I am a firm nonbeliever when it comes to the cult of John F. Kennedy, but like an atheist admiring the King James Bible, even I can appreciate some of the Kennedy scriptures. So as our latest lunar mission circles back to Earth, I find myself revisiting the speech at Rice University that launched us moonward. In that address, Kennedy declared that America would be ascending to the moon for the same reason that mountain climbers attempt Everest: because “space is there, and we’re going to climb it.”
What’s striking, when you reread the speech more than 60 years later, is how Kennedy tried to have things two ways. The lines that are most remembered portray the Apollo project as self-justifying — a mission undertaken for its own sake, as “one of the great adventures of all time,” valuable precisely because of its difficulty and hardships and uncertain gain.
But Kennedy sold the space program instrumentally as well, in a more familiar politician’s register. Sometimes he used the strategic language of the Cold War, promising to achieve “a position of pre-eminence” relative to the Soviet Union in order to pre-empt scenarios in which space is weaponized against us. And sometimes he defaulted to the language of technocracy and middle-class materialism, promising that the space program would help deliver “new tools and computers for industry, medicine, the home as well as the school.”
There are many reasons the first Space Age faded after the Apollo era, but the failure of the instrumental case for space exploration looms large. Kennedy’s aspirational because-it’s-there argument was vindicated by Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, but his self-interested arguments ultimately fell flat. Satellites matter to national security but getting to the moon did not win the Cold War and moon bases and colonization plans weren’t crucial to great power competition. Space exploration delivered some technical and scientific knowledge, but not nearly enough to make spacefaring a natural zone of private sector investment, at least until our own era of Ozymandian billionaires came along.
In an ideal world, the aspirational argument alone might be enough to bear us upward. Watching Artemis II, the most ambitious starfaring mission of my lifetime, has been a reminder of the purity of space exploration — the distinctive way it showcases technological mastery, the operatic themes it strikes, the extraordinary aesthetic landscape that’s both discovered and created by sending humans into space.
To read the curriculum vitae of the astronauts, with their Antarctic sojourns and fighter-pilot records, is to encounter a rare kind of human excellence, one that’s been channeled, for this mission, into a purpose that feels free of most political and culture-war entanglements. To take in the imagery of the mission, from the blazing leap of the rockets to the grand shots of celestial bodies to the intimate view of the cocoon that keeps the astronauts alive, is like peering at stained-glass windows dedicated to both the grandeur of God and the triumph of human spirit.
