One factor which made John F. Kennedy a great president was his conception & support for a moon landing program to win the space race then on-going with the Soviet Union. His vision has had far-reaching positive effects to our technological capabilities today. Two years into his Presidency (after the Bay of Pigs but before the Cuban Missile Crisis), JFK gave his Moon speech at Rice University 9/12/62. Background: The USAs one-man Mercury capsule flights were still going on and the two-man Gemini program was still on the drawing boards, but the space race was going full-force. The month before (8/12/62), the Soviet Union had just accomplished another first: simultaneous orbital flight of two manned spacecraft; something the USA wouldnt duplicate for 3 more years (with the rendezvous in orbit of Gemini 6 & 7 12/15/65). Kennedys moon challenge was designed to leap-frog the Soviets, and he asked Congress to appropriate sufficient additional funds so Before this decade is out, to land a man on the moon and return him safely to the earth. Thus was born the Apollo program which despite a 1.5 year delay (to find the cause of a fire during a routine test of the Apollo 1 capsule, which killed 3 astronauts), accomplished the first moon landing less than 7 years later on July 20, 1969. The Soviet Union was also furiously developing its own moon rocket; and actually were building 5 of their one man lunar ship called the LK... en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LK_(spacecraft) ...but due to several failures of their super-heavy N-1 booster rocket (akin to Apollos Saturn V), their effort was abandoned after America reached the moon first. Had their Chief Designer Sergei Korolev (counterpart to the USAs Werner von Braun) not died of cancer (1/14/1966), the Soviet Union may well have reached the moon ahead of the USA. The USAs national effort for Apollo was stupendous, akin to the 1940s atomic bomb Manhattan Project, which ultimately employed over 400,000 people, injected money into the national economy and invented many new technologies & techniques which were the basis for further inventions for many products and services we use today. Background music on the YouTube video is from Tom Hanks 1998 miniseries From the Earth to the Moon. For more information: $15 A Man on the Moon by Andrew Chaiken (book) amazon/Man-Moon-Voyages-Apollo-Astronauts/dp/014311235X $27 From the Earth to the Moon miniseries, 5 DVD set amazon/From-Earth-Moon-Brett-Cullen/dp/B002O3Z4QQ $9 When We Left Earth documentary DVD set by Discovery Channel amazon/When-We-Left-Earth-Missions/dp/B001BEK8CY
Posted on: Sun, 17 Nov 2013 17:57:42 +0000
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