http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/story.hts/special/02/wsc/1611076
Then an inquisitive, camera-toting high school sophomore, Houston attorney Terry O'Rourke set off on a bicycle for Rice University's sun-drenched football stadium to listen to a speech about space travel. The date was Sept. 12, 1962. The speaker was President John F. Kennedy. The nation's chief executive was in Houston to huddle with NASA's leadership and address a national audience from Rice to bolster his fledgling Cold War initiative to land American astronauts on the moon. "I remember the times, it was before Mustangs and miniskirts," O'Rourke recalled at a recent gathering at Rice University organized by U.S. Rep. Nick Lampson of Beaumont to commemorate the presidential visit. "The Cold War was real. It was scary." In the month that followed, the United States and the Soviet Union would square off in the Cuban Missile Crisis. For 12 chilling days in late October, the world's two superpowers edged toward the brink of nuclear war before turning away. But fall was in the offing on that warm September day, and a charismatic politician was in town. Many of the area's schools released their students for the occasion. As O'Rourke reached the stadium, he darted through a crowd of 50,000 to find a seat close to the presidential podium and leaned forward to listen. "Surely the opening vistas of space promise high costs and hardships, as well as high regard," said Kennedy as he pressed his case for the funding and national resolve to reach the moon before the dawn of the next decade. The Soviets already had reached space with the first satellite in 1957 and Yuri Gagarin, the first cosmonaut, in 1961, but Kennedy was determined to beat them to the moon. "The exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind," the president explained. Then came the phrases that made the Rice speech among Kennedy's memorable. " ... (T)his generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. We mean to be a part of it -- we mean to lead it," Kennedy assured his audience. "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 the challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win." Kennedy would not live to see his goals achieved. But under his successors, the United States reached the moon's surface a half-dozen times with 12 explorers. "John F. Kennedy did something. He took the horror of the Cold War and made something beautiful, a dream for all of us," O'Rourke said. "He was like the coach giving the calls to the team. He was young, but he really knew what the hell he was doing." By December 1972, while bogged down in an unpopular war in Vietnam and with no other nation interested in lunar exploration, the United States retreated from the moon. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration refocused its pursuits on an orbital space shuttle and, more recently, on joining 15 other countries to develop the international space station. If the nation's enthusiasm for taking the first bold steps into space has waned, it has not disappeared. Some like O'Rourke and Lampson would like to reawaken the passion Kennedy inspired. "We should all take great pride in what has been accomplished to date, but we should not be satisfied," Lampson, a high school science teacher-turned-legislator, told the recent gathering at Rice. "We have a solar system to explore. We need to find out if there is life beyond the Earth. We need to build the space-based observatories and the research stations that will allow us to search for Earthlike planets around other stars." Lampson remembers well that Kennedy's vision ignited an intellectual curiosity and enthusiasm among the students that populated Lampson's Beaumont classroom. In May, the lawmaker introduced the Space Exploration Act of 2002, a bill that would establish a new office of exploration within NASA responsible for a series of new achievements in space. The goals include new spacecraft capable of carrying humans to the moon as well as nearby asteroids and Mars within 20 years. Although his legislation failed to emerge from a House oversight committee, Lampson widened the circle of co-sponsors and won the backing of the National Space Society, a nonprofit organization dedicated to space exploration and development. He intends to pursue passage again next year. "We've got to start a base on the moon, and we've got to think about traveling with men and women to the other planets," he said. "If we don't start thinking about that and taking baby steps along the way, we will never get there." xponent Repeat Maru rob _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
