American Thought Leaders - Here’s What a Chinese EMP Attack on Taiwan Could Look Like: Greg Autry

Episode Date: August 15, 2024

Sponsor special: Up to $2,500 of FREE silver AND a FREE safe on qualifying orders - Call 855-862-3377 or text “AMERICAN” to 6-5-5-3-2Space policy expert Greg Autry believes the Chinese communist regime may be looking at targeting Taiwan with an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) weapon attack. What would such an attack look like, and why might an EMP be the weapon of choice for the Chinese regime?Autry is the director of space leadership, policy, and business at the Thunderbird School of Global Management and a professor at Arizona State University. He’s also the co-author of “Red Moon Rising: How America Will Beat China on the Final Frontier.”“Space is the ultimate high ground,” but America is at risk of losing its superiority in space, the policy expert says.What would losing the second space race mean for America and its allies?Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

An electromagnetic pulse weapon is a large nuclear explosion detonated at a high altitude outside the Earth's atmosphere. If one of these were detonated over, say, Taipei, you would find out that instantly everything in Taipei stopped working. And again, phones, laptops, iPads, that's bad enough, hospital equipment, cars, every single car would stop. The whole city infrastructure is completely frozen. Greg Autry is director of space leadership, policy, and business at Arizona State University's Thunderbird School of Global Management. He's the co-author of Red Moon Rising, How America Will Beat China on the Final Frontier.

Space is the ultimate high ground. It took eight years the first time for Kennedy. You think you could do that 60 years later with everything that we've learned, but we haven't done it in eight years. We are at risk of having the Chinese eclipsing us. While the American space industry is experiencing a rare industrial boom, China has committed massive resources to its space effort. Just what would losing the second space race mean for America and its allies?

This is American Thought Leaders, and I'm Jan Jekielek. Before we start, I'd like to take a moment to thank the sponsor of our podcast, American Hartford Gold. As you all know, inflation is getting worse. The Fed raised rates for the fifth time this year. And Fed Chairman Jerome Powell is telling Americans to brace themselves for potentially more pain ahead. But there is one way to hedge against inflation.

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Greg Autry, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders. Glad to be here. Thank you. I've been reading Red Moon Rising with rapt fascination, and you've been a huge advocate of getting Americans back into space, first on the moon and beyond, populating the solar system for some time. On the other hand, there's a lot of voices these days that are saying things like, we have a lot of problems on the ground here, and we really need to fix those things before we even look up there. So how do you respond to that? When you've got a big problem, first of all, and I think that if you look at our country and the world today, there's an innumerable list of big problems.

They are very rarely solved from with inside the box. It's important to get another perspective, first of all. And it's also usually important to bring in resources that you don't have to address the issues that you face. And historically, if you look at that, you'll find out that's often the case. One of the pieces of history that has always interested me the most is the age of exploration, the 15th and 16th century, when Europe essentially took over the entire planet. And by the beginning of the 20th century, the British alone essentially controlled a quarter to one-third of the earth and its population.

How did that happen, right? It's because their governments funded expeditions of exploration and had an orientation towards the economic development of the resources they encountered. A contrasting story comes from China when in the early 15th century, like 1405 to 1420 something, there were a series of voyages of exploration that were much bolder than anything Columbus or Magellan undertook. These were huge vessels that sailed from China across the Indian Ocean to the Indian mainland to the Middle East to the shores of Africa. And they were poised essentially to become the the dominant power in the world if they had continued with their exploration. For reasons of internal unrest in China and in the court of the third Ming

Emperor, they cancelled and essentially burned their treasure fleet and turned inwards to deal with issues inside of China they felt were more appropriate. This resulted in of course all of the world's wealth going to Spain, to France, to the UK, and eventually in China being subjugated by these huge economic powers with superior technology that were developed through this process of exploration, resulting in what's known as the Century of Humiliation, which is really quite a bit longer than a century. And we're at that moment again in time. And we can at that moment again in time. And we can either make the choice to go find these resources

beyond our planet and the perspective beyond our planet to solve the problems that we have here on Earth, or we can turn inward and find out somebody else is going to do that. And at this moment, and why we've written the book, it appears that China is going to do that, having learned the lesson of the 15th century very well. So you highlight quite a few different things in the book, but specifically, there's two threats from communist China that stand out in my mind. One of them is the military

threat in space. And this is something that they've been developing quite a bit. I want to get you to weigh in on what that looks like. But the other part, it's the messaging, right? It's the idea that we're the ones who have conquered this next frontier and not America. That would be a very powerful tool for the regime. Yeah, indeed. And first of all, on the military side, space is the ultimate high ground.

Anytime, and Sun Tzu tells us this very clearly, that you can capture the superior position, you want to do that because then you can force your enemy to capitulate without fighting. And whoever controls Earth orbit and the moon will be telling the people on Earth what they're going to do.

