Intro/Outro (00:06)
From the Bill of Rights Institute, Fabric of History weaves together US history, founding principles, and what all of this means to us today. Join us as we pull back the curtains of the past to see what’s inside.

Gary (00:21)
Hi, everyone. Thanks again for joining us. Gary here along as always, with Mary and Eryn. So, Mary, I have a question for you. What are you working on these days?

Mary (00:33)
I am still working on BRI’s forthcoming AP US History Resource.

Gary (00:38)
Sure.

Mary (00:39)
Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness is the title. It’s coming out for this coming school year for the 2020 school year. Mark your calendars. It’s really exciting. It’s the history of the United States from 1491 to the present day. It’s an enormous amount of research. There’s over 90 scholars writing there’s, all these teachers that have written assessments and helped us with primary sources. It’s really a tremendous game-changer.

Gary (01:04)
And you’ve been spending quite a lot of time on it. I cannot wait to see it.

Mary (01:07)
It’s going to be pretty exciting.

Gary (01:10)
What are the most recent aspects of it or areas? Are you in a particular time period?

Mary (01:16)
We are. So we’re in the 60s.

Gary (01:18)
Okay.

Mary (01:18)
Which is such an interesting time. Good music, lots of conflict, lots of things changing. And I was actually looking at an essay earlier this week on the moon landing, which was in 1969. So we just had the 50th anniversary of the landing last year.

Gary (01:36)
Right.

Mary (01:37)
And I think we don’t have any manned flights to the moon right now. So I think it’s so interesting. Like why did we go to the moon?

Gary (01:47)
Right. Do you think Mars is that coming up? I mean, not tomorrow, obviously. I think we have the idea that someday we’ll be doing manned missions. Am I wrong?

Eryn (01:56)
Yeah. And I just wonder why is it Mars and not all the other plans? I guess I just assume because out of all the planets think that Mars is most likely to have had life in the past?

Gary (02:09)
I think its closer and won’t immediately destroy us.

Mary (02:14)
Yeah. And it also has water there and the Moon’s old hat at this point. So, Mars, it is.

Gary (02:22)
But the original question is why the moon in the 60s, right?

Mary (02:25)
Yeah. So why this space race? This was a huge thing and we learned about it when we were little. And we have astronauts and Buzz Lightyear and just what’s the story there? Why do we go to the moon?

Gary (02:37)
That’s a great question.

Eryn (02:38)
And it really does enrapture people. And even though it was 50 years ago, or maybe Space Force is getting privatized or we’re not on the moon anymore, but people are still very much enraptured by it because last year, being in DC, they put up Apollo 11. Yeah. On the Washington Monument, every night and you could go and see it. And then they did the launch of it in real-time.

Gary (03:09)
That was very cool.

Eryn (03:11)
I live very close to the mall and there was just a ton of people every single night that were there. I don’t know. Nothing has really changed. It still continues even though we’re not on the moon to capture attention.

Gary (03:28)
I don’t know that that changed. I think there’s always been a sense of wonder.

Eryn (03:32)
No, I’m not saying that it’s changed. I’m just saying that even the moon landing was 50 years ago. There hasn’t been anyone on the moon since. A human hasn’t been on the moon since 1972.

Gary (03:45)
Right.

Eryn (03:45)
And so I just think that’s why it’s fascinating that it continues to be such a point of fascination for so many people when nobody’s been on the moon in like 50 years.

Gary (04:00)
Well, think about how long from early human history until we got there is obviously a very long time. So I think somewhere to start maybe is why did it happen when it did? Like, why the 60s? I imagine technology has something to do with it or what’s going on in the world or why then why not earlier?

