American Moonshot
Page 4
That very year, future moon walker Neil Armstrong was born on a farm near the small town of Wapakoneta, Ohio.
IN THE UNITED States, Goddard’s promised launch of the world’s first liquid-fueled rocket was continually being postponed. Other scientists had theorized about the use of liquid fuels to replace the explosive gunpowder that for centuries had been used to propel primitive rockets, but it was Goddard who had translated theoretical blackboard mathematics to the actual physical world. Liquid fuel (once jetted into a combustion chamber in the presence of liquid oxygen and flame) indeed brought forth expanding gases against the top of the engine, a force called thrust (which was more substantial than the heaviness of the rocket), and it lifted the rocket upward.
Finally, on March 16, 1926, Goddard and two assistants gathered on a snowy cabbage field in Auburn, Massachusetts, five miles from Worcester. The experiment was a family affair: the field itself was owned by Goddard’s aunt, Effie Ward, and Goddard’s wife, Esther Kisk Goddard, would serve as the day’s photo documentarian. Goddard mixed liquid oxygen with gasoline in the rocket’s carefully positioned propellant tanks, and his friend Henry Sachs used a blowtorch to touch off the black-powder igniter. On cue, the contraption, built out of slender pipes, rose gently into the sky “as if,” Goddard wrote afterward, “it said, ‘I’ve been here long enough; I think I’ll be going somewhere else, if you don’t mind.’”
Dr. Goddard’s ten-foot-tall rocket reached an altitude of forty-one feet before crashing downward like spent fireworks debris. Yet that short distance put humans a thousand times closer to the moon. No one could now deny the viability of liquid-fueled propulsion, which provides greater thrust than gunpowder while allowing greater control over how long the rocket burns. Goddard’s achievement, however, was not widely reported—a consequence, perhaps, of the hype he himself had generated with his talk of a moon rocket. Anything less seemed a disappointment, if not an abject failure, to an impatient Roaring Twenties public. This throttle ability factor, however, had important future space applications, such as landing on the moon, when astronauts had to control the deceleration beyond what the kick of a solid motor could provide.
In the Soviet Union, Goddard’s lunar ambitions continued to generate excitement. In the months after his first successful liquid-fueled launch, an erroneous rumor spread in Moscow that Goddard would visit the USSR, prompting Russian scientists to prepare a litany of questions for the wunderkind of Worcester. Though in reality Goddard had no plans to travel to the Soviet Union, he did correspond with the leading space organization there, the Society for the Study of Interplanetary Communications. He also wrote a letter to the All-Inventors’ Vegetarian Club of Interplanetary Cosmopolitans. Despite its frothy name, the group had thousands of members and played an integral part in organizing the first Soviet exhibition dedicated to space travel. The Russians who thronged to the Moscow show were, like Americans, interested mainly in moon travel, and they crowded around a mock-up of a moon rocket with intense curiosity.
While his rocketry experiments generally received little attention, Goddard couldn’t duck the wave of publicity that followed his ambitious test of the world’s first multistage rocket, on July 17, 1929.
It was not the good kind of publicity.
OVER THE PREVIOUS year, Goddard had scraped together just enough money to conduct his field test, in which he would send aloft an enlarged version of his earlier designs, accommodating a series of liquid-fuel compartments designed to detonate in succession and carry aloft a scientific payload that included a barometer, a thermometer, and a camera. Gathering on a hot and humid summer afternoon in the Auburn cabbage field, Goddard and his team lit the fuse, setting off a series of sonic roars that could be heard two miles away as the rocket ascended to ninety feet.
When neighbors looked skyward to discern what the fracas was, they saw something tall and thin falling to Earth. The weird phenomenon was the rocket, but reports that a pilot seemed to have fallen out of an airplane soon sent ambulances, police cars, and even a search plane rushing to the cabbage field. After the clamor dissipated, residents of Auburn forbade Goddard from ever launching another rocket within city limits, forcing the professor to find another launch site. Refusing to be diverted, he embraced Edison’s maxim that, in the scientific realm, an experimenter did not fail but “found ten thousand ways that won’t work.” And Goddard seized on an offer to experiment at an army base in nearby Devens, but soon found the controlled bureaucratic setting drearier than the cabbage field. Somehow, even the weather seemed more overcast, gray and dismal.