There'll be no point in fighting. The US has controlled space, essentially, since the collapse of the Soviet Union and used it to an incredible advantage to project force around the world. We've been able to take out the huge army in Iraq with very, very little losses on the American side. Spend many, many years, fruitless perhaps, in Afghanistan, again, without a lot of losses

compared to previous wars. And a lot of that has to do with America's superiority in space. Our ability to know where everything on the battlefield is at any time and communicate that to people on the battlefield. Not having that superiority would be a huge loss. On the geopolitical credibility stage, though, it makes a huge difference. And we talk a lot in the book about Space Race 1.0 with the Soviet Union back in the 60s, which was part of Cold War 1.0.

And Kennedy laid down the Apollo program very clearly as a challenge to the Soviet Union because he wanted to demonstrate to the entire world the superiority of the United States in technology and economic development and our ability to execute on a very difficult task that didn't involve going to war with the Soviet Union and killing millions of people. And we won that. And from that moment on, the Soviet Union was very much in a decline in its global credibility. Until that point, they were on the rise and highly respected around the world as the future of humanity. But their failure to execute on the moon program

was a national shame. It demoralized people inside the Soviet Union and it gave everybody else in the world an amazing respect for the amazing capabilities of the US and by by extension our system. So we're at that same point again. In 2016, I served on the presidential transition team and helped set the agenda that President Trump put in place

to return Americans to the moon, this time permanently, as well as other space-related decisions. And we understood that, again, we were kind of throwing down the gauntlet. And we had assumed that by 2024, we would be on the moon. That was eight years ago. It took eight years the first time for Kennedy to being on the moon.

You think you could do that 60 years later with everything that we've learned, but we haven't done it in eight years. We are at risk of having the Chinese, who have a very reasonable program in place eclipsing us. And even Senator Administrator Nelson, President Biden's NASA administrator, has recently said he's concerned about that. What is China's space capability as we speak? What have they developed and what is the threat? And you described some pretty significant military threats in the book. So they

have a very credible space program. It's very clearly number two. They've eclipsed the Russians, former Soviet program. United States is a clear leader in civil space, human spaceflight, space science, commercial space for sure, and in military space. But that doesn't mean we should go to sleep comfortable. Because it doesn't matter where you are in the race. It matters how fast the person behind you is catching up. And that should be of significant concern. Because China's vector, their trajectory, is stupendous. They are moving forward in every one of these categories successfully. You might have noticed that China just had another landing near the south pole of the

moon on the dark side of the moon with a sample return there, Chang'e 6 mission. We've tried twice this year to land a robotic lander on the moon, and the U.S. missions have failed both times this year. And NASA just canceled VIPER, one of our next major moon rover programs. So we're not looking good in this race right now, even though we have the lead. It should concern us. On the military side, it's a similar situation. Our stuff's better, but they're moving quickly.

They're very good at copying, stealing, and buying whatever it is they need from us or from the Russians on the open market, and then improving it and making a lot more of it because they're blessed with having the workshop to the world and a supply chain that is bar none. What does that look like from a military sense? We don't really think about space weapons that much when we think about military. We start with, we think often about conventional forces, the sorts of things we're seeing in Israel, in the Palestinian conflict, Russia, Ukraine. We talk a lot about information warfare and using the three warfares, these kinds of asymmetrical warfare methods that the regime uses

here. But we don't talk or we don't think a lot about space warfare and what that looks like and what kind of weapons are already developed to be deployed there. Sure. And we open the first chapter of the book with a discussion of an electromagnetic pulse weapon, which is a weapon that I think is very likely to be used if, God forbid, any space weapons are used at targets on the Earth. An electromagnetic pulse weapon is a large nuclear explosion detonated at a high altitude outside the Earth's atmosphere, perhaps four or five hundred miles up, and the area underneath it is bathed in radiation. The radiation from the bomb excites the molecules in the Earth's atmosphere and essentially causes an electromagnetic wave or pulse to go through the area.

And what that does, first of all, is it overwhelms any electronic systems that are exposed to it. And in most cases, it will actually permanently destroy those systems because it induces an electrical field and flow inside the wires and circuits of your iPad, your phone, your laptop, hospital equipment, anything. And what this could mean is if one of these were detonated over, say, Taipei, you would find out that instantly everything in Taipei stopped working. And again, phones, laptops, iPads, that's bad enough. Hospital equipment, cars, every single car would stop. The electric ones might explode and catch fire, honestly.

The internal combustion engine ones that all require computerized ignition systems and fuel control systems would become bricks. And no tow truck or anybody's coming to get them out of the way. So the whole city infrastructure is completely frozen, right? All the aircraft, military, civilian, would be down. The ones in the air would probably crash. But the ones on the ground aren't going anywhere. All the communication systems are gone.

