On This Date: May 25th 1961......

[Oceansaway]

President John F. Kennedy called on the nation to work

toward putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade.....

[Confusious]

1. Moon Shot = Luddite Mating Call

[Posteritatis]

8. Hee. (nt)

[Writer]

2. And Obama wasn't even born yet. n/t

[Oceansaway]

3. 1935....Babe Ruth hit # 714....

the final home run of his career........

[MyNameGoesHere]

4. And the nation responded.

No one threw their hands up in the air and said we can't do it, it's never been done before. I wonder what happened to America? Now it seems like everything is impossible and we shouldn't even dream about it.

[Hell Hath No Fury]

5. Too bad Obama doesn't have the insight/will --

to call for the same for clean energy. :(

We could have a clean energy source in ten years of we had the will and money.

[zipplewrath]

7. Careful there

Unless you have something specific to name, it may not be the same situation.

Kennedy made this call because he was told it could be done. They had rockets already in the conception stage to do it. They understood what was needed. He picked "within this decade" because he'd be out of office before they failed. Now, they were fibbing a bit. They had "concepts" but nothing of the Saturn V size had ever been built. They created the Saturn B1 because they couldn't get the V working fast enough. And it was a pure science project. No one had to make any money off of it, and they would accept alot of risk in the missions.

In the area of "clean" energy, depending upon your definition, the technology that most closely resembles this today would be nuclear. Throw in a healthy amount of wind energy, and some "smart grid" stuff and that'd probably be what you'd get.

I suspect what you'd probably really like is more of a "Manhattan project" for clean energy. No one had ever done anything like it before. They didn't even really know how they were going to do it when they started. And they almost blew up Stagg Field in the process.

[csziggy]

10. Obama knows that Carter's call for clean energy was what killed a second term

Jimmy Carter on April 18, 1977 called for a ten year initiative to get the US off dependence on foreign oil. I think that is what motivated the forces against him. If the ideaas Carter suggested had been implemented for the next ten years, we would not be in this situation. Then, we were not anywhere as dependent on foreigh oil as we are now. It would have been much easier to make the transition to alternative energy. Now the oil companies are much richer, have a bigger stranglehold on our government and are harder to push back against.

We could have had clean energy twenty years ago. Now, I am not sure we ever will. I think the oil companies are willing to let our civilization go down before they give up their grip on us.

[edbermac]

6. And yesterday May 24th, 1962.

Scott Carpenter was the 2nd American to orbit the earth aboard Aurora 7.

http://www.scottcarpenter.com/

[Soylent Brice]

9. i heard they were going to blow the moon up.

:popcorn: