Of all the major events I have experienced in my life, few come close to matching the moon landing on July 20, 1969.

It’s hard to imagine it now, especially if you talk to a Millennial or Gen X’er about it, because they have no firsthand knowledge of what it is like to send people from Earth to another celestial object and then bring them back safely. That’s largely because we stopped moon landings in 1972, but also because we haven’t had a concerted, national management challenge like it since.

As a story in The Miami Herald put it, “Inspired by the vision and words of President John F. Kennedy, the American space program catapulted from serial launch pad failures to a successful lunar landing in only eight years. The Apollo moon project cost $21 billion (the equivalent of at least $150 billion now), employed 390,000 Americans and gave the nation a common goal during a difficult time.”

The race to put someone on the moon certainly had Cold War tensions to help fuel it—we had to get there before the Soviets did—but it also was the product of President Kennedy’s grand vision and an infatuation that Americans had with space. It also took incredible managerial leadership, particularly in the science community, to focus our national effort on a complex and difficult goal.

“The Apollo program had a tremendous impact on the United States,” Space Foundation chief executive Elliot Pulham said recently in the Los Angeles Times. “It built national pride and, more importantly, it influenced a whole generation of children to study hard to become scientists, engineers and astronauts.”

But, it’s also a national effort that we would be hard-pressed to duplicate today. As the Herald story soberly notes:

“Today, there’s no lack of ambition and goal-setting at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, which is mapping long-range plans for a lunar base and eventually a human mission to Mars. But funding falls far short of what will be needed, Congressional support is anemic, and many ask if Americans—pummeled by economic woe, burdened by profound security threats, preoccupied with their iPods and their BlackBerrys—are still capable of being rallied to a cause that once galvanized the nation.”

Yes, it’s hard to imagine that Americans could be rallied around something like the space program back in the 1960s, but that was the beauty of both the grand vision from JFK and the well-orchestrated management effort to see the vision through.

The sad thing for me as I look back on the space race today is this: Despite all the money and effort that went into it, we couldn’t send anyone to the moon again next month or next year, even if we wanted to.

Former NASA administrator Michael D. Griffin made this point in Sunday’s Washington Post when he wrote, “What is most striking about this 40th anniversary of the first human landing on the moon is that we can no longer do what we’re celebrating. Not ‘do not choose to,’ but ‘can’t.’

“Only in human spaceflight,” Griffin added, “do we celebrate the anniversary of an achievement that seems more difficult to repeat [today] than to accomplish the first time. The United States spent eight years and $21 billion … to develop a transportation system to take people to the moon. We then spent less than four years and $4 billion using it, after which we threw it away. Not mothballed, or assigned to caretaker status for possible later use. Destroyed.”

That’s the lesson I take away from the race to the moon: We had the supreme vision and management know-how to get it done, but we lacked the long-term perspective to build on such a difficult and complex goal and to use it as the steppingstone to much, much more.

Get my latest blog updates and workforce management news by following me on Twitter.