JFK Continued the New Deal as the New Frontier

[LongTomH]

3. Thanks Octafish! People should remember it was Nixon who ended the Apollo project.

There were supposed to be three more Apollo lunar missions and an Apollo follow-on program. The Saturn V launchers for the Apollo 18 and 19 missions are corroding in the salt air at Johnson Space Center and Cape Canaveral.

For some time, I've been thinking about writing a book challenging the 'conventional wisdom' that the space program was purely an artifact of the Cold War. Eisenhower wanted NASA to be civilian and for our first satellite to be launched by a civilian rocket instead of the Army's Jupiter-C.

JFK, in the last few months of his life, wanted the US and USSR to work together in space. According to James Douglass, Nikita Khruschev finally acquiesced to Kennedy's request, against the advice of his own government.

The idea of space as an alternative, a 'moral equivalent to war,' was an early argument for space exploration.