Politics & Power Quote by Wilson Greatbatch

The exclamation-heavy urgency here feels less like a policy memo than an inventor’s bench-top pep talk: improvise, commit, ship. Greatbatch borrows Kennedy not for eloquence but for permission - a cultural “go signal” from the last era when big public bets in technology could be framed as national character. “Just do it!” collapses the messy middle (budgets, treaties, engineering risk) into a single muscular verb. That compression is the point: it’s a deliberately impatient rhetoric, optimized for breaking paralysis.

The interesting tension is the pairing of “good stewards” with “aggressively exerting control.” Stewardship implies care, restraint, even humility; “control” implies ownership, enforcement, borders. Greatbatch tries to reconcile them by casting dominance as responsibility: if we’re going to touch the moon, we should manage it, not merely visit it. The subtext is Cold War logic lingering into the space age’s afterlife - the moon as strategic terrain, not just a scientific destination. It also reads as an engineer’s faith that presence equals governance: you can’t manage what you can’t reach, so “going there” becomes both moral justification and operational plan.

Context matters: Greatbatch made his name building life-saving devices, a world where accountability and control are virtues, not imperial impulses. Transposed onto lunar exploration, that mindset reveals a broader American habit - treating frontiers as systems to be engineered, then administered. The quote works because it’s blunt enough to sound actionable, and conflicted enough to expose the era’s unresolved question: exploration for wonder, or for leverage.