Posts: 1933
From: Fairfax, VA, USA
Registered: Feb 2007

posted 05-22-2011 09:48 PM               

---

This Wednesday is the 50th anniversary of JFK's goal-setting speech, and there will be an interesting event at the National Air and Space Museum's Udvar-Hazy Center that evening featuring Gene Cernan.

On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy spoke before a joint session of Congress and voiced the words that have become indelibly marked in our minds as a defining moment in the history of the space age: “I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.”

Capt. Eugene A. Cernan, USN (Ret.), Gemini and Apollo astronaut and author of The Last Man on the Moon, will discuss his personal experience of carrying out President Kennedy’s mandate to land on the Moon.

Since I decided to upgrade my National Air and Space Society membership this year, I got two tickets to a buffet banquet starting at 6 p.m., before the lecture. There should be a chance to say hello to Cernan, which should be fun.

The friend and cS member I invited a while back can no longer attend, so if you live in the Virginia-DC-Maryland area and would like to be my guest, please e-mail me.

I should say that I was going to be giving this friend a small model to bring to Spacefest for Stafford to sign. The same unfortunate circumstances that will keep him from this event may prevent him from going to Spacefest. So I'm sure you will understand that if more than one person e-mails me about this, I'll prefer to go with someone who is going to Spacefest and could do this for me. But even if you aren't going to Spacefest, please e-mail me about going, just in case no one can help me out with the model. You won't need to pay for your dinner or the lecture - they are included with my National Air and Space Society membership.

Posts: 147
From: Northern Virginia
Registered: Jul 2002