The No. 1 threat to getting America back to the moon and beyond

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman says America will not only get back to the moon within a few years, and also build a permanent, inhabited base there within the next two decades; what he leaves out is the clear fact that the chief peril for dreams of becoming an interplanetary species is a Democratic Party victory in 2028.

Isaacman’s techno-optimism is something the nation desperately needs, the kind of inspiring vision increasingly rare in American politics.

Americans love space and our efforts to explore it as far and as fast as possible. Polls show about 70% of us want to return to the moon; the stunning success of this year’s Artemis II’s lunar flyby has kindled our collective imagination. 

Going to the moon — landing there, let alone building a base — will fan those flames further, inspiring patriotism and recruiting a generation of little kids to be future astronauts. 

On the science, we have to return and build a base there if we’re serious about getting to Mars and beyond: It will play a key beachhead role in further solar-system exploration (to say nothing of the scientific benefits we may reap, like moon-abundant helium isotopes crucial to developing quantum computers and fusion reactors). 

Yet here on earth, again and again we confront Democrats’ technophobia and reactionary fear of change. 

This, after all, is the party fanning the flames of AI data-center hysteria over water use, though AI uses a minuscule fraction of the water supplied to US golf courses — and the fact that failing to build the infrastructure to power an AI revolution now will mean handing a massive economic and strategic victory to China.

And that’s to say nothing of the direct economic losses to communities around the country.

Technophobia in general is now SOP for any Democrat seriously trying to get elected at any level, while Isaacman’s vision includes — gasp! — private-sector innovation in spaceflight, nuclear power and more. 

That’s exactly as it should be: Operators like SpaceX and RocketLab have proven that private companies will do spaceflight better, faster, and cheaper than the government. 

Yet today’s Democrats have made rocketeer-in-chief Elon Musk into a version of Orwell’s Emmanuel Goldstein — the party-approved object of daily hate, simply because he calls out their political and policy failures. 

Recall that in 2024 the California Coastal Commission tried to stop Musk from launching rockets explicitly due to his political views; Musk sued over this blatant illegality and won. 

A Democratic White House after 2028 will bring such moves on steroids, likely cloaked in smarter ways to avoid lawsuits: regulatory footdragging, endless environmental review, DEI shenanigans and worse. 

NASA has been a bipartisan disgrace on its own for decades, with bloated budgets and horrific inefficiencies putting a damper on our pushing the frontiers of space exploration, even as Beijing began to erase our decades-long lead on that front (China aims to get its taikonauts on the moon by 2030). 

The agency’s found new energy and wiser direction under Trump and Isaacman, but anti-tech, anti-innovation leadership under Democrats will kill that rebirth its cradle. 

Democrats once (quite rightly) embraced innovation and tech as a means to improve society; even President Barack “You didn’t build that!” Obama had the vision and wherewithal to push NASA in a new direction, setting up in 2010 the Commercial Crew Program that allowed its private partnerships to flourish.

Unless Dems recover their enthusiasm for letting brilliant engineers, scientists, and businessmen do what they do best — invent, discover, and scale — the Isaacman NASA renaissance and all the grand dreams it might make real will end up as one more blip on an increasingly dim horizon.