Featured image: (Pacer Graphic / Darby Self)
These are testy times in America: politics, culture, history and the country’s very mission all and again seem up for grabs.
Yet, there is at least one project that America can agree on: space exploration. If I had to choose an American dream that is the greatest, it would be the space race.
Not perfect, not easy, but worth it for the sake of American space exploration–the spirit of ambition and looking forward that represents the best of this constantly-bickering country. While everyone argues about what to do tomorrow to fix whatever ill or injustice seems most pressing today, America’s space program inspires us to look up, to reach for something hereafter, never giving up on a dream, even when it seems it has already expired. The recently-returned Artemis II mission, whose crew just completed the first crewed lunar flyby in 50 years by splashing down safely on April 10, 2026, is a prime example of America’s unyielding resolve to push forward into the unknown. NASA’s Artemis program is looking to return humans to the moon, but it also has an eye on sending them to Mars.
The space race is an idea: the belief in what a nation is capable of. America is a land of dreamers; we believe that anything is possible as long as it is challenged. We have been faced with tasks deemed impossible by other nations and have continually proven ourselves to be up to the challenge. No undertaking shows our faith in the potential of the American people more than space travel. Men and women have left our atmosphere and returned triumphant to our planet. Is there any other undertaking that better portrays the inherent capabilities of America?
Unlike typical Hollywood fare, American space stories are not altogether clean and shiny fairy tales. Two space shuttle disasters define the medium, the worst being the Challenger catastrophe that exploded 73 seconds into flight on Jan. 27, 1986, killing the spaceship’s seven crew members. Prior to that, the Apollo program suffered a tragedy of its own during a pre launch test on Jan. 27, 1967, when a flash fire erupted inside the command module killing astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee. It has been over a decade since the 2003 spacecraft Columbia disintegrated on re-entry into Earth’s atmosphere. But for NASA’s astronauts, the “Day of Remembrance” will always be a day of mourning, marking not just footnotes in history, but profound personal loss.
The space race is the greatest American dream, and the reason is simple: they are dreams that matter. And dreams that matter are not those that are never failed, but those for which people continue to choose failure. NASA made several major design and engineering changes following the Apollo 1 fire. They investigated and grappled with their culture following the losses of Challenger and Columbia. NASA’s legacy isn’t just that America landed men on the moon. It’s that America went back to the moon after disaster, and that we remembered that space exploration was worth rebuilding towards after tragedy.
Space program development is arduous and demanding. The challenges and rewards that space exploration and development offer to the American public are nearly the opposite of the short attention span and instant gratification society has grown accustomed to in modern times. The space program cannot be monetized or exploited for short-term political gain as other agencies and organizations are accustomed to doing.
NASA’s Artemis mission is a prime example of the type of work that NASA and America are capable of accomplishing when focused on a long-term vision over a period of time and with significant investment. It is serious, meaningful work that should be viewed and appreciated as such, not as mere entertainment.
America could use a little space race mania right about now. Space exploration is one of the few current national ambitions that can turn patriotism back into something meaningful instead of empty calories. Instead of a vision of a powerful, successful America driven by fear, space exploration offers a powerful, successful America driven by curiosity, science and human ingenuity. It gives a sense of purpose to national ambition and imagination, of building up rather than tearing down, of reaching out to the rest of the world instead of pulling up the drawbridge. The goals of a space program are as much about where you’re going as about who you are. So what kind of country do Americans want America to be?
What are we hoping for from the American dream these days? A job, a house, a healthy economy. But in the days of the space race, we had bigger dreams. Dreams to recover lost potential. When was the last time you looked up at a moonlit sky and felt the full potential of what this country could be? “Wow. We can go there.”
It’s the space race that’s the greatest American dream – ambitious without being unrealistic, hopeful without being naive – and as deeply full of grief, risk and personal cost as any truly human endeavor is capable of containing.
For America, it never should be.
