Shoot for the Moon

by James Donovan

  But on April 14, two days after Gagarin’s triumphant flight, Kennedy had hosted a meeting at the White House that included his vice president, Lyndon Johnson, and a few advisers. Also present was the tough Washington insider that the president, with help from the vice president, had chosen as NASA’s new administrator: a thick-necked, barrel-chested, square-jawed bulldog with a Southern drawl and a steel-trap mind.

  James Webb, born in a small North Carolina town and the son of a school superintendent, was a former Marine aviator. He had begun working the halls and back rooms of government in 1932 as secretary to a U.S. congressman while earning his law degree. After World War II, he had served as director of the Bureau of the Budget, then undersecretary of state. Tough, savvy, and a resourceful negotiator—“the fastest mouth in the South,” some called him, though he could also be an attentive listener—he had become a political operator nonpareil.

  When Kennedy called Webb to the White House to offer him the post, he had been working in the private sector for almost a decade. Webb told the president that he wasn’t the right man for the job: “You need a scientist or an engineer,” he said. He also knew that many others had turned the job down (seventeen, Lyndon Johnson would remember later), since no one knew how long the nascent agency would be around or how much support it would receive from the new administration. But Kennedy would have none of it. He knew Webb’s reputation, and he wanted someone who understood policy. Webb couldn’t see a way to refuse his president. He agreed to take the job.

  Within a few months, Webb stood up to the air force on a major matter of space policy, faced down the Bureau of the Budget director, and, in a House Space Committee hearing, became involved in a shouting match with a congressman while defending NASA’s budget. Over the next eight years, the energetic Webb would use his considerable charm, experience, negotiation skills, and knack for translating complex space terms and concepts into understandable English to lobby for the fantastic amounts of money NASA needed from Congress—and the freedom to operate with minimal interference. And he was not a yes-man, as Kennedy would soon find out.

  At the April 14 meeting, the president, exasperated and tired of being asked why the U.S. was second to Russia in space, asked the room, “What can we do? How can we catch up?”

  While stumping for the presidency, Kennedy had used space only as an issue on which to criticize the Republicans. In his inaugural address, he had suggested that the two superpowers “explore the stars” together, and ten days later, he had asked the Soviet Union to join with the U.S. in several space ventures involving weather prediction, communications satellites, and space probes. Nothing would come of his peace overtures. But the success of Gagarin’s flight and its extraordinary worldwide acclaim hadn’t been lost on him. He had also noted the enthusiasm with which the country had embraced the astronauts and the jubilation with which Americans had greeted Shepard’s suborbital flight. Maybe there was political hay to be made from space after all. Certainly, after his disastrous first hundred days, Kennedy needed a boost. And despite Freedom 7’s success, the Mercury program continued to fall behind schedule. More space triumphs might be long in coming and trivial compared to the Soviets’ accomplishments.

  Lyndon Johnson, the farm boy from the Texas Hill Country who, through massive ambition and keen politicking skills, had become the most powerful man in the Senate before assuming the vice presidency, was also Washington’s foremost advocate of the space program and had been for some time. He had called for research into a space program as early as 1949, to no avail. Upon assuming office and to give Johnson something to do, Kennedy had named him chairman of the National Space Council, a body created a few years earlier to help coordinate the nation’s space efforts. Now Johnson was in the middle of everything, making phone calls, prodding Webb and others at NASA, marshaling all the forces he could with his well-known and none-too-subtle powers of persuasion. When Kennedy asked him what they could do to get ahead of the Russians, a few possibilities were mentioned. One was landing a man on the moon. Johnson told Kennedy that yes, it was possible, and he asked the president for a memorandum containing his thoughts and questions. He got it the next day, April 20, 1961, a one-pager asking Johnson to be in charge of “making an overall survey of where we stand in space.” There were several questions about the program. The first was the most important:

  Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the moon, or by a rocket to land on the moon, or by a rocket to go to the moon and back with a man. Is there any other space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win?

  Johnson and Webb spent the next several days consulting with NASA officials, scientists, top military brass, politicians, and even a few prominent businessmen on the feasibility of putting a man on the moon. When some of them expressed reservations, Johnson said, “Would you rather have us be a second-rate nation or should we spend a little money?” As the vice president polled these leaders, he also developed support for—and commitment to—the project. Webb was initially resistant to the idea but slowly came around as he watched Johnson work his contacts.

  Von Braun, who had dreamed of personally exploring the heavens since childhood and had been jailed by the Gestapo for just mentioning space exploration, jumped on this idea like a Doberman on a burglar. In a nine-page detailed memo, he told Johnson that they had an excellent chance of beating the USSR to the moon.

  Johnson delivered his evaluation a week after receiving the president’s memo. The gist of it was that it was conceivable that the United States could circumnavigate the moon and possibly land a man on it by 1966 or 1967. The report set forth broad guidelines on how to get there and stressed the importance of manned spaceflight to national prestige.

