Dear Colleagues,

Early 60s, in between various messy love affairs, JFK delivered his famous Moonshot speech which got the Americans to the moon by the end of the decade, as you probably noticed in commemorations in the media this week. You can’t help but wonder what the equivalent of such a Moonshot speech/initiative would be in our times. These days, we seem to prefer entrepreneurs and billionaires’ lunatic dreams (see Musk, Bezos, Branson, … and their various space & other hyperloop/ mindreading/… dreams; if our “leaders” (say, Trump or Johnson) project big – positive – dreams for their country, everybody actually starts to giggle – for good reason); or else moonshot research projects that mostly seem to focus on boosting the competitiveness of our economies in a globalized world.

True, in a way, of course, the SDG agenda is a global moonshot initiative, and the ‘decade of delivery’ that the UN SG and many of us are hoping for, is a global dream more than worthwhile pursuing...