JFK on Moon Shot: An Expensive 'Stunt'?

John F. Kennedy may be well known for issuing the challenge to the United States to land on the moon and return safely to Earth by the end of the 1960s, but privately he expressed doubts about how expensive the endeavor would be, James Warren writes at The Atlantic.

"This looks like a hell of a lot of dough to go to the moon when you can go -- you can learn most of that you want scientifically through instruments and putting a man on the moon really is a stunt and it isn't worth that many billions," Kennedy told NASA Administrator James Webb on Sept. 18, 1963, just a little more than two months before the president was assassinated.

The conversation was revealed in tapes made public Wednesday in connection with the 50th anniversary of the speech to Congress in which Kennedy issued his moon-shot challenge. It is a dramatic foreshadowing of the debate that has dogged NASA ever since over whether various human space flight endeavors are worth the cost.

Rebecca Carroll has more on NASA's budget woes, including more detail on Kennedy's concerns about the cost of getting to the moon, in the June issue of Government Executive. In that piece, she writes:

Kennedy actually started to step back from his ambitious plan, reaching out to the Societs before his assassination. "In a field where the United States and the Soviet Union have a special capacity -- in the field of space -- there is room for new cooperation, for further joint efforts in the regulation and exploration of space," he told the United Nations General Assembly in September 1963. "I include among these possibilities a joint expedition to the moon."