Starting around 1947, the United States entered a war-like situation against the Soviet Union. The two nations competed on gigantic scales, trying to achieve more in terms of invention, creativity, and efficiency. As a result, President John F. Kennedy spoke at Rice University on September 12, 1962, attempting to excite the audience about the new space program and its upcoming mission to the moon. Because space was considered uncharted territory, which is still true in some cases today, the president wanted to ease the audience and the rest of the country into the new exploration age that the United States was headed towards. To achieve his purpose, John F. Kennedy appeals to the peoples’ pathos by speaking of conquering wary circumstances …show more content…
In 1961, the Soviet Union sent “Yuri Gagarin and he became the first person to orbit Earth” (FactCite). Because the Soviets were a communist nation and Americans were strictly opposed to communism, the United States feared that space would become a new battleground. Kennedy spoke of this later in his speech; paragraph 12 says “Whether it will become a force for good or ill depends on man, and only if the United States occupies a position of pre-eminence can we help decide whether this new ocean will be a sea of peace or a new terrifying theater of war.” It is evident that people strongly believed that only the United States could colonize the frontier for peace. By bringing up images of non-democratic governed societies, Kennedy proves his point to be effective because almost every citizen will agree to almost anything to prevent communist domination. Starting in the fifth paragraph, Kennedy talks about human development. He says that if all of human-recorded history were to be scaled to a factor of 50,000 years, before midnight on the day of the speech, humankind will have reached the moon. This provides insight as to how new the technology and the ideas of sending a man to the moon was. In a way, planning the mission was like Christopher Columbus planning a voyage across the ocean; both were progressive ideas, but were pioneering trips. Americans, people who see opportunity in every endeavor and