It's Friday, September 8, 2023.

I'm Albert Moeller, and this is The Briefing, a daily analysis of news and events from

a Christian worldview.

The Psalms tell us that the heavens are telling the glory of God ever since human beings

have been able to look up to the sky, human beings have looked to the sky with mystery

and with wonder.

And that's why when I was a boy in the space age was just beginning, there was absolute

unconditional obsession that was going on with the space project, the launch of astronauts

into space, and eventually a successful lunar mission that landed men on the moon and brought

them safely back.

There was a political context with President John F. Kennedy making that pledge in his

administration, a pledge that by the way, I guess all odds was fulfilled in less time

than he had predicted in the next decade.

There was also in the struggle of the Cold War and that global conflict between the Soviet

Union and its allies and the United States and its allies.

There was more to all of that than politics, but there wasn't less than that.

And thus these days when the big news is the failure of a Russian mission to the moon

and the success of an Indian mission to the moon, both of them aimed at regions of the

moon that have been unvisited thus far, well this just becomes a very big story.

It's a big story in Russia where the story was failure, the failure of their effort to

try to return to the moon.

The big story in India was success when India had never done anything like this before.

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