John F. Kennedy
In a speech before Congress in 1961, President John F. Kennedy declared the nation's goal, "before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth," a statement that, at the time, must have seemed torn from the pages of science fiction.
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| JFK rouses Congress and the nation to aim for the Moon | |
Two years later, the day before he was assassinated in nearby Dallas, Kennedy explained his intentions in a speech in San Antonio, Texas, referring to the Irish writer Frank O'Connor, who wrote that "as a boy, he and his friends would make their way across the countryside, and when they came to an orchard wall that seemed ... too difficult to permit their voyage to continue, they took their hats off and tossed them over the wall — and then they had no choice but to follow them."
America, Kennedy said, had "tossed its cap over the wall of space, and we have no choice but to follow it."
Two presidents later, in very different times, America beat the Russians to the moon, but the space race began losing its drama after the high-water mark of the Apollo missions that got us there.
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| Mission Control breathes again after Apollo 11 successfully lands astronauts on
the moon for the first time (Hi - Low) |
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Russian competitiveness in space began fading long before President Ronald Reagan's escalation in military spending and Cold War rhetoric. Part of Reagan's threat, of course, was to use space itself as a battlefield, to rain down missiles against earthbound missiles in a defense initiative that was nicknamed Star Wars.
Where once there were the heroics of Apollo 13, now there is the daily embarrassment of Mir. But space is still a reflection of the strategies of earthbound nations, even in times of peace. U.S. participation in the Mir boondoggle — including a gift of $400 million to the Russian Space Agency — is a nuclear deterrent, only this time it's designed to keep underpaid Russian scientists from lending their expertise to nuclear aspirants like Iran.
Today, thanks to the great gaze of the Hubble Space Telescope and planetary missions such as Sojourner, people identify space not with personalities but with its true inhabitants: asteroids, planets, stars, black holes. In some ways, true space buffs might be thankful that Sputnik launched the Cold War into the heavens. The superhuman melodrama may have gone out of space, but the point of it all — science — is alive and well.