Apollo came to mean many things to the people who were part of it, but it began as Jack Kennedy’s Apollo. Kennedy’s Apollo was not a spacecraft, not an engineering project, not a means of adding to man’s scientific knowledge. Kennedy’s Apollo was a heap of chips pushed to the center of the table. Kennedy’s Apollo came out of a long and honored tradition of great American boasts—that we could whip the British, cross the Rockies, build taller buildings, grow more corn and make better mousetraps than anyone else. Childish boasts, some would say, for there was never anything subtle about them:
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