President John F. Kennedy and the Moon

On the 25th May 1961 President John F. Kennedy addressed a joint session of congress saying “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and safely returning him to Earth.”

It was made at a time when America was reeling from the seeming spectacular achievements of the USSR. They had launched Sputnik I, the first satellite into elliptical low Earth orbit on 4 October 1957.
They followed this with by putting a live animal into orbit followed by the first human, Yuri Gagarin in April 1961. Even though Sputnik only transmitted its signals for a few weeks and burned up in the atmosphere within months it, and Gagarin's Vostok I mission was a single orbit, to the world it looked like the Russians were vastly more advanced than the USA where its very public failures had this joke doing the rounds

“how does the son of a rocket scientist in America learn to count 3,2,1 Oh Hell”. 

Setting a goal of reaching the Moon (before the USSR..) was a big goal. They did not know how they were going to get there, did not have the technology to do so, and in a very real way did not even know what they would need to succeed. They did though have three things going for them, national pride and a very powerful industrial and scientific base to build on and with national pride at stake a virtually unlimited budget.

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