Mary (04:17)
Exactly. So I think, like most things, it started out with a disagreement. So, yes, technology was a big part of it, actually. Nazi Germany was the first to research space travel when they were developing ballistic missiles. So if you know anything about Germany country born out of war, they know what’s up when it comes to war. So they were looking into this. They created a V-2 rocket. And of course, we’re in World War II. So in the 1940s, the United States and the Soviet Union, of course, were allies fighting against Nazi Germany. And we’re trying to capture all of this German research that they’re doing on how to launch Rockets and such like this. And once World War II ends, and then the United States and Soviet Union realize, hey, we don’t like each other at all. This is a very basic retelling of the origins of the Cold War. We cooperated for a little while, and then we decided it wasn’t going to work out. So, of course, the United States, we detonate the first atomic bomb. We use it the end of World War II twice. So that sort of launches this arms race. And I think that bleeds over into this idea of a space race because if you have this bomb if you have a missile, you can carry a bomb higher. So it’s kind of connected. Does that make sense?

Gary (05:38)
It does. It’s interesting that it’s when I think of it, though, I also think, like, much earlier than that. I mean, early movies was like from the Earth to the moon. Right. You had this much earlier than warfare. It far predates World War II. But this concept that you could build, the concept of a rocket and bringing people safely to the moon is something that it’s interesting that they’re tied in together both kind of warfare and exploration. Right. I mean, the idea of gunpowder itself was not originally for warfare. Right. But you have this really interesting sort of mix of the technology needed to do this wonderful thing quite literally can also be a very deadly thing.

Eryn (06:21)
Also outside of just warfare, they would say space the next frontier. And so it’s almost like a continuation of manifest destiny.

Gary (06:33)
Let’s define that for our listeners at home who may be the idea on the younger side.

Eryn (06:40)
The idea that people can go out and conquer new lands and they have a manifest destiny or it’s almost like a biblical thing to take over and rule that land. So manifest destiny is the concept that when we were heading out west that we used to justify establishing any Western territory or taking it from other people. And so I think in some ways that space is kind of a continuation of that. It’s like who can get there first and say it’s theirs.

Mary (07:21)
Yeah, absolutely. Because so implicit in the idea of manifest destiny is that the United States, our way of doing everything, our culture, our way of life is superior. So anybody in our way has to sort of assimilate or get out of the way. But then space was this competition with the Soviet Union and our way capitalism is better than the Soviet way.

Eryn (07:45)
And it’s kind of like they work together then because it was a fear that during the Cold War we did not want the USSR, I see, to take over ideologically, territories. So it’s a frontier, quote, unquote thing, but it’s also an arms race.

Gary (08:14)
So there’s a clock ticking because if we don’t go there, someone else will.

Eryn (08:19)
I think those two run very much align together.

Gary (08:23)
Right.

Eryn (08:23)
And I think they both have connections to the space race.

Gary (08:26)
Which makes sense with the origin you were saying about the V-2 and things that if we don’t develop something, someone else could develop. This technology concept is out there. Whoever gets to it first, it’s very important whoever gets to it first.

Mary (08:40)
Right. And you lose face if you’re not there first because the Soviet Union is the first to launch a satellite. They launched Sputnik in 1957, and the United States just changes everything. Sputnik raises the stakes. Fun fact. Sputnik means fellow traveler in Russian, which I thought was kind of interesting.

Gary (09:03)
That’s very sweet. Had a huge fellow traveler. What’s that?

Eryn (09:08)
I just wonder who their fellow traveler is. Is it someone in their own country?

Mary (09:14)
I don’t know. That would be the sort of thing that I would say to my class of students, and then they would be like, Eryn, and ask a lot of follow-up questions that I can’t answer, and that’s what they will fixate on and remember.

Gary (09:29)
So if you have thoughts on that write to comments@frabricofhistory.org.

Mary (09:33)
It is an excellent question, and I don’t know, and I would say you should look that up because there’s lots of things I don’t know who came up with that. Anyway, that is a really interesting question.

Gary (09:43)
Yeah, I hear that. And I think about the impact on education also fun fact, how that led to so many changes in our education system, including required world language learning and Phys Ed classes and things like this, because that fear really had a huge impact to this day. Why science classes and why you study chemistry in high school, things like this that find their roots in that one launch of one fellow traveler.

