American Moonshot

by Douglas Brinkley

  Wearing aviator’s caps, fancy goggles, and exotic silk scarves with calf-high leather boots, aviators—like Eddie Rickenbacker—had become American heroes in the First World War. Even though airpower hadn’t been a determining factor in the war per se, the U.S. government recognized its future potential in warfare. The pursuit of aeronautical innovation that would eventually take us to the moon, in fact, had come into being during World War I. A group led by Charles D. Walcott, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, had lobbied Congress to create an advisory committee that would coordinate aeronautical innovation efforts across government, industry, and academia, with the goal of producing cutting-edge military aircraft. In 1915, with President Woodrow Wilson determined to keep the United States neutral even as war consumed Europe, congressmen had quietly slipped a rider into a naval appropriations bill calling for the creation of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) to “supervise and direct the scientific study of the problems of flight to their practical solution.” It was an attempt to achieve aeronautical parity with the European powers, which, in the decade since the Wright brothers’ flight, had been busily studying the new technology’s military applications.

  Initially charged with meeting just a few times a year, the committee soon expanded its role, building America’s first civilian aeronautical research laboratory. The year Jack Kennedy was born, the NACA established the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory (LMAL) in Hampton, Virginia, situated on the Little Back River off the Chesapeake Bay, at the end of a peninsula running between the James and York Rivers. The regrettable fact was that no single airplane flown by U.S. pilots in World War I had been built in an American factory. The NACA leaders wanted this lack of foresight to end. In 1920, the NACA got a public relations boost with the appointment of the legendary aviator Orville Wright to the agency’s board. Soon the government-sponsored test laboratory was conducting research in aerodynamics, aircraft structures, and propulsion systems for both industrial and military flights while pioneering such innovations as wind tunnels, engine test stands, and test-flight facilities. It was at the NACA that safety solutions for flying “blind” (in fog, blizzards, and thunderstorms) were created. Although the NACA would build additional laboratories in Ohio and California during the Second World War, it would be primarily at the Hampton incubator that the idea of launching Americans to the moon would get its first serious discussion.

  Six hundred miles north of Hampton, some of the most aspirational aeronautical news in the world had emanated from the working-class city of Worcester, Massachusetts, about forty miles west of where Jack Kennedy spent his toddler years. There, in 1919, Dr. Robert H. Goddard, a professor at Clark College (now Clark University), unveiled his astronautical ideas in the sixty-nine-page A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, issued as part of the Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections. The document, written as bait to attract grant funding, illuminated a method of constructing a two-stage, solid-propellant rocket to use for atmospheric research. But what most fired the public imagination was Goddard’s assurance that a rocket fueled by a combination of gasoline and liquid oxygen would be able to dispense thrust beyond Earth’s atmosphere.

  Goddard had grown up in Worcester to a family with New England roots dating to the seventeenth century. Sickly as a boy, often bedridden with pleurisy and bronchitis, he engaged his mind with the telescope, microscope, and a subscription to Scientific American provided by his father, a mechanical inventor of the type that propelled New England textile manufacturing throughout the Industrial Revolution. Amid peers more interested in football and hockey, Goddard scoured the local library for books on the physical sciences. When he was sixteen, he read H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1897), became fixated on the cosmos, and attempted to construct a balloon out of aluminum, crafting the metal in his home laboratory, dreaming of the moon and Mars.

  Imbued with a visionary imagination, mapping out a future career as a physicist, Goddard was valedictorian of his high school class, delivering a speech that included the optimistic observation, “It has often proved true that the dream of yesterday is the hope of today, and the reality of tomorrow.” He attended Worcester Polytechnic Institute and then Clark College, from which he received an MA and PhD in physics in 1910 and 1911, but Goddard was more than a blackboard genius and armchair theorist: he was his father’s son, and he wanted to build and launch his own rockets to prove his bold theories. Always self-motivated, he had already conducted several rocketry experiments while scouring for funding to conduct more.

