The world catches up

A little more than two weeks ago, when Barack Obama and John McCain met for the second presidential debate, Sen. Obama spoke up for his alternative energy plan by invoking perhaps this nation's greatest achievement: "Now, when JFK said we're going to the moon in 10 years, nobody was sure how to do it, but we understood that, if the American people make a decision to do something, it gets done."

This week, India, which started its space program in the same year that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin planted the U.S. flag on the lunar surface, launched its own mission to the moon. Unlike Apollo 11, the Indian Chandrayaan spacecraft that lifted off from an island in the Bay of Bengal last week was not manned, but it does reflect a national spirit that our country once possessed, and which we will fail to reclaim at our own peril.

How to define that spirit? Some inside and outside of India have been critical of the Chandrayaan moon shot, saying that even at its relatively modest $78 million price tag, the cost of the mission represents an expenditure that the country can little afford, given the fact that millions of its inhabitants still live in conditions of crushing poverty. But the mission's advocates point to Chandrayaan as a first step toward scientific goals that are worthy of the expenditure. Some of these goals are of a practical nature, such as determining the prevalence of helium-3, a rare isotope that could be used as an energy source, and constructing a threedimensional map of the lunar surface, which could facilitate future missions for mining lunar resources such as this. And some of these goals serve pure science, such as experiments designed to learn more about the moon's origins.

They also point to the burgeoning space programs of China and Japan, and emphasize India's need to prove itself worthy of a share of the growing market for launching private satellites.

All these goals, poetic and prosaic, add up to vision — long-term, beyondthe immediate-horizon vision. This is the kind of vision that is given much lip service in our own political rhetoric. But when it comes to practice, some in America have said in recent years that we can't afford it, just as some are still saying that now — not in the midst of a Global War on Terrorism, not as we face the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, not as we In 1962, President Kennedy called upon America to put a man on the moon and return him safely, among other goals, "not because they are easy but because they are hard." In the years that followed, our nation fought the Vietnam War and launched, in the Great Society, one of its most ambitious social programs. We saw our society divided over issues of race and war. And yet, in 1969, president Kennedy's goal saw fruition.

The lesson is not only that we as a nation can achieve great things even in difficult times, but that our ambition to achieve great things is a necessary engine of progress. Despite what we might like to tell ourselves, America has never had a monopoly on this kind of forward-looking spirit. But there was a time when we surely had the world's largest supply of it. India's own reach into space serves as a much-needed reminder that, at the start of this new century, the rest of the world is catching up. And if America wishes to stay great, we need to discover once again the ambition to not only survive the present but also capture and define the future.