Mr. Vice President, Mr. Webb:
I want to express our thanks to all of you. We visitors come in and out of Cape Canaveral at the rate of 50,000 a year, and you stay, and you do the work upon which we so much depend.
I don't think that we can exaggerate the great advantage which the Soviet Union secured in the fifties by being first in space. They were able to give prestige to their system; they were able to give force to their argument that they were an advancing society and that we were on the decline.
But I believe that we are an advancing society, and I believe that we are on the rise, and I believe that their system is as old as time. As long as the decision has been made that our great system and others will be judged at least in one degree by how we do in the field of space, we might as well be first; and, therefore, this country, both political parties, have determined that the United States shall be first. We started behind. We have a long way to go, but with your effort and commitment and the effort of all of our fellow Americans and their commitment, we shall be first.
Thank you.
Note: The President spoke at the Manned Spacecraft Center. His opening words referred to Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson and the National Aeronautics and Space Administrator, James E. Webb.
John F. Kennedy, Remarks to the Staff at the NASA Launch Operations Center, Cape Canaveral. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/236762
