Robert Knudsem, Office of the Military Aide
50 Years Ago, Today... President John F. Kennedy announced that the United States would land men on the Moon by the end of that decade during a speech at Rice University in Houston, Texas. What makes this speech so special is that his goal, even though Kennedy wouldn't live to see it happen, became a reality about seven years later with Apollo 11. Since then, presidents such as George H.W. Bush and even his son George W. Bush tried to lay out the same ambitious plans for NASA (with George Bush Sr. announcing in 1989 that astronauts would venture to the Moon and Mars with the Space Exploration Initiative, and George Bush Jr. declaring in 2004 that humans would head to the aforementioned celestial bodies with the Vision for Space Exploration)...only to see these plans either shot down by Congress or the president himself not following through on providing adequate funding for the program.
President Obama has proposed that a manned mission be sent to a near-Earth asteroid by 2025. Even though NASA is making good progress on developing the Space Launch System needed for this flight, it remains to be seen if the U.S. space agency will actually achieve Obama's goal thirteen years from now—if at all. Stay tuned.
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