America’s galactic foreign policy

One thing his years of reporting had taught him, Walter Cronkite said near the end of his life, was that Americans did indeed have a knack for rising to any challenge, particularly when the odds were most daunting.

How appropriate, then, that Cronkite’s passing closely coincided with the 40th anniversary of Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrins landing on the moon, just the type of iconic achievement exemplifying the American spirit to which Cronkite referred.

And how disappointing that 40 years later, the moonwalk of July 20, 1969, still stands as an unmatched feat in the history of American exploration. As former NASA administrator Michael Griffin soberingly observes in a recent Washington Post essay, 40 years after Charles Lindbergh’s transatlantic flight, people were crisscrossing the oceans each day by the thousands.

Four decades after walking on the moon, however, Aldrin and Armstrong are still the only two with that distinction. It’s no wonder we meet the moonwalk’s 40th anniversary with some regret: How strange one feels celebrating an achievement that seems harder now than it did then.

Recalling the moonwalk’s corresponding rhetoric makes this fact even more poignantly baffling: It was suppose to symbolize man’s insatiable curiosity, his implacable determination and his relentless drive to penetrate the utmost bounds of human capacity.

Where did we go wrong?

“The answer,” author Tom Wolfe wrote in an essay for The New York Times, “is obvious. NASA had neglected to recruit a corps of philosophers.” The United States, argue both Wolfe and Griffin, was obsessed exclusively with beating the Russians to space, and therefore lacked a long-term, unifying philosophy to guide its space program in the post-moonwalk era.

“It had been a battle,” Wolfe wrote, “for morale at home and image abroad.” But after the United States won, that quintessentially American urge to keep exploring mysteriously vanished.

NASA’s narrow underpinning philosophy – or imperative, actually – was simply to beat the Soviet Union. What’s more, it was a philosophy heavily shaped by the unique demands of a bipolar geopolitical universe in which everything boiled down to competition and symbolism.

Not to downplay the genuine curiosity and ambition of NASA’s engineers, but nothing could have galvanized those folks like the desperation of winning a race – especially a race with such portent. Then-President Kennedy himself knew that in a strange, superstitious way, the race to the moon might prefigure the conflict between these two countries.  

But as we’ve learned, when exploration is solely competitive and achievement is strictly comparative, the collapse of the binary geopolitical structure will eliminate any impetus for further discovery, as the end of the Cold War and the demise of the Soviet Union demonstrated.

In the emerging era of multipolarity, though, perhaps the United States will return to space guided by its noblest motivations. As China, Russia and India pursue their own extraterrestrial ambitions, perhaps American astronauts will alight on the dusty lunar surface not as competitors, but in Armstrong’s own words from the moon in 1969, as “men of peaceable nations, men with an interest and a curiosity and men with a vision for the future.”