On September 12, it was forty years since John F. Kennedy made his famous Rice University speech, in which he supposedly laid out the rationale for the Apollo program.

The words are noble, and inspiring, but in some ways false or misleading, and they set us off down the wrong road, at least for those of us interested in a vibrant space policy--one that opens up vast new economic, political and spiritual opportunities for humankind off planet. Here is the paragraph that I have always found most troublesome:

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

There are two problems with it. One is that, though the words are lofty, they don't really stand up to any critical analysis. "Because it is hard" is not, in and of itself, a good reason to do something.

It would be hard to move Pikes Peak from Colorado to Florida. It would be even harder to build a life-size replica of the World Trade Center with used q-tips. Those things would also serve to "organize and measure the best of our energies and skills." That doesn't make them worth doing.

No, there should be intrinsic reasons for these national endeavors. The journey is important, but so should be the destination. Unfortunately, it wasn't, as evidenced by Kennedy's reason for choosing it. There were two main options in the early sixties as goals for the space race with the Soviets: a space station, or a Moon landing. Wernher von Braun, the nation's leading rocket engineer, told Kennedy that he couldn't guarantee that we could beat the Russians in building a space station. So the Moon it was.

And the fact that the destination wasn't important is the second problem--it is why our space program is, and has been, relatively moribund for decades. We seem to remain hung up on doing it just because it's hard.

Yes, there is no doubt that in 1962, sending men to the Moon was hard. Astronomically hard.

We had barely learned how to launch a man into low earth orbit. We had no experience with space operations. We didn't know how long man could survive in weightlessness. We didn't know what the composition of the lunar surface was like. We didn't understand the radiation environment between the two orbs. We were still learning how to miniaturize electronics, and computers still used discrete transistors for processing, and iron pellets for memory.

There were a lot of things that we knew we didn't know, and there were even more things that we hadn't even learned that we needed to know, and didn't.

But that was then, and this is now. Unfortunately, we still reach back to that speech for a crutch, and it still provides a flawed foundation for our space policy.

"Because it is hard" has long become a convenient mantra for the current way of doing business.

"Because it is hard," when things don't go right, the people doing them always have a convenient excuse for failure, even forty years on, and even in the face of obvious management disasters. They can ask for billions for a new program, "because it is hard." And when it screws up, they can say, "see, we told you it was hard--we just proved it. Apparently, you have to give us even more money."

It makes it harder to get other funding sources, or try other approaches, as well. "Because it is hard" means that only a government agency can do it, and any investor who puts money into a private space venture might as well throw it on the table in Vegas, or onto the compost pile.

"Because it is hard" means that very few get to go, and that the only way to do it is the NASA way--study your math and science, figure out what kind of personality traits and characteristics they want, and then apply to be an astronaut, and hope that, against all odds and the other hundreds or thousands of applicants, you're accepted. Then hope that they eventually get from a three-person station to a six person station, and you actually get a chance to fly sometime before you have grandchildren and retire.

But there's a problem with this argument. "Because it is hard" doesn't really explain why you do a controlled flight into the terrain of Mars, destroying a hundred-million-dollar probe, because one group of engineers is using metric, and the other is using English units.

"Because it is hard" doesn't provide an excuse for pouring a billion dollars into a single hangar queen in Palmdale, California called X-33, that had so many risky (and unnecessary) technologies in it that its failure was almost assured from the beginning.

It's not 1962 any more. It's the twenty first century. We have more computer power in our kitchen toasters than the Apollo capsule had. We have new materials that were barely imaginable then. We've learned more about the space environment in the last couple decades than we had learned in all of history leading up to that point.

Folks, it's not that hard any more. The only thing that's really hard is getting people to think about space in a different way, and raising the money for the real market. That market is the millions of people who actually want to do things in space, as opposed to simply assuring jobs in certain Congressional districts, and supporting foreign policy objectives (goals which can be accomplished without actually launching anything, as the space station program proved for a decade and a half).

After four decades, we need to give the "space is hard" mantra a rest. Try these on for size.

"Space is fun."

"Space is adventure."

"Space is new resources."

"Space is American free enterprise."

"Space is freedom."

"Space is important."

Personally, I have a fair bit of disdain for space enthusiasts who are either deluded or untruthful about their reasons for wanting greater effort in space exploration. There are very serious long term rationale for increasing our manned and unmanned space capabilities (such as the long-term safety of humanity). However, there are no serious immediate reasons why we should have manned spaceflight. The best reason is to continue to develop it at some level because it will be important long term. That, however, requires very small expenditures and very lack-luster activities. The only other valid reasons are commercial or emotional. There is no reason to deny those. My main reason for being a space enthusiast is because I think it's cool, and because I might someday want to go into space myself. That's a perfectly legitimate reason. As is developing the commercial spaceflight industry, including space tourism.

