Forty years ago a 38 year old American pilot stepped out of a ship that was really no more than a tin can, and not only the man but the whole of our country soared. America was in its heyday remember. Our factories were booming. People were making a very good living on a one person income, and our cities were still safe and full of people. For example the population of Cleveland Ohio (a heavy industrial city) was 750,879 according to the 1970 census. In 2000 that population dropped to 478,403.
What does this mean? Well it’s a heck of a lot easier to share a culture when you all live in the same place. Now you find that our culture in fragmented. Today, shuttle launches even shuttle explosions are hardly even noticed. When Challenger exploded we got a national day of silence, do you even remember the name of the recent shuttle that blew up? Columbia.
At that time Walter Cronkite was the news voice of our country. Do you know who is the news voice today? Yeah, we don’t have one. News has gone up and down over the years, and today I would say its on a down swing.
We have just elected the first African American President, we are turning to more “Green” technology, but as you watch the video below it almost feels like we won’t get another one of these moments. The entire country was watching, the same thoughts, the same worries. I don’t know if we will have a moment like this again.
BUT the worst thing that we could do is NOT try. Kennedy said:
” 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.
It is for these reasons that I regard the decision last year to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear as among the most important decisions that will be made during my incumbency in the office of the Presidency.”
He was fighting the Russians in the cold war. The world would almost be destroyed, but he sees this as the most important decision of his presidency. Why?
I think Kennedy knew that doing the hard things, even it if didn’t seem important at the time, made us better. Have we lost that focus?
The computer I’m using right now is 1000s of times more powerful then the one they used in the first space missions. We have objectives, right? Go back to the Moon. Go to Mars, and when you ask why, I’m going to point you to doing the hard things. If we do the hard things, things get better.
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