America used to be a country that dared great things. We did them because we could do them. The Soviet Union beat us to put an artificial satellite in orbit, so President John F. Kennedy said, “Hold my beer,” and made sure that we put men on the moon before the Soviets – and we did, in 1969. The Soviet Union, of course, never made it there and collapsed under the weight of their own economic failure twenty-some years later.
President Kennedy said this about that feat:
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.
We’ve kind of lost that drive in recent…
