“Militarized Space Race” doesn’t have a comforting ring to it, but Neil deGrasse Tyson (mischievously) asserts that’s what the U.S. and China need to engage in to kickstart in earnest a voyage to Mars. Perhaps.

I don’t know that the fear of China is the same as it was with Russia during the Cold War. I mean, we’re practically partners with China, and they’re good communists capitalists just like we are. Ultimately, I don’t know if it matters which nation gets there first. The whole world benefited from Apollo even if the bragging rights and flag-planting were awfully sweet. Would a competition between the two leading economies work better than the nations agreeing to work together to get to Mars ASAP? Perhaps the competition should be between government and private industry instead? Us vs. Musk?

From Chris Zappone of the Sydney Morning Herald:

In the search to find the high-paying jobs and industries of the future, Neil deGrasse Tyson has an idea for a novel solution. How about a militarised space race to Mars?

More specifically, the famed American astrophysicist says that if he could just get China’s leaders to leak a memo to the West about plans to build military bases on Mars, “the US would freak out and we’d all just build spacecraft and be there in 10 months.”

The fallout of such competition would, like the Space Race of yore, alter the technological focus of advanced economies, likely helping shake off the current period of low growth and innovation stagnation in favour of new industries for the future.

“This would reignite the flames of innovation that I think we, at least in the US, at one time took for granted,” Tyson told Fairfax Media from New York. And while Tyson offers his plan for Mars with tongue firmly planted in cheek, the issue of growing an economy through more science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) is no joke. …

In fact, the dazzling feats of humans in space would change the broader culture of a country.

“You would transform a sleepy country into an innovation nation and you’d do it practically overnight. And that transformation has huge economic implications,” he says.•