The American NASA Team was quickly able to replicate all the same accomplishments the U.S.S.R. achieved, within a year timeframe no less, all the under the Presidential administration of Dwight D. Eisenhower. John F. Kennedy however showed much more urgency in the matter and saw a prime opportunity to strike up and rally the nation together by instilling nationalistic pride in the need to make the first man on the moon an American. Following the return of NASA’s human spaceflight program, Project Mercury, which put Alan Shepard as the first American outside of earths orbit on May 5, 1961, President John F. Kennedy addressed Congress that the U.S. would become the first country to land on the moon by the end of the decade. President John F.