64th ANNIVERSARY OF JFK’S MOON SPEECH, May 25, 2025

On May 25, 1961, three weeks after Alan Shepard became the first American to reach space on a suborbital mission, President John F. Kennedy addressed a joint session of Congress and called on the nation to commit itself to the goal of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth “before this decade is out.”

John Logsdon wrote the definitive history of what led up to that announcement and JFK’s efforts to sell the idea to a lukewarm Congress thereafter (John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon).

JFK’s September 1962 Rice University speech where he said “we go to the Moon and do these other things because they are hard” is better known and often mistakenly identified as when he started the Apollo program. The 1962 speech was JFK’s attempt to build support for Apollo in Congress and with the American public, who were wary of the costs.  Space historian Roger Launius has written about the myth and the reality of how much support Apollo had in the early and mid-1960s.

We haven’t heard of any events to commemorate JFK’s speech and the beginning of the Apollo program, but if we do we’ll add the information here. In 2019, the nation embarked on the Artemis program, named after Apollo’s twin sister in Greek mythology, to again put U.S. astronauts on the Moon. As of May 2025, the first post-Apollo landing, Artemis III, is scheduled for mid-2027.