Why did Kennedy say “We choose to go to the Moon”?

Two defeats in one week

On April 12, 1961, Yuri Gagarin circled the Earth. Five days later about 1,400 Cuban exiles trained by the CIA landed at the Bay of Pigs, and within three days the invasion had failed. On April 20 John F. Kennedy, three months in office, sent a memo to his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, who chaired the National Space Council: “Is there any other space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win?”

The answers came back within days. A station in orbit? The Soviets would probably get there first. A flight around the Moon? Possibly. A landing on the Moon and back? There, both sides lacked a rocket big enough, so both would start from zero. Wernher von Braun, the German engineer who would build that rocket, wrote that the United States had an excellent chance.

The deadline: May 25, 1961

Kennedy took the goal to a joint session of Congress, in a special message on urgent national needs.

First, I believe 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.

He did not pretend it would be cheap or easy. No project of the period, he said, would be “so difficult or expensive to accomplish.” The only American spaceflight so far was Alan Shepard’s fifteen-minute hop, three weeks earlier.

Rice Stadium, September 12, 1962

Sixteen months later he made the case to the public, at Rice University in Houston, the city chosen for NASA’s new Manned Spacecraft Center. About 35,000 people sat in the heat of the football stadium. Why the Moon, he asked: why climb the highest mountain, why fly the Atlantic, and “Why does Rice play Texas?” The crowd laughed and cheered. Then came the sentence everyone quotes, which runs longer than most people remember:

We choose to go to the moon. 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, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

Read whole, it is a speech about a contest. Kennedy admitted that America was “behind, and will be behind for some time in manned flight,” and promised to catch up within the decade.

What he said in private

Ten weeks after Rice, in the Cabinet Room, NASA’s administrator, James Webb, argued that the aim should be preeminence in space across the board. Kennedy disagreed, and the White House tape recorded him:

Everything that we do ought to really be tied into getting onto the Moon ahead of the Russians.

Otherwise, he went on, “we shouldn’t be spending this kind of money because I’m not that interested in space.” The Moon was the measure of the rivalry.

The offer to go together

Kennedy also tried the opposite. At the United Nations on September 20, 1963, he proposed that the two powers explore cooperation, including “a joint expedition to the moon,” and asked: “Why, therefore, should man’s first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition?” Nothing came of it. Two months later he was killed in Dallas. Apollo 11 landed on July 20, 1969, with five months to spare; what Armstrong said there is a story of its own.