George Mueller, a career space engineer who dauntlessly helped fulfill President John F. Kennedy’s vision in 1961 of sending an American astronaut to the moon before the end of the decade, died on Oct. 12 at his home in Irvine, Calif. He was 97.

The cause was congestive heart failure, said Arthur L. Slotkin, a spokesman for the family and the author of “Doing the Impossible: George E. Mueller and the Management of NASA’s Human Spaceflight Program.”

“This day man’s oldest dream is made a reality — this day the ancient bonds tying him to the earth have been broken,” Dr. Mueller (pronounced Miller) wrote in The New York Times on July 21, 1969, the day after Neil Armstrong took his giant leap for mankind on the lunar surface.

Three days later, when the Apollo 11 astronauts returned safely, Dr. Mueller declared, “Today at 11:49 a.m. Houston time, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, we conclusively proved that man is no longer bound to the limits of the planet on which for so long he has lived.”