Yes—I liked seeing astronauts landing on the Moon

By SJ Otto

All weekend I have been seeing all kinds of reports on the anniversary of the US landing on the moon. So I have decided to post my own account of that event. It was an event I actually lived through. I was a young teen ager when it happened, maybe 14 years old.

I grew up in a Catholic home, where John F. Kennedy seemed like a great hero. In retrospect he does not seem as heroic today. He was not responsible for the civil rights movement getting passed the way Lyndon B. Johnson was. He was mostly a cold warrior trying to pick a fight in such places as East Germany, Turkey and Cuba. It was Kennedy who presided over the Cuban Missile Crises. Kennedy was not a traditional liberal. One thing he did preside over was the moon landing, although he died before the event actually took place. According to Wikipedia:

"We choose to go to the Moon" is the well-known tagline from a speech about the effort to reach the Moon delivered by United States President John F. Kennedy to a large crowd gathered at Rice Stadium in Houston, Texas on September 12, 1962. The speech was intended to persuade the American people to support the Apollo program, the national effort to land a man on the Moon.’“On September 12, 1962, a warm and sunny day, President Kennedy delivered his speech before a crowd of about 40,000 people in the Rice University football stadium, many of them students. The middle portion of the speech has been widely quoted, and reads as follows:

“We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people. For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war. I do not say that we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, 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. But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?

We choose to go to the Moon! We choose to go to the Moon...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; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win, and the others, too.”

It was probably the only Kennedy speech I ever really agreed with and liked. Most of his speeches were a bunch of anti-communist rants, such as him claiming to be a “Berliner,”

 "Ich bin ein Berliner." I lost my interest in anti-communism many decades ago.

 Ironically it was President Richard Nixon who was able actually see and preside over the moonlanding. He was one of my least favortite presidents, I was much less found of him than Kennedy. But I really did like Kennedy’s "We choose to go to the Moon” speech. It may be the only speech of his that I really liked.

If there is another big irony it is that it was the Soviet Union that actually started the so called “space race.” According to Office of the Historian:

“On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the earth’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik-1.” 

Then there is this:

 Sputnik, 1957

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the earth’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik-1. The successful launch came as a shock to experts and citizens in the United States, who had hoped that the United States would accomplish this scientific advancement first…..

…In the late 1950s, Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev (Никита Хрущёв)  boasted about Soviet technological superiority and growing stockpiles of ICBMs, so the United States worked simultaneously to develop its own ICBMs to counter what it assumed was a growing stockpile of Soviet missiles directed against the United States. 

So it was the Soviet Union and Khrushchev who touched off the space race. Khrushchev had hoped the Soviet Union could prove its superior technology by putting a device in space that simply went “beep beep.”

Perhaps it ended up that both countries allowed their paranoid dillusions to push them into a space race. The result is that the cold war inspired the US to race to put a man on the moon. It is possible and even likely that the US would have never gone to the moon without the so called “dangers of the Soviet Union.” Again from Office of the Historian:

“Eventually, lawmakers and political campaigners in the United States successfully exploited the fear of a “missile gap” developing between U.S. and Soviet nuclear arsenals in the 1960 presidential election, which brought John F. Kennedy to power over Eisenhower’s vice president, Richard Nixon. The Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 served to remind both sides of the dangers of the weapons they were developing.”

So paranoid dillusions brought us the “space race” and I’m glad it did. Years later the Soviet Union put Venera 13 on Venus. At some point in time I saw a TV show called Star Trek. That show took us to places many of us wanted to go. For some people in the world Star’ Trek is just a fantacy. But for people as I—we see some possibilities of what human kind could accomplish if we continued the “US space race” and similar types of evolution.

Maybe we will never travel faster than light to planets hundreds of light-years away. But after we put a man on the moon, many of us felt there were no limitations to space travel.

One thing that bothers me is that no one has gone back to the Moon after all these decades. There are no vacation packages on the Moon. There are no temporary space stations on the Moon rather than as there are that circle the Earth, or that sit on the continent of Antartica. A country that could put people on the Moon should be able to put a Moon base on the Moon.

Besides the fantacy, on Star Trek and Star Trek Next Generation, was the fantasy of a world without imperialism or imperialistic relationships. On both Star Teck’s they have the “prime directive” where they don’t interfear in a developing culture that is behind the highly developed Earth culture.

In reality the US and other more highly developed societies, in Europe and Japan, conquered less developed societies and enslaved their people. Just as I want to see people exploring space, I want to see imperialism die out.

Let’s celebrate going to the Moon and let’s go back to the Moon. Let’s promote a Moon base and the end of imperialism.