  Kennedy began talking to some of the men Johnson had consulted. Bob Gilruth told him it could be done—as a matter of fact, for two years he, Max Faget, and a few others at NASA had been researching how to put a man on the moon. The advantage of a moon-landing goal, he explained, was that it leveled the playing field for both countries, since neither had begun serious development of the massive boosters needed to lift a large craft into space. They’d both be starting from scratch, and he felt confident the United States could win that particular race. And no one needed to point out to the president the prestige that the winner would earn.

  On May 8, 1961, at a ceremony held in the sun-dappled Rose Garden, the president presented Shepard with the NASA Distinguished Service Medal. Afterward, Kennedy and the Mercury Seven retired to the Oval Office. Sitting in his rocking chair, Kennedy listened as Shepard talked of his flight, and he asked several questions about the mission, the men’s training, and the program. He even hinted at plans for a moon landing. The seven astronauts looked at one another, and Shepard said, “I’m ready.”

  Kennedy, it appeared, had made his decision.

  About three weeks later, Kennedy gave a speech to a joint session of Congress on “urgent national needs,” and he made a bold statement: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” He emphasized the necessity of “a major national commitment of scientific and technical manpower, materiel, and facilities…a degree of dedication, organization, and discipline which have not always characterized our research and development efforts.”

  Seven hundred miles away, in the main conference room at the Marshall Space Flight Center, von Braun and his board listened raptly to the president’s address. When they heard his moon-landing directive, they cheered, and some yelled “Ja!” and “Let’s go!”

  At the time, the USSR had already landed Luna 2 on the moon, sent Luna 3 around it, and orbited a man around the Earth. The United States had a total of fifteen minutes and twenty-two seconds of manned-spaceflight experience. What the space program didn’t have was the massive rocket needed to get to the moon, the spacecraft to convey the astrona
uts, or even a definite idea of how to navigate there and back. “Here we were struggling to get a 2,500-pound capsule up, and this thing [that Kennedy] just assigned us was going to require getting 250,000 pounds into earth orbit,” remembered one core member of the Space Task Group.

  A London bookmaker immediately set the odds at a thousand to one against a moon landing on Kennedy’s ambitious schedule.

  Gilruth and Webb were on a plane over the Midwest at the time of Kennedy’s speech, and they asked the pilot to patch the broadcast through the radio. Though Gilruth had discussed the possibility of a moon landing with the president and was impressed with his quick grasp of spaceflight fundamentals, he was aghast when he heard the challenge—only then did he fully realize the scope of what was proposed and understand the task ahead of him as director of the Space Task Group. He couldn’t believe Kennedy had actually gone through with it. “The concepts of manned spaceflight were only three years old, and voyaging in space over such vast distances was still a dream,” he would write later:

  Rendezvous, docking, prolonged weightlessness, radiation, and the meteoroid hazard all involved problems of unknown dimensions. We would need giant new rockets burning high-energy hydrogen; a breakthrough in reliability; new methods of staging and handling; and the ability to launch on time, since going to the moon required the accurate hitting of launch windows.

  It could be done. But the president’s challenge was a formidable one (and it could have been even tougher; an early draft of Kennedy’s speech had given a target date of 1967, prompting Webb to ask the White House to change the time frame to the end of the decade). As the normally taciturn Gus Grissom put it, “It’s as if somebody had said, ‘Let’s build New York City overnight.’”

  It would be an undertaking of enormous dimensions, and it required a new organization mode: a strong headquarters supervising several centers that would mobilize American industry and know-how to tackle a multitude of don’t-know-how matters. A massive rocket engine was already in development by von Braun’s Huntsville team, but a complex spacecraft, one with all the necessary features, would take years to design, develop, build, and test before it was man-rated. The sheer scale of the project would mean new factories, new testing and training facilities, new transport methods, and new systems of all kinds, from communications to environmental to others barely imagined.

  The gauntlet was picked up with enthusiasm by the rest of Gilruth’s Space Task Group. Faget and others had long been touting a moon landing as the follow-up program to Mercury. Both houses of Congress quickly approved massive increases in funding for the ambitious program—$1.67 billion for the 1962 budget alone, enough to get a strong start on Apollo—so NASA now had the money, the official approval, and a specific goal. Thus began one of the largest peacetime projects in U.S. history.

  But first there were important—and dangerous—baby steps to be taken.

  II.

  AROUND

  Chapter Five

  In Orbit

  Space is a risky business. I always considered every launch a barely controlled explosion.

  Aaron Cohen, NASA manager for

  Apollo command and service modules

  It didn’t take long for Jim Webb to prove his worth.

  NASA had received little cooperation from the air force in its first couple of years. It needed launch boosters and facilities—chiefly, the rocket range at Cape Canaveral—and the air force, jealous of the turf taken from it, had responded with only grudging assistance on that issue and others. In May 1961, Webb and Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara negotiated a document of agreement—former lawyer Webb argued about almost every line—that provided a mandate for NASA’s peaceful, noncommercial exploration of space and clarified and strengthened its position vis-à-vis the military branches. The space agency would not have to kowtow to them and would receive ready support when needed—and it would be needed often.

