🇺🇸👨‍🚀- On this day, September 12, 1962, President Kennedy gave his famous “We choose to go to the Moon” speech at Rice University. Yuri Gagarin’s flight the year before had exposed the Soviet lead and pushed spaceflight much higher on Kennedy’s agenda, which transformed it into a national contest with the Soviets.

What followed was an extraordinary technical race and a great cosmic battle between empires for prestige, power, and technological supremacy. A Moon landing depended on mastering orbital rendezvous and docking, decisive technical capabilities needed to reach the lunar surface and bring the crew home. America achieved the world’s first true crewed orbital rendezvous in 1965 and its first docking in 1966. The Soviets did not achieve a comparable crewed rendezvous until 1968, and their first crewed docking came in 1969. America mastered these techniques through Gemini, and less than seven years after Kennedy’s speech, Americans were walking on the Moon.