Re: Are there any rumors of a big NASA lunar space policy due any day now?


"Derek Lyons" <fairwater@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:44733d62.495502093@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
"Jeff Findley" <jeff.findley@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

"Derek Lyons" <fairwater@xxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:447a1fb6.487906437@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx

It would be interesting to actually figure out how much impact
Kennedy's speech actually had - and how much impact came from the
Apollo Program becoming his posthumous monument.

And I think people tend to forget that Kennedy was a small piece of this
entire equation, IMHO.

The bigger influences were that:

1. Space travel was cool and new and there was much excitement generated
for manned spaceflight because of this.
2. Those "godless commies" were neck and neck with us technologically and
were already ahead of us the "space race". This was somewhat of a black
eye
to US.

So? The bald fact remains that prior to Kennedy's speech - there
wasn't a coherent lunar program, and aftwards one came into being.

True, but it was all a means to an end. Beating the Russians was absolutely
the goal.

I don't think Kennedy really cared all that much about space. See here:

http://www.whitehousetapes.org/exhibits/space_old/

Here's a quote from the transcript of the above audio tape:

President Kennedy: Well, [unclear] talking about anything so much different.
The only thing I think . . . we locked ourselves at $400 million this
morning, and I want to take a look [and] talk to Dave Bell. But I do think
we ought to get it, you know, really clear, that the policy ought to be that
this is the top-priority program of the agency and one of the two-except for
defense-the top priority of the United States Government. I think that that's
the position we ought to take. Now this may not change anything about that
schedule, but at least we ought to be clear. Because otherwise we shouldn't
be spending this kind of money because I'm not that interested in space. I
think it's good; I think we ought to know about it; we're ready to spend
reasonable amounts of money. But we're talking about . . . we've spent half
the expenditures, we've wrecked out budget on all these other domestic
programs, and the only justification for it, in my opinion, to do it in the
pell-mell fashion is because we hope to beat them and demonstrate that
starting behind it [them], as we did by a couple of years, by God, we passed
them. I think it would be a helluva thing for us.


If you read the whole transcript, you can see he was trying to beat one
point into Webb's head, that beating the Russians to the moon ought to be
*the top* priority of NASA. Everything else could wait. Even the lunar
science could wait.

Jeff
--
"They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a
little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor
safety"
- B. Franklin, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations (1919)


.

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