American Moonshot

by Douglas Brinkley

  Kennedy’s moonshot plan was more than just a reaction to Soviet triumphs. Instead, it represented simultaneously a fresh articulation of national priorities, a semi-militarized reassertion of America’s bold spirit and history of technological innovation, and a direct repudiation of what he saw as the tepid attitude of the previous administration. Within months of winning the presidency in November 1960, Kennedy had decided that America’s dillydallying space effort was symbolic of everything that had been wrong with the Eisenhower years. According to Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy’s speechwriter and closest policy advisor, “the lack of effort, the lack of initiative, the lack of imagination, vitality, and vision” annoyed Kennedy to no end. To JFK, “the more the Russians gained in space during the last few years in the fifties the more he thought it showed up the Eisenhower administration’s lag in this area and damaged the prestige of the United States abroad.”

  Only forty-three when he entered the White House, Kennedy represented generational change. When he was born in 1917, West German chancellor Konrad Adenauer was already lord mayor of Cologne, French president Charles de Gaulle was a company commander in the French army, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev was chairman of a workers’ council in Ukraine, and President Dwight D. Eisenhower was a newly married West Point graduate preparing to train soldiers for battle in World War I. At the dawn of the transformative 1960s, these leaders, all born in the nineteenth century, seemed part of the past, while Kennedy and his spacemen were the fresh-faced avatars of a future in which a moon-landing odyssey was a vivid possibility. “I think he became convinced that space was the symbol of the twentieth century,” Kennedy’s science advisor Jerome Wiesner recalled. “He thought it was good for the country. Eisenhower, in his opinion, had underestimated the propaganda windfall space provided to the Soviets.”

  Calculating that the American spirit needed a boost after Sputnik, Kennedy decided that beating the Soviets to the moon was the best way to invigorate the nation and notch a win in the Cold War. But he also understood that a vibrant NASA manned space program would involve nearly every field of scientific research and technological innovation. U.S. leadership in space required specialists who could innovate tiny transistors, devise resilient materials, produce antennae that would transmit and receive over vast distances never before imagined, decipher data about Earth’s magnetic field, and analyze the extent of ionization in the upper atmosphere.

  President Kennedy bet that a lavish financial investment in space, funded by American taxpayers, would pay off by uniting government, industry, and academia in a grand project to accelerate the pace of technological innovation. He doubled down on Apollo even while calling for tax cuts. Breaking up congressional logjams over NASA appropriations became a regular feature of his presidency. Though the cost of Project Apollo eventually exceeded $25 billion, the intense federal concentration on space exploration also teed up the technology-based economy the United States enjoys today, spurring the development of next-generation computer innovations, virtual reality technology, advanced satellite television, game-changing industrial and medical imaging, kidney dialysis, enhanced meteorological forecasting apparatuses, cordless power tools, bar coding, and other modern marvels. Shortsighted politicians may have carped about the cost, but in the immediate term, NASA funds went right back into the economy: to manned space research hubs such as Houston, Cambridge, Huntsville, Cape Canaveral, Pasadena, St. Louis, the Mississippi-Louisiana border, and Hampton, Virginia, to the thousands of companies and more than four hundred thousand citizens who contributed to the Apollo effort.

  Because NASA worked in tandem with American industry, the agency often received bogus credit for developing popular products like Teflon (developed by DuPont in 1941), Velcro (invented by a Swiss engineer to extract burrs stuck in his dog’s fur on alpine hikes in 1941), and Tang (released in 1957 as a grocery store product). The most pernicious myths were that NASA innovated miniaturized computing circuits and personal computers; it didn’t. NASA, however, did adopt these product innovations for manned-space missions.

