I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth. –President John F. Kennedy to a special joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961

On this date 39 years ago, the national goal set to us by Kennedy was accomplished when Apollo 11, carrying Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin, and Michael Collins, splashed down safely in the Pacific Ocean. Over eight years of singularly focused scientific and engineering discovery was realized in this achievement. Many people say it’s still the greatest achievement of mankind.

Kennedy’s challenge to the nation became a calling for a Cause and fired our national imagination. It forged the will within the nation such that nothing could stop the Cause. Not the daunting technical challenges. Not the tragic deaths of the Apollo 1 crew in a capsule fire during testing. Not the naysayers who cried the project was too expensive. Not the turbulent social upheaval of the 1960’s. Not the Cuban Missile Crisis. Not the Vietnam War. Not the murder of John F. Kennedy, nor Martin Luther King, nor Robert Kennedy.

World War II was unquestionably the greatest focal period of the nation’s collective spirit during the 20th century, but the Apollo program of the 1960’s was surely the second. And at least during WWII, the need of singular focus on winning the war was obvious. And while the Apollo program was partially driven by Russianphobia, the benefits were certainly less nebulous than winning a war against the Axis Powers.

And the costs! According to Project Apollo article on Wikipedia, the final cost of the project was about $23 Billion in 1969 dollars ($135 Billion in 2005 dollars)! Again, other than war, when has any country committed itself to such an endeavor?

Kennedy knew the magnitude of the task he was setting, but as he said in his famous speech at Rice University:

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.

Setting such a bold goal for the country was a sign of great leadership. Somehow inspiring the public imagination and national will to actually accomplish the single greatest peacetime achievement in history, is, most assuredly, leadership truly worthy of being called presidential.

Something to think about in this election year.

File this entry under "what I learned today".

From the show Understanding on the Science Channel:

If you were to represent the entire electromagnetic spectrum (from radio waves to gamma rays) as a 2500 mile long roll of movie film, the section of visible light would be one frame of film. Amazingly, most of the electromagnetic radiation emitted by stars falls within that one frame.

I recently viewed an exhibit about the Hubble Space Telescope at the S.C. State Museum. I’ve always been fascinated with astronomy, physics, and science in general. To be honest, though, I found the exhibit shallow and disappointing; however, the exhibit did impress upon me, once again, the sheer enormity of space.

"Yeah, yeah, yeah", you’re thinking, "we all know space is big. DUH!" And you’re right. Everyone does know the distances are huge, but I don’t think they really comprehend the size. For instance, Alpha Centauri is the nearest neighboring star to our Sun at only 4.3 light years away. Only 4.3 light years equates to 25,265,838,509,316.77 miles! That’s 25 trillion miles! Then again, somehow the concept of a trillion doesn’t convey the magnitude (pun intended) of the number. Imagine a stack of paper 25 trillion sheets high. Any idea how tall that stack would be? A sheet of standard copier paper is 0.0038" thick so a stack of 25 trillion sheets would be 1,499,368 miles high — or a little over 6 times the distance to the moon!

As I said, it’s 25 trillion miles (4.3 light years) to the nearest star other than the Sun, but this is a mere speck compared to the size of our galaxy. The Milky Way is 100,000 light years in diameter, over 23,000 times the distance from the Sun to Alpha Centauri — 587,577,639,751,552,790 miles. Now that corresponding stack of paper is 34,485,464,000 (34 billion) miles high, roughly 7.5 times the radius of our solar system!

The farthest astronomical object yet discovered is a galaxy estimated to be 13 billion light years distant. That distance is 130,000 times greater than the diameter of the Milky Way. Now the corresponding stack of paper is 4,483,110,320,000,000 miles high — over 177 times the distance to Alpha Centauri!

It’s not just distances that are mind-boggling. It’s estimated that the Milky Way contains 200 billion stars. And the Milky Way is just one of an estimated 125 billion galaxies! In all, the estimated number of stars in the known universe is 10²¹ — that’s 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 stars. Interestingly, depending on whose estimate you use, that’s roughly equivalent to the number of grains of sand on Earth.

…as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore… –Genesis 22:17