Imagination

In Last Man on the Moon, Gene Cernan writes (page 344):

"Sometimes it seems that Apollo came before its time. President Kennedy reached far into the twenty-first century, grabbed a decade of time and slipped it neatly into the 1960s and 1970s ... after Mercury and Gemini, we should have proceeded to build the shuttle, then an orbiting space station, and only then sought the Moon. As it was, we accomplished the impossible, then started over again. It was as if our young nation had chosen never again to cross the Mississippi River after Lewis and Clark ... "

Roger Launius argues that Kennedy made the Moon a priority for purely geo-political and prestige reasons, not out of a personal conviction. According to Gerard DeGroot, Kennedy said to NASA Administrator James Webb:

"I don't really care about the moon. I know it's important; I know there are people who really want to go there, but I just want to beat the Russians."

That may be shocking to some, but more important than Kennedy's political cynicism is the power of imagination to achieve an impossible goal. Not Kennedy's imagination, but the imagination of the American people and the hundreds of thousand of workers, engineers and scientists who made Apollo possible. What did we get out of Apollo? Among many other things, tangible evidence of the power of imagination. As a designer, I can dig that.