  Even without the manifest technological and societal benefits of Apollo, Kennedy would have set a course to the moon because he believed America had an obligation to lead the world in public discovery. For though the moon seemed distant, in reality, it was only three days away from Earth. On September 12, 1962, at the Rice University football stadium, just a short walk across campus from my office at the university’s history department, Kennedy offered the nation a stirring rationale for Apollo. Identifying the moon as the ultimate Cold War trophy and throwing his weight behind landing there was the most daring thing Kennedy ever did in politics. “Why, some say, the moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask why climb the highest mountain? Why, 35 years ago, fly the Atlantic? . . . 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.”

  For Kennedy, the exploration of space continued the grand tradition that began with Christopher Columbus and flowed through America’s westward expansion, through the invention of the electric light, the telephone, the airplane and automobile and atomic power, all the way to the creation of NASA in 1958 and the launch of the Mercury missions that took the first Americans into space. Kennedy saw the Mercury Seven astronauts he hosted in the Rose Garden as path blazers in an American tradition that extended from Daniel Boone and Meriwether Lewis to Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart. When he was a boy, Kennedy’s favorite book was the chivalry-drenched King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. As president, he loved when newspapers such as the Los Angeles Examiner and St. Louis Post-Dispatch called his Mercury Seven astronauts “knights of space,” with him as King Arthur. “He made a statement that he found it difficult to understand why some people couldn’t see the importance of space,” von Braun recalled of Kennedy’s visit to the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville in September 1962. “He said he wasn’t a technical man but to him it was so very obvious that space was something that we simply could not neglect. That we just had to be first in space if we want to survive as a nation. And that, at the same time, this was a challenge as great as that confronted by the explorers of the Renaissance.”

  In 1959, LA Dodgers slugger Wally Moon became known for his towering home runs over the left-field wall at Los Angeles Coliseum, hits that radio announcer Vin Scully dubbed “moon shots.” The term quickly seeped its way into the culture and became synonymous with Kennedy’s aspirational space vision. Merriam Webster still treats moon shot as two words. But I have chosen the singular moonshot through this narrative, because it is usually uttered without a pause or break. As early as Kennedy’s Rice University address, in fact, the Houston Press called NASA’s new Manned Spacecraft Center in town the “Moonshot Command Post.”

  A large question I try to answer is what drove Kennedy—perhaps a deep romantic strain (which his wife, Jackie, believed was his true-self)—to gamble so much political capital on his aspirational Project Apollo moonshot? Certainly, he did harbor a quixotic streak when it came to exploration, and an interest in the sea that, he once wrote, began “from my earliest boyhood” sailing the New England coast, observing the stars, and feeling the gravitational push and pull between the moon and tides. During Kennedy’s Rice speech, he deemed space the ocean ready to be explored by modern galactic navigators. “We set sail on this new sea,” he said, “because there is new knowledge to be gained, and new rights to be won, and they must be won and used for the progress of all people.”

  By the time Kennedy stepped down from the Rice dais, his memorable words had been seared into the imaginations of every rocket engineer, technician, data analyst, and astronaut at NASA. It was that rare moment when a president outperformed expectations. “The eyes of the world now
look into space,” he had vowed, “to the moon and to the planets beyond, and we have vowed that we shall not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace. We have vowed that we shall not see space filled with weapons of mass destruction, but with instruments of knowledge and understanding. Yet the vows of this Nation can only be fulfilled if we in this Nation are first, and, therefore, we intend to be first. In short, our leadership in science and in industry, our hopes for peace and security, our obligations to ourselves as well as others, all require us to make this effort, to solve these mysteries, to solve them for the good of all men, and to become the world’s leading space-faring nation.”

