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On the Moon

Title text: "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on Venus and returning him safely to--" [an aide frantically whispers in the president's ear for a moment] "... of landing a man on Venus."

Explanation

The phrase "If we can land a man on the Moon, why can't we <blank>" is commonly used to question a perceived shortcoming of some company, government or humanity in general. The Apollo program landed twelve astronauts on the Moon in six landing missions from July 1969 to December 1972 and returned all of those twelve astronauts safely to the Earth. (However, from 1964 to 1967, there were eight deaths of astronauts or men training to be astronauts: three in the Apollo One fire, four in T-38 crashes, and one in a F-104 crash.) The premise is usually that, if "we" (whether referring generally to humanity, or specifically to the United States) have been able to achieve this extraordinary feat, our inability to achieve some lesser goal is questionable and/or ironic. Right after the Philae landing, the similar hashtag #WeCanLandOnACometButWeCant began on Twitter.

Here, Megan cuts Cueball's argument's short by implicitly reminding him that humanity has not put another human on the Moon since the end of the Apollo program in December 1972 (nearly 42 years at the time this comic was published). New manned programs to return to the Moon, such as the Constellation Program, have been repeatedly cancelled. The Orion spacecraft, which will be capable of carrying humans beyond low Earth orbit for the first time in over 40 years, executed its first test flight on the day after this comic was published, but NASA and the U.S. government still lack a coherent vision for manned spaceflight to the Moon or any other destination beyond low Earth orbit.

The title text is a retelling of President Kennedy's famous inspirational address to the U.S. Congress in May 1961 ("I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth"), which set into motion the Apollo program, except that this time, the speaker is talking about putting a man on planet Venus. The aide presumably explains to the president that the surface of Venus is such a hostile place (due to factors including high temperature, crushing atmospheric pressure, strong winds, sulfuric acid clouds, etc.) that it is unlikely that anybody could land there and come back alive. Even unmanned hardened pre-cooled robotic probes either got crushed or fried before landing, or survived only a couple of hours at most. As a result, the president backtracks from the goal of returning the astronauts safely to the Earth and comically limits the aspiration to landing an astronaut on Venus, full stop, without regard to the astronaut's safe return. This differs slightly from Kennedy's goal, which included the safe return of at least one astronaut from the moon. Although the overall 8:12 ratio of deaths to moonwalkers (during the period for Kennedy's speech to the end of the Apollo program) was too high to be considered "safe" by most standards, Kennedy had specified the safety only of the men who landed on the moon, and set a goal of "a" man returning safely. Technically, even if most of the men who landed died, as long as one returned safely by the end of 1969, Kennedy's goal would have been met.

Transcript

Cueball: If we could land a man on the Moon, why can't we-

Megan: -land a man on the Moon?

Cueball: ...ok, fair. But we're working on it, OK?

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