On the Space Race and Cathedrals

By Gary Topping–

Many years ago, a friend of mine spent several months in Mexico City while his wife, a university undergraduate, was on a study abroad program immersing herself in the Spanish language and Mexican culture.  He was and is very much opposed to religion, particularly Catholicism, and during that time he found much evidence to strengthen his bias.  While they enjoyed and appreciated the beauty of the city’s ornate churches, he in particular found a reprehensible contrast between all that wealth and beauty and the fact that many residents of the city were so destitute that they gleaned their daily bread from the garbage dump.  Why couldn’t some of that money be spent on relieving that abject poverty?

It is a question that has resounded down through the centuries, and it has lost none of its strength despite the fact that one of its early proponents was none other than Judas Iscariot, who objected that the woman who anointed Jesus’ head with expensive ointment was wasting money that could have been spent on the poor.  Being on the same side as Judas is not where most people would choose to be, but as I say, it hasn’t been much of a deterrent in this case.

A secular version of the argument emerged as the so-called “space race” developed during the 1960s and the United States marshaled vast sums of money to beat the Soviet Union to the moon.  That was the same decade, after all, when our country was beginning to arouse its social conscience and to realize our vast inequalities of wealth and political power and to waste equally vast sums on a war in southeast Asia that we would eventually lose.  Why couldn’t some of that money be spent on our desperately serious domestic needs?

I was in my first year of graduate school at Northern Arizona University in 1969, and I remember watching the moon landing with some friends sitting in front of a grainy black-and-white television set in a motel room in Phoenix.  We were all aware that we were witnessing an amazing technological achievement, but I styled myself as a student radical in those days and I must have objected to the expense of the whole project.  Further, I had been, I think, a sophomore in high school when the Soviets had humiliated us with the success of their Sputnik program, and I vividly remembered all the hand-wringing that that had evoked in this country.  When President Kennedy announced, in 1961, that we would put a man on the moon by the end of the decade, I considered that a form of national egotism that poorly became us.  Another strike against the space program.

Nowadays, as I have morphed into a geriatric radical from a student one, I’m no longer so sure of myself.  Man does not live by bread alone, I remind myself.  While those lavish churches in Mexico City were built by donations the peasants of that city could ill afford, those churches provided almost the only element of beauty in those peoples’ lives.  I doubt that many of those poor people regarded their donations as burdensome.  Similarly, the space program represents a triumph of the spirit of scientific curiosity, and thus it is a manifestation of a fundamental and good human quality.  Finally, as NASA has always emphasized during its funding appeals, the race to the moon (and soon Mars) has spun off a myriad of technological innovations that have made life easier for all of us—even opponents of the program.