Mary (10:10)
Right. So it really did. I think it was a watershed moment for the United States. Like, crap. We need to step up our games. So in 1958, so just one year later, Congress passes the National Aeronautics and Space Act, which creates NASA, and they also pass the National Defense Education Act, which leads to a lot of changes that Gary just mentioned. So the reason you have a lab in science class goes back to this act. So we need science, math, engineering. We need to beat the Soviets. So there was kind of this idea that science is going to equal our security. We need scientists, sure. Who can make us compete, not just compete, but win in this race to get up into space?

Eryn (10:53)
I think a lot of students who are listening to this are now going to take that quote from Mary and go back to all their teachers and say, I don’t know, the beginning of this was labs. We needed labs because of the space race and the Soviets. I don’t know. Some might say it’s still a problem. But I’m saying me being one of them in high school who did not like chemistry and science, I would take that back to my teacher and be like, do we really need this anymore?

Gary (11:24)
Yeah. I was on the side where I was reading comic books of the atomic age and all these amazing, fantastical things that science could do. And it was associated with greatness in a way, like really pushing yourself.

Eryn (11:37)
I found my greatness in other places.

Mary (11:43)
I think I appreciate it in high school, and I certainly appreciate now the importance of science and engineering. But in labs, I was just a kid who couldn’t turn on the Bunsen burner.

Gary (11:51)
Oh, interesting.

Mary (11:53)
And poured chromium nitrate down the sink once when it was supposed to be disposed of in the chemical hood. So I may have caused a fish kill in the Chesapeake Bay around the year 2005.

Gary (12:03)
Yeah, I was one of those model rocket kids.

Mary (12:07)
I would have wanted you as my lab partner, Gary.

Eryn (12:11)
I used moon boots. That’s about as far as I got.

Mary (12:17)
Education changes. So we’re trying to educate the next generation so we can compete in the space race, and that leads to some big changes. And also we had NASA created. So hopefully can the United States overtake Russia? We’ll see after this quick break.

Mary (12:52)
Okay, we’re back. So before we left you for a quick break, we had just created NASA with the hope that the United States can catch up in the space race. So NASA is created in and unfortunately, we weren’t doing so well. So the Russians, again, were the first to launch a human into space. So they beat us with Sputnik and now they beat us with an actual cosmonaut. So things aren’t looking really good. So in 1962, President Kennedy makes his famous speech about challenging the United States that we’re going to land someone on the moon.

Gary (13:30)
That’s a big claim for how we were doing it.

Mary (13:32)
Yeah. He was really setting the bar pretty high.

Gary (13:35)
So much so that we still refer to a moonshot as being, like, promising something or at least like scoping something out that we don’t even know how we can do it. But we really want to. Right. We still use that phrase.

Mary (13:49)
Yeah.

Eryn (13:50)
That or Hail Mary, right?

Gary (13:52)
Yeah.

Mary (13:54)
It’s a great speech. I used to play it for my students. So he’s speaking at Rice University in Houston, Texas, and he says, we choose to go to the moon. I’m not going to try to do his accent because I’ll sound like Mayor Quimby from The Simpsons, but we choose to go to the moon not because it is easy, but because it is hard. So that’s that famous line. So we’re going to put a man on the moon because we’re a leader of nations and.

Gary (14:20)
See, that’s really interesting, that goes back to that. Like, it’s about the getting there. Right. Rather than he didn’t say, like, we will get to the moon because of the Soviet Union.

Mary (14:28)
Right. You can’t say that.

Gary (14:29)
You can’t say, well, or even maybe that’s not what makes it something to rally behind.

Eryn (14:34)
At the root of both of it is a competition. You think, yes, it’s because it’s who’s going to get there first, who’s going to establish being number one. Right.

Gary (14:46)
Not just getting there at all, not just to show that it can be done.

Mary (14:51)
That’s what this rhetoric is implying.

Eryn (14:54)
Maybe it’s both, but it was still a space race. It was about who could get there. And I think the reason it became this competition was because it was something that hadn’t been done before. And it was about, well, we need to prove that because honestly, Russia was first. Right. Maybe they’re the first ones. Like, we’re going to try something that hasn’t been done before.

Gary (15:17)
Right.

