Fly me to the moon

Looking back it was a nuts idea, to attempt to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade and bring him back safely, as JFK declared on 25 May 1961. And even more incredible that the Americans actually achieved it, on schedule in July 1969 while engaged in a costly war in Vietnam and Cambodia. But when the Soviet Union laid down the challenge by launching Yuri Gagarin into space on the jolly ship Sputnik, the Americans had to think of something they could achieve first. Nasa’s rocket programme was nowhere near ready to launch manned flights into space, and so it was out of desperation rather than from calculation that President Kennedy’s advisers came up with the idea of sending a man to the moon and bringing him back again. They reckoned this was so far beyond the imagination of the Soviets they would never dream of attempting it.