The electrical grid itself, including the transformers that supply the power to every home and business, would be out. And if this were to happen in the United States, we'd have no opportunity to fix this stuff anyway because almost all of our supply chain is now in Asia, either in China or areas that China could easily cut off our access to within hours. This would be a really bad situation. Now, the scariest thing about this, in my opinion,

is that China has doctorally, and the Russians have too, classified these nuclear blasts in space as not strategic nuclear weapons, but rather as cyber weapons. They don't view them as a nuclear attack on a city, they view it as a cyber attack. And we of course know that they are using cyber attacks against the West, against the United States and all our allies in Europe and Asia on a daily basis.

They believe cyber attacks are perfectly legitimate method of open warfare that they conduct regularly. So I'm very concerned to see this doctrine that says these weapons are not really nuclear weapons, they're cyber weapons. I would suspect it would be one of the first major tools they might deploy, again, in an attack on Taiwan, on Korea, Japan, or any target. Well, the Chinese regime thus far seems to be using all sorts of what we would call gray zone methods, basically things for which there's plausible deniability. We know the fentanyl supply chain. They're involved in every step along the

way, but they can say, well, no, it's not us. It's the Mexican cartels really doing the fentanyl. Or what's happening in the South China Sea now with the Philippines. Well, there seems to be a bit of aggression, but it's not. It's water cannons and it's sort of dispute over some land and so forth, but it's certainly not a military confrontation of any sort. So that doesn't require kind of a strong response. And similarly, cyber attacks. I mean, we know there's cyber attacks constantly. I mean, we at Epoch Times are very aware of the cyber attack capabilities and have to ward those off. But again, it's sort of, is it really the Chinese state? Or maybe it's just some hackers in China. And there's always this kind of, you might even say implausible deniability in these methods. But this type of an EMP attack

would be obviously a completely different thing. And you're correct. They have been very careful to cause as much disruption economically, militarily, socially, and politically in our country and in the countries of our allies as they can get away with every single day. We are at war, but they're keeping that war at the point where we dare not respond. It's an excellent strategy and it's served them very well. On the fentanyl, I recall many years ago when I was working on the book Death by China, and I was in Shanghai, you know, and on the streets of Shanghai at that time, every single corner had a stand selling DVDs of bootleg copies of Hollywood films. And there was a whole counterfeit mall, basically, for watches, DVDs, iPads, everything underneath the Science Museum in

Shanghai. And I spoke to a Communist Party official about this clear violation of intellectual property and the response was, of course, we can't control that. It's just not possible. And I said, if these were videos of the Tiananmen Square massacre, do you think you could get them off the streets? And of course, that was the end of my discussion and interview. But the fact of the matter is they could control the fentanyl. They don't want to control the fentanyl. They want to see dead Americans. And they, more importantly, want to see chaos, misery, and economic degradation in our country. But you're right. They get away with it. The EMP is another level, but if they were actually to take military action, it's a level where they might not get the same

level of world condemnation as obviously if they kill a bunch of people. They can literally shut a country like Taiwan down without killing hardly anybody. So it would be the equivalent of using tear gas on a rioting crowd or whatever, a non-lethal weapon system, and then they can go in. In fact, I assume Taiwan would basically beg them for help after they began to run out of food, and they would be able to say they were invited in. So I hope they wouldn't do that. But I think it's more likely than an actual invasion. I believe that the Chinese, again, following Sun Tzu, the last thing they want to do is actually fight a traditional war that we're preparing for. That's not what they're going to do. Because every Chinese soldier is Private Ryan. He's the only son of an only son in a country that literally worships the male lineage.

It's highly unlikely they want to see a bunch of body bags coming back from landing on the beaches and storming up and shooting people with small arms. That scenario I don't think ever happens. And launching a bunch of rockets and killing and slaughtering hundreds of thousands or millions of people is also not going to play well and make it really hard to subdue the economy that they really want to control. So the EMP is, I think, a scary potential solution. The more I think about it, the more worried I am about it, because there is this, you highlight this dimension where, you know, they kind of come in as the sort of saviors of the society after having, you know, created the problem in the first place. And there isn't a lot of, from what I understand, what you would call hardened infrastructure, which means, you know, infrastructure that would be resistant to this type of attack. Anyway, I hope it's a scenario that doesn't happen,

but it highlights the power of space weaponry. And just knowing that that option is there and in their hands changes everything for every diplomatic discussion that happens between the U.S. and China, for instance, or between any other power and the Chinese. And the Chinese are very good at having these asymmetric threats that they hold back while they continue to do the low-level things that they can get away with. And so we won't respond to the fentanyl and we won't respond to the cyber attacks with

a cruise missile into the building where we know the hackers are running an operation. We've several times known exactly where they were because of these asymmetric threats that they have. Let's talk about the supply chain because one of the things we've highlighted quite a bit on this show over the years is this deep dependence of the U.S. supply chain on China and on Chinese manufacturing, as you suggested earlier. This is where a lot of the world's manufacturing is done today. And that, of course, has been a very deliberate project on the side of the Chinese. And in the U.S., many, many companies have been very happy to ship the manufacturing over there. So in that sense, we're at a disadvantage.

