Local Hero: Jim Church and John Kennedy

HometownSource

On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy proposed this plan before a joint session of Congress as he addressed urgent national needs.At the time the idea was considered an impossible mission. Nothing like this had ever been done, and the common belief, in 1961, was that a layer of dust covered the moon and would swallow anything that landed on it.But since Kennedy wanted to beat the Soviet Union in the “space race,” NASA started recruiting engineers. See more in Elizabeth Cook's Star News story.

The year was 1962. Jim Church, who now resides in Elk River, was a senior systems engineer at the California-based Aerospace Corp. where he worked on a space program developing and launching secret satellites to spy on Russians.