President Kennedy made a speech in the very early nineteen-sixties that set the course for the United States of America to put a human being on the lunar surface and return that crew safely to Planet Earth by the end of the decade.
On July 20, 1969 the first part of the goal was achieved; on July 24, 1969 the second part of the goal was achieved.

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Nasa Moonship flight target slips

Nasa hopes its Orion ship will take it back to the Moon

Nasa has pushed back by a year its internal target date for flying the successor to the shuttle.

Agency officials say they are now aiming for September 2014 for the first crewed mission of the Orion ship.

This is a year later than Nasa had hoped for, but still inside its March 2015 absolute deadline.

The officials say the funds currently available to develop Orion and its Ares launch rocket mean the faster timeline is no longer tenable.

Engineers also need time to grapple with a range of technical issues as they develop the new systems. These include trying to reduce the levels of vibration astronauts are likely to experience when they lift off atop the new Ares vehicle.

"The commitment date we have made to the administration and Congress has been March 2015 and that hasn't changed.

"What we have changed is our internal planning date," explained Doug Cooke, the Nasa deputy associate administrator in the Exploration Systems Mission Directorate.

"Without as much information as we have today, we were attempting to close the gap between shuttle retirement and the first flight of Orion and Ares 1 to the absolute minimum; and so we were trying to push the project towards a September 2013 date internally.

"That was not a commitment in any sense because we knew we had not built into that any contingencies; everything would have to go perfect to make that date, and would probably have required some additional funding.

"Now we've changed our planning date from September 2013 date to a September 2014 date."

In July, the US space agency fixed the dates of its last shuttle flights.

The final orbiter to launch before the whole fleet goes into retirement will be Endeavour on 31 May, 2010.

The timeline envisaged by Nasa means routine Orion trips to the International Space Station (ISS) to exchange crews are unlikely to occur before 2016. In the meantime, the agency will have to rely instead on Russian Soyuz capsules; or on a commercial system developed by the Californian SpaceX company, assuming this is flight-approved.