Kennedy gave a speech at Rice University in Houston today, and I think people will remember it longer than almost anything else he’s said about space.

He spoke to a crowd of 35,000. The whole speech is worth reading, but the passage that I keep returning to is the one about why:

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

I wrote about the original speech to Congress in May 1961. This one is different. The Congress speech was a commitment made to the legislature. This one is a commitment made in public, in a stadium, in the summer heat of Houston, to ordinary people.

“Not because they are easy, but because they are hard.”

He also said something I’ve been thinking about all evening: “Many years ago the great British explorer George Mallory, who was to die on Mount Everest, was asked why did he want to climb it. He said, ‘Because it is there.’ Well, space is there, and we’re going to climb it.”

Mallory died on Everest in 1924. They never found out whether he made it to the summit. The mountain was there before he climbed it; it was there after. The question was what people would do about the fact of it being there.

Space is there. We’re going to climb it.

I’ve been following this program for five years since Sputnik. Kennedy has just told me in plain language what it’s actually about. Not the Cold War, not the strategic competition, not the engineering challenge — those are real, but they’re not the deepest reason.

The deepest reason is: because it’s there. Because we are the kind of species that sees a mountain and wants to know what’s on top.

That’s all. That’s enough.