  The crucial theoretical turning point for Goddard occurred when he realized that Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion applied to motion in space, too. That opened up a universe of possibilities in his mind. By 1912, he became the first American to credibly explore mathematically the practicality of adopting rocket propulsion to reach high altitudes and even the moon. Following in the time-honored tradition of Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison, and wanting to make money on his innovations, Goddard applied for patents steadily, eventually receiving 214 of them from the federal government, including the first for a multistage rocket.

  During World War I, Goddard lent his mechanical talents to the U.S. Army, developing the prototype of a tube-based rocket launcher that would later become the bazooka, a light infantry weapon ubiquitous in World War II. The main impetus for Goddard’s work was his unwavering quest to prove that a rocket could navigate space. After the Smithsonian published A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, which included the idea of launching a rocket loaded with flash powder at the moon, such that the impact would be visible from Earth, newspapers across America reprinted his eye-popping pronouncement. “Communication with Moon Is Made Possible,” trumpeted the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. “Rocket for Moon, Plan of Professor” was the front-page headline in the Colorado Springs Gazette. Even while noting that shooting a flash powder rocket at the moon would not be “of obvious scientific importance,” Goddard believed that for all the inherent logistical and engineering difficulties, such launches depended “on nothing that is really impossible.”

  Though the paper laid the theoretical foundation for U.S. rocket development in the twentieth century, the contemporary media and public remained uncertain. On January 12, 1920, the New York Times ran a front-page story about Dr. Goddard’s wizardry, titled “Believes Rocket Can Reach Moon.” The next day, however, the Times editors admitted to “uneasy wonder” over the idea, maintaining that Goddard’s proposed rocket would “need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react.” Goddard, the Times editors derided, “lacked the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools,” comparing him uncomplimentarily to Albert Einstein and equating some of his ideas to “deliberate step[s] aside from scientific accuracy” as observed in Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon. Even this criticism wasn’t as bad as that of the Philadelphia Inquirer, which compared the Worcester rocketeer’s idea to a Mother Goose nursery rhyme.

  The snarky reaction in the Times and elsewhere made it open season on Goddard. Insipid jokes about his pie-in-the-sky moon trip abounded, even as respected aeronautical engineers stepped forward to support his principal contention: that a rocket could indeed function in a vacuum, needing no atmospheric pressure to push against. Goddard, an introverted man, balding, with a close-trimmed little mustache, and always impeccably dressed in a tailor-made suit, cringed at the skepticism and sophomoric humor that greeted his ideas, and he was determined to prove his detractors wrong. Though averse to showmanship, he conducted public demonstrations before an assembly of undergraduates, rigging a .22-caliber pistol loaded with a blank cartridge to the top of a spindle, inserting it into a bell jar, and then pumping out the air to mimic the vacuum of outer space. When fired remotely, the gun kicked back and made four full revolutions on its spindle, dramatically demonstrating thrust and velocity. As he watched the pistol spin, Goddard remarked dryly, “So much for The New York Times.” More than fifty subsequent simulation tests using va
cuum chambers proved beyond question that rocket propulsion could indeed operate in a void. Eventually, both the times and the Times caught up with his ideas: to the newspaper’s credit, it issued a public retraction of its 1920 commentary forty-nine years later, after Apollo 11 was launched to the moon.

  By 1921, still adhering to the hard, everyday, hermetic work of experimentation, Goddard was convinced that he would achieve greater thrust by switching from solid- to liquid-fueled rockets, utilizing cylindrical combustion chambers with impinging jets to atomize and mix liquid oxygen and gasoline. To test his ideas, he needed money. As the decade unfolded, Goddard realized that firing a rocket into space would require funding far in excess of the five-thousand-dollar grant he’d received from the Smithsonian. His own estimate was one hundred thousand dollars. In an era when few federal dollars were flowing into aviation technology research, even for military purposes—the NACA was still in its infancy—Goddard knew he had to think outside the box. Though secretive by nature, he determined that the garish publicity swirling around his high-minded plans for space rocketry held a wow factor that could potentially compel interest from private-sector investors. After all, he was that rare scientist of stature in America: one who’d proposed launching a rocket to the moon.

