From Khufu To Kennedy

When John Kennedy committed America to send men to the Moon, he made a speech in which two words have always stood out for me: 'choose' and 'hard'. The choice to act is always the prerequisite of achievement. And mankind has made the greatest strides through doing the hard, not the easy, things. So Kennedy said: 'We choose to go to the moon, and do the other things. Not because they are easy but because they are hard'. Going to Mars requires a choice. And the work will be hard. Over four millennia ago a god-king chose to build a monument, a tomb for himself. The building work was hard. And it was over-ambitious too because the king was no god in reality and he was the ruler only of a small and desert bound land. The king was Khufu, also called Cheops, of Egypt. The pyramid he had built benefited neither himself nor his people. But it has since inspired and awed countless human beings down the ages. Four millennia from now, John Kennedy too will be a footnote in history, his own speech barely remembered. But what he caused to have done, to take men for the first time to another world, will have inspired in turn generation upon generation of people like us. That is something truly worthwhile. Colonising Mars would rank in this league as one of the great inspirations of the human race. History calls. And history favours the brave.