Goodnight moonshot: turning the lights out on a government-aggrandizing metaphor.

• Author: Welch, Matt
• Position: From the Top - Column

"HALF A CENTURY AGO, when the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik, we had no idea how we'd beat them to the moon," President Barack Obama said in his 2011 State of the Union speech. "The science wasn't there yet. NASA didn't even exist. But after investing in better research and education, we didn't just surpass the Soviets; we unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs. This is our generation's Sputnik moment."

Was the president rising to the challenge of some new technology that America's adversaries were mastering? Was he doubling down on the vague, far-off promise by his predecessor to send a mission to Mars? No. He was talking about government loans for solar panels, federal spending on research, and the even more prosaic work of getting his preferred budget passed.

As The Washington Times pointed out at the time, "The sense of national purpose that followed the Sputnik launch was not based on an abstract sense of the need for better education programs; it was a national security emergency.... [Obama's] 'Sputnik moment' is a lifeless call for more aimless government programs and regulatory meddling." And as the country has since learned, with the Solyndra scandal and an endless series of unsatisfying budget confrontations, delivering a top-down solar energy breakthrough is as maddeningly elusive as the once-routine act of getting an annual appropriations bill out of the Senate Budget Committee.

These are failures not just of governance but of language. Ever since President John F. Kennedy's famous "Man on the Moon" speech in May 1961, and especially since the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) delivered on JFK's "goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth," succeeding presidents and the commentators who egg them on have been using the moonshot as a metaphor for successively less urgent, scientific, and attainable goals.

Three weeks after Neil Armstrong announced that "the Eagle has landed," President Richard Nixon declared that "abolishing poverty, putting an end to dependency--like reaching the moon a decade ago--may seem impossible. But in the spirit of Apollo we can lift our sights and marshal our best efforts." Not only is the American landscape still blemished by poverty and dependency on government, including sickening amounts of dependency by the rich, but the War on Poverty...