Critical Introduction

Welcome to our blog about the Space Race! We are three freshman in the College Park Scholars program at the University of Maryland. After studying rhetoric in our english class, we took a look at the differing strategies employed by people with distinct perspectives and roles in life. All of us having a great interest in the Space Race, we came into this blog with a good deal of background knowledge. However, through research, our appreciation of the specific historical basis of these texts increased.

We decided on these sources because they both had a lasting impact on the decade. JFK was a very influential figure during the early 1960s and his ideas, expressed in his 1961 Moon Shot Speech, inspired United States ventures in space for the rest of the decade. He used nationalism to convince Congress and the American people to support the space program. The tremendous popularity of David Bowie’s “Space Oddity” in 1969 showed the continued public interest in the Space Race. The song has a less divisive message and portrays humanity as a whole struggling against the challenge of space. President John. F Kennedy and musician David Bowie express differing opinions about the Space Race – while the former president argues that we must put a man on the moon, the artist had mixed feelings showing both awe and fear for the Final Frontier.

The Space Race played a major role in scientific advancements. For example, both weather and communication satellites would not have been feasible without the drive to obtain space travel. Space exploration was not only confined to the 1960s. Today we are still attempting to understand the many mysteries of space. Since the 1960s, we have continued to send missions into space, such as the Mars Rover.

Putting kairos first provides a background to the precise situation that will aid the reader in understanding the impetus for the texts. Audience is important to analyze early on because they differed greatly between the sources. JFK was specifically addressing Congress while Bowie targeted the population as a whole. Following the audience analysis, stasis theory provided the general arguments utilized by their respected texts. This is central to the reader's understanding of the rhetorical strategies that the authors chose to employ. At the end, we focused on the specific rhetorical strategies of each text, analyzing their strengths and weaknesses. The appeals to both ethos and pathos differed greatly between the speech and the song. JFK had extremely strong extrinsic ethos, while Bowie was relatively unknown prior to this hit song. Due to the fact that it is a song, “Space Oddity” has an advantage at appealing to the pathos of its audience. However, JFK attempted to overcome this by appealing to nationalistic pride.

Could you imagine a world where the Soviet Union won the Space Race? Winning the Space Race had an enormous impact on the outcome of the Cold War. It enabled Americans to have a sense of pride in their nation. It was also a major factor in the many scientific advancements that we cannot live without today.