In December, I read that a team of five students from my high school in Delaware, Ohio, had entered NASA’s national App Development Challenge for high school students. The competition’s requirement was to write software to enable lunar exploration by robotic rovers that will be sent to the Moon in NASA’s Artemis program, now underway. A Moon landing by a human crew is planned for 2024.

I wrote to the students’ math teacher and mentor, Ms. Joanne Meyer, to suggest they and she might enjoy visiting Pittsburgh to meet people working behind the scenes to make Moon travel a reality again. She and the students agreed.

Last week they arrived—now one of three winning teams, and the only one from a public high school. In mid-April, NASA flew them to Houston where they presented their work to NASA brass and toured NASA’s training and development facilities. For their two day Pittsburgh trip, I arranged for them to visit Carnegie Mellon University, the Moonshot Museum on the city’s North Side (adjacent to Astrobotic, the company that build the Peregrine lunar lander that will go to the Moon in a matter of weeks), the CMU-affiliated National Robotics Engineering Center, and VEX Robotics, a CMU-spinout company that develops robotics curricula for K-12 education.

The students—Rosemary Cranston, Adam Fronduti, Paul Gabel, Jacob Payne and Meg Wolf—are a vibrant admixture of smarts, curiosity and budding awareness of their own life potential. Ms. Meyer is a proud mentor who savored seeing her charges swap ideas with their hosts. The hosts explained their work and engaged the students as peers—the ultimate compliment to the students.

My goal in arranging the tour was to introduce the students to the work that underlays NASA space missions and to associated career opportunities. My co-host, Dr. Lynne Porter, is an Executive-in-Residence at CMU who mentors students developing robotics there. She is also a graduate of Ohio Wesleyan University in Delaware, Ohio, the students’ hometown.

After our Monday site visits, we ate lunch together and I shared excerpts of President John Kennedy’s “Why We Go to the Moon” speech at Rice University in September 1962. Cold War tensions were peaking, the Cuban Missile Crisis was six weeks in the future, and Americans fretted the Soviet Union had put a cosmonaut into Earth orbit first—Uri Gagarin in April 1961. Polls showed 58% of Americans questioned whether the U.S. space program was worth the cost. Former President Eisenhower opined, “Spending $40 billion to go to the moon is nuts.”

Aware of the political capital Kennedy had at stake, speechwriter Ted Sorensen delivered a tour de force. The speech opens with an historical perspective.

“Condense, if you will, the 50,000 years of man’s recorded history in a time span of about a half a century. . . . About 10 years ago, under this standard, man emerged from his caves to construct other kinds of shelter. Only five years ago, man learned to write and use a car with wheels. Christianity began less than two years ago. . . . Only last week, we developed penicillin and television and nuclear power. This is a breathtaking pace and such a pace cannot help but create new ails as it dispels old. . . .

“So it is not surprising that some would have us stay where we are a little longer, to rest, to wait. If this capsuled history of our progress teaches us anything, it is that man in his quest for knowledge and progress is determined and cannot be deterred.”

Then comes the payoff pitch, Kennedy’s challenge to his audience that is now a staple of television histories of space exploration.

“We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard. Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we’re willing to accept. One we are unwilling to postpone.”

Kennedy was the first American president born in the 20th Century. Our student visitors are among the first generation born in the 21st. In a time when we feel beset by internal political divisions, China’s bid for economic and military parity with the U.S., the recent pandemic and other challenges, Kennedy’s message should comfort and inspire us anew. With young people like Rosemary, Adam, Paul, Jacob and Meg rising to lead us, we can have confidence in the future they will create.