performance, it was in the integrated circuits that drove the personal computing and internet revolutions. Moore’s Law sustained global U.S. technological and economic dominance for decades. The Republican platform embraces the possibility of a similar boom in space.
China has a robust national space program with an operating space station and has recently delivered on a series of impressive robotic lunar landings and sample return missions. While their success cannot be ignored, much of their technology has been acquired from Russia and copied (or even stolen) from the America. China has publicly embraced commercial space, but their firms are years behind. China’s nominally commercial space firms have been spun out of the military and civil space agencies and are very closely tied to the People’s Liberation Army and the Chinese Communist Party apparatus. In fact, the Chinese commercial rockets that have been launching payloads below market price are really just repurposed ICBMs. Future rocket designs presented by Chinese firms are nearly always blatant copies of SpaceX hardware. One of these, a knockoff of the Falcon 9, was recently destroyed in a failed test firing so catastrophic it presented a serious threat to the public safety.
We firmly believe that the ingenuity and determination of free Americans will best China’s authoritarian space program and deliver an era of even greater prosperity and safety to people and our planet. The GOP platform lays the groundwork for a second Trump administration to lead us into that future.
Red Moon Rising: How America Will Be China on The Final Frontier is written by Greg Autry. He was President Trump’s nominee for NASA’s CFO position and held the position of White House Liaison for the agency.
Alexander William Salter is a research fellow at Texas Tech University’s Free Market Institute and the Georgie G. Snyder Associate Professor of Economics in the Rawls College of Business.