Page 12 - Apollo Moonships

10 On bOard apOllO mOOnships
WE CHOOSE TO GO TO THE MOON
On September 12, 1962, in Houston, Texas, President Kennedy spoke to 35,000 people at the football stadium of Rice University: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade (...) not because they are easy, but because they are hard; because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one we intend to win,”, he said.
KENNEDY’S DECISION
On May 25, 1961, the U.S. president, John F. Kennedy, speaking to Congress and the nation, said: “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 Earth.
No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important in the long-range exploration of space, and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.” These words not only committed the nation to achieve an ambitious
goal but also announced the presidential determination to convert the American Space Program into a strategic instrument within the context of the Cold War with the Soviet Union, at that time the main military, political, economic, and ideological rival of the United States. The Kennedy decision was made after a shocking series of Soviet firsts that jarred the American public. They were the first to launch an artificial Earth satellite (Sputnik 1, 1957);
the first to send a probe to the Moon (Luna 2, 1958); the first to send a living being—a dog named Laika—to outer space (Sputnik
2, 1958); and most importantly, the first to put a human in orbit around the Earth (Vostok I, 1961). Other Russian firsts were
the first image of the far side of the moon (Luna 3, 1959), the
first woman in Earth orbit (Vostok 6, 1963), the first spacewalk (Vokshod 2, 1965), and the first lunar soft landing (Luna 9,
1966). After Kennedy’s statement, the conquering of the moon became a national priority aimed at beating the Soviet Space Program, but most of all, it was oriented to demonstrate to the world the technological capabilities of the United States and its determination to remain the leading power in the world.
ONLY 15 MINUTES IN SPACE
When President Kennedy made the decision to send astronauts to the moon, the United States Space Program only had 15 minutes of experience in space. In effect, at that time, the United States had conducted only a short suborbital mission under the command of the naval officer Alan Shepard. The flight took place on May 5, 1961, 23 days after the Soviet Union put the first man in space,
Yuri Gagarin, but Shepard’s flight was not even able to match the orbital flight of the Russian cosmonaut. Going to the moon before the end of the decade would require enormous progress in a short time, not only in manned space flight but also in engineering, rocketry, technology development, and many other areas. The task was immense. In 1961, it was not even known if a man could resist the trip to the moon and back safely or whether he would be able to work properly in space. The moon itself was unknown. For example, no one knew if the lunar soil was firm enough to support a heavy landing spacecraft. Going to the moon was a national priority, but ¿could it really be done? How to do it was not known exactly, but many people inside NASA, American universities, and
the aerospace industry were sure that the goal could be achieved. When the lunar program reached its peak effort, an impressive number of 400,000 people worked on it. The cost of the program was also huge: 23.5 billion dollars, or 170 billion current dollars if inflation is taken into account.
FIRST AMERICAN ASTRONAUTS
Photography of the seven American astronauts
involved in Project Mercury, the first U.S. space
program Alan Shepard is the first from left in
the back row. On the right is the Mercury capsule,
designed to put one astronaut in orbital or suborbital flight
and to investigate human performance in the space environment.