For the United States, outer space has always been about foreign policy

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David Shribman is the former executive editor of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and winner of the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of U.S. politics.

For the first time in more than a half-century, an American engineering triumph in space is set to affirm the country’s prowess in technology – and perhaps restore its prestige in an era when its moral standing around the world is in peril.

In 1969, more than 125 million Americans watched in awe as the Apollo 11 astronauts planted a flag on the lunar surface. And hopefully soon, millions will watch as the Orion spacecraft escapes the gravity grip of Earth and heads toward the moon.

The presence of a Canadian astronaut aboard the vessel only underscores the poignancy of the moment. Jeremy Hanson’s role as a mission specialist on Artemis II represents a rare moment of cross-border co-operation at a time when relations between the two North American giants is at a historic low point.

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The Artemis launch comes as the U.S. makes one of its trademark regular adjustments in its space program, this time scrapping a station to orbit the moon and contemplating using some of the components of the original plan – but likely not the Canadarm – in a proposed permanent lunar base.

For the United States, especially at times when it is in global infamy, space policy is foreign policy.

“When it comes to global appreciation of the United States, the Apollo 11 moon shot was our saving grace in the Vietnam years,” said Douglas Brinkley, the Rice University professor and author of the 2019 book, American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race. “The whole world was riveted and rocked by American astronauts on the moon. It made the world recall the importance of American ‘can-doism’ and exceptionalism.”

Artemis II comes at a juncture when President Donald Trump has frayed relations with the country’s traditional allies, especially Canada.

“This flight is a direct result of over 60 years of peaceful co-operation and mutual support between the United States and Canada,” Chris Hadfield, the Canadian astronaut who flew two Space Shuttle missions and was commander of the International Space Station, said in an interview. “This is huge in Canada because it is a counterbalance to all the noise of politics. And it is significant that the first non-American to fly beyond Earth orbit will be from Canada, not from Russia, not from China, not from India.”

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This mission occurs in an age far different from the first time Americans flew beyond Earth orbit, on the Apollo 8 mission which orbited the moon.

That occurred in 1968, the chaotic year that included the assassinations of the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. and Senator Robert F. Kennedy, protests and riots in American streets, and worldwide condemnation of the country’s involvement in combat in Southeast Asia – global disrepute softened when the astronauts read from the Book of Genesis on Christmas Eve and concluded their broadcast with Frank Borman signing off, “Good night, good luck, a Merry Christmas and God bless all of you, all of you on the good Earth.”

At that time, the United States had a single rival, the Soviet Union, in the race for space conquest. Today, space exploration has gone international. More than 80 countries, including Canada, have operated satellites, astronauts from more than four dozen countries have travelled into space, and China’s Tiangong space station is now in a low-Earth orbit.

The American reach for the moon began when the country was reeling from the botched 1961 Bay of Pigs military operation in Cuba. President John F. Kennedy, in office for only four months, wanted both to change the subject and to change the country’s focus. A month later he appeared before a joint session of Congress to transform American attention, replacing a mortifying foreign-policy failure with a formidable technological challenge.

The original idea was for a moon landing as early as 1967, a goal meant to tweak the country’s Cold War rival, the Soviet Union, in the year in which it commemorated the 50th anniversary of the Russian Revolution. Cooler heads, more interested in technical plausibility than political ideology, prevailed. As a result, the revised text for the president’s May, 1961, speech on Capitol Hill called for the United States to “commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon.”

But the Soviets, who launched the first satellite (Sputnik in 1957) and sent the first human into space (Yuri Gagarin in 1961), proved to be a formidable foe. The Sputnik success prompted Soviet leader Nikita Khrushchev to crow, “The United States now sleeps under a Soviet moon.” Indeed, the American efforts seemed lame; the first U.S. satellite, Explorer 1, was sent into orbit a full 119 days after Sputnik, and a sub-orbital flight by Alan Shepard (less than 16 minutes) came 23 days after the Gagarin flight (108 minutes) that actually reached Earth orbit – a far more impressive feat of ingenuity and engineering.

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From the start, American space travel was a tool to mitigate frayed international relations and a bruised American image abroad.

Both the Soviet and American space efforts had military implications; the rockets that propelled cosmonauts and astronauts into space were largely derived from, or shared vital similarities with, intercontinental ballistic missiles. The Atlas-D booster rocket that propelled John Glenn into space in 1962, for example, was a modified U.S. Air Force nuclear missile. The Titan IIs that boosted a dozen Project Gemini missions into orbit between 1964 and 1966 were designed to carry what was then the most powerful weapon, a nine-megaton nuclear warhead.

One of the lawmakers who did not cheer when Mr. Kennedy proposed the lunar mission was Republican Senator Prescott Bush, who worried about the cost of what he considered an extravagant sci-fi fantasy.

Some 28 years later, Mr. Bush’s son, president George H.W. Bush, would tell another joint session of Congress that he supported a plan to send humans back to the moon “to stay.” Senator Bush’s grandson, president George W. Bush, called for returning Americans to the moon by the year 2020 as a stepping stone to an eventual crewed voyage to Mars. The missions may be different, but what remains is that space remains political.