Moonshot / NASA Apollo missions

**Lindsey Cormack** (0:01)
This is Rewind.

**Greg Jackson** (0:03)
Rewind.

**Neil Maher** (0:07)
Colonization is going to allow us to pollute here and go away. Why don't we just focus on...

**Lindsey Cormack** (0:11)
We can dump our trash out our windows and then we're going to find a new place to sleep.

**Neil Maher** (0:14)
We can trash this planet because we're all going to go visit Venus and live there so nicely. It's going to be perfect.

**Greg Jackson** (0:26)
It's just about 9:30 a.m., September 12th, 1962 We're under an already sweltering sun at 6100 Main Street, Houston, Texas, also known as Rice University Football Stadium. But today, we won't be catching an Owls game. No, we're here to listen to our president, John F. Kennedy, deliver his first lecture as an honorary visiting professor. While we're getting settled among the 50,000 people on the grandstands, allow me to explain just what Jack is doing in the Lone Star State. See, back in May of 1961, President Kennedy delivered a special message to Congress, vowing to put man on the moon. Now, roughly a year and a half later, the space race is intensifying, and it's not going fully in America's favor. In August, the USSR successfully launched Vostok 3 and 4, space flights where humans orbited the Earth. Within this heated Cold War environment, Jack isn't going to let the Soviets get ahead of the US, and they've got a big task ahead. So this means a two-day trip to check on several NASA facilities, ranging from Huntsville, Alabama, Cape Canaveral, Florida, Houston, Texas, and St. Louis, Missouri.
Oh, and it looks like everyone's quieting down.
It must be time for the presidential address.
Donning a Navy suit with a matching blue tie, crisp white button-down shirt and white pocket square, Jack Kennedy stands atop the football field behind a wooden podium with the seal of the President of the United States affixed to its front. Flanked by the American and presidential flags, JFK begins announcing his delight to be here today. Recounting a brief history of American progress, he raises the question, But why some say the moon?

**John F. Kennedy** (2:16)
Why choose this as our goal? Well, it's because of, Our obligations to ourselves, as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world's leading spacefaring nation.

**Greg Jackson** (2:37)
The President then hones in on the importance of focusing the space race on the peaceful exploration of space rather than a new frontier for violence.

**John F. Kennedy** (3:14)
why climb the highest mountain? Why 35 years ago fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas? We choose to go to the moon.
We choose to go to the moon.

**Greg Jackson** (3:30)
That last little bit is ad-libbed for this specific crowd. And oh, do they enjoy the president's personal touch.
So much so, that laughter nearly drowns out what we now know to be the speech's most iconic line.
And with that, American destiny is set. Man will set foot on the moon by 1969
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. With those ringing words in 1962, President John Fitzgerald Kennedy transformed a geopolitical necessity into a national calling for a moonshot. The term moonshot is something we use today in business speak and other parlance. Yet, a moonshot demands more than just oratorical inspiration. It requires the relentless alignment of scientific ambition, economic resources, and political will. This literal moonshot was something that only the vast resources of the United States federal government could do. And we did it. But while JFK provided the spark, the flame was maintained by a complex apparatus of administrators, engineers, and the support of a public often deeply divided over the cost of such progress. To understand how the government accomplished this, we turned to historian Neil Maher, author of Apollo in the Age of Aquarius. We'll pull back the curtain on the myth of the Apollo program to see how leadership really functions. Not in the vacuum of a podium speech, but in the messy, high stakes, and often contradictory reality of governing a democracy during one of its most transformative eras in our history. Welcome to Government That Doesn't Suck. We are your professors, Greg Jackson and Lindsey Cormack.

**Lindsey Cormack** (5:42)
I have with me award-winning historian Neil Maher to talk about his book, Apollo in the Age of the Aquarius, and what the Apollo mission says for the American experiment. Neil, thank you so much for joining us on Government That Doesn't Suck.