  Publicity can be a double-edged sword, and as a colleague later observed, Dr. Goddard had “early discovered what most rocket experimenters find out sooner or later—that next to an injurious explosion, publicity is the worst possible disaster.” Yet Goddard himself stoked the disaster, or at least the publicity, announcing in April 1920 that he had already received nine applications from brave men who wanted to soar to the moon in the first rocket. Of course, there was no manned rocket planned—Goddard had never written anything serious about that possibility—but it didn’t matter. In homes like that of the Kennedys, in tree-lined Brookline, a new debate replaced the old one, as people stopped wondering whether a moon rocket was really possible and turned to the even more adventurously romantic questions: Would you go? Do you have the mettle?

  Goddard’s public relations instincts had proved well grounded, and as his work progressed, he fed the public just enough information to tantalize, always mentioning an eventual moon launch to stoke their imaginations, even though privately his focus remained on “the more practical objects of my experiments.” Public consensus held that a mission to the moon could easily happen in their lifetime, but public consensus did not equate to public funding. Though Clark University and the Smithsonian continued their limited financial support, Goddard’s solicitations for Americans to support his “Rocket to the Moon” research-and-development fund came up short, yet again.

  IF ROBERT GODDARD’S early 1920s experiments kicked up a storm of excitement in the United States, they had just as sharp an effect in Germany, where two other rocketry pioneers were toiling in similar isolation but even greater obscurity. One of them was Hermann Oberth, a German national born in Romania’s Transylvania region. After moving to Germany, the gangly Oberth became a university student who had, like Goddard, been fascinated with the idea of space travel since reading Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon, even constructing a small replica of the rocket engine described in the novel. Oberth wrote his doctoral dissertation at Heidelberg University on the futuristic prospect of launching a rocket into space, but while his hypothesis was cited as a brilliant examination of possible modes and methods, it was peevishly rejected on the grounds that it covered both physics and astronomy rather than focusing on a single discipline.

  As the bitterly disappointed Oberth prepared a revised version of his monograph for the printer, he heard about Goddard’s A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes and wrote to the American inventor, requesting a complimentary copy. This audacious letter made Goddard uneasy because he disdained the German penchant, as demonstrated in World War I, for turning scientific inventions into tools of war; nevertheless, he acceded. The two rocket engineers engaged in a friendly correspondence, and a grateful twenty-nine-year-old Oberth quickly added a description of Goddard’s work to the end of his book Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen (The Rocket into Planetary Space), published in 1923. Anchored in the claim that liquid-propelled rockets could indeed escape Earth’s atmosphere, thereby making interplanetary travel possible, Oberth’s book was an instant sensation in German scientific circles. Within months, word of Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen reached the Soviet Union, where it straightaway elicited an unexpectedly passionate response from university-trained scientists. Following the Russian tsar’s 1917 abdication and the civil war that followed, the new Communist government kept the nation largely closed off from the Western world through the early 1920s, as the Leninist revolution celebrated its most intellectually creative period. An account in Moscow’s leading newspaper, Izvestia, praised Oberth’s work while also describing it as providing support to “the American professor Dr. Goddard, who has recently presented a sensational plan to send a rocket to the moon.” As a result, Goddard became respected, even idolized, in the Soviet Union.

  As word of Goddard’s and Oberth’s separate but parallel research spread, a blind schoolteacher in a small town south of Moscow was outraged. Konstantin Tsiolkovsky had written similarly about rockets in 1903, in a book called Explorations of the Space of the Universe by Jet-Propelled Instruments. In meticulously constructed calculations and equations, Tsiolkovsky’s volume had proposed many of the same principal features of space rockets described by Goddard and Oberth. More recently, Tsiolkovsky had written a novel, Beyond the Planet Earth (1920), about an international cabal of space travelers who reach the moon: an American named Franklin, an Englishman named Newton, an Italian named Galileo, and the calm and controlled Russian hero of the story, Ivanov. Though far-fetched and kitschy, Tsiolkovsky’s novel was ingenious in envisioning future moonshots and space stations in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

  With Tsiolkovsky as the homegrown hero and Goddard as the acknowledged leader in the global rocketry revolution, a “mass fascination with space travel . . . exploded in Soviet Russia in the 1920s,” according to historian Asif Siddiqi. “Students, workers, writers, journalists, artists and even filmmakers,” he wrote, “explored various dimensions of the possibility of cosmic travel.” Meanwhile, on the ground in Moscow, the new Communist state was busily retooling the largely agrarian nation for a future of technology and industry.

