The US and USSR were on opposite sides in the Cold War. They were against each other in another way too. Each country wanted to be the first to send a man to the moon. This was called the ‘Space Race’.
In 1960, President Eisenhower started the Apollo Space Program, and when Kennedy became president, he went on with it. Kennedy thought it was very important for the US to be the leader in the Space Race. He wanted to show the world that the US was a great and strong country.
It cost billions of dollars to send a man into space. On 25 May 1961, Kennedy gave a speech to Congress. He said that it was very important for the US to win the Space Race. By the end of the 1960s, he said, he wanted to send a man to the moon and back. He asked Congress for twenty-two billion dollars for the Apollo Space Program, and Congress agreed to give him the money.
On 12 April 1961, the Soviets sent a man called Yuri Gagarin into space for the first time. Kennedy was worried that the US was getting behind the USSR. He thought that perhaps the Americans and Soviets could work together, and he asked Khrushchev about this at the meeting in Vienna in June 1961. But Khrushchev did not want help from the US. He did not want the Americans to learn about the work that the USSR was doing on space travel, so he said no.
On 12 September 1962, Kennedy made a speech at Rice University in Texas. He told the people why the Apollo Space Program was so important for the US. He said, ‘We choose to go to the moon … and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.’
On 21 July 1969, nearly six years after Kennedy’s death, the Americans Neil Armstrong and Edwin Eugene ‘Buzz’ Aldrin became the first men to walk on the moon. So the US won the Space Race, but Kennedy did not live to see it happen.
First man on the moon