[null and void]

What, exactly, did we have when Kennedy said "I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth."?

It was a few captured V-2s and a handful of Redstones, and very little else.

We made it with years to spare.

Magnatron and my point is that we don't lack the technical capability, but the will, and we have the bonus of hyper-abundant bureaucratic "help".

Sell your can't someplace else, we're all stocked up here."

[calljack]

We made it with years to spare.

Actually:

We made it with 5 months to spare July 1969.

[Spktyr]

Kennedy made that statement in Congress on May 25, 1961. At the time he made that famous speech, we were already assembling the first of the Saturn rockets... but it had been ordered on August 15, **1958.** We didn’t start from zero in May of 1961 and the order of 1958 doesn’t reflect the development that took place before then; development actually began in 1957.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturn_I

The point is, AGAIN, that right this second, we *cannot* assemble a Saturn V to carry people to the moon. We didn’t maintain the assembly line or suppliers. New ones have to be built back up first and this takes time - even if you waive all the regulations and bureaucracy, it would still take years.