What was the purpose of landing on the moon?

Answer 1

President Kennedy understood that some measure of competition / conflict between the Soviet Union and the United States was inevitable: the social and economic systems of the two blocs were so fundamentally opposed that actual peaceful co-existence was no better than a pipedream.

Kennedy was also wise enough to understand that it was safer and more conducive to technological advance if the US compete with the USSR on who could get a man to the moon first, rather than have both countries continue with the Sabre rattling which had brought the world to the edge of destruction during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

In committing the USA to putting a man on the moon before January 1, 1970 Kennedy was inviting the USSR into a game which it was unlikely to win (the USA had scientists who were at least as good, and technology which was better), but could not ignore (Communist régimes rely heavily on government propaganda - to just let the USA control space exploration would have been a disaster for the Kremlin).

Kennedy was playing the USSR, forcing the Warsaw Pact countries to divert resources away from territorial expansion - where they might have given the USA a real headache (by extending the Communist sphere of influence in Berlin, for example) - to a technological race where they could barely keep-up (and even if they won, it would do no great harm).

The other great beauty of the Space Race was that it was open ended. Even if the USA put the first man on the moon (which it eventually did), the new goal might then be to build a Space Station. If the USSR was building a Space Station they would have no funds to deploy in Vietnam or to occupy Afghanistan. Kennedy's ruse might have kept the USSR playing catch-up for the rest of the century.

Sadly, after a few years of sanity following the assassination of Kennedy, the US electorate chose to elect a common swindler as its President. Then when the swindler was found out, they chose a cowboy from Brooklyn.

The Space Race strategy was largely abandoned, freeing up the USSR to annex Afghanistan and give the US Military the kicking of its life in Vietnam. The Brooklyn cowboy's only answer to America's plummeting reputation in the West was to mobilise Christian fundamentalist groups at home to prop up the waddling Republican cause - so you get Creation Science, 9/11, Abu Ghraib, Laura Schlessinger, and the collapse of the Western banking system.

The Space Race was a clever idea, but in a democracy there is always the danger that you might be cleverer than the electorate can keep up with.

As Lord George Brown once said: It is Democracy, sometimes it is going to demock.