Mike Pence’s Outer-Space Gospel

For decades, outer space has been described by U.S. leaders as the final frontier, and so it has been infused with the characteristics that are often said to have defined other frontiers in American history: wilderness, lawlessness, unknowable perils but ample opportunity, and the stubborn, pioneering will to conquer it all. “We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people,” John F. Kennedy said in 1962, as he declared that the United States would send a man to the moon by the end of the decade.

Then there was Lyndon B. Johnson, in 1967, two years before the country followed through on that plan:

We are all the descendants of those voyagers who found and settled the New World … Today we stand here at the gateway to another and a more glorious New World … We must be the space pioneers who lead the way to the stars.

And George H. W. Bush, in 1989:

Why the moon? Why Mars? Because it is humanity’s destiny to strive, to seek, to find. And because it is America’s destiny to lead.