by Robert Stone
By 11:00 P.M. in New York, the networks concluded their live breaking coverage with news that the Gemini 8 astronauts were safe in the Pacific recovery area. It was called “one of the year’s best and most suspenseful true-life dramas” by a television journalist, but viewers didn’t agree. The network switchboards registered a record number of complaints from people angry about missing their favorite programs; not a single caller to NBC’s switchboard expressed praise for their Gemini coverage. Overnight ratings confirmed that TV sets were gradually switched off that evening; a viewer who saw some of the Gemini 8 broadcast called it “too long, boring, and there was nothing to see.” The networks lost roughly 3 million dollars in advertising revenue that night, with local affiliates forfeiting additional money as well. Most Americans appeared to prefer the fiction of Lost in Space to the real thing happening live.
Hours after their near-death experience on Gemini 8, astronauts Neil Armstrong and David Scott smile at the press and crowds of onlookers at Hickam Air Force Base in Hawaii. Among those who turned out to catch a glimpse of the astronauts was four-year-old Barack Obama and his grandfather.
Aboard the recovery ship Leonard F. Mason, Armstrong appeared depressed, refusing congratulatory handshakes. Despite achieving the world’s first space rendezvous, he worried it might appear that he was responsible for wasting American taxpayer money. If somehow Gemini 8’s near disaster was attributed to pilot error, Armstrong knew, this flight would probably be his last trip into space. But his concerns were quickly banished, as it became clear within hours of the return that Armstrong’s quick and commanding decision-making and his skill in bringing the spacecraft’s wild gyrations under control were exemplary of the way to handle such a crisis. Armstrong had proven himself to be the ideal person to command one of the first missions to the Moon.
The Gemini 8 crew members left the Leonard F. Mason when it docked in Okinawa and flew to Cape Kennedy via an eighteen-hour layover in Hawaii. A scrum of photographers and the local Honolulu television stations covered Armstrong and Scott’s departure for Cape Kennedy as a crowd of well-wishers looked on. In the ring of observers at Hickam Air Force Base trying to catch a glimpse of the two Gemini heroes was a four-year-old boy waving an American flag while sitting on the shoulders of his grandfather. Years later as president of the United States, Barack Obama recalled that moment as one of his earliest memories.
Despite the fortunate and safe return of Armstrong and Scott, James Webb was not pleased with how the situation had been handled within NASA. In particular, Webb was furious that while the crisis was taking place, Robert Seamans, who had recently assumed the position of deputy administrator, had addressed thousands of VIP attendees at the black-tie Robert Goddard Dinner in Washington about the ongoing events, even though he didn’t have access to verifiable facts. Webb told him that if NASA had released a misleading or erroneous public statement during a developing emergency situation, the public’s trust in the space agency would have been harmed irreparably.
Previous to Gemini 8, a rough plan of action had been established in case of an accident during a spaceflight, which focused primarily on investigating the cause of the incident. Less thought had been given to handling public announcements during a developing emergency situation and its immediate aftermath, and both Seamans and Webb concluded they had to be better prepared if and when the next crisis occurred. At Webb’s direction, Seamans drafted a new emergency plan, recommending that NASA’s top administrators use confidential lines of communication to gather accurate information before releasing any news to the public. And beyond that, any accident-review-board inquiry would be conducted as a NASA internal investigation and reported directly and solely to NASA’s administrator.
During the Gemini 8 emergency, the space agency’s vaunted open public-affairs program came under press scrutiny, especially when NASA withheld recordings of the astronauts’ communications with Houston for nearly twenty-four hours. As was revealed when the tapes were made available, few signs of undue alarm or panic could be heard in the astronauts’ voices. But NASA’s desire to contain and control the narrative continued to frustrate journalists. Some reporters were convinced of the existence of a separate private communications channel between the ground and the spacecraft, used for confidential conversations that were never made available to the press.
While reviewing the Gemini 8 news coverage, NASA’s public-affairs office discovered that ABC News had included exclusive information in their broadcast, leading the space agency to correctly surmise that ABC had somehow hacked NASA’s internal audio-communications loop. NASA summoned the ABC News producers to a meeting at its Washington office and threatened to cut off their press access in retaliation. But the network producers feigned innocence, admitting to nothing. The situation only exacerbated the already testy relationship between NASA’s Julian Scheer and ABC’s ambitious science correspondent Jules Bergman, who had recently been caught venturing into restricted areas and acting as if he didn’t need to follow the same rules and procedures as his colleagues.
The next shot in NASA’s war with ABC came when the network’s news president, Elmer Lower, complained that those currently in power in Washington had become increasingly restrictive when giving journalists access to information. In a public speech, he attacked the pervasive culture of dishonesty practiced by the government and military press officers in South Vietnam, pointing a finger specifically at the high-handed attitudes of the public-relations officers working for NASA, branding the space agency “one of the largest sacred cows in the federal establishment.” Lower even reported that Jules Bergman believed that NASA was actively wiretapping phones at Cape Kennedy to prevent news leaks, a wild charge with no supporting evidence.
