Excerpt: Echelon

She understood suddenly and completely the motivation of men of true achievement; the desire to test oneself, one’s abilities and resolve and potential, and passing the test not according to the measure and satisfaction of other men, but to the measure only of oneself, and the objective standard of factual success or failure. That what governed those men responsible for such massive achievement was winning—though not in order to put down their colleagues, or rob their friends of the success; and not to extort deference nor to demand acclaim. Rather, the act of choosing a goal, and deciding that it would be achieved by one’s own effort and nothing more, without care for how one was seen—for the praise of achievement or else the scorn of failure—and then achieving it and in doing so, living up to nothing more than the fulfillment of one’s own values.

She knew that politically speaking, it had been a battle between America and the Soviet Union to beat the other to the finish line. She did not believe that that motivation was what drove the men, the scientists, who actually did cross that line, and she did not believe that it was the spirit of a political feud that she heard in Kennedy’s speech. Perhaps that was the trigger, but it was neither the means nor the ends by which America at last sent man to the moon.