Eryn (15:17)
And the United States said, oh, no, we’re going to get there first.

Mary (15:21)
We intend to be first. I’m quoting the speech again. Our leadership in science and an industry, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world’s leading space-faring nation.

Gary (15:39)
See it’s to rally behind this general idea of, like, we are awesome, we can do this. You can get really invested in a feeling. Right. We believe in ourselves. We don’t know how, but we’ll figure it out because we’re all very smart and we’re all really dedicated and we have perseverance, right?

Mary (15:58)
Yes. And so I think the space program really picks up in earnest in the 60s and then just the courage and the persistence of these astronauts. So there are accidents along the way, but we do launch Apollo 11 lands Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the moon. The third astronaut, I don’t know his name. And now I see Tom.

Gary (16:24)
Collins. Mike Collins. I’m sorry. I was thinking of something completely different. It’s after hours. Mike Collins. We can edit that or not. Anyway. Yeah. He was the right home, had he a loop a few times.

Mary (16:59)
Right. Still important, but very important. Like the teamwork, they couldn’t have done it without knowing his name or it’s not as his name is lost. Often we think of Neil Armstrong and even Buzz Aldrin.

Eryn (17:21)
Okay.

Gary (17:21)
I half blanked on our own names earlier today.

Mary (17:23)
Yeah, that’s true. All right, so we plant the American flag on the moon. It’s still there today. They collect a bunch of rocks and everybody watches it on TV. You can see the rocks at the Smithsonian.

Gary (17:36)
See, again, I’m so nerdy. To me. It’s like Mission Control was really cool to me, like all those other folks that’s in a commercial right now. But I think it’s such a powerful commercial indeed, which is about all of the people it takes to do something like that, to me is such a cool American 60s thing of like the computers and monitoring this and that and all the little factors and hidden figures that movie, all these things are just so powerful in terms of what it took and how much know how to do what. Sounds simple. Landing a thing on the moon, putting a flag in the ground, and yet it’s unbelievable what it took to do that.

Mary (18:16)
It is unbelievable. I shouldn’t have sounded so glib. No, you’re right, because I think it happened before I was born and we take it for granted. But all of the work and all of the people’s blood, sweat and tears and mental work energy to get that to happen is really amazing. It’s really a pretty incredible achievement what mankind can do when we put our money in where our mouth is. But Interestingly, once after the moon landing, space exploration, it sort of dies down in the 70s. So we got there and it was really exciting and everyone’s watching it on TV when these guys are walking around on the moon and then people sort of interest starts to Peter out a little bit, do you think?

Gary (19:03)
Because the goal is less clear. Right. The goal, again, of like being the first group to put a flag on a plot of land on another celestial body. Very clear goal, you know, when you did it.

Mary (19:16)
Right.

Gary (19:17)
And do you think tossing it out there that it was because another goal wasn’t as clear, right? Is it like orbit for a certain amount of time?

Eryn (19:30)
Once you got to the moon and a lot of the work that NASA has been doing since it’s just a lot of science and different research, they all individually have goals. But there’s not one big goal anymore. And it’s not that race that I was talking about earlier. It’s no longer a competition. It’s just very particular and nuanced research that’s getting done.

Gary (20:00)
Right, exactly. I mean, tons of work is happening. It’s just not the kind that people are around their TVs watching. Even today. We are trying to get to asteroids to mine things like these are cool things.

Eryn (20:12)
Yeah. Also, the picture of that black hole came out.

Gary (20:15)
Right.

Eryn (20:17)
That was pretty cool. That was something that also had befuddled scientists for quite some time. And they’re like, we finally have a photo of a black hole.

Gary (20:29)
So if there’s a really clear goal. And again, I think that’s kind of writ large. We were talking earlier about the idea of a moonshot, like as a nation, being able to rally around a particular thing is very powerful. And I think there’s doing the hard work that you need every. And that’s back to the persistence thing that I think there may be a time again. But I’m just saying, just during the 70s, like a lot was going on in the 70s. It just wasn’t TV broadcast prime-time stuff.

