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“We choose to go to the moon. 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, and the others, too.” President John F. Kennedy , Rice University, September 12, 1962.
Our country needs a breath of fresh air. And it’s sad that at the moment, we seem to have no where to look but the past. Not just one or the other political party, but our country itself needs a positive force and a vision for a common good to lead us into a brighter future, a future much brighter, more vigorous and much more optimistic than our present.
Sixty-three years ago today, it was President Kennedy who spoke before a crowd of 40,000 people on a hot, sunny day at Rice University in Houston, Texas, also the home of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), to rally a nation to focus its considerable human and financial resources and “…commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”
This speech outlined President Kennedy’s reasoning for gathering our country’s best scientists and policy strategists toward space exploration, with a singular objective to land a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth, a goal that many thought unachievable, given our technologies at the time. But together, our people and our country accomplished President Kennedy’s vision by the end of the decade.
In December 2017, the National Air and Space Museum, part of the Smithsonian Institution, revisited President Kennedy’s audacious idea to land a man on the moon and his historic “moonshot speech” at Rice University, in view of our country’s renewed interest in space exploration at the time. The article discusses how President Kennedy prepared his thinking about the goal, and includes excerpts from a memo co-written by then NASA Administrator James E. Webb and Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara to Vice-President Johnson dated May 8, 1961, titled: “Recommendations for our National Space Program: Changes, Policies, Goals”. In other words, President Kennedy didn’t just blurt out this specific objective, he sought information and recommendations from experts, and they concluded the goal was achievable before the end of the decade. Below is an excerpt from the memo, courtesy of The Smithsonian Institution’s National Air and Space Museum:
It is our belief that manned exploration to the vicinity of and on the surface of the Moon represents a major area in which international competition for achievement in space will be conducted. The orbiting of machines is not the same as the orbiting or landing of man. It is man, not merely machines, in space that capture the imagination of the world.... the establishment of this major objective has many implications. It will cost a great deal of money. it will require large efforts for a long time. It requires parallel and supporting undertakings which are also costly and complex. Thus, for example, the RANGER and SURVEYOR projects and the technology associated with them must be undertaken and must succeed to provide the data, the techniques, and the experience without which manned lunar exploration cannot be undertaken.
Also in 2017, the JFK Presidential Library and Museum hosted a fascinating discussion of a new book titled, “JFK: A Vision for America” that collected President Kennedy’s most important speeches along with commentary on those speeches by notable historians, political figures and artists, like Congressman John Lewis, Senator John McCain, Senator Elizabeth Warren, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Robert Redford, Conan O’Brien, Dave Eggers, Gloria Steinem, Don DeLillo, David McCullough, among many others. The co-editors of the book are noted historian Douglas Brinkley, and Stephen Kennedy-Smith, a nephew of President Kennedy and one of the board members of the JFK Library Foundation.
They both talked about President Kennedy’s ability to inspire individual citizens to contribute to our country and cautioned about those who promise quick fixes to complex, world problems. In President Kennedy’s final speech that he was to deliver in Dallas, Texas, on November 22, 1963, he planned to say:
In a world of frustrations and irritations, in a world of complex problems, the policies of the United States must be governed by learning and reason. Otherwise, those who confuse the rhetoric with reality and the plausible with the possible will gain popular ascendancy with their seemingly quick and easy solutions to every world problem.
And according to Stephen Kennedy- Smith: “So that's on us. It's our choice what kind of leaders we want to choose. And we're the ones that are ultimately going to be responsible for our choice.” [emphasis added].
NASA and Rice University celebrated the 60th anniversary of Kennedy’s “moonshot” speech on September 12, 2022, and for good reason: it inspired Americans and millions of people around the world because it showed that our country and its leaders cared about something bigger than ourselves, something that would benefit all of humankind—and it did. Below is the 60th anniversary commemoration in full, and it is well worth your time to see.
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What do you think about the impact of President Kennedy’s “moonshot” speech? The relevance to today’s divided nation? Will we find a real leader with both a knowledge of history and the vigor and intellect to inspire us? Let me know in the Comment Section below—thanks!
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