  Webb had experience working a budget. His time on Capitol Hill came in handy later that year when the president asked him how much it would cost to put a man on the moon. Webb’s staff had given him an estimate of thirteen billion dollars, but Webb decided on a different amount, one that provided some flexibility to counter the optimism of NASA’s technical experts. Webb didn’t want to have to go back in a few years and ask for more money; who knew how supportive Congress would be then? So he told Kennedy that the lunar program would cost upward of twenty billion dollars—an outrageous sum. When Webb’s people heard about it, they were shocked. “I put an administrator’s discount on it,” he told them. Though that figure would rise modestly through the years (the final price tag would end up a few billion more), it reflected well on NASA that the agency stayed close to its initial budget. Webb’s decision to add his “administrator’s discount” would pay dividends a few years later when he requested annual budgets of five billion dollars or more.

  Nine and a half weeks after Kennedy’s May 25 call to action, Gus Grissom—who took great pains to keep his classically Russian middle name, Ivan, on the down-low—was shoehorned into his own Mercury capsule. He’d dubbed it Liberty Bell 7, and it even had a crack painted on it. The fit wasn’t quite as tight for Grissom as it had been for the first astronaut to fly; at five foot six, Grissom was five inches shorter than Shepard. The flight was planned to be a virtual repeat of the previous one, and if successful, it would be the last on a Redstone booster (provided the air force’s more powerful Atlas ever became reliable and fully man-rated).

  Glenn, still smarting from his third-place showing, was Grissom’s backup. The two had been training almost constantly since Shepard’s mission, spending plenty of time on the centrifuge and the trainers; each had done more than a hundred different simulations. Grissom was prepared for one more situation, since neither the doctors nor the engineers had addressed the problem Shepard faced. He wore a makeshift urine-collection device that he and Glenn patched together using a few condoms, some tubing, rubber cement, and a plastic bag.

  At 7:20 a.m. on July 21, 1961, the Redstone lifted off. The flight went off without a hitch, and after six minutes of weightlessness, Grissom splashed down close to where Shepard had.

  With the recovery copter hovering above, Grissom armed the side hatch—new in this model Mercury and held in place with seventy explosive bolts—loosened his helmet, unbuckled the several harness straps, and lay back on his contour couch, waiting for the chopper to hook the capsule and carry it onto the recovery ship. Once the capsule was safely aboard, Grissom would hit the plunger that opened the hatch, emerge as the conquering hero, and stride across the deck as men cheered and cameras recorded the moment for posterity.

  A moment after Grissom lay back, he heard a dull thud and watched the hatch cover blow off and skip across the waves. Salt water began to pour into the capsule. Grissom threw his helmet off and quickly followed the hatch cover, swimming away from the foundering Liberty Bell 7. When he looked back at the capsule and saw it sinking, he realized he was entangled in a line attached to a dye marker.

  He fought free of it. But as the chopper attempted to secure a line to the capsule and Grissom attempted to help, he realized his pressure suit was losing air through his neck dam, which wasn’t tight enough, and through his oxygen inlet port, which he hadn’t sealed, and water was entering the port. Along with some small models of his spacecraft, two sets of pilot wings, and a string of pearls for his mother, in the left leg he was carrying two rolls of dimes he planned to give to the children in his neighborhood. He was slowly sinking in a heavy suit that was becoming heavier by the second, and when another recovery copter approached, its rotor wash made floating even more difficult, and he began bobbing beneath the surface and swallowing seawater. He feared he was going to drown.

  The second copter lowered a looped horse-collar lifeline. His head barely above water, Grissom grabbed the collar and hauled himself into it. He had been in the water no more than five minutes, but it had seemed like an eternity. As one copter reeled
him to safety, the other cast the capsule loose—filled with water, it was now more than a thousand pounds over the chopper’s lifting capacity. The Liberty Bell 7 sank to the bottom of the sea, almost three miles below, where it would remain for thirty-eight years, until it was salvaged in July 1999. The first thing Grissom said after reaching safety was “Give me something to blow my nose. My head is full of sea water.”

  Grissom had flown a hundred missions during the Korean War and never lost a plane, so the loss of Liberty Bell 7 pained him. He insisted that he hadn’t hit the detonator plunger (though in his first debriefing, he said, “I don’t see how I could have hit it, but possibly I did”), and he had no bruise or cut on his hand that would indicate he had. In private, he admitted to his best friend, Deke Slayton, that he might have accidentally banged into it. NASA investigated and found that that would have been unlikely but could not determine how the hatch could have opened by itself. Despite Grissom’s protestations of innocence, a cloud hung over him, and he was acutely aware of it. It also didn’t help that in the press conference following the mission, he had used the S-word; he’d admitted that he had been “scared a good portion of the time.” Surprised, the reporter who had asked the question said, “You were what?” “Scared, okay?” was Grissom’s reply. Slayton and other NASA managers defended Grissom, but of course, heroes weren’t supposed to admit to feeling fear.