Addressing Congress on 25 May 1961, six weeks after Gagarin's flight, President John F. Kennedy declared that the United States should commit itself to landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth before the decade was out. At that moment America had only 15 minutes of human spaceflight experience. The Apollo programme that followed cost about 25 billion dollars and employed hundreds of thousands of people. His Rice University speech of September 1962 gave the famous line 'we choose to go to the Moon'.
Before and after
- May 1961Nirenberg and Matthaei crack the first word of the genetic code
- 4 May 1961Founding of Institut Polytechnique des Sciences Avancées
- 6 May 1961Birth of George Clooney
- 17 May 1961Birth of Enya
- 25 May 1961Kennedy commits the United States to a Moon landing
- 1 June 1961Birth of Yevgeny Prigozhin
- 6 June 1961Death of Carl Jung
- 21 June 1961Birth of Joko Widodo
- 1 July 1961Birth of Diana, Princess of Wales
More in Exploration & discovery
- 3 August 1958The USS Nautilus crosses the North Pole under the ice
- 14 July 1965Mariner 4 sends the first close-up pictures of Mars
- 3 December 1973Pioneer 10 flies past Jupiter
- 1 September 1985The wreck of the Titanic is found
- 26 September 2022DART spacecraft deflects an asteroid
- 23 August 2023Chandrayaan-3 lands near the lunar south pole
The era
This moment belongs to the Contemporary world (1945 CE to today), the world since 1945. You can also browse everything in the 20th century.