We Stopped Dreaming
In high school, I was an avid member of the Madison West Rocketry Club (one of the nerdiest things I’ve ever done). Naturally, being a member of rocket club you learn a lot about rockets and space. The favorite activity at team get togethers was Kerbal Space Program and we spent entire weekends inhaling epoxy dust, learning to program on custom soldered parallax boards, and 3D printing parts we made on Solidworks.
Rocket club taught me a lot about engineering, but more importantly, rocket club taught me how to dream about making something in the world that went far beyond myself.
The space race was an interesting time in history because we truly were at war. The soviets (visa vi Sputnik) beat us to intercontinental ballistic missiles that could drop nukes on our cities and we were very far behind. People were afraid.
Contrary to popular belief, during the early space race the United States was quite behind. We had a lot of issues even getting a person beyond the boundary of space, while the Soviet Union beat us to the first people in orbit and the first space walks. The technology that was supposed to power our ICBMs kept exploding on the pad, and the public didn’t have a lot of confidence in our engineers or military to catch up. It’s ancient history now, but we were the early losers.
In 1956 JFK gave the following speech at Rice University:
To be sure, all this costs us all a good deal of money. This year's space budget is three times what it was in January 1961, and it is greater than the space budget of the previous eight years combined…. —even though I realize that this is in some measure an act of faith and vision, for we do not now know what benefits await us. But if I were to say, my fellow citizens, that we shall send to the moon, 240 thousand miles away from the control station in Houston, a giant rocket more than 300 feet tall, the length of this football field, made of new metal alloys, some of which have not yet been invented, capable of standing heat and stresses several times more than have ever been experienced, fitted together with a precision better than the finest watch, carrying all the equipment needed for propulsion, guidance, control, communications, food and survival, on an untried mission, to an unknown celestial body, and then return it safely to earth, re-entering the atmosphere at speeds of over 25 thousand miles per hour, causing heat about half that of the temperature of the sun—almost as hot as it is here today—and do all this, and do it right, and do it first before this decade is out—then we must be bold.
What followed was a heroic effort to build the Saturn 5 rocket, ultimately culminating in the moon landings in 1969.
In that era, kids were taught to dream about outer space because they had to. It was a core part of security and life. A whole generation grew up dreaming about building rockets and doing science, not because it was some secure job, but because it was the critical forcing function driving our world forward.
I worry that we’ve lost that as a society, and it will lead to our slow (or perhaps increasingly rapid) decline. The Facebook and Instagram generations have been raised to believe that society values something very different.
Economics alone isn’t enough to incentivize growth, you need to believe in something bigger than yourself. It’s that faith that drives you to work harder than you ever thought you could, and produce results that no one else thinks are possible.
The other key about dreaming is recognizing the willingness to fail and doing things anyways. Failure also leads to growth, we need to know what doesn’t work to figure out what does.
I don’t think we need to go back to the moon, that’s old news, but I do think we need something to galvanize young scientists and technologists to dream, because if we don’t we’ll be stuck in the dirt forever.
Will leave this post with this somewhat dated video from Neal deGrasse Tyson - in there he has a quote about the Apollo 8 moonrise photo: “we went to the moon and we discovered the earth for the first time“. The curious thing about new science and engineering is that when you try new stuff, sometimes the universe reflects that back a bit with something you didn’t expect.
I hope we can get back to dreaming - it’s that + love that makes humanity great.