Kennedy Space Race

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President Kennedy’s speech regarding the ‘Space Race,’ at Rice University on September 12, 1962, was used to encourage the competition America faced with the Soviet Union following the Cold War. His speech examines the importance of being the first country to explore space and land on the moon, calling attention to the value of American space involvement through its growing industrialization and the Soviet threat towards national security.

Soviets Sergei Korolev and Valentin Glushko, two known competitors in the advancement of space technology, can be credited with the creation of satellites. When World War II began, they were sent to work camps to develop new military weapons, and in 1941, Glushko was placed in charge of a design bureau for …show more content…
However, following the outbreak of the Korean War, “The defense budget soared to $40 billion in fiscal year 1951 and to $60 billion during the following year” (Slotten 23), with threats of national security rising. Officials in The United States of America believed that the highest priority was on high-technology weapons, such as nuclear weapons, ballistic missiles, and radar defenses, regarding the NSC-68 policy. According to the U.S. Department of State, “NSC-68 concluded that the only plausible way to deter the Soviet Union was for President Harry Truman to support a massive build-up of both conventional and nuclear arms.” In 1950, the RAND report stated that, “satellites would provide critical reconnaissance information about Soviet defense activities and missile development, difficult if not impossible to obtain by other means” (23). The creation and implementation of satellites became the top priority for American high-ranking officials, to further develop intercontinental warfare. President Eisenhower, preceding President Kennedy, had a clear recognition of the importance of technological advancement, and its relationship to national security. President Eisenhower, preceding President Kennedy, created the President’s Science …show more content…
Kennedy (1917-1963), future president of the United States of America, was born in Brookline, Massachusetts as the second of nine children. Joseph Patrick Kennedy, his father, had acquired a multimillion-dollar fortune in many businesses, as well as a skilled player of the stock market, and his mother Rose was daughter of a onetime mayor of Boston ("John F. Kennedy”). Through his influential parents, Kennedy started his life with connections and in an educated, well-off manner. He joined his father in politics early in his life, and for six months in 1938 John served as secretary to his father as the U.S. ambassador to Great Britain. He used his experience to draft his senior thesis at Harvard University, on Great Britain’s military unpreparedness and further expanded it into a best-selling book, Why England Slept (1940). In the second year of the World War II, Kennedy joined the US Navy, and by the end of it, he returned to a newly formed pressure to pursue politics, as his older brother had been killed. Kennedy’s first opportunity came in 1946, when he ran for Congress and campaigned aggressively. Kennedy soared through the election, and he received nearly double the vote of his nearest opponent in the Democratic primary. Kennedy was the youngest man ever elected to the presidency of the United
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