But with space, it's actually quite interesting that we actually do have a robust manufacturing and tech innovation front. Elon Musk loves to put up videos of these amazing rockets landing on their own after they've been deployed to space. And you get a sense there's something really significant happening. There's technological development. There's all sorts of satellites being put up into space. We have Starlink. I mean, I don't know how many satellites that is, but there's a lot of activity on the U.S. side. And it has been an amazing revolution in manufacturing in a country where we seem to be incapable of manufacturing very much these days. Many other attempts to get manufacturing going in the US outside of the space industry have

not been terribly successful. There's been a lot of struggling trying to get Foxconn to set up a factory in Wisconsin or for Taiwan Semiconductor to get factories making chips in Arizona. Space, we're doing it ourselves. We're doing it with passion and speed and in a volume that eclipses anything that's been done before in that industry. If you go to SpaceX factory in Hawthorne, California, there are literally thousands and thousands of good blue collar jobs there. People doing welding and people bending metal and putting in wiring harnesses. There are, of course, people developing software and testing rocket engines and all the things that you need to do to build a successful vehicle. They've got another large facility in South Texas building their Starship rocket and

a testing facility in Texas. Jeff Bezos has built a factory that's hundreds and hundreds of thousands of square feet and employs thousands of people in Florida right outside the gates of the Kennedy Space Center. And these are creating the sort of manufacturing jobs that change people's lives in which you can go and support a family without having to accumulate $200,000 in college debt. And it's working. 2012, when SpaceX first started launching commercial payloads, the U.S. had basically 0% of the commercial space launch business. If you were an Israeli communications company or a Malaysian TV station or somebody in Africa that wanted an agricultural satellite, you went and you asked the Chinese, the Russians or the Europeans to launch your satellite, nobody came to America. Today basically every satellite that wants to get launched in the world comes and asks

a US launch company to do it first. The only reason they go to these other countries is because they can't get a ride on SpaceX or one of the new competitors that are popping up. We own 80% plus of the global launch market. In the satellites, in 2010, there were about 1,000 operational satellites in the world. There are more than 10,000 today, 10 times as much. Essentially, all of those are made in America. It's been a complete revolution.

And one of the reasons is simply because there were laws that prevented American companies from taking that manufacturing and doing it in China or transferring the technology licensing and know-how to China. They had to do it in the U.S. and guess what? It turns out you can. You drew my attention to the Wolf Amendment. This actually fostered this revolution in some ways, right? The Wolf Amendment prevents NASA from essentially working with China. And there are many people who complain because they would like to do that. They see

the short-term gains that could come from using China's massive supply chain and labor force and their admittedly good space technologies in, quote, cooperating. But Frank Wolf understood who we were dealing with in the CCP. This isn't like working with the Japanese government or the British government or even the Saudi government. You're dealing with somebody who really wants to see our downfall and is treating their own people and their own environment in the most horrendous ways. So no, I agree. Hats off to him. There's also a body of laws called ITAR, the International Traffic and Arms Regulations, that restricts the transfer of many of these

technologies out of the country. And again, many people in my industry complain about these laws because they want to do business with foreign countries. But we're very concerned about foreign countries, frankly, like Canada becoming a conduit for secondary transfer to China because they're really good at that and they don't manage their own security well enough. So you've got to keep those rocket businesses in the U.S. And what this means is not just U.S. companies, but when Richard Branson wanted to start a couple of space companies, he started them in the United States, right? There was a Ukrainian gentleman who started a company called Firefly here in the United States, right? There was a Ukrainian gentleman who started a company called Firefly here in the United States decades ago. It's now a U.S.-owned company. Rocket Lab, one

of SpaceX's biggest and most successful competitors, was founded by Peter Beck from New Zealand, who brought his company to the United States because he had to do that in order to get what he needed to get done because the Wolf Amendment and ITAR made sure that you had to. So a really successful example of creating a barrier around an industry and having it work and not only prosper in the United States but bring in net positive trade flows because every time we launch one of those satellites from a foreign country, that's an upside for our trade balance. It totally contradicts the academic theory that you can't do that, that you can't put

