65th ANNIVERSARY OF JFK’S MOON SPEECH TO CONGRESS, May 25, 2026

On May 25, 1961, in a speech to Congress on Urgent National Needs, President John F. Kennedy 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.” It initiated what became known as the Apollo program and the goal was achieved on July 20, 1969 when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin because the first humans to set foot on the Moon.

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 choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but 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.

As of April 25, 2026, 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. The original deadline was 2024, but has slipped every year and now is planned for 2028, although four astronauts successfully flew around the Moon (they did not got into orbit or land) in April 2026.

NASA Administrator Jared Isaacman recently revamped the Artemis program inserting an earth-orbital test flight before a landing. Artemis III is now the earth-orbital mission and Artemis IV is planned as the landing in 2028 and he hopes to have two landings that year.