I think you're looking back at that time through the filter of rosy hindsight. All was not golden...we were feeling threatened by the Soviet Menace, Cuba nibbled our southern flanks, we had nightmares about an endless supply of ChiComs marching arm-in-arm across the Pacific, and the Russkis were ahead of us in The Space Race. Kennedy deftly played a conscious theme of optimism backed up by a generally-unspoken anxiety about the world. His style of leadership was to offer hope.

This may also be too obvious to type, but that rarely stops me...99% of our species doesn't possess The Vision Thing. Never have, never will. Most of humanity drifts from day to day satisfying natural urges. Nothing ever happens on the large scale without an exceptional individual herding the masses, for better or worse. Why should the exploration of space be an exception to that rule?

Are we holding out for a mass conversion like a religious epiphany? We could wait forever. A powerful space program won't just materialize spontaneously out of the aether or the collective unconscious.

I understand that the theme of our world has become hunker down, circle the wagons, and think small. That has to change sometime. It had better, or we'll have bigger things to worry about than the lost opportunity of space.

I agree with you about Dubya's voice, that nasal whine with all the charm of a dentist's drill. The thought of him trying gum elegant phrases like "We will commit this nation, before the decade is out, to landing a man on the Moon" like they were chewing tobacco makes me queasy. God forbid he should slip the leash and try to wing it:

"We will commiserate this nationhood, sometime real soon now, to breathing the sweet air of democraticization and flea markets on the green lush...I mean lush green...lawns of that ole' Moon up there. It will be a gerbil...journal...trip of many millyuns...billyuns of malls, but I am confidenced, because Gawd told me so, that the Lunar Peoples will greet us with open arms (or tentacles as their alien beliefs may dictation) as the liberationators we know ourselves are to be. Thank yew."