Thread by @ZachWeiner

Fascinating Space history:

This is Arthur C. Clarke, writing in a book from 1968, in a section on ways that have been proposed to get to the Moon.

(for the non-space-geek, note the Apollo 11 Moon landings haven't happened yet)

“It will be noted that reusability was taken for granted; it never occurred to us that multimillion-dollar vehicles would be used for a single mission and then abandoned in space. We were not that imaginative.

If human beings were logical entities, controlled by reason instead of emotion, these or similar ideas would probably have been developed in an orderly manner, rendezvous techniques would have been perfected,

and we would have been ready to land on the Moon sometime around the end of the century. But once again politics and astronautics combined, with results that no historian could ever have predicted.

On May 25, 1961, President Kennedy announced that a manned lunar landing “in this decade” was a prime national objective of the United States.

The previous month Yuri Gagarin had been the first man to go into orbit; that, as well as earlier Soviet space achievements, was still rankling.

So was a debacle only one week later, and much nearer to home, the ill-fated Bay of Pigs adventure, America’s answer to the Anglo-French Suez shambles.

Only a person of extreme political naivete would imagine that there was no connection between these events and the challenging goal the United states had set itself.”

He goes on to say nice things about JFK's speech.

What's interesting to me is that the above is as far as I can tell settled opinion among historians, though still feels like heresy to many a spacegeek. So, it's surprising to see it said as obvious truth just 7 years after that speech.

clarification: The settled history party is the idea that Kennedy did Apollo as a political act in reaction to Gagarin, Bay of Pigs, and other stuff, as opposed to a genuine deep interest in space stuff or any scientific goal.