NASA (Project Apollo) J. F. Kennedy & NASA’s chief J. Webb, Cape Canaveral 1962

President Kennedy with NASA's chief James Webb visiting Cape Canaveral for the last time before his assassination, 16 November 1963

Vintage gelatin silver print on fiber-based paper, printed 1963, 20,3 x 25,4 cm

An important photograph featuring the major political visionary who made the U.S. Moon landing

possible.

This was the last visit of the President to the Florida Space Center.

From 1963 to 1973, Cape Canaveral became Cape Kennedy when President Lyndon Johnson by

executive order renamed the area, announced in a televised address six days after the assassination,

on Thanksgiving evening.

One year earlier, President Kennedy had detailed his goals for the nation’s space effort in the famous

“Moon speech” at Rice university.

“We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not

because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and

measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept,

one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.”

President Kennedy, Rice University, September 12, 1962