As part of his attack on NASA, Lower presented a case for the addition of live television on future Gemini flights. But Lower’s reasons were less about granting Americans an opportunity to see their tax dollars in action than a practical business decision. Since third-place ABC News had a minuscule production budget in comparison to its two better-financed competitors, CBS and NBC, Lower knew that live television from space would immediately put the three networks on a level playing field, with all forced to broadcast the identical audio and video.
Lower charged that NASA opposed live television from space out of fear a tragedy would erode public support, arguing the public’s right to know was more important than protecting a huge government agency’s reputation. In fact, Julian Scheer and some others within NASA very much wanted live television included on future missions; the resistance to television cameras on American spacecraft was concentrated among engineers and astronauts.
The ABC News president’s criticism of NASA reflected a gradual shift in attitudes regarding the American government that had arisen during the half decade since Kennedy’s call to go to the Moon. Although the space agency’s critics had garnered little national attention, there were stirrings of opposition to Apollo on Capitol Hill, in academia, and on newspaper editorial pages. As academic and intellectual criticism of Johnson’s Vietnam policy grew louder, it brought with it skepticism about the underlying wisdom of other government priorities, including renewed scrutiny of NASA and the decision to land men on the Moon.
Nevertheless, James Webb believed that his larger vision of NASA as a catalyst for the nation’s educational, technological, and manufacturing base made it a logical ally in achieving Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society, especially if the lessons of space-age management could be applied to other domestic challenges. So it was something of a rude awakening when Webb was invited to address the annual National League of Cities conference and heard mayors and city officials attack the federal spending for Apollo as misguided when so many American cities were in crisis and their renewal been declared a national priority. Webb countered that neither he nor anyone else in government believed that the space program was considered a higher priority than the needs of the cities
but argued that the country should spend money where it could effectively lead to productive change. Webb’s argument relied upon his belief that an innovative big-government program with a clearly defined goal could, when managed creatively, serve to nurture educational and technological spin-offs. However, his nuanced defense was somewhat undercut by NASA successfully telling its story as one of heroic exploration rather than emphasizing the long-term benefits to the nation.
The skepticism toward government priorities that Webb encountered at the National League of Cities conference was a reflection of the larger changing culture during the immediate post-Kennedy era. For thirty years, from the height of the Great Depression, when unemployment exceeded 20 percent, and through the 1950s, opinion polls indicated that Americans remained optimistic about the country’s future. After the trauma of the Kennedy assassination and America’s growing involvement in Southeast Asia, such optimism began to decline. As World War II and Korean combat veterans assumed positions of power, some influential works of art employed irony and dark humor to satirize and call attention to the underlying absurdity and hypocrisy of institutions, political pragmatism, and American culture in general. Joseph Heller’s Catch-22 (1961) and Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove (1964) spoke to both a generation of experienced war veterans and their children—the first wave of the baby boom, who entered college during the early 1960s, energized by the idealism of the Kennedy era.
During the Gemini years, the American space program was largely spared the biting satire inflicted on the Pentagon and other American institutions, with one powerful exception. Tom Lehrer, an academic with connections to Harvard and MIT, moonlighted as a performer of comic songs about social and political issues. In 1965 he released a comedy LP that included a savage two-minute ballad about the career of Wernher von Braun. Confronting his Nazi past and his political expediency, the song’s clever lyrics and irreverence would have been unthinkable during the Eisenhower era.
Don’t say that he’s hypocritical,
Say rather that he’s apolitical.
“Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department!” says Wernher von Braun.
Far more than Hollywood’s portrayal of von Braun in I Aim at the Stars, Lehrer’s brief musical takedown became the lasting artistic interpretation of his life and legacy. What irked Lehrer wasn’t von Braun’s employment by NASA but his status as a national hero in the media, which he considered grotesque. Arthur C. Clarke provides one of the rare accounts of von Braun’s reaction to Lehrer’s song, recalling a party where Lehrer’s LP was played and Clarke witnessed von Braun’s usual good sense of humor “tested to the breaking point.”
With his subversive song, Tom Lehrer focused attention on the wartime past of von Braun and the Peenemünde Germans working on Apollo—something few American journalists covering the space program in the 1960s had revisited. For them, the story of the V-2’s development was old news and irrelevant to the bigger ongoing story. Von Braun’s colleague from Peenemünde Kurt Debus was now Cape Kennedy’s director of the Launch Operations Center. An imposing figure, with a face scarred from deep wounds sustained during his university fencing days in Darmstadt, Debus had been an active member in Heinrich Himmler’s SS during the Third Reich. Journalists weren’t comfortable detailing biographies such as his when writing pieces about Gemini and Apollo, even though in private they joked about the irony that a lot of former Nazis were going to put America on the Moon.
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WITH CULTURAL AND political attitudes in transition, James Webb continued to strive to build support for NASA’s post-Apollo future, without any encouragement from the White House. In mid-1966, congressionally imposed NASA budget cuts were scheduled to compel the first significant layoffs, with forty thousand to sixty thousand Apollo-related jobs to be eliminated later that year. Webb felt he had no choice but to go public to spur the White House and Congress to decide about NASA’s future.
