ROCKET TESTING LED TO RACE TO THE MOON SOVIET ACHIEVEMENT QUICKENED PACE.

Byline: Charles F. Bostwick Staff Writer

Six weeks after cosmonaut Yuri Gargarin orbited the Earth in a Soviet spacecraft, President John F. Kennedy told a special joint session of Congress the United States should commit itself to landing a man on the moon by 1970.

``No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important in the long-range exploration of space, and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish,'' Kennedy said on May 25, 1961.

Kennedy's challenge came in the infancy of space travel, a natural outgrowth of the birth of aviation with the first manned flight 100 years ago this week.

The United States' interest in space didn't start with Gargarin's flight, or even with the October 1957 upstaging of American technology when the Soviet Union's Sputnik beat American satellites into orbit.

The U.S. military began testing high-altitude rockets near the end of World War II. Earlier, college physics professor Robert Goddard, who drew ridicule for suggesting a rocket to the moon was possible, launched the first liquid-fueled rocket in 1926 from his aunt's Massachusetts farm, then later moved his launches to near Roswell, N.M.

America's postwar rocket work got a boost from the fortunes of war. American soldiers captured German rocket scientists who sneaked through their own army's lines to surrender. Other soldiers snatched up German V-2 rocket components - used by the Nazis to attack England - before the Russians could get them.

The U.S. Army began launching reassembled V-2 rockets, and American rockets, from White Sands in New Mexico. Meanwhile, rival rocket efforts were under way by the Navy and the Air Force.

As of yet, there was no NASA - rocket research was mainly a military effort.

``We were interested in ballistic missiles in the 1950s. There was interest in it from a scientific aspect as well,'' said Stephen Gerber, NASA history web curator.

NASA was established in October 1958, in part out of the embarrassment of the Sputnik launch. America's first satellite, Explorer I, was an Army project, launched in January 1958. The Navy launched Vanguard I in March 1958.

After Gargarin went into orbit, NASA's Project Mercury put Alan Shepherd into space three weeks later, in a 15-minute, 28-second flight that took him from Cape Canaveral - later to be renamed Cape Kennedy - to a wet landing in the Atlantic Ocean.

Astronaut John Glenn made America's first orbital space flight in February 1962.

Two-man Gemini missions followed, with astronauts leaving the capsules for spacewalks and practicing docking maneuvers in space - techniques necessary for the moon mission.

Meanwhile, American aerospace companies were trying to build a giant new rocket - the nearly 300-foot-tall Saturn V, more than five times as tall as the rockets that launched the first Mercury capsules.

``It's interesting; it's in the public eye,'' longtime Rocketdyne engineer Don Eddy said of designing rocket engines, which for him started in 1955 at Rocketdyne's Chatsworth plant and included work on Thor, Delta and Atlas engines, as well as the later space shuttle.

Overcoming a January 1967 fire on the launchpad that killed astronauts Gus Grissom, Roger Chaffee and Ed White in Apollo 1, Apollo 11 on July 20, 1969, set Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin down on the surface of the moon.

Twelve more astronauts followed Armstrong and Aldrin to the moon over the next 2 1/2 years. The last astronauts - Gene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt - left in December 1972.

Science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke in 1945 suggested that orbiting satellites or space stations could relay television and other signals around the Earth. Bell Labs began working in the mid-1950s on making the idea a reality.

AT&T's Telstar 1 in July 1962 transmitted the first live television broadcast across the Atlantic: Europeans got to see the president's weekly press conference and watch the Philadelphia Phillies get a base hit against the Chicago Cubs.

``The plain facts of electronic life are that Washington and the Kremlin are now no farther apart than the speed of light, at least technically,'' newsman Walter Cronkite told his Telstar viewers. ``We in television are convinced that the ability to portray immediacy, to realize what's new, what's going on, is the true significance of this new communications bridge.''