The short answer is no. The long answer is a bit more nuanced. To understand this, we must go back to April 12th, 1961. The Soviets had just successfully launched the Vostok 1 carrying Yuri Gagarin, the first human to reach outer space. News of this had spread throughout the world and due to the Cold War and both countries using the space race as a competition of sorts, the successful Vostok 1 mission was looked upon as a failure in the US. Kennedy had just been sworn in that January and, as a young and optimistic leader, felt the Vostok 1 was a major defeat in the space race. So just 2 days later, on April 14th 1961, Kennedy asked to meet with leaders in NASA to review the options for the space program. It was known at that time that the Soviets had more advanced launch vehicles than the US, and so it seemed to those present at the meeting that the Russians would be the first to put astronauts in orbit, establish a space station, and circumnavigate the moon. Therefore, the conclusion of the meeting was that the only way the US could compete with the Russians would be to actually put a man on the moon. This is when Kennedy first got the inkling that he really wanted to send a man to the moon. To say that he was cavalier about the decision, however, is a slight overstatement. He would meet with NASA staff multiple times and asked many questions about whether it was possible to reach the moon, circumnavigate the moon, put a man on the moon and safely bring him back. NASA did not have the answers to many of these questions, and any answers they gave the president were mostly hypothetical and in many cases, very optimistic (remember, NASA hadn't even put a man into space/Earth orbit yet at this point). Nevertheless, after the meeting had concluded, Kennedy had decided then that they would send a man to the moon. It’s also important to remember that it was around this time that the Bay of Pigs fiasco happened in Cuba, which felt to Kennedy like a second US defeat almost exactly a week after the Vostok 1 flight. So the political pressure was high on him to achieve a victory. Later that spring, the US ultimately did achieve its first success with the launch of Alan Shepard in the Mercury spacecraft (Freedom 7) on May 5, 1961. With the morale boost from the Shepard flight, Kennedy’s decision to go to the moon became firmly reinforced. Jerome Wiesner, the head of the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), said at that time that the decision to go to the moon was “a political, not a technical issue” and even went so far as telling Kennedy that PSAC would never accept this kind of expenditure on scientific grounds. Kennedy had made up his mind, however, and three weeks later he stood before Congress and asked the nation to go to the moon. It was after this that NASA seriously began to ramp up its research and logistics to achieve this goal, and it would not be until much later that a hypothetical blueprint of the Apollo spacecraft was finalized on paper, let alone a working prototype. So in conclusion, when Kennedy decided to go to the moon, he didn’t really know if it was possible.

Source: Murray, C. & Cox, C. (1989). Apollo: The Race To The Moon. New York, New York: Simon & Schuster

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