Prologue: “We Should Go to the Moon”

Abstract

On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy, then just over four months in the White House, addressed a joint session of Congress to deliver what was billed as a second State of the Union address on “Urgent National Needs.” Before the assembled senators and representatives and a national television audience, Kennedy declared: “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.” Later in his speech, he reiterated: “I believe that we should go to the moon.” Sixteen months later, in his most memorable space speech, made before a crowd of 40,000 at Rice University in Houston, Texas, Kennedy gave this reason for undertaking the lunar journey: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.”¹