In Germany, Professor Hermann Oberth wasn’t faring much better. In 1928 and 1929, Fritz Lang, a risk-taking motion picture director, was in production on Die Frau im Mond (The Woman in the Moon), a feature film about a rocket trip to the moon. Lang had contracted Oberth to be a science consultant on the film, with his principal task being the design and construction of a working rocket that would be launched as publicity for the film’s premiere. For the project, he was assisted by rocketry enthusiasts from the Verein für Raumschiffahrt (Society for Space Navigation, or VfR), which produced a monthly magazine covering news of high-altitude rockets. The Oberth project was widely covered in the United States, where it elicited an envious response from Goddard. He resented competitors under the best of circumstances, but especially when his own fortunes were low. By the late 1920s, the status of rocket science in America was deficient. No level of government was interested in lending support. Universities were ungenerous, and the nascent aeronautical industry was openly skeptical. Under the tightfisted circumstances, an aeronautical engineer holding a contract with someone willing to underwrite a rocket, even one that was a glorified movie prop, could only inspire envy.
Oberth’s happiness was short-lived. Overwrought from the strained collaboration with Lang, and in the dumps, he was rumored to have suffered a nervous breakdown. He later denied this, but the stress of scientific innovation indeed drove the gifted rocketeer to the brink of exhaustion. As Die Frau im Mond’s October 15, 1929, premiere approached, it became clear that Oberth’s rocket would not be ready. Despite being dismissed by critics as claptrap for fourteen-year-old boys, the film was an enormous box-office hit. Nevertheless, Oberth’s failure to meet his obligations soured the producers on lending him any further support. Burned out and depleted, he was forced to scour elsewhere for financial backing, but had limited success.
In the United States, Goddard was in something of the same situation, trying to maintain his dignity while hunting desperately for funding for his visionary aerodynamics and rocketry projects. Then the famous aviator Charles Lindbergh came knocking. Two years after his epochal 1927 solo flight across the Atlantic in the Spirit of St. Louis, the Lone Eagle had become American royalty, moving in the most elite social and business circles and able to secure private meetings with experts and engineers in whatever field intrigued him. By 1929, erroneously believing that piston-engine aircraft were nearing their top capacity for speed, Lindbergh had become keenly interested in rockets as a potential new airpower source. Having read an article in Popular Science about Goddard’s liquid-fueled test launch, Lindbergh visited Clark University specifically to meet the distinguished professor. Wandering around the green-leafed campus and chatting for hours, the two men were impressed with each other. Although Goddard was normally suspicious of technology thieves and spies, he immediately trusted Lindbergh and described his rocketry work to him with unprecedented candor. Likewise, Lindbergh respected Goddard’s up-from-the-tinker’s-bench perseverance, his bedrock belief that there was no prayer more powerful than desire.
Lindbergh made himself Goddard’s chief fund-raiser and advocate. No scientist could have asked for a better backer, especially given that their discussion took place in November 1929, just weeks after the October 29 stock market crash that ushered in the Great Depression. As the economy cratered, failing banks and panicked investors weren’t focused on giving loans to mad scientists, and even L
ucky Lindy, with all his flyboy cachet, made little headway. After a string of discouraging calls, he notched only one small grant to support Goddard’s experiments. Nonetheless, an undaunted Lindbergh kept trying, rattling the tin cup to the millionaire crowd as he proclaimed that Goddard was a prodigy destined to open up space for human exploration someday.