  During this nascent era of rocketry, an aristocratic boy named Wernher von Braun was growing up in the city of Wirsitz, in the province of Posen, in Prussian Germany. Born on March 23, 1912, five years before John Kennedy, von Braun was raised to be an aristocrat. When he was five, his family moved to Berlin. Wernher was a talented young pianist who dreamed initially of becoming a composer in the vein of Beethoven or Bach. Then, at twelve years old, he heard the siren call of space. “For my confirmation,” von Braun recalled, “I didn’t get a watch and my first pair of long pants like most Lutheran boys. I got a telescope.”

  Having read in a popular magazine about automobiles being powered by rockets, young Wernher built his own contraption using a coaster wagon with six large firework skyrockets fastened on the back bed. Rolling the strange vehicle onto Berlin’s swank Tiergartenstrasse, he lit the fuse. “I was ecstatic,” he later recalled. “The wagon was wholly out of control and trailing a comet’s tail of fire, but my rockets were performing beyond my wildest dreams. . . . The police took me into custody very quickly. Fortunately, no one had been injured, so I was released in charge of the Minister of Agriculture—who was my father.”

  Although he was grounded by his father for his dangerous public experiment, young von Braun’s obsessive pursuit of rocketry continued unabated. His jet wagon opened up the cosmos to him. The moon became his fixation. At fifteen, he read a magazine article describing an imaginary lunar voyage. “It filled me with nomadic urge,” he later wrote. “Interplanetary travel. Here was a task worth dedicating one’s life to! Not just to stare through a telescope at the moon and
the planets, but to soar through the heavens and actually explore the mysterious universe! I knew how Columbus felt.” As he matured, young von Braun read Oberth’s The Rocket into Planetary Space, and though stymied by the profusion of mathematical equations and scientific terminology in the text, he was ignited with a burning desire to learn more.

  Realizing that to be a rocket scientist meant learning calculus, von Braun bore down on his academic studies. Wherever he went, he carried a slide rule and compass. At sixteen he transferred to a special college preparatory school on Spiekeroog Island, in the North Sea, where, much like Jack Kennedy, he learned to sail and swim in rough seas and began to associate the vastness of the ocean with the vastness of space. Obsessed with the stars, von Braun persuaded the school’s headmaster to purchase a five-inch refracting telescope and led the effort to construct an astronomical observatory on campus. “As soon as the art of orbital flight is developed,” he wrote in his diary, “mankind will quickly proceed to utilize this technical ability for proactive application.” His love of astronomy spilled out in “Lunetta” (Little Moon), a five-page short story about living on an Earth-orbiting space station, written for the school magazine.

  Beginning in 1930, von Braun attended the Technische Hochschule Berlin (Technical University of Berlin), where he apprenticed under his idol Dr. Hermann Oberth and conducted liquid-fueled rocket tests as part of the embryonic German rocket team. The military took note of their work. The provisions of the Treaty of Versailles had neutered German aspirations in traditional weaponry, but it hadn’t banned rocket development. Von Braun believed that what Oberth was trying to prove to the world was fourfold: that a machine could soar beyond Earth’s atmosphere; that humans could leave the gravity of Earth; that humans could survive flight in a space vehicle; and that space exploration could be financially profitable. The last goal was, at the time, elusive. Among von Braun’s duties for Oberth was fund-raising for rocket science research at a Berlin retail department store, where he would stand for eight hours a day soliciting money beside a display on interplanetary exploration. From that experience with sales, he learned that the cash barrier was one of the hardest obstacles for a rocketeer to surmount. As part of his 1930 pitch, von Braun would bark, “I bet you that the first man to walk on the moon is alive today somewhere on this Earth!”