It’s Branson, however, who has always been the most troubling of the cosmic cowboys—selling not just himself on his fever dreams but his trusting customers

via Enough With Amateur-Hour Space Flight | TIME.

There was another cowboy back in the day who dare to dare everybody become cowboys.

When Kennedy made this speech, we didn’t even have a vehicle capable to reach halfway the moon, hell I think the Atlas rocket could barely break Earth orbit.

And we had loses that did not even happened on the air:

Perhaps Mr. Kluger is under the impression that our Space Program was built by an efficient government in governmental offices and produced a flawless product the first time around. He probably ignores that we sent men to outer space wearing suits built by a brassiere manufacturer sitting on rockets built by a private company with enough explosives inside to erase half Manhattan contained in vessels with the thickness of a metal trash can and landed on the  moon on another privately built ship that had more in common with an Airstream Sport mounted on a scaffold than what science fiction ever envisioned to be a proper landing craft.

Same as now with Mr. Kluger, the Timid & Cowardly back then had their way and killed the most advanced and fruitful scientific & technological  project of the XX Century. Their disgust was so that they ignored what hundred of thousands of people worked on and declared that the biggest contribution that the Moon program ever gave was Tang. Forget the new materials, the new engineering and even the new computing & software that launched this country ahead of everybody else in the history of Humanity.
Shall think themselves accursed they were not here,
And hold their manhoods cheap whiles any speaks.

Ad Astra Per Aspera
(A rough road leads to the Stars)

Hat tip to Tam.