September 12

On the 12th in 1962, during a speech given by President John F. Kennedy at Rice University, Kennedy stated his belief that the United States needed to pull ahead of the Soviet Union in the Space Race. He declared, “No nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in this race for space. 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.” Previously, in a May 25, 1961 address to a joint session of Congress, Kennedy had revealed to those assembled his belief that “this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.” In documents from Kennedy’s administration that have only recently been de-classified, it is revealed that the man Kennedy had in mind was his vice-president Lyndon Baines Johnson.