Happy Moonshot Day

On May 25, 1961, 58 years ago on Saturday, President Kennedy addressed a joint session of Congress with what is now called the Moonshot Speech. It was a month after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, the country was still climbing out of a recession that dogged the previous year’s presidential campaign, and JFK’s first hundred days didn’t compare well with the first hundred days of Franklin Roosevelt. In today’s golf terminology we might say JFK needed a Mulligan, a do-over, and the Moonshot speech was the vehicle.

Looking back at the success of the Apollo program you might think going to the moon was no big deal, but from the perspective of 1961, it was a big ask, a heavy lift. The US and USSR were already competing in space with launch vehicles which, to that point, were designed to lift the occasional satellite or more likely a nuclear warhead.

The Russians had much bigger rockets than the US, mostly because their nuclear program could only produce a warhead that weighed an incredible 11,000 pounds compared with the much smaller, but no less lethal, US warheads that were just over ten percent of the Russians’ devices. They had bigger rockets because they needed them; we didn’t. Still that was something we didn’t discuss. All we could admit was that the Soviets had superior space lift ability.

They’d launched Sputnik a few years earlier and put the first man into space, Uri Gagarin. A few weeks before the speech the US had launched Alan Shephard on a sub-orbital ride making us officially number two in a two-nation space race.