On 12 September 1962, US President John F. Kennedy rose to his feet at Rice University in Houston, Texas to deliver what would prove to be one of the most memorable speeches in human history.
The speech concluded: “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 organise 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.”
Delivered just 13 years after the end of the Second World War, that speech not only set the scene for the coming space race between the US and the Soviet Union; it also encapsulated a post-War ambition in which not challenge was considered too big or too challenging.
In the years and decades that followed, the US and the world achieved things that would have been unimaginable just a few years earlier. The US put a man on the moon and built an interstate highway network that criss-crossed the nation and brought commerce and inter-connectivity to even the remotest areas.
In the UK, we rebuilt entire cities damaged and destroyed during the war; continued the construction of our motorway network, completing the M1 and then adding the M4, M5 and M6 in relatively quick succession. We also forged a tunnel beneath the sea-bed to link the UK with mainland Europe.
Elsewhere, we have seen buildings grow ever taller, with some now stretching almost a kilometre into the sky.
I am paraphrasing Will McAvoy from The Newsroom here: “We built great big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe, cured diseases. We reached for the stars.”
And then, we didn’t.
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