ON THIS DAY – AT 11:08 A.M. ET:  This is the anniversary of the day, in 1969, when men landed on the Moon.  The venture began with a speech by President Kennedy at Rice University in 1962: 

"We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win . . . This is in some measure an act of faith and vision, for we do not know what benefits await us . . . But space is there and we are going to climb it.”

I remember July 20, 1969 well.  We'd had our first daughter two months earlier, and we propped her up, in a baby seat, in front of an old black-and-white television set, so she could later say that she witnessed the Moon landing.

I was on The New York Times at the time, and was one of the editors assigned to the coverage of the Moon landing by The New York Times Magazine. 

The event was an enormous boost for a nation that was going through turbulent times – the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr and Robert Kennedy, a civil rights movement that was deteriorating into the black-power movement, and an assault on our popular culture that we still feel today.

Despite all the upsets, America was great.  The world watched as we, and no one else, went to the Moon. 

In 1969 we still had World War II veterans who were in their early 40s.  The spirit of their generation went with the astronauts to the lunar surface. 

And what has become of us since?  Today America is in the doldrums.   Under the pseudo-leadership of a pseudo-president who really doesn't like his country very much, we are going through a crisis of confidence.  We don't seem to do great things, or even dream great things.  Dreamers are laughed at by the intellectual classes and their lapdogs in the media.  It is "unsophisticated" to climb mountains.

And what of NASA, which brought us to the Moon with the vast assist of the private sector?  Robert Zubrin, space expert and dreamer, tells us.  From NRO: 

NASA may be a government agency with the usual bureaucratic attributes, but it is also something else: It is the epitome of the pioneer spirit. The agency’s formative adventure — and in a very real sense the agency itself — was launched by an administration whose slogan was “The New Frontier.” It is not without meaning that so many of its craft have had names like Liberty, Freedom, Pioneer, Voyager, Discovery, Endeavor, Pathfinder, Opportunity, and so on. Its astronauts are heroes in the most classic Homeric sense of the term, voluntarily risking death to do great deeds and win eternal glory.

The values championed by the Obama administration are comfort, security, protection, and dependence. But the frontier sings to our souls with different ideals, telling stirring tales of courage, risk, initiative, inventiveness, independence, and self-reliance. Considered as a make-work bureaucracy, NASA may be perfectly acceptable to those currently in power. But for mentalities that would criminalize the failure to buy health insurance, the notion of a government agency that celebrates the pioneer ethos by risking its crews on daring voyages of exploration across vast distances to terra incognita can only be repellent.

So in place of the ringing declaration of courageous spirit that JFK gave in his speech at Rice University in 1962, the current administration offers this alternative:

We choose not to go to the Moon, nor do other things, because they are hard. We do not want a goal that will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are unwilling to accept, one that we are quite willing to postpone, and one that we will not win.

This is unacceptable. The American people want and deserve a space program that is really going somewhere. The nation needs a space program that can make a powerful statement to a confused world — as Apollo did in its day — that free societies are the path to the future. Our youth needs a bold space program that inspires them to excellence with the grand challenge of pioneering new worlds. We can have such a program. Despite all the issues of concern — real, exaggerated, or imaginary — from a technical point of view, we are much closer today to being able to send humans to Mars than JFK’s America was to being able to send men to the Moon in 1961, and we did send them just eight years later. Given the will, we could be on Mars within a decade. We can inspire millions of our youth to devote themselves to science and engineering, and once again astonish the world with what free people can do, as we plant the seed of a new branch of civilization that will put our stamp on the human future for ages to come. But leadership is necessary.

COMMENT:  Yippee.  Well said.  And needed.  By both parties.

July 20,  2014