We choose to go to the Moon, Kennedy tells 40,000 at Rice Stadium
Fifteen months after Kennedy asked Congress to fund a Moon landing, the goal was still an expensive gamble, one polls showed most Americans doubted. On a warm September afternoon in 1962, Kennedy stood before roughly 40,000 people at Rice Stadium in Houston, many of them Rice students, and reaffirmed it. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade, he said, not because it is easy, but because it is hard. He framed the landing as a test of will as much as engineering.
Kennedy turned a cost estimate, 22 billion dollars, into a national commitment argued in public, on a football field, to ordinary Texans in Houston. That choice, selling the Space Race as a test of American character rather than a budget line, is why NASA's funding survived a president who did not live to see Apollo 11 land.
QWho scoffed that spending 40 billion dollars to reach the Moon was "just nuts"?
Former president Dwight Eisenhower, who had watched the space budget balloon after leaving office, told reporters flatly that spending 40 billion dollars to reach the Moon was "just nuts." He was not alone. Senator Barry Goldwater argued the civilian space program was crowding out the military one, and Senator William Proxmire worried it would siphon scientists away from defense research entirely. A budget cut to Apollo was only narrowly averted in Congress. Rice faculty member Robert Curl, sitting in the crowd that day, later admitted he too was staggered by the cost. Kennedy's Houston speech built public enthusiasm, but Eisenhower's complaint kept circulating in Washington for years afterward.
QDid Kennedy ever try to get the Soviets to go to the Moon together instead of racing them?
Yes, twice. Kennedy first raised a joint lunar mission with Nikita Khrushchev at their June 1961 summit, and the Soviet leader waved it off. Kennedy tried again publicly at the United Nations General Assembly on September 20, 1963, barely a year after the Rice speech. Khrushchev stayed cautious, announcing that October that the Soviet Union had no plans to send cosmonauts to the Moon at all. Behind the scenes, though, his own military advisors argued the offer was worth taking, since cooperation would let Moscow quietly absorb American technology. The idea died for good with Kennedy's assassination two months later, and Apollo remained a solely American undertaking.
QWhat happened to the stadium where Kennedy gave the speech?
Rice Stadium, built in 1950, outlived the speech that made it famous by hosting an entirely different kind of national spectacle. In January 1974 it staged Super Bowl VIII, the same grass where 40,000 people once heard a president promise the Moon later serving as a Super Bowl end zone.