In the new year, Lindbergh finally landed a big donor in Daniel Guggenheim, a philanthropic New Yorker who had made more than $250 million for his family in mining. Through his Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics, Guggenheim offered $100,000 to underwrite Goddard’s theoretical research, in payments spread over four years. Armed with this grant, Goddard immediately moved both his rocket experiments and his household to Roswell, New Mexico, a tumbleweed-strewn Eden Valley ranching town that offered Goddard three things his work required: flat and arid terrain, mild weather, and a sparse population. Secluded in this new desert environment, away from the public glare, Goddard made incremental advances over the following years. In the spring of 1937, he launched a rocket that reached an altitude of nearly nine thousand feet in just 22.3 seconds, but nobody paid much attention to isolated feats conducted under the ceramic-blue skies of New Mexico. “Morning in the desert,” Goddard wrote in his diary from Roswell, New Mexico, in June 1937, “when the impossible not only seems possible, but easy.”
Even as Goddard labored as America’s only serious rocket experimenter, pushing toward more powerful multistage rockets with the thrust to escape Earth’s gravitational pull, five thousand miles away the field of rocketry was moving in a more ominous direction as Europe prepared for another world war.
John F. Kennedy and his friend Lem Billings with the dog Dunker in The Hague, Netherlands, on August 24, 1937.
Courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston
2
Kennedy, von Braun, and the Crucible of World War II
Only a pure determinist could designate the V-2 a sine qua non of the origins of the Space Age in our time. What the German engineers did, with their clever fabrication of what seemed even in World War II a “baroque arsenal,” was to prod their enemies to the East and West into premature fear and rivalry and to make themselves and their blueprints the most prized spoil of the war.
—WALTER A. McDOUGALL, THE HEAVENS AND THE EARTH (1985)
As 1930 began, twelve-year-old John Kennedy was living at his parents’ home on Pondfield Road in the suburb of Bronxville, in Westchester County, New York. Jack was a good-natured boy with green-gray eyes and a Huck Finn cowlick, admired for his quick wit and beatific smile. With both his father and mother traveling extensively, sometimes away from the household for months at a time, it was Jack’s older brother, Joseph Jr., who served as the day-to-day model of everything Jack both did and did not want to become. Blessed with a deft intellect and preternatural drive, Joe was self-contained, slender, vigorous, a bit humorless, and a natty dresser with a distinctive aura of future greatness. On the downside, he also had a notoriously quick temper and could be brusque when under pressure.
As a youth, Jack held none of these attributes.
From a distance, Jack was a fortunate son, living in the lap of luxury even as most American children were beginning to suffer the grips of the Great Depression. Money was tight as banks foreclosed at an alarming rate. Privileges for the Kennedy kids came in droves. But Jack’s affluence came with its own complications and challenges. Determined not to raise carefree children, his parents were hard on him, and the constant obligation to be as tough and resilient as Joe Jr. also bore down. Once, when Jack was a boy, he and Joe engaged in a game of chicken on their bicycles, pedaling into each other. Joe was barely hurt, while Jack had to get twenty-eight stitches. After that incident, Jack resisted any expectation that he be like his older brother, developing a distinct personality of his own rather than emulating Joe’s. Confronting the mores of the high and the rich, he adopted an air of amused, slightly sardonic detachment, as though he were a social scientist clinically observing an esoteric subspecies of man from afar. Yet he did so with such confidence and goodwill that most were charmed rather than offended. Burdened with high expectations, he met them in a charismatic and exemplary way that would one day enter the language: Kennedyesque.
As Jack was learning to negotiate his formative years, a new, wildly popular cartoon and radio character appeared to help those of his generation escape to the stars, if only in their imaginations. Buck Rogers, originally a short story by Philip Francis Nowlan, debuted as a comic strip in January 1929 and achieved enormous popularity through syndication in the early 1930s. In each strip, the eponymous hero, an earthling of the twenty-fifth century, roamed the stars in search of adventure. By 1932, a Buck Rogers radio show was airing on CBS, bringing the concept of space exploration to millions. To capitalize on the craze, futuristic Buck Rogers toys, such as the ZX-31 Rocket Pistol and the XZ-44 Liquid Helium Water Pistol, were rushed to the market, where they pushed aside cowboys-and-Indians playthings and sold like hotcakes to children of all ages.
