By Matt Rooney
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When Neil Armstrong placed a foot on the lunar surface on July 20, 1969, he didn’t just take a “giant leap for mankind.” He helped unify a country caught up in the maelstrom of Vietnam. He also inspired a generation of young Americans to think big and dream bigger.
Make fun of President Trump’s new ‘Space Force’ if you must, but it’s probably exactly what this country needs right now.
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American politics is more myopic than ever.
The ill-informed social media dust-up over the new Space Force logo and its Star Trek similarities is all of the proof you need.
Congress no longer debates the big issues: war, peace, continental expansion or human emancipation. Our place in the world, what it took to get there, and the prosperity that goes along with it are routinely taken for granted. We used to be the sort of nation that revolutionized industries, constructed massive hydroelectric dams and dug canals across miles of earth. Putting a man on the moon wasn’t a departure for us so much as a next logical step forward. A natural progression for a people infatuated with greatness.
Impeachment trials and prescription drug cost debates are important? I guess? At least the latter is a real problem. Yet hyper-partisan domestic debates – and the tribalism and identity politics which drive them -are inarguably less likely to inspire the next generation of explorers, scientists and statesmen. The Americans who won two world wars have precious little in common with the ones castigating their fellow citizens for believing in only two genders.
Do we want our children playing astronauts and aliens? Or House impeachment managers?
We need to start looking outward again.
We need to give kids something to aspire to again.
There are concrete benefits. Star Trek inspired the cell phone and laptop computers; life-changing inventions including baby formula and Velcro owe their origins to real space race. Eventually? If humanity wants to survive the next inevitable climate-altering event? Humans need to expand beyond our third rock from the soon.
There’s the defense imperative, too. Like it or not, the Chinese and Russians are already working towards weaponizing space. If we’re not there? Our satellites and our military edge could soon be a thing of the past.
But there’s more to it than that. There’s the unifying principle of our common American character. Kennedy himself said in his famous ‘we choose to go to the moon’ speech that “the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world’s leading space-faring nation.”
Our obligations and requirements are no different today, at least not fundamentally, than they were in the 1960s. If anything they’ve become more essential and pressing than ever before. We need Space Force; not because it will be easy but precisely because it is hard.
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