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Celebrate a presidents challenge

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  • Originally published July 19, 2008 at 10:03 p.m., updated July 19, 2008 at 10:03 p.m.

“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 the Earth.”

There he was, a fresh-faced young American president, barely four months in office, and he stood before a joint session of Congress and threw that mighty challenge at them, and at every citizen of this country.

Many thought this Boston Catholic president to be insane. After all, less than four years earlier the Soviet Union had launched the first Sputnik into orbit, a stunning space defeat for America, and the Soviets had continued to lead on into manned space flight.

How could we catch up? Indeed, how could we hope to successfully get astronauts all the way to the moon when it had been only three weeks prior to Kennedy’s speech that we had even managed to send Alan Shepard on a suborbital flight of 15 minutes duration. The soviets, by the way, had sent Yuri Gagarin into full orbit a month before Shepard’s flight.

Still, Kennedy boldly told the world, “We choose to go to the moon and do the other things, not because they are easy but because they are hard.”

Indeed, they did prove to be very hard. As Tom Wolfe wrote in “The Right Stuff,” it seemed “our rockets always blow up, and our boys always botch it.”

Once we had trained astronauts to sit atop these rockets, with their tens of thousands of gallons of volatile and highly explosive fuel, how could we know whether their launch would come off safely?

Gus Grissom, who followed Shepard with a second suborbital flight, lost his Mercury capsule after landing in the Pacific Ocean. And, years later, he and two other brave astronauts were killed when fire swept through their Apollo spacecraft while it was still in the testing stage on the ground.

Still, NASA pressed on, and Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon, who followed Kennedy into the Oval Office, continued to work with supportive Congresses to fund the Apollo program to its conclusion.

On July 20, 1969, an amazing 39 years ago today, after the Mercury, Gemini and earlier Apollo flights had paved the way for them, the Eagle (Apollo 11’s lunar lander) came to rest on the surface of the moon and Neil Armstrong stepped onto another world and said it was a small step for him but a giant leap for all mankind.

Now, almost four generations later, we’re making plans to go back to the moon, and on to Mars.

It’ll be another challenge, just as bold as Mr. Kennedy’s was almost half a century ago.

And this time, it’s truly a challenge for every American, because it’s now just as likely that the next footprints on the moon will be a woman’s, so firmly have they staked their claim on human spaceflight.

Had he lived, I’m sure Mr. Kennedy would be leading the charge in support of further exploration.

After all, he’s the one who first had the faith that we could do it.

Jim Bishop is a senior editor for the Advocate. Leave him a message at 361-574-1210.



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