“Not because they are easy, but because they are hard…”
–President John F. Kennedy, 12 September 1962, Rice University, Houston, Texas
“Half that of the temperature of the Sun,” is how President John F. Kennedy described the heat on that Texas summer morning. Sixty years ago today, 40,000 people including Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson, Mercury astronauts, and students baked in the bowl of Rice University’s football stadium listening to the words of that young Yankee from Camelot. President Kennedy was in Houston touring the new Manned Spacecraft Center and to rally support for the nation’s space efforts. While hard to believe today with the cherished legacy of the Apollo program, Kennedy’s space policy was very unpopular. A Gallup poll of Americans published 2 June 1961 reported 58 percent of those surveyed responded “No” when asked if they supported spending billions of dollars on sending a man to the moon. After falling behind the Soviet Union and its successful launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957 and flight of Yuri Gagarin in April of 1961, Kennedy formally challenged the country to exactly that expensive goal. Before the end of the decade, the United States should commit itself to “landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”
Much like today, the country in the early 1960s struggled through social, economic, and technological disruption. Though wealth and social class were becoming more democratized, the modernizing world also deepened the racial divide of the nation. In a time when neighborhoods were burning and many living on the brink of poverty, the call to invest today’s equivalent of roughly $500 billion in a government space project was out of touch. The media christened the term “moondoggle.” Even former President Dwight Eisenhower called Kennedy’s moonshot “nuts”—controversial statements for a former President.
Kennedy had to sell space to a skeptical public. People are agreeable to ideas that directly benefit them. That is simple human nature. We want everything . . . now . . . and done for us. Those are the projects we get behind. Unfortunately, the magical Information Age we enjoy today, the real prize of the space race, would not be realized for another generation. Human nature also encourages politicians to embellish the benefits of their ideas. Being popular is far easier than leading.
But Kennedy and his speechwriter Ted Sorenson took a different approach with a simple belief—human nature is not what we actually want from ourselves. Indulging in our instincts leads to conflict, suffering, and regression – something the country deeply understood less than two decades from the end of World War Two. Instead Kennedy built his presidency on the principle, “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country,” imploring us to elevate ourselves from humans to citizens. As great as his 1961 inaugural “ask what you can do for your country” address is, it is, in this writer’s opinion, a distant second to his September 1962 speech at Rice University.
“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 his conviction, Kennedy projected the confidence of courageous explorers into midcentury Americans. Courage gives people agency in their lives and allows us to live up to our best selves. JFK knew in 1962 that is what the country needed.
Courage does not simply materialize from talk. The President emphasized in his Boston Trans-Atlantic accent “hard . . .” letting that single syllable ring just a little louder in our minds. But what was hardship to this President? Jack Kennedy, the wealthy Harvard educated son of the Ambassador to the United Kingdom, was after all one of the most privileged men in the country.
“We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people.”
It is no coincidence in this speech that Kennedy, a naval officer, repeatedly used the imagery of the sea when describing the new frontier of Space. The Sea is hard. It is cold, bleak, and unforgiving. Less than twenty years prior from his Rice University speech while patrolling the waters of the Solomon Island in the South Pacific, Lieutenant (j.g.) Kennedy’s command, the 80ft motor torpedo boat PT-109, was rammed and sunk by the Imperial Japanese Navy destroyer Amagiri in the early morning hours of 2 August 1943. The collision instantly killed two of i 109’s 13 men, TM2 Andrew Kirksey and MM2 Harold Marney.
The officers and men of PT-109, 1943. Credit; U.S. Navy
LTJG Kennedy and his surviving crew were adrift in the darkness, wounded, and burned clinging to the wrecked hulk of their ship. The light of the rising sun would only expose their location and bring more trouble. Kennedy decided the best course was to swim to a little uninhabited island four miles away. The order could have led to the exhausted crew’s drowning. But he knew the men of PT-109 had to make this journey. The swim against the current took five hours. Kennedy towed badly injured MM1 Patrick McMahon by clinching his teeth on the belt of the sailor’s life jacket. When the party finally reached the beach of Plum Pudding Island, the lieutenant fell in the surf and heaved the saltwater from his gut.
