Merritt Island, Fla. — As a child, I was in love with America. From England, everything about the place just seemed marvelous. America was where the movies were set. It was where all the good roller coasters had been installed. It had cities with skyscrapers with romantic names: the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, the TransAmerica. Elvis had been an American, as had John Wayne. Marilyn Monroe, too. The Americans — or so I thought — had invented all of the fun stuff: Superman, Coca-Cola, denim jeans, ten-pin bowling. Americans were rich, and happy, and on top of the world. Their president was a film star, with a welcome-to-Disneyland voice. And above all — above absolutely everything else — Americans had been to the moon.
An old joke has it that there are two sorts of countries: “those that use the metric system, and those that have put a man on the moon.” Today, this is typically told with an ironic, self-conscious faux-bombast — as a critical, cosmopolitan nod toward the jingoism of old. But here’s the thing: It’s true. It is difficult to overstate just how substantial a PR victory the Apollo program was for the United States, and tough to relay to the inured just how exceptional its space program made the country look from the outside. As a boy, I would watch the nightly news in wide-eyed wonder as the Space Shuttle blasted off. I proudly carried around my Neil Armstrong lunchbox. I knew by heart the famous, if imprecisely delivered, line: “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” In America, they got things done.
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