Flutterby™! : What's a moonshot?

ACM: Hey Google, what's a moonshot?

I am having a hard time imagining Kennedy's famous speech working as a TechCrunch pitch to "make the world a better place by spending billions dollars to harvest 381 kilos of rocks." Was the Apollo program's goal to make the world a radically better place? Enough people doubted that at the time to make Apollo the most obvious symbol of the failure of technology to make the world a better place. "If they can put a man on the moon," asked critics, "why can't they do [X]." Common values for X were "cure the common cold," "end urban poverty" and "fix traffic problems." The modern version of that might be "If Elon Musk can launch a Tesla at Mars, why can't his car factory come close to production metrics for quantity and quality that other carmakers hit routinely." Sometimes the rocket science is the easy part.