Years before we knew how to make it happen, President Kennedy said we would go to the moon. Louise Hay talked about the importance of our words to create actions. You can't just wake up and see if today is the day you'll act. Yoda from Star Wars was correct: "Do or do not, there is no try." Even a small decision makes a difference.

Obama’s NASA budget perfectly captures the difference between Kennedy's liberalism and Obama's. Kennedy's was an expansive, bold, outward-looking summons, Obama's is a constricted inward-looking call to retreat. Fifty years ago, Kennedy opened the New Frontier. Obama has just shut it.

In January 2004 President George W. Bush put NASA in high gear, heading back to the moon with a space vision that was to have set in motion future exploration of Mars and other destinations. The Bush space policy focused on U.S. astronauts first returning to the moon as early as 2015 and no later than 2020. Portraying the moon as home to abundant resources, President Bush did underscore the availability of raw materials that might be harvested and processed into rocket fuel or breathable air. “We can use our time on the moon to develop and test new approaches and technologies and systems that will allow us to function in other, more challenging, environments. The moon is a logical step toward further progress and achievement,” he remarked in rolling out his space policy. To fulfill the Bush space agenda required expensive new rockets — the Ares I launcher and the large, unfunded Ares V booster — plus a new lunar module, all elements of the so-called Constellation Program. The Bush plan forced retirement of the space shuttle in 2010 to pay for the return to the moon, but there were other ramifications as well. Putting the shuttle out to pasture created a large human spaceflight gap in reaching the International Space Station. The price tag for building the station is roughly $100 billion, and without the space shuttle, there’s no way to reach it without Russian assistance. In the end, the stars of the Constellation Program were out of financial alignment. It was an impossible policy to implement given limited NASA money.

"For me, the most ironic token of [the first human moon landing] is the plaque signed by President Richard M. Nixon that Apollo 11 took to the moon. It reads: "We came in peace for all Mankind." As the United States was dropping 7 ½ megatons of conventional explosives on small nations in Southeast Asia, we congratulated ourselves on our humanity. We would harm no one on a lifeless rock."

Let me hypothesize a political scenario on the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11’ s landing on the moon, in 2019. The U.S. President, whoever that may be, takes the opportunity to direct the future of human space exploration, pioneered by Americans, by stating in a speech: “I believe that this nation should commit itself, within two decades, to establish permanence on the planet Mars.

Look up from your BlackBerry one night. That is the moon. On it are exactly 12 sets of human footprints -- untouched, unchanged, abandoned. For the first time in history, the moon is not just a mystery and a muse, but a nightly rebuke. A vigorous young president once summoned us to this new frontier, calling the voyage "the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked." And so we did it. We came. We saw. Then we retreated. How could we?

As Robert Kennedy many years ago said, "Only those who dare to fail greatly can ever achieve greatly." He also said, "I do not lightly dismiss the dangers and the difficulties of challenging an incumbent President, but these are not ordinary times and this is not an ordinary election." He said, "At stake is not simply the leadership of our party and even our country. It is our right to moral leadership of this planet." So today I say to you my friends, these are not ordinary times. And this will not be an ordinary election. But this is our America. And here’s the thing. It’s up to us. It’s up to us. Each and every one of us. So let's remember in this fight we have the power of the people. We can achieve the dreams of our parents and grandparents. We can heal our nation. We can give our children the future they deserve. We can reclaim the American Dream for every single person in our country. We can restore America’s moral leadership on this planet. So let’s do this. And let’s do it together. And let's start now. Thank you. God bless you. And God bless the United States of America.

The next level in moral behavior higher than that exhibited by the baboon is that in which duty and loyalty are shown toward a group of your own kind too large for an individual to know all of them. We have a name for that. It is called "patriotism." Behaving on a still higher moral level were the astronauts who went to the Moon, for their actions tend toward the survival of the entire race of mankind. The door they opened leads to the hope that H. sapiens will survive indefinitely long, even longer than this solid planet on which we stand tonight. As a direct result of what they did, it is now possible that the human race will never die. Many short-sighted fools think that going to the Moon was just a stunt. But the astronauts knew the meaning of what they were doing, as is shown by Neil Armstrong's first words in stepping down onto the soil of Luna: "One small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind."

It is a most important decision that we make as a nation. But all of you have lived through the last four years and have seen the significance of space and the adventures in space, and no one can predict with certainty what the ultimate meaning will be of mastery of space. I believe we should go to the moon. But I think every citizen of this country as well as the Members of the Congress should consider the matter carefully in making their judgment, to which we have given attention over many weeks and months, because it is a heavy burden, and there is no sense in agreeing or desiring that the United States take an affirmative position in outer space, unless we are prepared to do the work and bear the burdens to make it successful. If we are not, we should decide today and this year.

The scope and audacity of John Kennedy’s May 25, 1961, message to a joint session of Congress on “Urgent National Needs” — the speech that launched the Apollo program — dazzled me. We would use rockets not yet designed and alloys not yet conceived, navigation and docking schemes not yet devised, in order to send a man to an unknown world — a world not yet explored, not even in a preliminary way, not even by robots — and we would bring him safely back, and we would do it before the decade was over. This confident pronouncement was made before any American had even achieved Earth orbit.

During my testimony <small>(to the House Science and Technology Committee)</small> in May I said, “Some question why Americans should return to the Moon. “After all,” they say “we have already been there.” I find that mystifying. It would be as if 16th century monarchs proclaimed that “we need not go to the New World, we have already been there.” Or as if President Thomas Jefferson announced in 1803 that Americans “need not go west of the Mississippi, the Lewis and Clark Expedition has already been there.” Americans have visited and examined 6 locations on Luna, varying in size from a suburban lot to a small township. That leaves more than 14 million square miles yet to explore.

I'm here tonight I'm here tonight to pay tribute to two men who have changed my life and the life of this country – Barack Obama and Edward M. Kennedy. Their stories are very different but they share a commitment to the timeless American ideals of justice and fairness, service and sacrifice, faith and family. Leaders like them come along rarely. But once or twice in a lifetime, they come along just when we need them the most. This is one of those moments. As our nation faces a fundamental choice between moving forward or falling farther behind, Senator Obama offers the change we need. Everywhere I go in this country, people tell me that Barack Obama is making them feel hopeful, the way they did when my father was president. It's hardly the words he uses – words that remind us that we are all in this together and that we each have something to contribute to this country that has given us so much.

For too long, we’ve been told “no” to a substantially better future - that the America that went to the moon, pursued the Great Society & electrified the nation is no longer possible. I disagree. Instead, let’s break past our self-defined limits and redefine what’s possible.

It was July 19, 1969, and everyone was excited about the news that astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin were walking on the Moon. To me, the idea of U.S. military men on the Moon was scary rather than exciting, given what they were doing on planet Earth, and that the Moon trip was a military project. (p197)