Carl Sagan on the Audacity of John F. Kennedy's Moon Mission Proposal

Once upon a time, we soared into the solar system, for a few years. Then we hurried back. why? What happened? What was Apollo really about?

The scope and audacity of John Kennedy's May 25th 1961 message to a joint session of Congress on "Urgent National Needs" -- the speech that launched the Apollo program--dazzled me. We would use rockets not yet designed and alloys not yet conceived, navigation and docking shemes not yet devised, in order to send a man to an unknown world--a world not yet explored, not even in a preliminary way, not even by robots--and we would bring him safely back, and we would do it before the decade was over. This confident pronouncement was made before any American had even achieved Earth orbit.

Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space (1997-09-08)

• astronomy
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• space
• space exploration