MITT ROMNEY needed an iconic representation of the mid-20th-century American optimism his campaign wants to channel for his acceptance speech last week, and he settled on the recently deceased Neil Armstrong and the Apollo moon programme. "When President Kennedy challenged Americans to go to the moon, the question wasn’t whether we'd get there, it was only when we'd get there," Mr Romney said.

The soles of Neil Armstrong's boots on the moon made permanent impressions on our souls and in our national psyche. Ann and I watched those steps together on her parent's sofa. Like all Americans we went to bed that night knowing we lived in the greatest country in the history of the world.



God bless Neil Armstrong. Tonight that American flag is still there on the moon. And I don't doubt for a second that Neil Armstrong's spirit is still with us: that unique blend of optimism, humility and the utter confidence that when the world needs someone to do the really big stuff, you need an American.

In the age of Paul Ryan, you don't ordinarily hear Republicans praising massive government programmes to accomplish airy missions of national moral purpose. It got me thinking about something my colleague wrote in a post some weeks ago, something that's been bugging me ever since. In a post otherwise concerned with tax fairness and the "you didn't build that" controversy, my colleague said:

However, there are serious questions about whether all the underlying public goods that make modern business possible must be provided by government and financed with taxes. Education, roads, bridges, and fire protection are routinely financed privately. If most, or even many, of these goods are better provided privately, Mr Obama's "we're in this together" argument for higher top tax rates may be a non-starter. Of course we're in it together! Yet it remains unclear that government-financed bridges, much less NASA's moon boondoggle, represent the perfection of productive "in-it-together" public spirit.

I think the contrast here, between Mr Romney's praise of the lunar mission as reflecting an America that does "the really big stuff" and my colleague's sense that the effort was a "boondoggle", is interesting, because it goes to the question of what we mean when we say some form of government spending is or isn't worth it.

First off, I should acknowledge that I'm not quite sure what my colleague meant by calling NASA's moon programme a "boondoggle". I suppose there are two possibilities. The first, which would be logical in a post that mainly argued that the private sector might be able to more efficiently do lots of things the government currently does, would be that private entrepreneurship could have gotten us to the moon cheaper. But this would be an absurd argument. Private entrepreneurship couldn't possibly have put astronauts on the moon in the 1960s or 1970s, or in all likelihood ever. Who would have put up the capital? Why? It seems sufficient to note that in the four decades since the last moon landings, even though the technology is now off-the-shelf, no private entrepreneur actually has landed astronauts on the moon. Had America left this job to the private sector, people might have landed on the moon by the 1980s, but they would have been speaking Russian—not that there's anything wrong with that; the point is that the trip would definitely have been government-funded.

So I trust this isn't what my colleague meant when he called the moon programme a boondoggle. Which leaves the other possibility: the claim that the moon programme wasn't worth doing at all, or not for the money we spent on it.

I suppose I understand the grounds on which one might say that the Apollo programme wasn't worth the cost. It was pretty expensive, and it didn't produce many direct commercial applications, unlike the telecom satellites and so forth that grew out of the orbital space programme. The scientific benefits might not have been entirely achievable with robots at the time, but they would have been if we'd waited a decade or two, and that would no doubt have been cheaper. The space race was a significant battlefield in the cold war, and the American win was one of the most important demonstrations on the international stage that the future belonged to the capitalist democracies rather than to communism; but I suppose one could argue that both the American and Soviet moon programmes were "boondoggles", and that it would have been better if neither had tried. In any case, we don't today regard its strategic value, nor even its scientific value, as the chief justification for the Apollo programme. Rather, we think of sending human beings to walk on the moon a a monumental achievement of human science and engineering with a profound aesthetic and spiritual dimension—a spectacular technological achievement with deep moral implications, like Reims Cathedral but on a much larger scale. But the value of those sorts of things is hard to measure, and not everyone necessarily appreciates them.

Moreover, contrary to popular mythology, the moon shots didn't enjoy overwhelming public support at the time. Opinion polls in the 1960s generally found most people thought the programme to put a man on the moon wasn't worth the money being spent on it. The data isn't unequivocal; 60% to 80% of those polled consistently said they "approved of Apollo", though most disapproved of the price tag. Meanwhile, since 1965, about 80% have consistently said they approve of NASA's current funding levels, even though the public is under the impression that NASA's budget is over 20 times as big a part of federal spending as it actually is (ie, under 1%). This is all a bit hard to put together, but at the least, it does make it hard to say Americans approved of spending what it took to go to the moon.

