Back to space
On the Interstate highway system, triumph in the Cold War, and why a Moon mission should matter a lot to Americans
To far less widespread fanfare than was appropriate to the occasion, NASA has launched Artemis II, a mission to orbit the Moon with a live human crew. It’s an ambitious project on the part of an agency that has been downscaled significantly by executive-branch intervention.
■ A diverse, populous, and continent-sprawling nation like the United States needs certain bold common endeavors to give the public a widespread rooting interest in times of peace and prosperity (and something aspirational to keep up hopes when times are tough). We’ve had the Interstate highway system and the Apollo missions, which to some extent channeled the same kind of energy that went into the common purpose of winning World War II. Even the 80s-defining effort to triumph in the Cold War had something of that same rallying spirit.
■ But we really haven’t repeated any of that in the years since: The abundance and technological optimism of the 1990s could be dizzying, but we missed the opportunity to channel a sliver of that momentum into a specific public purpose. And the two and a half decades since have been characterized more by strife than by esprit de corps.
■ Perhaps that can be at least partly explained by the lack of a common project. Economically and technologically, the last quarter-century has been remarkable in many ways. But sometimes it is the lack of a motivating challenge that brings out the worst of our petty differences, our cynicism and ennui, or our dissatisfaction with objectively good times. As Benjamin Franklin put it in 1742, “They who have nothing to trouble them will be troubled at nothing.”
■ A common project doesn’t have to be outrageously expensive nor overwhelmingly large to do some real good -- it just has to be ambitious enough to capture the imagination and constructive enough that public figures can talk about it and the general public can follow its progress. And while it may not satisfy the strictest libertarian instincts (the ones that don’t want to see government doing anything beyond the strictly necessary), some things we must do to pay the social-cohesion tax. It shouldn’t be hard for even middling leaders to summon the personal wonder and awe to get people stirred up about missions to the Moon.