barriers up and have a successful industry, that they'll become weak and noncompetitive. That doesn't have to be the case. You bring up an incredibly important point. We were doing this with Japan, it would be a completely different situation because you assume there's good intentions, playing by, to some extent, the same rules. You're both looking for win-win outcomes. But with the Chinese regime, that's not the case. I was thinking to myself, as you were just talking, it would be fantastic to have a Wolf Amendment on AI, for example. That would be a great use of legislative

power. I think that's something we need to seriously look at. And I want to be clear, it's not China. It's the CCP. I am very impressed with what the Chinese scientists and engineers have done in space. And there's nothing I'd like more than for our two countries to be able to work together and bring a free and prosperous future for humanity in space. But as long as they have a government that's dedicated to exporting repression and misery, we can't allow that. And you're right, AI and several other technology categories could benefit from similar restrictions. Because our companies, unfortunately, have quarterly profits they have to report.

They have boards of directors who only care about those quarterly profits, people on Wall Street who are financing the whole thing who have no morals. And not to say that they're immoral. They're amoral. They just don't care. And they want to do whatever it takes to lower their cost and lowering the labor by sending it to China, producing things in an environment where nobody cares about the environment. That boosts profits.

They like that. They're going to want to do that. And they can't do it in space. And I think it serves as a bellwether of what could be done in other industries. Greg, while we're here, while we're at this point, why don't you just tell me a little bit about your background and how it is that you came to basically be so knowledgeable and focused on this sector? Sure. Well, like a lot of people my age, I sat and watched Neil and Buzz step on the moon. I was six years old in 1969.

There was a lot of chaos in our country at that time. And at six, I don't know that I fully understood that, but I was aware that there were protests and riots going on over the Vietnam War, over civil rights, women's rights. My own household was very dysfunctional, to be honest. And for some reason, I really attached to what I saw in the Apollo program, where a group of people were working with a passion on something they truly believed in and doing it well,

that they were doing it with dignity and that they were inspiring the whole world. And I saw, I don't know, a sense of order and purpose that I didn't feel in my household or around me. So that connection has been deep inside me since that moment. When I started my career, I would have loved to have gone into space,

but aerospace in the United States has always had these cycles. And when I came my career, I would have loved to have gone into space, but aerospace in the United States has always had these cycles. And when I came of age, the Cold War was slowing down and the civil space program had been cut way back post-Apollo. There weren't a lot of jobs there. So like a lot of people I know, I went into computing and I had a series of technology startups. I began teaching as an adjunct at the University of California, Irvine after doing my MBA there.

And in fact, Peter Navarro was my economics professor back in 2001. And I recall working with him right after I came back from China where we did our overseas residential in Hong Kong and visited some other cities on the mainland. And I wanted to find an area in the American economy to study that was interesting as an adjunct professor and write case studies. And I saw this new commercial entrepreneurial space business emerging. The professors at the time all looked at me like I was crazy. You can't study entrepreneurship in the aerospace sector because that's all government. And if it's not government, it's the military industrial complex, these big companies that

are indistinguishable from the government. And I said, I've met this fellow named Elon, and I think you're going to hear from him. And I had the remarkable opportunity to be the first really management scholar that took this area seriously. And I met Elon, I met Richard Branson, I met Jeff Bezos, and a host of thousands of other really interesting, passionate characters who want to build this better future for humanity and space and do it while making money.

And it just, it's inspired me. Fast forward, in 2013 I finished my PhD and did the first management dissertation on the commercial space industry context. In 2016 President Trump asked me to join the transition team at NASA and help set the goals for the Trump administration in space. I was excited to do that and of course we decided to return to the moon. We recommended standing up the National Space Council again, which brings all the cabinet secretaries together and eventually I made recommendations as did other people to create a space force.

All those things happened. It was great. I went back to teaching. I had hoped though that we'd be farther along than we are right now and I have a sense that it's time to dig in again regardless of who the next president is. We need to approach this with a greater sense of alacrity than we have. Well, and one thing I'm very curious about, and this is exactly, precisely your discipline,

the space program under Kennedy was largely a government operation, as I understand it, and you can tell me if I'm wrong here. And the space program today really seems to be largely this commercial entrepreneurship, especially SpaceX, but of course with others kind of coming up alongside. And so how does this work in conjunction? How do these two sectors work in conjunction with each other? Yeah, exactly. The 1960s program was all government and all American. And we were spending nearly 5% of the US federal budget at the height of the Apollo program. That's an absurd

thing that would never happen today. Today's NASA's budget is 0.3-something percent, one-third of 1% of the federal budget, and we're trying to do a much bigger return to the moon. And we're doing that by leveraging the capabilities of our commercial companies, both the traditional ones that have been doing good work for many years and the new entrepreneurial ones that are very often represented by Musk. But again, there are hundreds and hundreds of space entrepreneurs making rockets, satellites, and components of all sorts that can contribute to this. It's also an international vision this time.

