Ex-NASA Astronaut to Newsmax: US Must Beat China to Moon

It’s important for the United States to beat China in returning to the moon to minimize the possibility that Beijing will try to claim part of its surface, Captain Winston Scott told Newsmax on Wednesday.

Scott, professor emeritus at the Florida Institute of Technology and a retired NASA astronaut who is currently the director of operational excellence at the Kennedy Space Center, said on “Wake Up America” that “as we have seen over the past years, China is not exactly a great friend of the United States,” and that Beijing often uses aggressive and intimidating tactics.

Scott noted that a few years ago China already “demonstrated the ability to shoot down a satellite from orbit … so already they have attempted to militarize space.”

Scott gave as an example as to why he is concerned over the possibility of China reaching the moon first.

“Just as we have seen water rights disputes — and that agreements have to be put into place here on the surface of the Earth — if China got to the moon first, landing near the South Pole, where we believe there is a lot of water/ice, they could lay claim to it and try to deny other nations use of that, so we would have a water dispute on the moon,” he said.

Scott said that’s a key example of why “it is in our best interests as a nation to get (back) to the moon first and thereby maintain some type of leverage over the resources that we might find there.”

He also said the U.S. getting there first would help minimize the possibility that China or Russia could try to bring nuclear proliferation on the moon.

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