While delivered from their wreckage, the crew was still in enemy waters. Kennedy set out that evening on a solo swim into the passage with the hope of hailing a sister torpedo boat. His crew pleaded for him to abandon the plan. But he stripped to his skivvies and trekked across a coral reef jutting into the strait. Instead of a soft light to illuminate the horizon, the new moon only fed a black void. There was “some” light. The pull of his stroke disturbed the tiny fireflies of the ocean energizing a phosphorescent wake—blurring the edge of the sea into the stars above. After hours of treading water Kennedy lost his bearings. He began to drift away—carried only to his wits’ end. Miraculously, the current circled him back to the reef the next day returning him to his men. That would be the first of several more risky swims to find help.
The courage and endurance of the crew of PT-109 paid off when they made contact with allied scouts on a nearby island. This set in motion a rescue plan by Kennedy’s squadron who previously held a memorial service in their lost shipmates’ honor. Six days after their engagement with the Japanese destroyer and subsisting on coconuts, the 11 survivors of PT-109 made it back to their home base.
President Kennedy was far from the idealized character both publicly and in his private life. Even his actions as the commanding officer of PT-109 are not above criticism. He had fears and weaknesses. He was a human being. But his courage and patriotism, tested under intense hardship during the war, was unimpeachable.
“…all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and both must be enterprised and overcome with answerable courage.”
A President’s courage was just one drop in the fuel tank to get America’s rocket to the moon. There were the obvious sacrifices of astronauts and test pilots pushing the limit of how high and fast we fly. And hundreds of thousands of engineers and scientists pushed the limits of their personal lives forgoing family time in service of this objective. But the burden placed on the average American cannot be overlooked. The collective cost of projects Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo was incomparable to any federal program before and arguably since. Despite reservations of costs and relevance to their day-to-day priorities, the public voted in the five national elections from 1958 to 1966 their support for the moonshot. From 1961 to 1967, federal government tax revenues grew by an astounding 60 percent and NASA’s budget by more than 600 percent. NASA in 1966 accounted for 4.4 percent of the total federal budget. For context, as a percentage of federal spending in 2021, that would be equivalent to either half of the Pentagon’s entire budget, nine times NASA’s current budget, or more than the interest expense on the national debt. Taxpayers paid those costs.
“… our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, 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 space-faring nation.”
The fruits of the moonshot, while science fiction in 1962, touch every aspect of our contemporary lives. How we travel, how we do business, all kinds of life-saving medical technology, and perhaps most profoundly—how we socialize with others have been disrupted by the research of getting a man to the moon. And those are just the self-centric examples, to say nothing of our larger knowledge of our planet, solar system, universe, and time.
As great as these benefits of the space program have been, perhaps the most valuable is how the achievement of a seemingly impossible challenge makes us realize our potential. Spaceflight still makes us feel that way. Right now there are thousands of young space companies competing in this new commercial marketplace. Each is working on their own moonshot. While the new space economy is extremely disruptive and will only be more so, there are less risky ways to make money than bolting a product on top of thousands of tons of explosives then blasting it into orbit. Profit alone does not compel people to fly. But they do. There is no other more moving experience than seeing a flying machine you designed and built sitting downrange ignite its engines in a flash of light then seconds later have your core shaken by the Earth and the air from the boom of the rocket as it ascends into the sky. Sixty years later, we’re in another space race. It’s just as consequential. And this is what still drives us.
In a cynical 1962 editorial The New York Times mocked Kennedy by arguing that a Harvard University could be reproduced for every state and then some for the cost of the moonshot. Seven years later, The New York Times dedicated 18 pages in a single edition to the Apollo 11 landing—including a page of poems. Leadership and great triumphs take courage. Sixty years ago President Kennedy said to accomplish this challenge, “we must be bold.” He was proven right.
Earthrise, from Apollo 8 on 26 December 1968. Credit: NASA
