Why does Rice play Texas?

Address at Rice University on the Nation's Space Effort
President John F. Kennedy
September 12, 1962

I recently had the occaision to read several essays by high school students responding to this speech. (This is the one that features, "We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.")

I don't think I had ever read (or heard) it before. I've heard folks say "Why does Rice play Texas?" but I always took that at its obvious meaning, with no idea that it was a rhetorical reference.

Were we really ever that young? Were we really ever that sure that technology could solve human problems? Did we even have the faintest idea what a hard problem was? Would the pure and steadfast quest for knowledge simply clear our shining way through the sticky worldly complications of prejudice, ignorance, greed, scarcity?

It's quite the contrast to the War on Poverty that Lyndon Johnson would declare a year and a half later. Now that's choosing something hard!


This time of year, all the columnists and pundits and journalists are putting together their various lists of the top ten stories of the year. Almost an unmitigated flow of misery, natural and human: Bam earthquake, a record hurricane season, Abu Ghraib, the Madrid train bombing, the Beslan school bombing, genocide in Sudan, war in Iraq, war in Afghanistan, war in Palestine, war in Haiti, ... and tucked down toward the bottom of the list, those little robot geologist cuties, the Mars rovers. Made me smile...