Unfortunately, as it stands now the really big and exciting stuff (like manned Mars missions) would be so expensive that they would require government funding. And the government tends to prefer better reasons than "because I think it's cool" for spending gigabucks. So people who think it's cool try to create better reasons (perhaps they even believe them). Though no matter how fervently they try they cannot convice me that spending billions of dollars RIGHT NOW in order to investigate microgravity, or Mars, or whatever, is a wise expenditure. Especially when R&D in aerospace will likely make such endeavors cheaper by orders of magnitude within the next few decades.

"Because its hard" is the core of socialism. By its very nature socialism is anti-competitive, it is stagnant. What once was difficult and expensive remains difficult and expensive. And thus it further reinforces the notion that the endeavor is by its very nature difficult and expensive, and is the exclusive realm of a massive government agency. But competition has a knack for turning difficult things into easy things. We could spend billions of dollars sending humans to Mars, or the Moon, or continuing with the ISS, but in reality the little guys like XCOR are more likely to pave the way in opening up space.

I'm not sure that the phrase "because it is hard" is the root of evil for JFK's vision. In 1962, there was no "easy" path into space, so in a way I think he was just being realistic.

The tragedy of Apollo was that there was no follow through. So we junked it and have then been trying in vain to recreate it for the past thirty years.

Of course 40 years later, things are (or at least can be) easier.

I'm not sure that the phrase "because it is hard" is the root of evil for JFK's vision. In 1962, there was no "easy" path into space, so in a way I think he was just being realistic.

The tragedy of Apollo was that there was no follow through. So we junked it and have then been trying in vain to recreate it for the past thirty years.

Of course 40 years later, things are (or at least can be) easier.

When von Braun came to the United States, he brought the world's most advanced rockets with him. Unfortunately he also brought a culture that was already stagnant and in decline.

Authoritarian systems in part rest upon preventing competing ideas from taking root. These systems also tend to put blame on anybody but the leadership. Failure is explained not by wrong ideas, but by external forces, lack of resources or internal subversion of some sort.

I saw this kind of behavior in my 9 years at Goddard Space Flight Center. I also saw it get worse in those 9 years.

Sad to say, I can see some of the same stuff in space interest groups. There's too much talking and not enough listening. Although, thankfully, there is a lot more openness in space interest groups than in the aerospace establishment.

The problem with Kennedy's "space race" is that it turned a scientific endeaver into a political one. The unstated reason we were doing it was to upstage the Soviets. Once that was accomplished there was no reason to continue. Gobs of money were thrown at a venture of dubious scientific value, with little regard for expense. Meanwhile, more cost-effective unmanned exploration languished for lack of funds.

The much-hyped spin-off technologies could never justify the expense of the high-dollar program, and the current space station program has a similar effect of siphoning off money that could otherwise be used for more worthwhile projects.

Both programs ultimately serve to discredit space exploration and to cause taxpayers to wonder why they should support space exploration at all.

I think that y'all are parsing a political statement a bit much. The phrase "because it is hard", while it may be twisted to suit state-direction of a key science, was, I think, intended more as a rallying cry. (This is sorta like the folks who inevitably sneer at the "Ich bin ein Berliner" speech. Yes, Kennedy got it wrong. It was still a stirring moment.)

Moreover, the phrase hearkens back to Teddy Roosevelt's call for Americans to "lead the strenuous life," and it was a recognition (as Mark Whittington notes above) that the path would be long and hard. I think the point was that being hard should not be enough to cause us to shirk, falter, or not pursue the cause.

Given a choice, wouldn't it be better to have a slightly flawed phrase and a more robust space program than grammatically correct speech-ifyin' and the anemic space program we have now?

Dean, I think that you missed my point. The anemic space program we have now is a consequence of that "slightly flawed phrase." Or at least, that's my thesis.

Rand,

I think what I was trying to get at was that the speech was fine, but that the policies that were enacted were bad. The speech, of course, didn't exactly determine the policy, any more than the argument that JFK saying "We will pay any price, bear any burden, in defense of liberty" meant that Vietnam was, in and of that speech, inevitable.

I guess my point was simply that the phrases in a speech are intended to galvanize public support---NOT to lay out the actual mechanics of a program.

JFK (and Sorenson) produced beautiful rhetoric. They were not necessarily the best policy-makers.

And my point is that that same rhetoric created the flawed mind set for the space program that persists to this very day.

I always wonder what some of those "more worthwhile projects" are, that people bring up when criticizing the exploration of space. I am sure that there are some worthwhile ones, but I would guess that most of them are themselves "black holes" that offer very little return on investment as compared to ...yes, the technological spinoffs (which continue to affect each of us and our families in ways to numerous to count). One also cannot put a value on the inspiration of our youth and the jumpstart on opening up our future options as the planet becomes a little more cramped. No Kennedy fan, I still think he deserves credit for getting us there, even if the motives were political.