For America’s political leaders, space exploration also speaks to the need to offer a hopeful narrative about the country and its potential, as well as an unabashed point of national pride Americans can embrace without reservation. Space exploration can offer a strong antidote to the relentless doomerism and pessimism that course like a poison through our national bloodstream, injected by prominent voices on both left and right. It’s not just a matter of the technical achievements involved in space exploration, impressive as they admittedly may be, or even the limits to which it can push us as individuals and societies More than anything else, space exploration expands the frontiers of human knowledge, broadens our sense of the possible, and grants us the perspective that can only come from a more-or-less conscious awareness of the vastness of the cosmos – or what some modern philosophers call the “view from above.”

It’s far too much to expect space exploration to provide this sort of optimistic political narrative all on its own; patriotism and belief in one’s country can’t and doesn’t derive from any one achievement or enterprise, no matter how inspirational or impressive. But it can serve as a spark to think more expansively and hopefully about the country and humanity as a whole, especially at a time when so many of us seem so down on our nation and our species. Space exploration gives us an example of what we can accomplish as a society even as we seem to be coming apart at the seams in so many ways. America can and did put a man on the Moon despite the limitations of 1960s-era technology and the myriad convulsions shaking the foundations of American society at the time, and today we can and are looking back through time and space to the very beginnings of our universe despite our very real societal fractures and very dire threats our democracy faces from within.