On september 12, 1962, president john f. kennedy delivered his "we choose to go to the moon" speech to a crowd of thousands at rice university stadium in houston, texas. the country was unsure about the time and cost of sending a man to the moon, and president kennedy's speech addressed their uncertainty. read the excerpts from kennedy's speech. then, respond to the prompt that follows. i am delighted to be here, and i'm particularly delighted to be here on this occasion. we meet at a college noted for knowledge, in a city noted for progress, in a state noted for strength, and we stand in need of all three, for we meet in an hour of change and challenge, in a decade of hope and fear, in an age of both knowledge and ignorance. the greater our knowledge increases, the greater our ignorance unfolds. despite the striking fact that most of the scientists that the world has ever known are alive and working today, despite the fact that this nation's own scientific manpower is doubling every 12 years in a rate of growth more than three times that of our population as a whole, despite that, the vast stretches of the unknown and the unanswered and the unfinished still far outstrip our collective comprehension. if this capsule history of our progress teaches us anything, it is that man, in his quest for knowledge and progress, is determined and cannot be deterred. the exploration of space will go ahead, whether we join in it or not, and it is one of the great adventures of all time, and no nation which expects to be the leader of other nations can expect to stay behind in the race for space. those who came before us made certain that this country rode the first waves of the industrial revolutions, the first waves of modern invention, and the first wave of nuclear power, and this generation does not intend to founder in the backwash of the coming age of space. we mean to be a part of it—we mean to lead it. for the eyes of the world now look into space, to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shal