cury were hurriedly reduced to one by the media. The goal was to get a man into space and orbit him around the earth before the Soviets could do so. As John F. Kennedy said in his 1962 speech at Rice University, Texas:
             We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not only 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.
             Never mind that it was a costly project, or that space was a cruel and unknown new frontier, or that the Soviets had a head start in this area; the job had to be done now. This was the political attitude shared by many people towards the space race and the Mercury Project. Thus, when the Soviet Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man to orbit the Earth in April 1961, Project Mercury was seen by some to be a failure. This attitude was not helped when, in June 1963, the Soviets further insulted the Americans with another " first" by making Valentina Tereshkova the first woman in space. It has been speculated that the Soviets specifically chose a woman to go into space early in their space program to highlight differences in the political systems of the two superp
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