What I'm interested in, though, is not so much whether most Americans in the 1960s thought the moon shots were worth the money, but why my colleague, as someone living in the 2010s, thinks they weren't. What should that $14 billion per year for 12 years (in 2005 dollars) have been spent on instead of putting astronauts on the moon? It's not quite clear what the Americans who didn't think the programme was worth it, back in the 60s and early 70s, would rather have spent the money on, but polls in October 1965 seemed to suggest the possibilities included federal aid to education, Medicare funding, slum clearance or national defence. Newspaper articles interviewing those sceptical of the moon programme at the time turn up a lot of sentiment that the government should spend the money on fighting poverty. (This was, after all, the 1960s.) How many Americans today would prefer that astronauts, or American ones anyway, had never gone to the moon, but that a bit more had been spent each year in the 1960s on Medicare, slum clearance, or the Vietnam War? The alternative answer, naturally, is that the money ought to have been left in the pockets of the taxpayers at the time, for them to spend as they wished. This doesn't necessarily seem to be what people at the time wanted though; that summary of 1965 polling has "another tax cut" as the one option that doesn't rate meaningfully higher than the space programme.*

Speaking for myself, I don't think I would notice or care if the government had spent an additional $14 billion a year in the 1960s on slum clearance and national defence, and I certainly wouldn't care if the money had been kicked back to taxpayers instead; whereas I derive great pleasure, intellectual stimulation and spiritual satisfaction from the historical accomplishment of the moon programme. Similarly, I wouldn't notice or care if the 14th-century Catholic church had cut the cathedral-building budget somewhat and spent a bit more on caring for pilgrims or the Crusades, whereas I derive great intellectual and spiritual pleasure from Reims Cathedral. But do supporters of the moon programme, such as Mitt Romney and myself, have any business arguing that tax dollars ought to be spent on something simply because it is noble, extraordinary and an inspiring first step in a new age of human existence in the cosmos, which future generations will regard with wonder and awe? Shouldn't efforts of that sort be financed voluntarily, by those who believe in them, rather than out of compulsory taxes?

This is of course an entirely theoretical debate, since, as noted above, there is no conceivable possibility of a private moon programme. If you want to go to the moon, a government programme is the only way to do it, at least for the next century or so until technology is a lot more advanced and the richest humans are vastly richer. But even if a privately financed programme were possible, if Richard Branson or Carlos Slim were able to get together $100 billion and put an astronaut on the moon (and somehow recruit a corps of dozens of test pilot/engineers willing to risk death for some billionaire's personal prestige), I fear it would be inferior to Apollo because it would lack any public stake in the achievement. Back when humanity's exploratory ambitions were somewhat more circumscribed, the great expeditions could be privately financed: Amundsen conquers the poles, Hillary conquers Everest, and so forth. I can't see that as an exciting model for humanity's leap into space. If I'd been around when Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic solo, I'd have said: good for him, but so what? When Neil Armstrong landed on the moon, he did it with an American flag on his shoulder, on behalf of a country that claimed leadership of what used to call itself the Free World. It was a bit of a stretch to say he did it on behalf of all mankind, but not as much of a stretch as it would have been if he'd done it bearing the logo of Facebook or America Movil.

So this is where I end up when I ask myself what it means to say the moon shots were a boondoggle. In some ways it's a powerful case to examine, because the point of the moon programme is that it can't be justified in terms of monetary return. The core justification for the moon programme, in Mr Romney's eyes, is that it "made permanent impressions on our souls and in our national psyche", and proved that America is the greatest country in the world. In less nationalistic terms, the justification for the moon shots is that they were beautiful and great, that because of them we as a species are at a place in our intellectual development where we wouldn't otherwise be. And the core of the argument against them is that this is not the sort of justification that can be offered for spending tax dollars, certainly not on something which many or most citizens don't want to do. In the speech Mr Romney referred to, JFK announced the launch of the Apollo programme by saying, "We choose to go to the moon." Mr Romney may invoke the feel-good glow of that historical memory, but his candidacy embodies the growing entrenchment of a political philosophy that doesn't think "we" should be choosing to do much of anything.

* This is an important historical paradigm shift that needs to be kept in mind for this debate. People who thought the moon programme wasn't worth it in the 60s and 70s were mostly critiquing it from the New Deal left; they would say that "we ought to be spending that money to fight poverty." In the 2010s, critics of such big-ticket government initiatives mostly come from the right; they don't think "we" should be spending that money collectively at all, and certainly not to fight poverty, which they generally consider an even bigger boondoggle than the Apollo programme. The right question to ask from the point of view of the debate in the 1960s is whether the moon shots were worth more than an extra $14 billion per year for Great Society programmes; the right question from the point of view of today's debate is whether the moon programme was worth more than a $14 billion per year tax cut.

(Photo credit: Wikipedia)