Mary (20:55)
Right. And there’s also going back to what Eryn said about the race. So we’re pursuing a policy of détente in the Cold War. So we’re de-escalating, we’re sort of ratching it back. So it sort of dies. The quote, unquote sexiness of manned flight to the moon just kind of peters out. But we start using space shuttles US space program in the 1980s and the building of the space station. So it space didn’t go away. We’re still doing the research. And then you have the age of the space shuttle.

Eryn (21:26)
And the space shuttle was just to take as a kind of a people mover type of thing. Yeah. Because I think that’s something.

Mary (21:44)
I hear space shuttle all the time.

Gary (21:45)
Right.

Mary (21:46)
All the time.

Eryn (21:46)
But I haven’t ever actually stopped to think about the purpose of a space shuttle.

Gary (21:50)
It’s being reusable. That’s what made it remarkable. The idea that you could land it like an airplane when you were done with it and use it again was unheard of. Right. Prior to that, you had to drop it in the ocean and lose this multi-million dollar piece of technology. Yeah.

Eryn (22:05)
But I think even if younger listeners, whoever it’s like, what is the purpose of having a space shuttle? Yes. For it to be reused. Yes. To move people. But I guess supplies as well, right?

Gary (22:18)
Exactly.

Eryn (22:19)
Yeah.

Mary (22:19)
And you can see the space shuttle at the Air and Space Museum in Chantilly. Is that where Columbia is? It Columbia? That’s there no Columbia. Right. I don’t know which one it is then, but there is a space shuttle there. Maybe we’ll look that up and get back to you during our week.

Gary (22:39)
I want to say Enterprise is there.

Mary (22:42)
That’s Star Trek.

Gary (22:44)
It is Star Trek.

Mary (22:45)
Oh, okay. I was like, are you pulling my leg, Gary?

Gary (22:49)
Am I wrong?

Eryn (22:50)
To be determined.

Mary (22:54)
Anyway, the final space shuttle flight occurs in 2011.

Gary (22:59)
Right.

Mary (23:00)
And we have not a human has not been on the moon since 1972, but we still have NASA. So what does the future hold with space?

Eryn (23:10)
A lot of privatization that’s been fascinating to watch is a lot of these billionaires deciding to test out their own spaceships, for better or for worse.

Gary (23:22)
I think it’s fuzzy when it comes to the geography of space. Right. So, I mean, on a map, the United States has some pretty clear boundaries, East, West, North, south, that kind of thing. But as far as vertically going like who and what jurisdiction and what you can do in space, I think it’s a little fuzzy for a lot of folks.

Eryn (23:40)
Right. Well, that’s why you have these random billionaires who aren’t attached to any specific country, really being able to take these spaceships up there because they’re like, oh, it doesn’t matter to whom we’re doesn’t matter who we’re sending up there. Really? Because you’re talking about the geography of countries. I’m talking about private companies. So geography. Geography implies a specific country.

Gary (24:09)
Citizens of countries.

Eryn (24:11)
Yes. But they’re also privatizing something. So if they’re offering that.

Gary (24:16)
They’re not representing the country when they send someone into space.

Mary (24:20)
Correct.

Eryn (24:20)
They have a private, private for-profit company.

Gary (24:24)
Right.

Eryn (24:24)
And anyone who’s willing to pay a million dollars to go up in space, they’ll take them there.

Gary (24:29)
Right. And to show that it is possible to develop technology that can bring people up into space for, say, vacation for whatever reason, one would go into space.

Mary (24:39)
An unparalleled customer experience.

Gary (24:42)
What are you quoting?

Mary (24:43)
I am quoting Virgin Galactic. Their mission is to be the spaceline for Earth. Like a spaceline using space for good while delivering an unparalleled customer experience.

Gary (24:54)
So a really nice trip to space.

Mary (24:56)
Yes.

Gary (24:58)
Not representing a country or any kind of military thing just to go space for space. Much like early airplanes for vacation. There were airplanes, obviously, for the military, but they’re also airplanes for vacation. And you can do that.

Mary (25:13)
I’m good on Earth, but I respect that. If people have the money and want to go, then they should be able to go.