  For Kennedy, spurred onward by Alan Shepard’s successful suborbital arc into space on May 5, 1961, the moonshot was many things: another weapon of the Cold War, the sine qua non of America’s status as a superpower, a high-stakes strategy for technological rebirth, and an epic quest to renew the American frontier spirit, all wrapped up as his legacy to the nation. He would bend his presidential power to support the Apollo program, no matter what. How he envisioned the moonshot gambit, his day-to-day tactics and long-term protocol, and how he pulled it off are what this presidential biography is all about. It’s a political epic of how Huntsville rocket genius Wernher von Braun, the Texas wheeler-dealer Lyndon Baines Johnson, and North Carolina–raised manager James Webb of NASA took up the dream that someday astronauts like Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin could indeed break the shackles of Earth and walk on the moon. “I think [the lunar landing] is equal in importance,” von Braun boasted, “to that moment in evolution when aquatic life came crawling up on the land.”

  Hundreds of U.S. policy planners and lawmakers followed the leadership directives of President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson. And then thousands of astrophysicists, computer scientists, mechanics, physicians, flight trackers, office clerks, and mechanical engineers followed the White House planners. Millions of Americans joined in the dream, too. Finally, when humans did walk on the moon, five hundred million people around the world took pride in watching the human accomplishment on television or listening on the radio. Even Communist countries swooned over Apollo 11. “We rejoice,” the Soviet newspaper Izvestia editorialized, “at the success of the American astronauts.” Unfortunately, Kennedy didn’t live to see the Eagle make its lunar landing on that historic day of July 20, 1969. Everybody at NASA knew that Armstrong’s “giant leap for mankind” was done to fulfill Kennedy’s audacious national directive. As Kennedy dreamed, the first human footprints on the gray and powdery moon were made by mission-driven American space travelers. And given that the moon has no erosion by wind or water because it has no atmosphere, they will likely remain stamped there for time immemorial as his enduring New Frontier legacy. Someday the Eagle landing spot and those astronauts’ footprints should be declared a National Historical site. “We needed the first man landing to be a success,” Aldrin later reflected on JFK’s lunar challenge, “to lift America to reaffirm that the American dream was still possible in the midst of turmoil.”

  Throughout the United States there is a hunger today for another “moonshot,” some shared national endeavor that will transcend partisan politics. If Kennedy put men on the moon, why can’t we eradicate cancer, or feed the hungry, or wipe out poverty, or halt climate change? The answer is that it takes a rare combination of leadership, luck, timing, and public will to pull off something as sensational as Kennedy’s Apollo moonshot. Today there is no rousing historical context akin to the Cold War to light a fire on a bipartisan public works endeavor. Only if a future U.S. president, working closely with Congress, is able to marshal the federal government, private sector, scientific community, and academia to work in unison on a grand effort can it be done. NASA has achieved other astounding successes in the realm of space, such as exploring the solar system and cosmos with robotic craft and establishing a space station, but without presidential drive, these didn’t galvanize the national spirit. Kennedy’s moonshot was less about American exceptionalism, in the end, than about the forward march of human progress. For as the Apollo 11 plaque left on the moon by Armstrong and Aldrin reads, WE CAME IN PEACE FOR ALL MANKIND.

  Part I

  Rockets

  Robert H. Goddard poses with his first liquid-fueled rocket on March 16, 1926, in Worcester, Massachusetts. Although this first rocket rose only forty-one feet, Goddard’s immense body of work, covered by 214 patents, established him as one of the founders of spaceflight.

  Everett Collection Historical/Alamy Stock Photo

  1

  Dr. Robert Goddard Meets Buck Rogers

  Earth is the cradle of humanity. But one cannot live in the cradle forever.

  —KONSTANTIN TSIOLKOVSKY

  History has taught us that artists are often decades ahead of engineers and scientists in imagining the future, and so it was with the idea of voyaging to the moon. In 1865, Jules Verne published From the Earth to the Moon, which detailed the story of three intrepid astronauts blasted from a gigantic cannon in Tampa, Florida, en route to a lunar landing. A devotee of hot air balloons, astronomy, and newfangled gunnery, with a mind that could easily grasp Galileo’s theories on the phenomenon of lunar light, Verne consulted with French scientists about the challenges of a lunar voyage, then translated those complexities for the layman. Enormously popular, From the Earth to the Moon and its sequel, Around the Moon, inspired readers to reimagine what was possible and to beware of “certain narrow-minded people, who would inevitably shut up the human race upon this globe.”

