By JoEllen McBride, PhD
The views expressed in this blog post are not necessarily the views of the CSWA, the AAS, its Board of Trustees, or its membership.
When the U.S. decided to go to the Moon, President John F. Kennedy famously said “We choose to go to the moon and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” But is that why we went to the Moon? It is pretty well known that our arms race with the Soviet Union provided the urgency to send men to the Moon. We considered Air Force pilots for astronauts and the government pumped billions of dollars into creating NASA just to beat the Soviets to the Moon. It’s also safe to say that going to the Moon inspired a whole generation of kids to go into STEM fields and created new technologies that benefited most of us.
But what happens when you only look at the products of science and technology and not how it was accomplished? Is it just as inspiring to know the reasons behind why we went? What if the government had just invested in the space program for the technological innovations that would result and the people it would inspire? Instead, we went to the Moon to prove our military and technological superiority to another country that we were in a nuclear arms race with. A race that made it so children practiced drills in school in the event a nuclear weapon was detonated over their town and the government questioned the loyalty of its own citizens.
