Fight For Space

The area of manned spaceflight budget request for Apollo

is being reduced by $42.1 million

to $916.5 million.

This reduction will be achieved by canceling the Apollo 15

and 19 lunar missions,

redesignating the remaining Apollo flights

as Apollo's 14 through 17.

Everything is going smoothly here

at the Kennedy Space Center for the launch of Apollo 17,

man's last trip to the moon in the foreseeable future.

Three, two, one ignition.

We're on our way, Houston.

I believe that this nation should commit itself

to achieving the goal before this decade is out

of landing a man on the moon

and returning him safely to the Earth.

No single space project in this period

will be more impressive to mankind,

or more important for the long-range exploration of space.

None will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.

The average taxpayer is entitled to ask,

"What's in space for me?"

T minus 15 seconds, guidance is internal.

12, 11, 10, nine, ignition sequence start,

six, five, four, three,

two, one, zero. All engine run.

Lift off, we have a lift off, 32 minutes past the hour,

lift off on Apollo 11.

Roger, we got a roll program.

Tower cleared.

Roger, roll.

What does spaceflight do for people?

It's a philosophical answer.

It's exploration, it's the human spirit of going out there.

The great thing we wanna know is, "Where do we fit in?"

There's two questions that trouble us all

at some point in our life.

Where did we come from?

And are we alone?

Without the space program,

our economy would be hurled 50 years back into the past.

Think of it for a moment--

GPS, weather satellites, telecommunications, the Internet.

By the exploration of the moon,

or by landing on the moon and walking around,

that led to a space program,

which led to Global Positioning Systems,

which led to so-called space assets,

which have affected everything.

The reason to explore space

is that it can boost our economy... period.

It boosts our economy as it changes the culture.

People think differently.

Think about the future, think about inventing things.

Think about making a better tomorrow,

rather than just surviving the day.

You go over the hill,

you don't know what you're gonna find.

And you're not gonna go over the hill

unless you're curious about it.

It transforms the intellectual outlook of a nation,

when a nation embarks on something bold and audacious,

such is going into deep space, as it did in the 1960s.

Today a new moon is in the sky,

a 23-inch metal sphere placed in orbit by a Russian rocket.

Here, an artist's conception

of how the feat was accomplished.

A three-stage rocket. Number one,

the booster in the class of an intercontinental missile.

Its weight estimated at 50 tons.

A smaller second stage took over at 5,000 miles an hour

and carried on to the highest point reached,

500 miles up, the artificial moon is boosted

to a speed counterbalancing

the pull of gravity and released.

You are hearing the actual signals transmitted

by the Earth circling satellite,

one of the great scientific feats of the age.

In 1957 Sputnik was launched.

And if you ask me what drove the creation of NASA,

it was the launching of Sputnik.

The public often thinks of Sputnik as,

"Oh, it's just an innocent little satellite that went beep."

Let's part the curtains, and you find out

this was the shell

of an intercontinental ballistic missile

that had been hollowed out

and a radio transmitter put in the head.

That's what was flying over our heads in America

on October 4th, 1957.

Spooked us to no end.

No one said, "Oh, the frontier of exploration is breeched."

No, it was, "The Soviet Union has the new high ground.

"They are our sworn enemy.

"We can't look bad in front of them.

"We've gotta do it too.

We need an agency to take care of this."

A year later, NASA was founded.

This special report brought to you by NASA,

the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.

What we had was something

that had come out of a very can-do spirit,

that came out of the spirit of winning World War II.

It came out of the technology burst

that was going on around the world at that time.

It came out of the imaginations of people

like Wernher Von Braun, Willy Ley, and Walt Disney.

In our modern world, everywhere we look,

we see the influence science has upon our daily lives.

Now here's a model, my design

for a four-stage orbital rocket ship.

It came out of the inspiration

of people like Arthur C. Clarke, and Robert Heinlein,

and Isaac Asimov, and Silverberg,

and all the great science fiction writers of the time,

who were inspiring children

and all kinds of people in that realm.

And then we had the spark that ignited that passion

into a fire that was from Sputnik.

People said, "What happens

"if there's a hydrogen bomb orbiting head?

"If the Russians have the high ground,

then we could be outmaneuvered in the next war."

The United States too,

promised to launch an Earth satellite,

but in our satellite program,

we Americans got badly bogged down.

Why? What happened?

We had the money, the resources,

and the scientific know-how.

Unfortunately, a series of wrong decisions

led us to frustration and failure.

This order went out to the Armed Services.

Let me read it to you.

"Recent news stories which have described certain projects

"as space flight projects

"have resulted in unfavorable reaction

"at Department of Defense and congressional levels.

"In any speeches or public releases

"planned by you or your staff,

"avoid the mention or the discussion of space,

space technology, and space vehicles."

And so, by the summer of 1957,

"space" had become a forbidden word in Washington.

In totally realistic terms,

Von Braun could've had us there in 1950.

We need to understand,

we would have launched a satellite in 1950.

The reason we did not is because we didn't wish to.

Panic set in, and after that people said, "Okay,

let's regroup, let's do something."

It was your patriotic duty to become a physicist,

a chemist, a mathematician.

It was for America and for freedom

that people said, "Yes, I wanna to become a cold war hero

for their freedom and for liberty."

The history of human reaction...

to the threat of death knows no bounds...

and knowing no bounds includes

birthing an entire space program

for the purpose of showing the world

that we will not be bested by evil godless Communists.

Such was the mood and the attitude in the 1950s.

Man had his first great success in space

when the Russians pushed a man across the threshold.

He was Yuri Gagarin,

the astronaut the Russians lionized

as the first to orbit the Earth.

It was the propaganda coup of the year.

Thank you.

"But why," some say, "the moon?

Why choose this as our goal?"

And they may well ask, "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.

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,

because that goal will serve to organize and measure

the best of our energies and skills,

because that challenge is one

that we're willing to accept,

one we are unwilling to postpone,

and one we intend to win.

At the time that President Kennedy made his speech,

we had never been to orbit.

Just a little bit over a week before the Kennedy speech

to the US Congress,

we had launched Alan Shepard.

Lift off.

Ahh, Roger, liftoff and the clock is started.

We'd never been to orbit,

and we were challenged to beat the Russians to the moon.

So, to a great extent that initial challenge

was one that I believe was geopolitical,

but it also had the economic benefit

to basically generate the enthusiasm

and the passion within the American public.