Some – amazing – friends of mine and I were in the small town of Mesilla, New Mexico last week killing a few hours; in one little store a young woman told us about the pottery they were selling, all of which had been made by Navajo Indians from around the state. As she talked she let it slip that she wasn’t from New Mexico, so we asked her where she was from; “Semipalatinsk, Kazakhstan.”

Besides the obvious strangeness of meeting someone who was born and grew up in the “secret” city where the Soviets developed and tested their nuclear weapons, the point that was – and is – of interest is that she has been here for 8 years and is now, quite definitively, an American.

50 years ago – July 20th, 1969 – we landed on the Moon… On a small brass plate on the side of the Apollo 11 lander there is a plate that reads: “We came in peace for all mankind.”

Those are wonderful words, but the simple fact is that the Apollo crews didn’t get to the Moon because of the efforts of all mankind, but because of the efforts embodied in the US space program. The US put men on the moon, not the Soviets, the Chinese, or anyone else.

It was, and remains, a truly exceptional engineering feat – one created by imperfect people; one of the few events of the 20th century that will be remembered in the centuries ahead. There are those who argue that it was an engineering feat that’s unmatched with any social, cultural, or economic need; that many technological advances took place in the past that were necessary to advance civilization, but there was, and is, no great and immediate need to go into space (except, for convenience sake, into near space). Communications satellites and weather satellites are handy, but mankind doesn’t need space to survive, unlike advances in power generation and propulsion and communication and other technologies that came before the Moon landing.

I suspect that’s true, at least for the near term, say the next century or so.

But two points are worth stressing: The folks who built the Mercury – Gemini – Apollo programs, the men and women, many of whom were born in countries spread across the globe, were Americans.

We may, in this embittered and prolonged national harangue we are stuck in want to insist that every hurt is massive and horrible, transcends all time, and demand every possible human distinction; but the men and women who built and launched and flew those amazing rockets weren’t White or Black or German or French or Russian or Catholic or Protestant or Jewish; they were Americans, and should be recognized precisely as such. And they built those rockets and painted those flags on the sides of those rockets as Americans. As with the young woman in Mesilla, they may have been from someplace else, but they were – and are – Americans. Period. Not Irish-Americans, or Black-Americans or Jewish-Americans or any other kind of hyphenated Americans. Just Americans.

America remains a nation not simply of place, defined only by a boundary, but a nation of ideas, a nation built on the vision described in our founding documents. It is what makes America an exception, an exception then and an exception now.

The idea is remarkable, even if the people who created it weren’t perfect, just as the people who live here now aren’t perfect.

And the second point is this: you may regard the “Space Race” as simply a feat of engineering, unmatched with an interlocking cultural need, but how sad…

Because exploring space, conquering space, isn’t just about need, it’s about changing our world. There is the “simple” economic perspective: in just one asteroid one might find more metal – iron, nickel, manganese, copper – than the entire world uses in decades. There is more natural gas in the atmosphere of Uranus than mankind is projected to need for thousands of years.

But more important is the great cultural good that exploring and expanding into space brings us. It gives us a true challenge, it addresses the fundamental need to reach beyond our grasp, to do more, to do what “can’t be done,” to have a vision of America as something much greater than it is today, a nation and an idea that would, in the end, fully match the incredible visions of the very human but very exceptional Founding Fathers.

Copyright 2019 Arrias
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