Did you ever wonder why Kennedy proposed a race to the moon?
Oh, we wanted to win what was called “the space race.” There was worry about the relative prestige of the communist and non-communist worlds. Communist societies had been thought to be hopelessly backward – until the Sputnik satellites of October and November, 1957, and until Lunik became the first vehicle to reach the moon two years later. Did this mean that communism really might be the wave of the future?
But already, by 1962, America’s scientific and technical, industrial and economic resources, had put it far in the lead in terms of missions of scientific value. Yuri Gagarin circled the earth in 1961, nearly a year before John Glenn made his historic three orbits in February, 1962. But we were clearly catching up.
Putting men on the moon by the end of the decade of the 1960s was going to cost a fortune, and the benefits to be gotten from it were speculative. Yet Kennedy made a strategic decision to commit the country to do just that, and he got the Congress to vote the money, back when $5 billion a year was real money.
Why?