We choose to go to the Moon

The space race's defining speech was given outdoors, in Rice Stadium in Houston on September 12, 1962, to a crowd of about 40,000, many of them Rice students. That setting is why the film is worth seeing: Kennedy is selling an enormous, expensive science program to a stadium crowd, and you can watch him work it. He wrote one joke into the text by hand, "Why does Rice play Texas?", a nod to a football rivalry the students knew well, and it lands just before the line "We choose to go to the Moon," repeated several times over. It is the best single film for showing students that science policy needed public persuasion.