Lunar lessons
In new book, Brinkley celebrates the possible
Historian Douglas Brinkley, a native of Perrysburg, Ohio, is on a whirlwind book tour this summer as the 50th anniversary of the first moon landing approaches.
“American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race” was released in April, and in it, Mr. Brinkley makes the case for considering America’s lunar missions as an example of what is possible.
“I was in Perrysburg when Neil Armstrong walked on the moon. I was at home with my parents at 1075 Cherry St.,” the Rice University history professor told a hometown crowd at a book tour event recently.
Now, Mr. Brinkley’s Houston office is a stone’s throw from the site where Kennedy first called on Americans to get to the moon — a challenge that sounded absurd to many at the time.
Today, moonshot is a term referring to “when Americans work together to collectively accomplish great things,” Mr. Brinkley said.
The United States needs more moonshots: halting climate change, curing cancer and creating a health care system that serves everyone, to name a few. There is no shortage of opportunities to accomplish great things collectively.
Mr. Brinkley rightly pointed out that the moon landing’s 50th anniversary is a rare opportunity to mark a joyous, triumphant moment. And it was triumphant not just for the United States, but for the world. Not just for science and technology, but for politics, culture and human ambition in general.
Neil Armstrong — who did not share the rest of the country’s romanticism about the moonshot, which he saw as just another military mission — gave himself a 50- 50 chance of returning to Earth alive.
The political odds against the moon exploration were actually even longer, though we don’t tend to remember the period that way. We recall the Apollo missions as the result of collective national ambition, but they hardly had universal support, particularly when it was time to fund them.
Progressives wanted to spend NASA’s budget on social programs and help for America’s struggling inner cities. Conservatives, including Sen. Barry Goldwater, thought space exploration money would be better spent on the military.
Kennedy, Vice President Lyndon Johnson and the moon mission’s other supporters understood, however, that succeeding in space exploration would deliver dividends in everything from spin- off technology and jobs to pride and national unity.
It had a healing effect. It demanded the best work of the nation’s best and brightest. It let a nation marvel in what was possible.
The legacy of the moonshot need not be more missions to the moon or to Mars — though America should aim for those goals. The legacy of landing on the moon should be to remind us always that America is capable of achieving more than we imagine when we pull together collectively.