It's silly to do things just because they are hard. Extraordinarily silly.

What Kennedy did not say, was "it's just hard enough". Hard enough that we can pull it off, and the Soviets can't, and the world can see that. Much better to gain a space upmanship victory than a shooting nuclear missile victory.

Now we are in a different place. Well, maybe not for too long, you never know. China has its own space ambitions, and military ambitions too.

But just doing hard things for the sake of doing hard things makes no sense.