Watching the Folly of Rocket Science Evolve

While at Rice University, Texas, in 1962 where he had just been made an honorary visiting professor, former US president John Fitzgerald Kennedy held a famous lecture, in which he lay out the rationale for all the money the US government had planned to waste for reaching the goal of carrying American living beings to the moon and back. That money was large scale PR money and from the point of view of a majority of the citizens of the United States that became and stayed a sensible investment for quite a while.

The thrice repeated phrase of "We choose to go to the moon" is famous to this day and was again heard recently in all its glory on TV and radio when the step of the first male American citizen, in common parlance "man", onto the surface of the moon was celebrated even in the smaller banana republics of Europe and the People's Republic of China, which, before Tricky Dick Nixon's visit, the western world used to call Red China.

This speech now, if you have not watched it in full, contains many more interesting quotes. Here are just a few of them:

The greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorances unfold. ... This is a breathtaking pace. And such a pace can not help but to create new ills as it dispells old, new ignorance, new problems, new dangers. ... And please, we have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction but with instruments of knowledge and understanding. Yet the vows of this nation can only be fullfilled if we in this nation are first and therefor we intend to be first. ... But I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours. There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again. ... We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy but because they are hard.

In the anniversary broadcast the ingenious speech of Mr. Kennedy was followed up with a chain of TV based presentations and a professionally directed competition for the minds and hearts of men that went on and on until the climatic moment when the picture shows Neil Armstrong leaving the tiny lander capsule, stepping onto the surface of the moon and speaking the famous words a gifted script writer had prepared for him.

The speech and the pictorial and rhetorical chain it opened made real what vice president Nixon had said to premier Khrushchev in their famous kitchen debate in Moscow 4 years before. It made nearly all people forget that bringing the first man into space and back was not the last triumph the Soviet Union had ever landed out there, in the dark, cold and hostile stretches where no man had ever gone before.

For the SU, the grand auntie of all the rogue states that followed regrettably not only beat the US to the first hard and the first soft landing of unmanned spacecraft on the moon. They were even the first to bring living beings around the moon and back. Two turtles and various insects and worms were in fact the first earthlings to take that voyage and survive it in good health. The spaceship that carried them even caused a sensation and panic in the west when radiowaves carried recorded human voices back to earth. Still, in life support systems the Americans had the upper hand, which, given their cost, is no wonder.

The conclusion one can draw is that the lack in media proficiency and the weakness of their life support systems, between them, might have been the most eminent of disadvantages the Soviet system had and that being ahead in color TV, as Mr. Nixon had said and as Mr. Kennedy though having critizised Nixon for the statement had proved thereafter, was really a lot more important than being ahead in rocket thrust.

In 7/7 hindsight on the other hand, it's easy to state that the US marred a large part of their moon landing successes by the simultaneous escalation of the Vietnam war and the moving pictures with sound that escalation generated. Those pictures and sounds in turn could in the meantime be called a just revenge of color TV practiced against its slightly hypocritical misuse by distorting the facts of space travel, as it was.