Why Does Rice Play Texas?

Today marks the 50th anniversary of JFK's announcement to Congress that the US intended to put a man on the moon. This was an expensive and dangerous proposition, and the Americans didn't see the point of it until September 12,1962, when in his prepared speech to Rice University in Houston he pencilled in, "Why does Rice play Texas?" This won over the overheated crowd, and he went on to deliver the more famous line, "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."