  Blessed with a probing curiosity that never rested, Verne was eerily prescient. Writing around the time of the American Civil War, he accurately prophesied that the United States would beat Russia, France, Great Britain, and Germany to the moon, and that the voyage would be launched from the Florida tidal lowlands, at the approximate latitude from which Apollo 11 blasted off in 1969. Verne’s postulation that the projectile would take four days to reach the moon was likewise remarkably accurate.

  Verne’s novels exemplified the optimistic spirit of their times, when the potential for industrial and technological progress seemed limitless. It was a spirit that still suffused public discourse and literature into the early years of the twentieth century—especially in the United States, where, as novelist Kurt Vonnegut once noted, the enthusiastic experimenter and inventor with “the restless, erratic insight and imagination of a gadgeteer” has been an archetype since the nation’s birth.

  It was into this cultural milieu that John Fitzgerald “Jack” Kennedy was born on May 29, 1917, in the Boston suburb of Brookline, Massachusetts. His parents, Joe and Rose Kennedy, both grandchildren of Irish immigrants, came from families that had thrived in business and politics. Rose’s father, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, was a former Massachusetts congressman and mayor of Boston. Joe’s parents had worked their way into the upper middle class through the saloon business and connections in the Democratic Party. The pride of their respective families, Joe and Rose were already well established in Boston society when they started their married life. Joe first made waves as a banker with a gift for spotting opportunity in the fine print of legal documents. Eventually, he became known as a Wall Street speculator or even manipulator, amassing millions by the time Jack was a small boy. The second of what would eventually be nine children, Jack had a sheltered upbringing, wanting for nothing, though this didn’t protect him from contracting scarlet fever at age two. He was quarantined with a 104-degree fever and blisters all over his body. For three weeks, his parents attended church services daily to pray for his recovery. After a month, he took a turn for the better, but he continued to suffer from various afflictions for the rest of his life, despite an outward appearance of robust good health.

  Always taking life lightly, Jack could be a scamp of a boy, yet at the end of the day, he wanted only to delve into books by Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and others, which created in him a ravenous
appetite for world history and high-risk adventure. An appreciation of the seashore, sailing, and maritime culture was ingrained in him at an early age. Simultaneously, his parents instilled in him a focus on politics and global affairs, with suppertime conversations typically turning on the week’s news from the New York Times and The Saturday Evening Post, including the latest developments in aeronautics.

  As the century progressed and real-world technological advances closed the gap on Verne’s fiction, space travel moved into the realm of plausibility. In the wake of the Wright brothers’ first flight, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the skies were suddenly open to mankind, and even space travel seemed attainable. In 1910, a year out of the White House, Theodore Roosevelt became the first U.S. president to fly in a plane—it was the future, he declared. If Orville and Wilbur Wright could devise aircraft controls that made fixed-wing powered flight attainable, and if TR flew, then why couldn’t the moon be conquered someday? After Kitty Hawk, space was talked about as a “new frontier,” to be conquered by rockets instead of Conestoga wagons and the Pony Express, and the news reported regularly on the latest advances in the burgeoning fields of aviation and rocketry.

  In the early years of the 1920s, northeast of Los Angeles, astronomer Edwin Hubble was observing the solar system through the Mount Wilson Observatory’s just-completed Hooker Telescope, at one hundred inches, then the world’s largest. By 1924, his findings would shatter the common notion that the Milky Way encompassed the entire cosmos, proving instead that it was just one among potentially billions of galaxies in an unimaginably vast universe. CBS Radio often hosted astronomers speculating about life in other galaxies, while top-tier universities began hiring space physicists. Interest in space transcended regionalism. Every village, it seemed, had a space buff, with discerning eyes for the moon.