Walter Cronkite, Patrick Moore and James Burke can rest easy

I had an interview filmed at the recent Ike Reconsidered Conference. Somehow, I think my days as a TV pundit will be brief - though kudos to the editors for actually getting some sense out of my musings. You can see me here.

Soaring sentiment - but rhetoric or reality?

Yesterday marked the 50th anniversary of Kennedy's address at Rice University in Texas when he said: "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."

It was a striking statement in a superbly crafted speech  which probably owed as much to JFK's Special Counsel Ted Sorensen as it did to the President. But one should never do down Kennedy's power as an orator. He had the charm, grace and gift for telling a good story that the likes of Truman, Eisenhower, Johnson and Nixon could only dream of. And, at the height of Camelot's power, he had the nation in the palm of his hand.

But did JFK really have a deep passion for space? Was he quite as fully committed to the moon landing as his Rice oratory suggests? Was going to the moon even the right path to take?

Of course, it has been an area of huge debate and one I cover to some extent in my '240,000 mile cul de sac' paper.

Perhaps we remember Kennedy's speech because the moon landing happened. Perhaps the moon landing happened only because Johnson needed to deliver a legacy for Kennedy. Perhaps, if that fateful visit to Dallas in November 1963 hadn't happened, the US path to outer space would have taken a different course as tax bills, civil rights, Vietnam and the wider Cold War filled the Presidential agenda in the expected second term. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

Speculation aside, this was one of the most powerful political speeches from the age of frontierism.

This week's reading

Still in that funny period where my Masters dissertation is being marked...which puts a bit of a brake on the PhD work since one of the markers is my PhD tutor. So our current contact is minimal...err, non-existent.

However, there's plenty I can be getting on with and much of that concerns reading. I'm fascinated by Eisenhower at the moment and am having a proper read of Stephen Ambrose's biography. So far I'm still in WW2 and the read is entertaining rather than overly enlightening. Ambrose is at his best when on 'Band of Brothers' territory. The first 50 years of Ike's life has been covered in a rapid gloss and I'm somehow missing the analysis of how an extremely competent staff officer morphed into Supreme Commander in two years - and was to be President just a decade later. Anyway, still 300 pages to go!

Alongside Eisenhower, I'm also reading the rest of Murray & Bly Cox's: Apollo: The Race to the Moon.

Mission Control's Sy Liebergot told me that this was his peers' favourite account of the US space programme and I can understand why. It's an energetic account that focuses on the engineers and specialists who delivered the programme rather than the up-front astronaut tale. It's an excellent back-office account and is filling in a number of gaps in my understanding of the programme. Still a couple of hundred pages to go on this one too!

Finding focus

Bit of a change of tack on the disso. Following feedback from my supervisor, I'm changing from what's basically a chronological structure to a thematic structure.....probably essential to get all I want to say down into 15,000 words with the right analytical vigour.

Still nailing down the 'themes' to group the analysis around, but it'll be something like:

• prestige (beating the Soviets)
• adventure (romanticism/frontier spirit)
• discovery (engineering v science)
• ....and there's something around politics/expediency and possibly legacy that I haven't quite bottomed out yet.

In all cases I still want to analyse the impact of NASA's manipulation of the media...and indeed the media's independent response to NASA and whether the tail in fact began to wag the dog even before the moon goal was reached.

I really want to nail the structure this week and start drafting (even skeleton drafting) over the next fortnight.