{"id":2156,"date":"2010-07-27T07:00:44","date_gmt":"2010-07-27T11:00:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/nicholsclan.com\/tinblog\/?p=2156"},"modified":"2010-07-26T10:56:56","modified_gmt":"2010-07-26T14:56:56","slug":"a-moon-too-far","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/2010\/07\/a-moon-too-far.html","title":{"rendered":"A Moon Too Far"},"content":{"rendered":"

Two days before I was born President Kennedy issued a challenge before Congress to put a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth by the end of that decade.\u00a0 With six months to spare, an eight-year old me watched fuzzy images of astronauts stepping onto another world.\u00a0 Mission accomplished.\u00a0 In 2005 dollars, the Apollo program was estimated to have cost $170 billion.\u00a0 It required the unwavering bipartisan support of Congress across four elections, and the support of three Presidents.\u00a0 Add to that, the space program was commensurate with one of the most unpopular wars in US history, a time of great social unrest, and also the dawn of one of the most sweeping social entitlement programs.<\/p>\n

\"Man<\/a>Today’s question is, do you think we could possibly pull off a moon mission scale project today?\u00a0 That is, if we set forth a national project that was financially non-trivial and wouldn’t see results for eight or ten years, even if that project had more direct tangible benefit to our collective welfare than Apollo, could we sustain the required momentum?\u00a0 I fear the answer is, not a chance in hell.<\/p>\n

It would seem that as a country we’ve lost our collective ability to plan more than a short time into the future.\u00a0 This is most evident in politics where everyone is playing for the best leverage in the next election with little regard for what’s best for the country.\u00a0 Our leaders look to polls and surveys to see what the popular position will be.<\/p>\n

Industry isn’t much better.\u00a0 Long term investment is down.\u00a0 It’s all about how to maximize share price and next quarter’s balance sheet.\u00a0 Executives are mostly looking to make a quick name for themselves so they can hop to the next multi-million dollar job.<\/p>\n

And consumers aren’t immune either.\u00a0 How many are putting off buying that new flat screen or living room set rather than saving for their kids’ college or their own retirement?\u00a0 How many buy houses they have no hope of paying off?<\/p>\n

What led us to this state is less certain, but it would be hard to argue that we are here.\u00a0 Is our desire for immediate gratification driven by marketing messages?\u00a0 You can have it all, now.\u00a0 Why wait?\u00a0 Alternatively, perhaps it’s the inundation with media and information.\u00a0 There’s so very much to process in the here and now that’s it’s difficult to think about the future.\u00a0 Or perhaps it is the uncertainty of the future itself that fuels our short attention span.\u00a0 The world is changing so very fast that glimpsing the world our children will live in is very difficult.\u00a0 There are so many possible futures that it’s just easier to live in the now and let the future fall where it may.<\/p>\n

I don’t personally think it seems so bleak.\u00a0 It’s not clear what has driven this change, but as long as we are this short sighted, we are unlikely to ever return to the hay-day for which we pine.\u00a0 We desperately need some sort of collective vision of what we can become.\u00a0 We will never be of one mind, but we can be of one goal.\u00a0 At the fuzzy level, we are.\u00a0 We all want this to be a great and prosperous country.\u00a0 But that’s not an actionable goal.\u00a0 It’s about as useful as your kid declaring that when he grows up he wants to be rich.<\/p>\n

If history has a lesson for us it is that we respond to competition.\u00a0 We rallied together against the Nazis.\u00a0 The fear of communism drove enormous growth in science and technology, and in large part was likely the underlying driving force behind Apollo.\u00a0 We have enemies now in Al Qaeda and the Taliban, but they are not useful as competition.\u00a0 We need something larger, something that demands more of us.\u00a0 I’m thinking China.\u00a0 Economically, China is the largest looming threat on the planet.\u00a0 Not that they are evil or anything, or that we even need to hate them.\u00a0 But they may well be in a position a decade hence to just buy us for petty cash.\u00a0 We could do with a healthy desire to beat them at that game.\u00a0 To rebuild our own economy, infrastructure, and industrial base to out compete them in the global market.\u00a0 This is a challenge worthy of the people who put a man on the moon.\u00a0 And wouldn’t it be nice to be a part of something productive again?<\/p>\n

Now, if only we had a Kennedy to inspire us…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Today’s question is, do you think we could possibly pull off a moon mission scale project today? That is, if we set forth a national project that was financially non-trivial and wouldn’t see results for eight or ten years, even if that project had more direct tangible benefit to our collective welfare than Apollo, could we sustain the required momentum? I fear the answer is, no chance in hell.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2156","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2156","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2156"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2156\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2161,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2156\/revisions\/2161"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2156"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2156"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timscogitorium.com\/tinblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2156"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}