So we're bringing our partners along from, for instance, Japan and from the European Space Agency and from the UK and NASA wisely created a program called the Artemis Accords, which is a series of bilateral agreements with now, I believe, 43 different countries around the world that have agreed to participate in setting standards and modes of behavior on the Moon that will allow us to work together in exploiting the resources of the Moon for the benefit of people here on Earth. How does this future governance of the Moon look different in a situation where, let's say, China makes it there first? Does that make it a definitive thing that we're going to be following the China under

the Chinese Communist Party model? Or how does that work? Yeah, that's a really great question and one that keeps us up at night, as we say in the book. We believe that humanity is at this tipping point very similar to the age of exploration I discussed at the opening. And we're going to have this opportunity to expand to the moon and through the solar system to Mars and beyond. There are many great resources out there in many places for humans to live, to finally make ourselves a multi-planetary species, which from my point of view seems destiny. If there's a God, why would we have created billions and billions of stars, like Carl Sagan said if nobody was ever to use them. It's either going to be the United States bringing the traditions of the

enlightenment of tolerance and diversity and respect for religion and all peoples, or it's anolithic, Borg mindset of the Communist Party, who are bringing a twisted version of a crazy German's philosophical rants from the 19th century fed through Mao and Xi Jinping thought to bear. And I don't want to see a future where we have gulags on the moon, you know, where people who are not of correct thinking, who are of the wrong religious persuasion are being persecuted through the solar system or prevented even from being able to leave the planet and carry their visions and their faith and their viewpoints with them. So I think it's super, super important. It might be the most important moment, frankly, in all of human history that we do this right and that we do this

in a way that allows freedom to flourish. That said, rule of law on the moon is a really complex topic governed by a 1960s treaty that's going to make it very challenging for commercial companies to do what they need to do there to succeed. Well, so this is exactly what I want to cover now. I mean, let's talk about possible scenarios. You have a robust set of policy ideas for the U.S. to be successful, the minimum viable product, so the real viable requirement to be able to achieve that to get there first versus the alternative. Right. I testified to the U.S. Congress, the House Natural Resources Committee in December on this topic. The moon is about the size of Africa.

And the great thing about it is nobody lives there. So if we go to exploit, to settle, to develop the moon, to use its resources, we're first of all not taking them away from anyone else. Nobody is going to be enslaved or die. And I know these things happened during the first age of exploration. I don't want to glorify everything that happened in the 16th century. There were certainly some horrors. But the bottom line was that people who invested in technology and exploration defined the thinking and lifestyles and success of the people in the future. When we get to the moon,

whoever gets there first is going to be able to carve off areas of operations. The moon is governed by an international treaty called the Outer Space Treaty, which prevents claims of national sovereignty. But it does allow people to essentially create working areas where you must give due regard to whatever scientific or engineering activity is happening there and you can't go interfere with them. aggressively their territory, that they're very likely to target the areas with the most resources, just like the reason they're in South China Sea isn't because it's called the South China Sea, it's because there's a lot of natural gas there, right? So on the moon, they know where the metals are, the water, and the other things you have to have to develop and survive on the moon. I would expect them to put scientific outposts and robotic operating systems there, radio telescopes or whatever, and say, you can't come in this zone, right?

And that can be done in the next five to ten years, right? We may not be actually mining those elements and developing products and returning them to Earth for 10 or 15 years, but that might not make a difference. They can draw that dotted line, and they're very patient at doing it and very strategic at doing it. The U.S. has to understand that, and it's why we need to move quickly to make sure that we get access for ourselves and our international partners to the best materials that are up there.

Well, you know, it's not just dotted lines. In fact, you know, there's a whole island of reefs that through this giant dredgers that come in and build, you know, reefs, which are then, you know, have landing strips on them. And then later, you know, hey, this is, of course, this is our space. You know, we've been here all along, right?

And I mean, what I mean is there's a certain kind of chutzpah or mentality around this, which is, I don't even know if we know how to deal with very well. No, we haven't dealt with it very well at all. We've accepted it. We said, stop that and don't militarize those islands. And they, of course, promised not to militarize the islands. And then they just went ahead and did it right under our noses. But again, they never crossed a threshold where we were going to send in a cruise missile or send in the Seventh Fleet and stop them.

Now we're at a point where sending in the Seventh Fleet is a little bit risky for us and we need to back off a step maybe. And that's exactly what they wanted. And I assume they will behave the same way in space. And they've got a great history of pretending that they're always the victim here, right? That everybody's picking on them and they're never the aggressor. But tell that to the Tibetans or the Mongolians or the Uyghurs in Xinjiang, right, or even the Manchurians. They've been very good at any time that they're attacked, taking over their attacker and controlling that territory.

