“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth,” President Kennedy told a joint session of Congress on May 25, 1961. In a separate speech at Rice University on September 12, 1962, he reinforced the challenge: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard”.

Kennedy’s pledge came in the midst of the Cold War and after early Soviet space successes. The technology did not yet exist; the risks of rocketry were enormous; the cost would be immense. The decision rested on faith that American science, industry, and will could achieve what many experts considered impossible within the allotted time—and that doing so would expand the frontier of human aspiration.