Eryn (25:19)
Some people are just so enraptured by it.

Gary (25:23)
It would be cool.

Eryn (25:24)
I wouldn’t even want to be on the moon or anywhere in space. It just doesn’t sound that fun.

Mary (25:30)
I think it’s all about your priorities. So I think the priority is something we can explore a little bit more when we come back from break.

Mary (25:55)
Okay. So we’re back and before we left you, we were talking about this idea of value. So is it worth paying all this money to go into space? So there is a definite cost to go up into space. Right.

Gary (26:10)
Even though it’s decades, it’s still not exactly cheap and easy.

Mary (26:14)
Right.

Gary (26:15)
Despite having shuttles.

Mary (26:16)
Yeah, it wasn’t cheap either. So NASA spent $150,000,000,000 in today’s money to put a man on the moon, adjusted for GDP. Any ideas what that would be in today’s money?

Gary (26:35)
Like three times as much.

Mary (26:41)
A trillion dollars,

Eryn (26:44)
1 million dollars

Mary (26:46)
$640,000,000,000 in today’s money,

Gary (26:49)
$640,000,000,000.

Eryn (26:52)
To put someone on the moon.

Mary (26:55)
To put a man on the moon

Gary (26:56)
It’s in the history books.

Eryn (26:57)
But yeah, I wonder, none of us might have the answer to this.

Gary (27:02)
Great.

Eryn (27:02)
But it’s something to think about. I guess it was public knowledge how much they spent at the time it had to be.

Mary (27:15)
Well, they must have known.

Eryn (27:16)
Freedom of Information Act. Did that exist?

Mary (27:17)
That didn’t exist? No, but they must have been for the conversion of how much money was being spent having to be transparent.

Eryn (27:25)
But I just wonder if they had what sounded like a very positive public backing.

Gary (27:33)
Right.

Mary (27:34)
Well, it does.

Eryn (27:34)
I wonder. That is a lot of money.

Mary (27:37)
It is.

Gary (27:38)
But I think that’s why it’s a question of value. Rather, what is the value of getting to the moon? The equivalent of $648,000,000,000.

Eryn (27:47)
Were there people who had a problem with that?

Mary (27:51)
Oh, I’m sure, yeah, absolutely. And I think there’s still people. So NASA still exists today and every now and then you pop up, why do we still need this? But in the 60s, for sure, there were people who didn’t see they valued spending that money on things a little bit closer to home rather than putting someone on the moon. So actually in 1966, so this is before someone landed on the moon, but after President Kennedy’s challenge that we would land right. In the process, in the process, the space race. Martin Luther King says when he’s testifying to the US Senate on race and urban poverty, in a few years we can be assured that we will set a man on the moon, and with an adequate telescope, he will be able to see the slums on Earth with their intensified congestion, decay, and turbulence.

Eryn (28:43)
So was he, therefore, implying that if all the money that we’ve spent to get this man to the moon. He’ll look back on Earth that we didn’t spend money on?

Mary (28:53)
Or just look back on Earth that’s full of problems.

Eryn (28:58)
Full of problems where that money could have been used for those said problems. That was the implication.

Mary (29:06)
And this is something that I actually just learned about today, because when you’re a little kid, at least when I was a little kid and you learned about the space race and the moon landing. It’s this great achievement. And there’s less on the people or less on people who didn’t really question it or didn’t see it maybe as an achievement because there were bigger problems that needed to be solved. So even when the rocket, when the Saturn Five rocket is launched, that’s the rocket that takes Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins to the moon, there was a protest there. So there was the Southern Christian Leadership Conference. So that was the group that Martin Luther King was in charge of in 1969. Of course, he’s already been assassinated, but his successor, Ralph Abernathy, carried a sign that said $12 a day to feed an astronaut. We could feed a starving child for $8. We may go on from this day to Mars and Jupiter and even to the heavens beyond. But as long as racism, poverty and hunger and war prevail on Earth, we as a civilized nation have failed.

Eryn (30:17)
Pretty powerful.

