Success Quote by Bart Gordon

Scarcity is doing all the work here: not scarcity of resources, but scarcity of prestige. Bart Gordon frames the moon less as a scientific frontier than as a scoreboard, where the worst outcome isn’t failure but arriving second. The opening clause, “If we don’t do it, somebody else will,” is political judo: it turns an optional, expensive ambition into a defensive necessity. The verb “wake up” sells the threat as sudden and humiliating, like the nation slept through its own eclipse.

The subtext is classic post-Cold War space rhetoric updated for a multipolar world. Instead of “the Soviets,” we get a tidy roster of rivals - Chinese, Europeans, Japanese - bundled into a single pressure wave. That list isn’t an intelligence assessment; it’s coalition-building at home. By naming multiple competitors, Gordon widens the circle of anxiety and, with it, the coalition for funding: industry, defense hawks, and districts tied to NASA contracts all hear a reason to spend.

“Base” is the key word. It smuggles military and economic implications into a line that never says “weapons” or “mining.” A base implies permanence, infrastructure, and control of access - the suggestion that the moon could become a strategic high ground or a gated resource. Contextually, this is the era when NASA’s human spaceflight program was looking for a clear next act after Shuttle and station politics: a narrative that could survive budget fights. Gordon offers one that Congress understands instantly: not wonder, but leverage.