Forty-five years ago yesterday, Neil
Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to put their
boots on the ground of the moon. For many, the U.S. space program
has been kind of a letdown ever since. Alas, not for statists and
speechwriters. As I wrote in the February
2012 issue of Reason,
Three weeks after Neil Armstrong announced that
“the Eagle has landed,” President Richard Nixon
declared that “abolishing poverty, putting an end to
dependency—like reaching the moon a decade ago—may seem impossible.
But in the spirit of Apollo we can lift our sights and marshal our
best efforts.” Not only is the American landscape still blemished
by poverty and dependency on government, including sickening
amounts of dependency by the rich, but the War on Poverty launched
by Nixon’s predecessor, Lyndon Johnson, turned out to be one of the
great launch failures in policy history.The moon’s metaphorical record has only waned since then. In
1971 Nixon fired his rhetorical rockets on cancer: “The time has
come in America when the same kind of concentrated effort that
split the atom and took man to the moon should be turned toward
conquering this dread disease.” Cancer has since taken some hits,
but is still not beaten. Both Jimmy Carter, in his notorious 1979
“malaise” speech, and George H.W. Bush, in his less remembered 1992
State of the Union address, used Apollo as an almost desperate
reminder to depressed Americans that they can still be great.
“There’s been talk of decline,” Bush said. “Someone even said our
workers are lazy and uninspired. And I thought: Really? You go tell
Neil Armstrong standing on the moon.”There’s no escaping the moonshot in contemporary political
discourse. GOP presidential contender Herman Cain…used it in
February 2011 as proof we can and must “secur[e] the border”: “We
put a man on the moon,” he said, “so this isn’t that hard!” Bill
Clinton, in his exhaustive (and exhausting) post-presidency, has
been fond of such formulations as “we need to make fixing climate
change as politically sexy as putting a man on the moon.” The whole
thesis of the bestseller That Used to Be Us by
Thomas L. Friedman and Michael Mandelbaum is that the United States
has lost its ability to do such great things as, well, you know
what.
Why is this a problem? Because politicians deploy
the moonshot metaphor to make expensive, long-range promises. When
those deadlines inevitably fail to get met, well, that’s the next
guy’s problem. Meanwhile, just as predictably, moonshot enthusiasts
fail to grok the more relevant lessons of Apollo:
[T]hese transparent attempts to glom onto JFK’s glamour skip
right over the 35th president’s real-world pragmatism. Consider
this passage from Kennedy’s terse “Man on the Moon” speech: “This
decision demands a major national commitment of scientific and
technical manpower, material and facilities, and the possibility of
their diversion from other important activities where they are
already thinly spread.…It means we cannot afford undue work
stoppages, inflated costs of material or talent, wasteful
interagency rivalries, or a high turnover of key personnel.”
Read Reason’s whole private-space special
issue from 2012, including Robert Zubrin’s
bracing examination of whether we have become too scared about
astronauts dying. (Opening sentence: “If we could put a man on the
Moon, why can’t we put a man on the Moon?”)
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