Capitalizing on the popularity of Buck Rogers, other newspaper syndicates unveiled their own original science-fiction comics. Flash Gordon debuted in 1934 and was centered entirely on interplanetary travel in rockets. Becoming even more famous and successful than Buck Rogers, Flash Gordon took place contemporaneously, in the early 1930s, starting when Flash, a handsome polo player and Yale graduate, meets a scientist working in isolation on a space rocket. If that smacked a bit of what Americans already knew of their real-life rocket scientist, Dr. Robert Goddard, the story continued from there with everything that the wizard of Roswell couldn’t yet supply: a trip into outer space and the cosmic, gravity-defying feat that Americans craved. Although Kennedy, in his teen years, was now more interested in novel-length adventures such as Treasure Island and Robinson Crusoe, Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon were making his generation believe in space as the next frontier.
After earning a mixed report card at his private day school in the Riverdale section of the Bronx, Jack Kennedy, having relocated to New York with his family, spent the summer of 1930 preparing to leave for boarding school. He expected to follow his brother to the elite boarding school Choate, in Wallingford, Connecticut, but at the very last moment, at his mother’s insistence, he enrolled instead at a different Connecticut school: Canterbury, in New Milford, which reflected his family’s Roman Catholic values. Attending Canterbury in 1930–31, he felt isolated and was undoubtedly homesick, but he didn’t complain. “Please send me the Literary Digest,” he implored his father in a letter. Although Jack suffered an attack of appendicitis at Canterbury, he kept a stiff upper lip. As Rose Kennedy put it, the family was “accustomed to the idea that every now and then he would be laid up by some disease or accident.” While different from his father, by late adolescence Jack exhibited the same dauntlessness, the absolute belief that complaints were a bore and a nuisance to those within earshot.
In 1931, Jack transferred to Choate, in part because it functioned as a direct conduit into Harvard. However, the teenager didn’t fit into the old-money mold that dominated the school. A Catholic in a WASP milieu, restless and unfocused, he was inattentive and couldn’t master his schoolwork, plan his days, keep his possessions in order, stand out in sports, or manage his spending money, much less gain the respect of his teachers. Jack was more of an undisciplined big boy, popular but unfocused. During his Choate years, he veered toward flirting and frittering around. “Jack has rather superior mental ability without the deep interest in his studies or the mature viewpoint that demands of him his best effort all the time,” the Choate headmaster wrote of Kennedy at eighteen. “We have been and are working our hardest to develop Jack’s own self-interest, great enough in social life, to the point that will assure him a record in college more worthy of his natural gifts of intelligence, likeability, and popularity.”
In a more relaxed, less competitive family and school, Jack might have been judged an above-ave
rage teen with good manners. But as a Kennedy and Choate student, he relied on whimsical irony and unrivaled charm to excel. Blessed with a fine winning smile and coolheaded demeanor, he was liked for his insouciance and good cheer. At the same time, he was constantly plagued with bouts of illnesses, was thin as a rake, and in 1934 was struck by a digestive disorder that caused fatigue, weight loss, and spells of pain. Physicians at the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota, determined he had colitis. He spent the spring semester of that year in a hospital room filled with books, magazines, newspapers, and, somewhere underneath it all, a phonograph to play Bing Crosby records.
As he approached commencement in 1935, graduating 65th in a class of 110, the mere fact of his attendance at Riverdale, Canterbury, and Choate practically guaranteed admission to the Ivy League, whose schools were weathering the Great Depression by accepting nearly every applicant with an elite prep school on his résumé. In the fall he began studies at Princeton, but had to withdraw during his first semester due to illness. Upon his recovery, he set his sights on Harvard, his father’s alma mater.