Not lengthy after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed the Lunar Module (LM) Eagle on the floor of the Moon in July 1969, somebody paid a go to to Arlington Nationwide Cemetery in Virginia. Threading their method by way of its hallowed grounds to Lot 45, they absolutely noticed the dim glow of the John F. Kennedy Everlasting Flame, then the naked Monson-slate marker for a president whose assassination six years earlier shocked the world. Pausing a second, this nameless customer laid a small bouquet of flowers and a card. “Mr. President,” it learn, with unabashed poignancy, “the Eagle has landed.”
It stays one of many nice tragedies of the final century that Kennedy, the energetic younger chief of the USA who, in Might 1961, boldly directed his nation to land a person on the Moon earlier than the last decade’s finish, didn’t reside to see that promise fulfilled. Unsurprisingly for a politician, that promise was a politically motivated one, pushed into pressure solely weeks after the Soviet Union launched the primary man into space and America globally humiliated itself with its failed try to topple Fidel Castro at Cuba’s Bay of Pigs.
Regardless of a continuously swaying pendulum of competing public opinion, Kennedy staunchly supported the lunar purpose. There was disquiet over the president’s preferential remedy of the Moon above schooling and social welfare, for which he had vigorously campaigned throughout his years representing Massachusetts within the Senate. Certainly, a Gallup ballot in Might 1961 revealed solely 42 % of Individuals heartily endorsed Kennedy’s bid for lunar glory.
The president had a lot to show six many years in the past at the moment, on September 12, 1962, when he arrived on the 70,000-capacity Rice Stadium on the Rice College campus in Houston, Texas. Town had been chosen the 12 months prior as the situation for NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Heart (MSC) — at the moment’s Johnson House Heart (JSC) — and the college had performed a pivotal position in its choice.
Kennedy goals for the Moon
As Kennedy took to the lectern round 10 A.M. that Wednesday morning, the stadium’s bleachers brimmed with a sweltering crowd of 40,000 or extra. Fall semester lessons have been but to start, and the president’s viewers have been principally Rice freshmen, newly arrived on campus for orientation. Even at this early hour, temperatures regarded set to soar to some 85 levels Fahrenheit (30 levels Celsius), as suited officers rhythmically tugged handkerchiefs from pockets to vigorously mop their brows. Maybe conscious of their discomfort, Kennedy pledged that his lecture could be temporary.
Kennedy began his now-historic Rice speech by condensing the whole thing of human historical past right into a metaphoric 50-year “capsule of progress” to light up the relative recency of our evolution from cave-dwellers to farmers to space vacationers. If all human historical past have been condensed right into a 50-year interval, “Final month, electrical lights and telephones and vehicles and airplanes grew to become accessible,” Kennedy stated, clearly relishing the prolonged metaphor. “Solely final week did we develop penicillin and tv and nuclear energy.”
