Kennedy Commits to the Moon Before the Decade Is Out
John F. Kennedy told a joint session of Congress on 25 May 1961 that the nation should commit itself, before the decade was out, to landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth. The context was a run of humiliations. The Soviet Union had orbited Sputnik in 1957 and put Yuri Gagarin into space on 12 April 1961, and the Bay of Pigs invasion had collapsed five days after that. Kennedy had shown little interest in space before. He asked his vice-president Lyndon Johnson to find a programme the United States could win, and the answer that came back was that a lunar landing was far enough off that the Soviet lead in launch capacity would not decide it. The speech was explicit that no single space project would be more impressive or more important for the long-range exploration of space, and equally explicit about the cost — he asked for an immediate seven to nine billion dollars over five years, and said Congress should not vote for it unless prepared to see it through. The commitment was strategic rather than scientific: a demonstration to non-aligned countries of which system worked better. He offered Khrushchev a joint mission twice, in 1961 and at the United Nations in 1963, and got no answer. NASA's budget rose to over four per cent of federal spending. Around 400,000 people worked on Apollo at its peak. Apollo 11 landed on 20 July 1969, five months inside the deadline and six years after Kennedy's death.
- Year: 1961 CE
- Category: Political
