September 12 · This Day in America
It is hot in Rice University's football stadium in Houston, and the President is sweating through his suit. The United States has logged barely fifteen minutes of human spaceflight. No one yet knows how to rendezvous two ships in orbit, or land on another world, or come home. Standing in that heat, John F. Kennedy commits the nation anyway: a man on the Moon, and safely back, before this decade is out. "We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things," he says, "not because they are easy, but because they are hard." It is not a prediction. It is a dare the country makes to itself, out loud, with no idea how to keep it. Seven years later, two Americans would stand in the Sea of Tranquility. The promise made in that stadium was kept exactly.
Source: www.nasa.gov
Also on this day · 1953
Before he was the president who aimed at the Moon, he was a 36-year-old senator getting married in Newport, Rhode Island. On this morning, John F. Kennedy weds 24-year-old Jacqueline Bouvier at St. Mary's Church before some 750 guests, with a blessing from Pope Pius XII read aloud. Eight years later they would become the youngest president and first lady in the nation's history. On this day they were just a couple cutting a cake.
Source: www.jfklibrary.org
“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.”President John F. Kennedy, Rice University, 1962