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At that time, in the spring of 1961, there had been no successful United States unmanned probes to the Moon or the planets. We had no large boosters. We were at the earliest imaginable stage in the Space Program. We had orbited unmanned and animal-inhabited vehicles and one or two humans, just barely.
Eight years later, which is a very short period of time, three Americans voyaged in Apollo 11 to the Moon. Two of them landed and all three successfully returned, as had been urged by the President, by the end of the decade.
The step from that speech to July 20, 1969 is, in my estimation, much larger that the step from today to a voyage of human beings to the surface of Mars. Technologically, in terms of confidence in nature of the objective, in terms of management, in every conceivable respect, Mars is not nearly so large a step for us today as Apollo was for United States 1961.
The success of the Space Program can be judged by various criteria. One criterion which is important for many in the scientific community and for the general public are lunas and planetary missions, and they provide a very interesting perspective. In the 1960's and 1970's when the Apollo goal was dominant, there were dozens-literally dozens-of unmanned, comparatively inexpensive missions to the Moon and the planets. And the momentum carried it a little past the end of the Apollo Program in the early 1970's to Viking, which was launched in 1975; Voyager, which was launched in 1977, and a comparatively inexpensive Venus Pioneer mission in 1978.
Since 1978, the United States has not launched a single lunar and planetary probe, unmanned or manned, not one. And it looks very much as if we will finish the decade of the 1980's in that same doleful situation - there's a bare chance that in December of 1989 there might be a launch if everything goes well.
The United States has in effect opted out of the scientific exploration of the solar system. We've had great triumphs, of course, including lately, last January, the Voyager 2 encounter of the planet Uranus and its rings and its moons. But that was a mission that was first approved in something like 1970. Because it takes a long time to get to the outer solar system we are still today the beneficiaries of the wise decision made a decade or two ago, and I hope we continue to be. Voyager 2 is still working and is scheduled to encounter the planet Neptune and its rings and its moons in August 1989.
Now, while the United States unmanned planetary program and many, many other aspects of our space program have been on a progressive decline for the last decade or so, there has been a significant increase in the European and Japanese space programs. They have both experienced recent successes in their first interplanetary missions connected with Halley's Comet, ANd the Soviet Union, which, of course, started strong, started space age in October 1957, has been steadfastly continuing. Despite various setbacks, they have had a continued source of funding and a clear set of goals. We now find that the Soviet space program has had some remarkable recent successes in the course of which they are brokering international cooperative agreements among large numbers