John F. Kennedy's Speech: We Choose To Go To The Moon

“We Choose To Go To The Moon” John F. Kennedy’s Address at Rice University on the Nation's Space Effort, or the “We Choose To Go To The Moon” speech was given on September 12, 1962, in the Rice Stadium in Houston Texas. This speech was to inform the general American public of NASA’s plans to land a man on the moon for the first time ever. Russia and the United States of America had just recently cleared up the Cuban missile crisis but then became involved in a space race. They were both trying to beat each other in their space technology, but Russia, who had launched the first artificial satellite: Sputnik four years before the speech was delivered, was winning. This speech was given to address the nation and tell them that America was
Kennedy first refers to ethos when he says that space is a new frontier and they have “vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction” (Kennedy). When he says this, he makes a promise that the United States of America will honor space as neutral grounds. Because sea, land and air are already places of war, he hopes to prevent space from becoming just another place to fight. This convinced the crowd that they needed to put the first man in space to defend themselves from people who want to use space for weapons. The second use of ethos is when Kennedy said that “we have had our failures, but so have others, even if they do not admit them” (Kennedy). This uses ethos because he is saying that the people can trust their government to tell them of any failures and won’t hold back any details that would lower the status of the country, like some other countries did. The third and final use of ethos in the rice moon speech was when Mr. Kennedy promised to put a man on the moon, “before the end of this decade” (Kennedy). This was a huge promise on his part. By saying this, he left just over six years to build a launch site, the rocket, and scrape up the crew members for the launch. It was this sentence that separated the United States of America from Russia in the space race: promises of impossible sounding goals, and
John F. Kennedy made very valid points in his speech and, along with the use of ethos, pathos and logos, he convinced a nation to send billions of dollars and three extremely smart men to uncharted territory, where anything could happen. His moving speech has made such an impact, that his words still resonate even today, in 2016. Mike Wall says that “without that speech, humanity would still be… wondering when the first human foot would ever settle into the gray lunar dust” (Wall 3). Kennedy was one of the greatest speakers in this country, with countless memorials, including 2 airports, countless streets across the world (including 30 in France), a memorial museum, several schools, and the Cape Canaveral Space Center, NASA’s launch operations center, was renamed the Kennedy Space Center for the huge impact JFK had on space travel through the centuries. His speech changed our world, and will change future worlds that may (hopefully) come thousands of years from