Fifty years ago today, John Fitzgerald Kennedy stood before a joint session of Congress and declared that the nation should, within that decade of the sixties, send a man to the moon and return him safely to the earth.   NASA, up until then just the old National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA) extended to space technology, has never been the same since.  The rush, lunar goal, and unlimited budgets transformed the agency, and while it accomplished the Cold-War goal of getting to the moon, it utterly failed in the promise that so many thought had been made in the sixties — to open up space.  I expand on this theme — that Apollo got human spaceflight activities off on the wrong foot — in an essay over at Pajamas Media today.