In a public interview, Webb declared the nation was facing a long-term space-planning crisis. Apollo was on track and on budget to land on the Moon, but few contingencies existed in the event of unforeseen delays. In addition, unless a longer-term decision was arrived at during the next year, the United States would sacrifice its position as a preeminent spacefaring nation during the post-Apollo era. By 1970, Webb said, NASA would meet its secondary goal of “establishing the managerial, industrial, and technological resources to do almost anything in space,” but few in Washington appeared interested or committed to the nation’s massive space investment.
If there had ever been a possibility that the year 2001 would see giant revolving space stations such as those Harry Lange envisioned for Stanley Kubrick’s film or like the moon colonies of 2024 at the World’s Fair’s Futurama, it disappeared during the latter half of 1966. By the end of the year, the White House approved only a modest budget for an Apollo Applications program, which was to expand on the existing Apollo technology for missions in the 1970s. This initial plan called for extended lunar stays of up to two weeks in a roving mobile lab and an earth-orbiting space workshop built using existing Apollo hardware and technology. Only the space workshop would survive; renamed Skylab, it would be the home to three sets of astronauts in 1973 and 1974.
For the moment, though, the Gemini program was concluding with four more flights. Following Neil Armstrong’s success, three of the Gemini missions also docked with Agena target vehicles, and two ignited the Agena’s engine to boost the docked spacecraft into higher orbits. But Gemini’s later spacewalkers had far less success than Ed White. Three subsequent Gemini spacewalkers all ran into severe difficulty when attempting to maneuver outside their spacecraft. They flailed and spun as they tried to position themselves in zero gravity and in the process became dangerously overheated and unable to see clearly through fogged visors. Learning how best to work effectively outside a spacecraft became the final challenge of the Gemini program.
The last Gemini astronaut scheduled to walk in space was Buzz Aldrin, a Korean War jet combat veteran with an MIT doctorate awarded for his work on orbital-rendezvous mechanics. Aldrin decided to take on the spacewalkers’ problem using a novel and somewhat controversial training program. An experienced scuba diver, like Arthur Clarke and Wernher von Braun, Aldrin metaphorically likened skin diving to floating weightlessly in space. He knew that when he was diving it was counterproductive to struggle against the current. Rather, the most effective approach was to proceed slowly while accounting for the current’s flow. Aldrin wanted to train for his spacewalk while wearing his space suit in a huge neutral-buoyancy water tank. Chief astronaut Alan Shepard and others rejected his idea, assuming there existed little similarity between being suspended in water and floating in space. But others at NASA arranged to try just such an experiment and rented a large pool at a boys’ private school in Baltimore during off hours. Here Aldrin put in more than twelve hours of underwater training with submerged prototypes of the spacecraft, trying out new handrails, handles, foot holders, tethers, and EVA tools. He planned to pace himself outside the Gemini, taking scheduled two-minute rest periods to keep his heart rate consistently low.
When put into practice during Gemini 12, Aldrin’s spacewalk was an astounding success. Subsequently, EVA training in a neutral-buoyancy water tank became standard preparation for all future spacewalkers. The New York Times hailed Gemini 12’s near-perfect flight as a “victory over space.” In recent months the Times had questioned the wisdom of Kennedy’s lunar timetable but in this instance praised the significance of the scientific knowledge returned.
The success of the Gemini program had not only ushered in the transition to Apollo but also had fulfilled its secondary role of sustaining public interest in the American crewed space program. But despite the complications Armstrong had encountered on Gemini 8, the success of the ten Gemini missions led to a s
ense of complacency. No longer were the astronauts’ names familiar to most Americans, nor were the personal accounts published in Life magazine attracting reader interest. The news divisions of the three television networks continued to interrupt regular programming for live launch coverage, but each of the later missions took on a routine sameness. Even the astronauts’ personalities and profiles were strangely alike. Journalists did their best to distinguish between them with labels like: “the PhD astronaut,” “the first Catholic astronaut,” “the only Ivy League astronaut,” “the civilian astronaut.”
NASA announced its first three-man Apollo crew while Gemini was still at its midpoint. Two were experienced astronauts, whose names were already fairly well known: Gus Grissom, veteran of the second Mercury flight and commander of the first Gemini mission; and Ed White, Gemini 4’s handsome and ebullient spacewalker. Joining them was Roger Chaffee, who was only thirty-one, a member of the third group chosen in 1963. While their spacecraft was still being assembled at North American Aviation’s plant in Downey, California, motivational posters displayed on the factory’s walls urged employee perfection. One featured a portrait of Gus Grissom and reproduced the three-word speech for which he had become famous. In 1959, Grissom had been asked to address thousands of aerospace workers at Convair’s Atlas missile plant in San Diego. Grissom, who had been named a Mercury astronaut only weeks earlier, said everything he thought necessary: “Do good work.”
Astronaut Gus Grissom dominates this 1966 Manned Flight awareness incentive poster created to increase morale and encourage quality workmanship at facilities where many of the Apollo program’s components were being built. The quotation alludes to a simple request Grissom asked of Convair employees in 1959 when they were assembling the Mercury Atlas missile that he hoped he would ride into space.