Because It's Hard

Fox News ^ | September 26, 2002 | Rand Simberg

[NonZeroSum]

Forty years ago this month, John F. Kennedy made his famous Rice University speech, in which he supposedly laid out the rationale for the Apollo program.

We choose to go to the moon. 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, and the others, too.

[NonZeroSum]

One more bit of the Camelot castle wall comes tumbling down...

[maxwell]

Because It's Hard

Yeah that's my excuse for alot of things too...

/bad joke

[My2Cents]

They set the United States off down the wrong road, at least for those Americans interested in a vibrant space policy--one that opens up vast new economic, political and spiritual opportunities for humankind off planet.

Don't blame JFK's oratory and policy for this. Blame visionless "leadership" from Nixon on down to the current one for the lack of a vibrant space policy. The lack of vision for space has been a truly bipartisan failure. Kennedy's oratory and policy got us off the planet. What we did with that "giant leap" was left to the rest of us, and successive Administrations.

[TrappedInLiberalHell]

Yeah that's my excuse for alot of things too...

You sort of beat me to it (no pun intended)...I was going to say something like "Yeah, quite the contrast to the way Clinton uses the phrase, when justifying his extramarital affairs..."

[The_Victor]

Good article. The reason I use to justify the space program is that if mankind does not leave this planet, then we will die here.

In 1962 the mandate was clear and the funding basically unlimited. Since then the both items have become thuroughly muddled during 40 years of politics. Well, it actually only took 10 years to foul-up the space program with politics.

*Sigh*

[NonZeroSum]

...JFK's oratory got us off the planet...

In entirely the wrong way, and with entirely the wrong attitude, for the wrong reasons. That's the point of the article.

[NonZeroSum]

Space ping...

[Brett66]

Thanks for the ping. BTTT

[RightWhale]

Ignoring Executive rhetoric for a moment, the Apollo moon program was begun in the House of Representatives long before JFK thought of it. He adopted the program because Congress wanted to do something and they were willing to support this. The Vice President, as the 101st Senator, is actually closer to Congress and to the pursestrings than is the President. Somehow this makes the Vice President the CEO of NASA. Not Goldin, Not O'Keefe. This in turn is why the ISS and the rest of NASA's space program is so messed up. ==> Algore pounded the final nails into the coffin. Having a sequence of Presidents from Nixon through the present occupant who know zilch and dream less about space has not been a plus.

[TheEngineer]

I don't see why Kennedy and his speech get the blame for NASA's performance over the past 30 years. Regardless of what his stated reasons, the goal of the lunar mission was to beat the Russians to the moon. Period.

Perhaps the author, using his brilliant 20-20 hindsight, should consider what our world would be like today had the Russians beat us to the moon. The loss of prestige to the US and to the free world would have been immense. The USSR would have held this up as a symbol of their communistic system's superiority. Even today with our large history of victories over communism, we are still engaged in political battles with it every day... Except that today the communists call themselves liberals.

Maybe people (and I suppose some folks at NASA), when they read Kennedy's words today about going to the moon "because it is hard", take them at face value. But back then, there was no doubt in any listener's mind why we were going to the moon. But Kennedy (like any leader) knew that it would sound sophomoric to say, "We are going to the moon to beat the Russians to the moon." Hence his lofty language.

I wonder what the author thought Kennedy should have said back then? Does he really believe that different words 40 years ago would have made the NASA of today a model of government efficiency and productivity?

[Poohbah]

It's not so much that we were in a race to the Moon--it's that we were in a race, period. We worked very hard to set the pace with Apollo. We should've been more confident in ourselves and said "We're going to be the nation to put man PERMANENTLY in space." I think that with a space station focused on developing a space transport infrastructure, we'd have vacations on the Moon and Mars (I wanna go snowboarding on Olympica!) by now.

[NonZeroSum]

It's actually conceivable that they could have. The problem was, that wasn't the goal. Kennedy never had any interest in space, as the historical record now shows. He was only interested in winning the Cold War (not a bad goal in itself).

But we shouldn't delude ourselves that he was some kind of space visionary, and we should recognize that if our goal was space, the way we set about to do it in the sixties was not useful to that goal over the long haul. It was focused purely on the Cold War.