Even though Yuri Gagarin beat Alan Shephard to space by just a few weeks, the Soviets could claim the advantage as Gagarin actually went into orbit, where Shephard’s was a suborbital flight. The Russian space program was seemingly clicking on all cylinders, and meanwhile NASA was adrift directionless. It did not help that the U.S. followed it up with a fiasco in the Bay of Pigs, in Cuba. President Kennedy sensed a new challenge was needed to motivate the nation, give purpose to NASA, and reclaim the lost prestige. A challenge like a moon landing.

On this day, May 25, in 1961, President John F. Kennedy went before Congress to address what he called “Urgent National Needs.” Kennedy cited Alan Shephard’s flight saying that space was now open, and discoveries there may be key to life on earth. The he delivered his famous call: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.”

Kennedy further elaborated on his vision in a speech at Rice University. Landing a man on the moon was still a matter of prestige, of reclaiming world leadership, but also of scientific advancement, he said. Human spaceflight to the moon before the decade’s end was an enormous undertaking – it would be hard — and precisely for that reason it had to be done by the United States.