Any time they have a resource like the water of the Himalayas or the minerals of Tibet they want, that's always been ours, right? And they move in and they get the world to accept it because they just keep repeating that lie over and over that that's always been ours. And the world eventually tires of arguing about it and moves on. What will it take at this point to, you know, let me qualify one thing. So you set up a whole bunch of new structures during the Trump administration. I think all those structures have remained. I mean, the Space Force is in play.

There's a whole bunch of new initiatives. What is the next play in the next administration in your mind to actually make the timeframe that you've been describing happen? So, yeah, I do want to be clear. The Biden administration has had significant continuity in space policy from the Trump administration. It's the one area where there's been very little change. So the Space Force has continued, the Artemis program to the moon has continued, the National Space Council and

all these organizational structures have continued, and most of the individuals that have received appointments from the current White House are excellent people doing good work. What there isn't, though, has been enough sense of urgency on the part of the White House to confront the competition that we're facing with China. And consequently, the program has fallen behind. We also have a huge supply chain problem that comes from the fact that although our space industry is very healthy, all the adjacent industries have been outsourcing everything

they can for decades out of the country. And so our raw material access, we have real problems there getting basic assemblies and computer chips and all the things that you need for any advanced industry are difficult. So that supply chain has to be addressed. And we need a greater sense of urgency. We need to commit to getting on the moon very clearly before the Chinese. And changes need to be made to make that happen.

And it's got to have cover from the White House. So I am hoping that we might see that post-election, regardless of who's elected, that we would see a new sense of urgency on this point to make sure that we're there first and that we're willing to be realistic about how China is going to behave based on what they've done in the past. And when they're doing something that violates the treaty they signed or international norms or isn't in the best interest of our planet and people, that we stand up and say, no, you're not going to do that and there will be consequences as opposed to, please tell us what we want to hear.

And then we'll look the other direction while you do something completely the opposite. The issue of supply chains is one of, it's been of great concern for me over the last many years. You know, for example, the medical precursor supply chain. I see it as a huge, you know, the pregnant national security issue that's just ready to become a huge problem at any moment and that I don't see a lot of action on. Can you expand a little bit about what it would take to fix this supply chain issue on the space side? So the space supply chain is closely related to the technology and heavy manufacturing supply chain, the same things

that you see causing problems for the aircraft industry. I understand Boeing has dozens, maybe 100, 787 sitting on runways waiting because there are components that they can't get. We've seen repeatedly car companies with thousands and thousands or hundreds of thousands of cars sitting in lots waiting for microprocessors that we couldn't get from our just-in-time supply chain. All the way down to the basic raw materials that you need for space, things like titanium and rare earth elements. And we've allowed aggressor states to not only outproduce us in those materials from their own resources, but we've allowed them to take over essentially every mine practically in Africa and South America that they can get their hands on.

So they control the global chain and they dictate the global price to us. At the same time, with the best intentions, we've heavily restricted extractive industries here in the United States. So mining and drilling are heavily restricted because we claim we're saving the global environment. Now, what we're really doing is just offshoring our pollution so that iPad you're holding has rare earth elements in it that are mined in Inner Mongolia in the most abysmal conditions you can possibly imagine.

My electric cars, I love them, but I know that parts of the batteries are being mined by children in Africa and in China in ways that are destroying the global environment, right? We just don't see that because we're keeping our country looking pretty, but we're non-competitive and we are at a huge risk because we could be cut off from these basic raw materials at any time. And, of course, those basic raw materials go into fundamental materials, metal alloys and wires and such that work their way into subcomponents and assemblies. And almost all of this stuff is made in China. Or again, if it's not, it's made in countries that China could cut off our access to in a heartbeat. And we've got

to look at that. And it is costing us real pain. And it is a constant threat that hangs over our head too. It's another one of those asymmetric weapons that the Chinese can just casually hint at. They won't say it out loud, but anytime an American diplomat goes into meeting with the Chinese, he knows that we might lose access to rare earth elements or pharmaceutical precursors and it will result in job losses and the deaths of Americans if those things are cut off. We have to fix this problem. It's not just space, but I understand it very well in the space world and it is a problem that hurts. Now that's one of the reasons to go to the moon. There's access to resources that are not owned and tied up by the Chinese Communist Party right there in space. And you can mine and strip mine and process all

you want without affecting any biosphere because there is no biology on the moon. It's a way to make life on Earth better with no cost to the environment. You don't have to tear up the Brazilian rainforest to get lithium. I don't want to belabor this too much. I just want to touch on it a little bit because I know that even during the pandemic, that threat was made, the restricting of the medical three-person barter regime. And I know there was an interest in the Trump administration of reshoring some of these medical precursors and so forth, but somehow we haven't actually managed to manifest these things. And so what does it take to actually make that happen? I think it requires a constant and daily sense of urgency

and people in appointments that are going to roll up their sleeves and work like Elon Musk does, which is 80 or 100 hours a week on behalf of the American people and insist that these problems being solved. I looked at the cancellation of NASA's VIPER program recently, and the excuse was supply chain problems drove up the cost and delayed it to the point where we finally had to cancel it. It's like, what supply chain? Why wasn't somebody at NASA headquarters on the phone with the person that says, we have a supply chain problem saying, OK, point me to the company that's not supplying you? And then getting on the phone with the CEO of that company and saying, why can't you

deliver product X? And if you don't have an answer for me, I'm going to hold a press conference saying this program and all these jobs are being lost because of you, right? And that's the sort of thing you've got to do. And then if that person says, I can't do it because farther down the supply chain, we need to identify it. And we need the White House back there when it gets international to go to the State Department and say, make that happen. We have levers to pull. If we can't get this product from China or this resource from there, we can perhaps get it from a country. Why? We need your help making it happen. And we've just got to have that sense. Because you watch

Elon Musk, and I guarantee you, if his people need something, they get it. And the production happens, and nobody just says, can't do it supply chain. Well, so so let's talk a little bit about that. You know, Elon Musk definitely has this, you know, vision for interplanetary, you know, population, the human race populating the stars as we finish here, let's talk a little bit about the opportunities that exist in space for humanity. Yeah, so I'm a little bit about the opportunities that exist in space for humanity. Yeah, so I'm happy to talk about the beautiful upside to space, which is what made me fall in love with it to begin with. So first of all, I've mentioned there are raw materials in space that we can access.

And we can access them and process them and do the heavy manufacturing without polluting anything here on Earth. Now that doesn't mean we're going to be mining materials and bringing them back in space trucks in five years or something. It means, though, that as we develop a human future in space, we're going to be able to do it without having to lift everything out of the atmosphere. There are also things that you can do in the microgravity environment of space that cannot be done on planet Earth.

If you think of a pharmaceutical factory, what do you think of? You probably think of these big vats of chemicals being stirred by a machine continually and things dripping through tubes. And all of that has to do with gravity. The reason those vats are stirring is because the heavier elements in the vats sink to the bottom and when they do that they don't mix effectively with the other molecules we're trying to get them to mix with.

In zero gravity, chemical compounds form bonds that are much more perfect, much quicker and in some cases impossible to replicate on Earth. And we've identified drugs that we could make in space and perhaps things that we already make on Earth that we can make better in space, that we can crystallize so they have longer lifespans and treat everything from diabetes to cancer in microgravity. We can make metal alloys that they cannot be formed on earth because again as as the alloy cools the heavier elements sink to the bottom or it causes what's called convection the

heavier elements sinking cause imperfections in the in the form of the alloy or the crystal you're trying to make. We can make fiber optic cable that's incredibly better. We can make biomedical devices and even biology that works better. Stem cells grow orders of magnitude faster in zero G than they do in a two-dimensional Petri dish. If, you know, gosh forbid you should need a new liver, you know, you've got to sign up for the donor list and wait for some poor person to be killed in a car accident or for the CCP to kill them into a liver, and actually grow a liver organ or organoid that could be implanted back to you with your DNA. And a couple of things that are important about that. One is, again, we don't have any donor. And two, you have this DNA match so you don't have to be on immunosuppressant drugs, which

put you at risk your whole life of secondary infections and cost a whole lot of money to maintain. You try to grow the liver on Earth, in the gravity you get a liver pancake basically. There's a lot of exciting things happening in microgravity research that promises to transform our lives. Another company I know is making artificial retinas that hopefully we're going to be testing in a few years that will be able to save people who have macular degeneration or other degeneration of their retina and allow them to see again. And it can only be done in microgravity because of the fact you need to put these chemicals

perfectly on a film substrate in a way that doesn't work in gravity. You know, Greg, it's really interesting that you mention the liver being forced organ harvested from a Falun Gong member. As there is this in Congress right now, there's the Falun Gong Protection Act that has passed the House by voice vote unanimously. And now there's a Senate companion bill. So it looks like the first federal U.S. legislation to counter this barbaric practice might actually come into force sometime in the future. I'll refer people to other episodes of American Thought Leaders that have covered this issue. A little bit back to the idea of, I guess, the opportunity in space. It is, in some sense, very much the final frontier, as we hear in Star Trek.

I'm excited to see what the future holds. I am too, and I'll look forward to seeing you there. Well, Greg Autry, it's such a pleasure to have had you on. Thank you. A great conversation. Appreciate it.