In public, former U.S. President John F. Kennedy spoke inspiring words about the space program. “We choose to go to the moon,” Kennedy said in a speech at Rice University in September 1962, not because reaching that goal would be easy but because it would be hard: “because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.”
Kennedy’s rhetoric birthed the moonshot myth: that a dynamic, doomed young leader rallied a country to great heights through research and engineering. It was only ever partially true, if that, but the image endures, from television shows like Disney+’s The Right Stuff and Apple TV’s alternate history series For All Mankind to how corporations and governments refer to their ambitious goals as “moonshots.” Google’s parent, Alphabet, brags of its “moonshot” factory. As vice president, Joe Biden promoted the “Cancer Moonshot”—a “new national effort to end cancer as we know it.”
