Today, for the first time in the history of mankind, a man piloted a privately built craft into space.
Over the years since the Apollo missions, our nation has lost interest in space, whether it be from the disappointments of disasters like Challenger, or from politicians and people complaining that we have "problems to solve at home" that are more important than spending our money in space.
Our race has all of its eggs in one basket. That's a fantastic reason to spread out, to hedge our bets, to protect our future from mishap and accident.
But more than that, we have a responsibility to raise our eyes above the horizon, and to pursue discovery for the sake of exploration and learning and growing. We owe it to ourselves and to those who come after us to always push farther and harder.
Space technology is the only technology that I know of since the dawn of man where we've actually advanced and then retreated. If we wanted to put a man on the moon tomorrow, we couldn't. That terrifies me that we've actually allowed an advance to slip through our fingers and out of our minds. That should never be true. Progress should be a steadily advancing, multipronged path into the future, not something we give up on when it's difficult.
And with that, I'd like you all to read again the words that Kennedy spoke over forty years ago, and realize they're no less true today than they were back in the stone age of space flight, where they pushed farther with primitive technology than we're doing today in our age of scientific might.
"There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation many never come again. 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?
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 are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.
Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, "Because it is there."
Well, space is there, and we're going to climb it, and the moon and the planets are there, and new hopes for knowledge and peace are there. And, therefore, as we set sail we ask God's blessing on the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked."
We choose to go to the moon.
