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    "headline": "JFK’s ‘We choose to go to the moon’ line at Rice in 1962 ends ‘and the others, too",
    "description": "JFK's 1962 Rice speech said \"we choose to go to the moon\" three times, and the transcript shows a longer sentence than most posters quote.",
    "datePublished": "2026-11-11T04:34:00+00:00",
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    "keywords": "Apollo program, John F. Kennedy, Rice University, Ted Sorensen",
    "articleBody": "John F. Kennedy said “We choose to go to the moon” three times in a row at Rice Stadium in Houston on September 12, 1962, and the crowd’s applause cut him off after the second. The full sentence he finally finished is longer, and stranger, than the version on most posters. The occasion was a two-day visit to Houston, chosen in 1961 as home of NASA’s new Manned Spacecraft Center. About 40,000 people, many of them Rice students, sat in the stadium on a hot, sunny afternoon to hear the president argue for a Moon landing he had first proposed to Congress the year before. What Kennedy actually said The public-domain transcript of the address, a work of the US federal government, records the passage like this: “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon… (interrupted by applause) 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.” Three details tend to vanish when the line is shared online. The first is “and do the other things”, which ties the Moon to a wider program of space work rather than a single stunt. The second is the phrase “one which we intend to win”; many retellings shorten it to “one we intend to win”. The third is the closing “and the others, too”, a throwaway that reads almost like an aside. The joke he wrote in by hand Just before the famous lines, Kennedy asked why anyone would climb the highest mountain or fly the Atlantic, then added: “Why does Rice play Texas?” That football jab was handwritten by Kennedy onto the speech text. The drafts themselves came largely from his adviser and speechwriter Ted Sorensen, with Kennedy’s own changes; the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library holds those drafts with his additions. The mountain image returns at the end. Kennedy recalled the British climber George Mallory, who was asked why he wanted to climb Everest and answered, “Because it is there.” Kennedy’s reply: “Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it.” A timeline of the promise April 12, 1961: Yuri Gagarin becomes the first person in space, deepening American fears of falling behind the Soviet Union. May 25, 1961: Kennedy asks Congress to commit to landing a man on the Moon before the decade is out. September 12, 1962: the Rice speech turns that request into a public rallying cry. July 20, 1969: Apollo 11 lands, meeting the target five and a half years after Kennedy’s death. Not everyone was sold The speech did not settle the argument over cost. Kennedy himself told the crowd that the space budget had reached “5 billion 400 million dollars a year”, which he called “a staggering sum, though somewhat less than we pay for cigarettes and cigars every year.” Former president Dwight Eisenhower later said that spending $40 billion to reach the Moon was “just nuts”, and a cut to the program was only narrowly avoided. Seen side by side, the two famous Kennedy lines on Badiyaa’s history pages share a pattern: what people remember is tidier than the tape. The same gap shows up in the myth that Kennedy called himself a jelly doughnut in Berlin, and in debates over whether Martin Luther King Jr. improvised “I have a dream” in 1963. The Moon, meanwhile, is back on the agenda: NASA has set a $10 billion ceiling for Moon Base cargo landers. The lectern Kennedy used that afternoon is on display today at Space Center Houston, about 25 miles from the stadium where he spoke. Further reading Wikipedia: We choose to go to the Moon Wikisource: Address at Rice University on the Nation’s Space Effort Illustrative image. Image: Brandonrush, CC0 via Wikimedia Commons This article was produced with AI assistance and reviewed by our Editorial Desk. How we work.",
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