The John Griff Column: With a bit of effort, we can solve anything…
Every once in a while, if you’re lucky, something happens either close to you or within your sphere of influence, or with someone you know that changes your outlook on life, the universe and everything. Once it’s changed, it’s changed for good – or at least until the next change comes along and changes it again. Something like that happened to me last weekend, quite out of the blue.
‘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…’
In 1961, the then President of the United States, John F Kennedy, used the words above as he challenged his fellow Americans – and humanity – to achieve a specific goal. The space race was well and truly on by then. Being the first nation to land humans on the surface of our closest heavenly neighbour and return them safely to Earth again would be about as great a demonstration of national capability as could be conceived. But it would also be a clarion call for others to do similarly and push human endeavour forwards in a variety of directions, not just towards the outer reaches of the solar system, and beyond. In the event, although his challenge would be accepted and achieved, assassination robbed Kennedy of seeing the day that the Apollo 11 mission blasted off from launch pad 39A Cape Canaveral. Bound for a successful landing of the Eagle lander on the surface of the moon and man’s first steps on its surface – it completed the challenge by returning astronauts Aldrin, Armstrong and Collins to a safe splashdown in the Pacific.
In 1969 when the Eagle landed on the moon – with only a few precious seconds of fuel remaining – I was a 5-year-old boy staring intently at the black and white pictures on the TV of my family home in Wootton. I was completely captivated in what was unfolding. I devoured every moment of the mission and it set up an interest for me which remains to this day. That interest got spiked anew at a venue called Lightroom, just behind St Pancras station in London, on a wet Sunday afternoon last weekend. Lois and I were there to watch the ‘Moon Walkers’ 360 degree projection which took as it’s subject the Kennedy challenge by looking back – and forward to the forthcoming Artemis programme which aims to put humans back on the surface of the Moon over forty years since they were last there.
Watching the projection, I was struck by the voice and enthusiasm of narrator and co-writer Tom Hanks, who, in just over 45 minutes, managed to encapsulate the scale of Kennedy’s challenge, the achievements of NASA and the wonderment of a child similarly struck, like me, by what was going on as the world neared the 70s.
At one point, and in an entirely personal observation, Hanks states his belief that if mankind can solve the kinds of challenges associated with the process of reaching for the stars as Apollo did and Artemis is aiming to, then ‘…there is nothing that we cannot solve…’. He may have a point. Sitting in the Lightroom as his words struck me, my imagination was again sparked and the journalist in me turned to events in Downing Street which played out earlier this week. Ukraine, Great Britain, France and Germany were all represented in the same room, as Western Europe again stated its support of its Eastern neighbours under ultimate duress. Only negotiation will conquer that particular challenge – and one day it surely will. To save lives though, that has to be sooner, rather than later.
As we travelled back home by train, I reflected on what Tom Hanks’ commentary had asserted. My interest in the moon landing of 1969 had captured the imagination of the then 5-year-old me. JFK’s words as a 44-year-old President meant nothing to me – but now, with the experience that life has brought to me, they certainly do. Tom Hanks is a few years older than me, but not many. How many people – of whatever age - could be similarly inspired to do ‘the other things…because they are hard’, for the greater good? It doesn’t have to be technical innovation reaching for the stars. It could be advances in medical science, understanding and repairing the world around us – or perhaps more fundamentally, addressing the fractures between nations and finding a healing process to unite us for the common good. It will take a lot of effort, rather than just a bit – but if we aim for the stars, we might just reach the moon.
Maybe John F Kennedy’s words can achieve resonance again – if we choose to listen to them.