On the morning of 12 September 1962, President John F. Kennedy stood in Rice University's football stadium and made the public case for the Moon landing he had asked Congress to fund the year before. "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things," he said, "not because they are easy, but because they are hard." The crowd, usually put at about 40,000 and including many Houston schoolchildren, sat through it on a warm, sunny morning before fall classes had begun. Kennedy mentioned the heat. Describing a spacecraft returning from the Moon, he said it would meet heat about half that of the sun, "almost as hot as it is here today." He also wrote in, by hand, the line the crowd remembers: "Why does Rice play Texas?" The schools had split their previous ten games, and Rice has beaten Texas only twice since.
The speech was also about Houston. The city, Kennedy said, "with its Manned Spacecraft Center, will become the heart of a large scientific and engineering community," and the furthest outpost of the old western frontier would become the furthest outpost of the new frontier of science and space. Rice had made that possible: the thousand acres at Clear Lake were offered to the government through the university.
Rice followed through. Within months it had created a Department of Space Science, one of the first in the nation; the university now calls it the first. The lectern Kennedy spoke from is on display in the Starship Gallery at Space Center Houston.
Getting there
29.7164, -95.4092
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