America, the Impossible Superpower

America has a remarkable way of treating the impossible like a logistics problem. In 1961, after the country had put a man in space for all of fifteen minutes, President Kennedy promised to go one step further. A giant leap further, in fact. America spent the GDP of a mid-sized country, employed 400,000 of the finest minds of a generation, built things, broke them, built them again, and finally strapped three men to a rocket with less computing power than a washing machine. Somehow, within eight years of setting the target, and only 66 years after inventing powered flight, it landed a man on the moon.

What other power could have achieved such a thing, let alone dreamed it? The USSR had ambitions, certainly, but ultimately didn’t have the right stuff. Today, the European Union – which resembles the USSR in some ways, although not in industrial output – looks at Elon Musk’s rocket catcher and shakes its head. Not out of awed disbelief, but because it knows, on…