T-minus 37:20

On September 12, 1962 President John F. Kennedy addressed an audience of scientists, students and faculty at Rice University in Houston, Texas concerning his decision to advance the nation's space program to the forefront of national effort. In the twenty months leading up to this speech, NASA's budget had tripled to reach a value greater than that of the previous eight years combined, and the space program had acquired a defined goal backed by popular support and, by today's standards, virtually unlimited funds.

The only part of that speech now well-remembered is the rallying proclamation:

"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 [...]"

Such a reason for any action deserves, in its own right, to be remembered among the finest words ever spoken by a United States President.

As a scientist I believe fervently in President Kennedy's words, in his tireless efforts to advance man's technology in the pursuit of knowledge of the universe we live in. He, or his speechwriter (but I would much rather think of those words as a creation of the visionary president himself), drove at the heart of scientific exploration and understanding when he continued with the less well-remembered, but no less vital, words:

"[...] because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is the one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win [...]"

I find it incredible, reading back over this speech (which, I have no shame in saying, makes me tear up with pride and love for science and my nation every time), that a president so far removed from me in experience, knowledge and time, articulated so clearly those qualities which make me a scientist. To pursue a path, not because it is easy and offers the least resistance, but because it is the most difficult and daunting; and because it offers the greatest reward not at its end, for science never ends, but at the smallest success and the most seemingly insignificant gain.

It is these gains President Kennedy saw and presented to the nation when he said,

"We set sail on this new sea because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people."

[Text of President Kennedy's speech obtained from the JFK Presidential Library and Museum online archives; to see the full speech: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TuW4oGKzVKc&feature=fvst]

It is not the great achievements, the lunar landing at the end of the decade, of which he is speaking. Rather, he is holding up to his citizens the accomplishment of each step on the road that leads not to success but is a road of success on which every step, even the setbacks, represents knowledge gained for the good of humanity. It is not to the masterpiece of July 20, 1969 to which he refers, but to those advances which made it possible: the building of NASA's state-of-the-art facilities in Houston and Cape Canaveral out of which came technologies that have bettered our daily lives, and the development of the Saturn rockets that, although containing the ability to cause destruction, particularly at a time of political unrest, were used in the peaceful pursuit of knowledge - to name only two of hundreds.

This is the nobility of science.