The leaders of ESA and other space agencies this week on Planetary Radio.

We choose to go to the moon and this decade and do the other things.

Not because they are easy but because they are hard.

Because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.

Because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept.

One we are unwilling to postpone and one we intend to win and the others too.

Welcome. I'm Matt Kaplan of the Planetary Society.

With more of the human adventure across our solar system and beyond.

And that was US President John Fitzgerald Kennedy on a blazingly hot Houston Texas afternoon

at Rice University. The date was September 12, 1962.

Exactly 60 years later an international coalition is attempting to send more humans to the moon.

In this special episode we'll talk with a series of international leaders who came to the Kennedy Space Center hoping to see the launch of Artemis 1.

The first big step into space that will realize this new goal.

First though, a bit more history.

Hardly anyone alive has listened to the entirety of Kennedy's speech that day.

It's a remarkable statement delivered by a young president who seemed to barely notice the heat even as dignitaries behind him mop their brows.

We now know that Kennedy had expressed serious doubts about setting the United States on course for the moon but you'd never know it from his remarks.

Here are the last four minutes of that stirring address delivered six decades ago.

To be sure all this costs us all a good deal of money.

This year's space budget is three times what it was in January 1961.

And it is greater than the space budget of the previous eight years combined.

That budget now stands at five billion four hundred million dollars a year.

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