JFK: The Exciting Adventure of Space

[beamjockey]

In another of the onrushing Fiftieth Anniversaries Of Something That Happened In 1961, today, 25 May, marks a notable speech to Congress by President John F. Kennedy. It was long, proposing a lot of policies and new programs, most nearly forgotten now.

But there is a part of this address that you have all heard. Toward the end, JFK began talking about spaceflight.

"I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish. [...]

"This decision demands a major national commitment of scientific and technical manpower, materiel and facilities, and the possibility of their diversion from other important activities where they are already thinly spread. It means a degree of dedication, organization and discipline which have not always characterized our research and development efforts. It means we cannot afford undue work stoppages, inflated costs of material or talent, wasteful interagency rivalries, or a high turnover of key personnel.

"New objectives and new money cannot solve these problems. They could in fact, aggravate them further--unless every scientist, every engineer, every serviceman, every technician, contractor, and civil servant gives his personal pledge that this nation will move forward, with the full speed of freedom, in the exciting adventure of space."

This was after Sputnik, after Gagarin's orbital flight, and after Alan Shepard's brief hop into blackness. It was pretty audacious for the president of a country that had managed to send just one guy into space-- not even into orbit-- to say that America should send an astronaut to the Moon. With a deadline.

But Kennedy did say it. The Sixties wouldn't have been the same Sixties without it. And it was a pivotal moment for NASA; its consequences still give shape to the agency today. It took the Space Age to a different level.

That's why you've heard this speech before.

Here's a transcript of the entire 25 May address to Congress.

Here are newly-released transcripts of a taped 1963 conversation between Kennedy and NASA Administrator James Webb.

Comments

[derekl1963.livejournal.com]

These particular transcripts may be newly minted and released... But their contents have been known (and tacitly ignored) by the space history community for at least a decade now.

Scratch that, in the summaries you linked to Kennedy's doubts about the program are glossed over.

[mbcrui.livejournal.com]

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouRbkBAOGEw
Youtube video of the Rice University speech...

(Also this year marks the 50th anniversary of the most important event of my life... my birth :)

[charlie-meadows.livejournal.com]

Interesting to read the discussion with Webb: it suggests that a good part of what was driving the "race to the Moon" was a sort of mirror game. We're pressing this because the Russians are pressing it; if they don't do "something spectacular", we may not be able to sustain the support required to keep at it ourselves. Meanwhile, as we learned later, Khrushchev was pacing the Soviet program against our announced schedule of milestones.

Some of the exchange centers on the issue of whether there *is* any compelling reason to go to the Moon. National prestige, military applications, and advancement of high technology were all proposed, but they seemed unsure as to whether any of these would be convincing arguments. (Certainly there wasn't any *money* to be made doing it.)

Perhaps the idea of going to the Moon backed by the threat of a rival doing it first and by public excitement over getting there first was the only way this could have gotten done within a decade. The problem with only having a political motive for the project is that this didn't make it sustainable. Apollo was carried out with technology really *just barely* able to do the job (and it helped that we got lucky more than once). It doesn't come as much of a surprise, though, that once the mission was "accomplished", it didn't leave much behind to continue the effort. (The "let's do Mars next" people didn't seem to have considered that we still hadn't really learned much about carrying out an *interplanetary* mission. We're not all that much closer to having that ability 40 years on...)