Gary (30:18)
It is very powerful.

Eryn (30:19)
It’s also really interesting because I guess maybe in my student’s mind, the civil rights movement and the space race always operated in very parallel fields. And I never thought of them kind of crossing over each other.

Mary (30:34)
Yes, I think that is true for a lot of classrooms. You teach a topic and you don’t. They are all like.

Eryn (30:42)
Yeah, they’re all happening.

Mary (30:43)
I’m taking this interconnected motion with my hands. That’s what I’m doing.

Eryn (30:48)
And talk to one another.

Mary (30:50)
Right.

Gary (30:50)
They’re not just simultaneous. There’s actual.

Mary (30:52)
Yeah.

Eryn (30:52)
And sometimes I think even as a kid, I forget that they were happening at the same time because they seem like such disparate events.

Gary (30:59)
Right. It’s a powerful way to rephrase what was happening in the earlier segment on President Kennedy’s speech about showing greatness by doing this and the idea that if a nation is truly great, what does that mean for how it’s treating its citizens and how things are going? You know what I mean?

Mary (31:19)
Yeah.

Gary (31:19)
Like, that greatness for some reason. Maybe it’s a strange parallel to try to make a connection here with our fabric. But I think about like in other civilizations throughout history, the civilization has to get to a certain point to do the creativity. So I’m thinking of like Athens. Right. You need to get to a certain point internally, your structure in order to create art and to do these amazing other wondrous things. And so I think looking at landing on the moon as being this amazing thing, that’s proof that a civilization, the American civilization is great is one perspective. But then part of that narrative is. Yes, but is it entirely great in terms of how it is structurally and how it’s working out?

Eryn (32:01)
And I think it’s like, who is it surveying, right.

Mary (32:05)
Yeah. That’s a really great short way of putting it here. I like that a lot. No, I’m not being facetious. I’m serious. But I think it is an amazing achievement. I’m thinking of a meme that I used to show my students it was a picture of Neil Armstrong on the moon, and it said we did not get to the moon by screwing around on our phones. I may have adjusted the language in that for the students, but it really is. I think it’s a tremendous achievement. At the same time, there’s a whole lot of other problems going on in the United States that needed attention and weren’t getting the attention, perhaps that they need it, they deserved so. It’s a complicated, messy story, And I think we don’t always tell it that way, But I think it’s important to do so, and that doesn’t make the achievement any less great, in my opinion. It’s just that it colors it, and I don’t know, it makes it more nuanced.

Eryn (33:11)
I completely understand, because even within NASA and space and everything we’re doing there Thinking about how long it took to get a female astronaut. And last year, we delayed the spacewalk because the spacesuit for these female astronauts, they couldn’t design it to fit them properly, and they had to go back and rework it. And I think that’s another question, like, who is this serving? And who is it important to and who was included in this great achievement at the time? In the 1960s, it was like a white man, and that was it, right? Not for everyone else. And then how long did it take until he got a female? And I don’t even know the answer to that, but, and I think that’s still being built upon.

Mary (34:09)
I think it’s important to celebrate our achievements and what we are capable of doing but to acknowledge at the same time that there is work to be done. I think that is certainly true. It will always be true. Nothing is simple. So we are running out of time here today on the fabric of history, but we’d love to hear your thoughts. Did you see the moon landing? Have you seen the moon rocks? Have you been to the air and space Museum? What do you think about space and the future? What does it hold? Are we going to Mars? We’d love to hear your thoughts so you can email us at comments@fabricoffhistory.org and we’ll see you next time.

Gary (34:49)
Thanks so much for joining me.

Mary (34:50)
Bye.

Gary (34:51)
Keep looking up.

Intro/Outro (34:58)
The Bill of Rights Institute engages, educates, and empowers individuals with a passion for the freedom and opportunity that exists in a free society. Check out our educational resources and programs on our website mybri.org. Any questions or suggestions for future episodes? We’d love to hear from you. Just email us at comments@fabricofhistory.org. And don’t forget to visit us on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram To stay connected and informed about future episodes. Thank you for listening.