When John F. Kennedy became president in January 1961, Americans had the perception that the United States was losing the Space Race with the Soviet Union, which had successfully launched the first artificial satellite, Sputnik, almost four years earlier.
.The perception deepened when in April 1961, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space before the U.S. could launch its first Project Mercury astronaut.
Library of Congress Blogs Edwin Marcus Sputnik Cartoon
Convinced of the political need to make an achievement which would decisively demonstrate America’s space superiority, and after consulting with NASA through his Vice President Lyndon Johnson to identify such an achievement, Kennedy stood before Congress on May 25, 1961, and proposed that “this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”
Kennedy’s goal gave direction and a specific mission to National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Apollo program.
Wernher von Braun, President Kennedy and Vice-President Johnson at NASA
This required the expansion of NASA’s Space Task Group into a Manned Spacecraft Center. Houston, Texas was chosen as the site, and the Humble Oil and Refining Company donated the land in 1961, through Rice University as an intermediary.
Kennedy took advantage of the 1962 construction of the facility to deliver a speech on the nation’s space effort.
On September 12, 1962, President Kennedy delivered his speech before a crowd of 35,000 people in the Rice football stadium. The most memorable and quoted portion of the speech comes in the middle:
There is no strife, no prejudice, no national conflict in outer space as yet. Its hazards are hostile to us all. Its conquest deserves the best of all mankind, and its opportunity for peaceful cooperation may never come again.
We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people.
For space science, like nuclear science and all technology, has no conscience of its own. Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war.
I do not say that we should or will go unprotected against the hostile misuse of space any more than we go unprotected against the hostile use of land or sea, but I do say that space can be explored and mastered without feeding the fires of war, without repeating the mistakes that man has made in extending his writ around this globe of ours.
Kennedy 1961 Space ProgramBut why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?
