American Moonshot

by Douglas Brinkley

  JOHN KENNEDY FINALLY had his national issue in Eisenhower’s alleged indifference to technology. Over the next three years he’d turn the “missile gap” itself into a weapon. Experts at the time questioned the relevance of numerical advantage when it came to missiles, given that so many other factors impacted the efficacy of nuclear weapons. They also wondered where Kennedy had gleaned the hard-to-prove data that America was falling behind; by many measures, the “gap” was far smaller than he asserted. But JFK had learned that his message rang loudest when it was boiled down to a score. Realizing that sports analogies resonated with the American electorate, he had given Americans the simplest of yardsticks by which to measure a Cold War world where technological development was racing to the edge of the unknown.

  Nevertheless, Kennedy was right that the Soviets had turned rocketry into an unprecedentedly potent military weapon, a Kremlin strategy that stemmed from the immediate aftermath of World War II. In May 1945, the Soviets had been aghast when the United States absconded with the top level of Nazi rocket scientists and their research, minus any coordination with their supposed allies. Even though distrust between the two nations was already brewing on many levels, the American raid of Peenemünde contributed to the Soviets’ fear that the United States sought world domination, and it acted like a cattle prod on the Soviet scientific community.

  As long as Stalin was alive, the USSR proceeded as though World War II had never ended. Until his death in 1953, Stalin gave priority to the production of atomic weapons, as well as to the rocket science that would combine with it to produce the ICBM. While military technology was treated as a matter of life and death by Stalin, other sectors of the Soviet economy stalled, including consumer goods and other civilian needs. These privations gave rise to a long line of jokes in America, such as the one about a Soviet engineer rushing in to see his boss: “Sir, we have done it, we have built an atomic bomb so compact, it can fit into a suitcase!” The boss looked glum: “But where are we going to get a suitcase?”

  Compared with America’s scattershot, underfunded initiatives, the Soviets’ largely classified efforts in ballistic missile and satellite technology were quite advanced. In April 1955, they’d announced the formation of a Commission for Interplanetary Communications in the Astronomics Council of the USSR Academy of Sciences, to work on satellite development. Meanwhile, the Soviet missile program was well organized, leveraging captured Nazi scientists, the theoretical legacy of the late Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, and the technical wizardry of their chief rocket designer, Sergei Korolev. Luckily, however, the U.S. Army had perhaps the only rocket engineer more advanced than Korolev: von Braun.

  Meanwhile, Eisenhower was most concerned about finding innovative ways to minimize a surprise Soviet missile attack—Pearl Harbor redux, only with weapons of mass destruction. The burning desire to peer into Soviet territory; to identify what Khrushchev’s military was up to; to photograph the major military posts, nuclear zones, missile factories, bomber plane runways, and the like, via U.S. strategic reconnaissance, consumed Eisenhower. At that time, in the mid-1950s, only U.S. aircraft overflight and camera-loaded high-altitude balloons were available for the huge job. Neither method was both safe and reliable. So Eisenhower decided to approve the air force’s building of high-altitude U-2 spy planes, which could ostensibly fly undetected, even over Moscow, by Soviet antiaircraft technology or advanced radar. And Eisenhower approved the development of space satellites that could, once perfected, spy on the USSR with near-zero danger of being destroyed by Soviet air defenses. These satellites had the big bonus of perhaps not being banned by international law. Space was a new field of human endeavor and lawyers had not firmly established what was legal and what was unlawful once a man-made object left Earth’s atmosphere.

  For Eisenhower, establishing a doctrine of “freedom of space” was a paramount national security concern. In 1955—the same year von Braun became a naturalized U.S. citizen—Eisenhower plotted the peaceful exploration of space on pure scientific grounds. Three years before, the International Council of Scientific Unions had proposed the “International Geophysical Year” (IGY) to coincide with the high point of the eleven-year cycle of sunspot activity, occurring between July 1957 and December 1958. Uniting scientists from around the world, the IGY would allow for coordinated observation of various geophysical phenomena (including cosmic rays, the aurorae, the ionosphere, solar activity, geomagnetism, and gravity) and would encompass earth sciences such as glaciology, oceanography, meteorology, seismology, and accurate longitude and latitude determinations. Sixty-seven countries would take part, along with four thousand research institutions that would freely share their data. Promoted by the United Nations, the IGY effort won the support of both the United States and the Soviet Union, and both superpowers announced plans to launch satellites in the name of global peace.

  Almost obligated to participate, Eisenhower resisted any pressure to show U.S. superiority by rushing a satellite launch, instead proposing to choose among three programs that were already on track. The first was the army’s Redstone rocket, which had been refined by von Braun and his Huntsville engineers. The air force had started late but had made impressive progress with its Atlas and Aerobee Hi rockets, while the navy had poured money into its own Project Vanguard, which hoped to launch a satellite using an upgraded Viking rocket. In the summer of 1957, either the army or air force programs, if properly funded and incentivized, could have launched an American satellite into space. The frustrating truth was that the United States had the technology and know-how to be first, but not the will.

  Along with workability, optics were a deciding factor in Eisenhower’s eventual choice. On July 29, 1955, the president announced that the United States would launch a satellite in IGY. The Pentagon, after careful review, chose the navy’s Vanguard rocket because it carried a larger payload than von Braun’s Redstones. The air force proposal wasn’t taken seriously. The National Academy of Sciences and the Naval Research Laboratory were directed to join forces in planning for a Vanguard satellite launch, emphasizing the peaceful nature of America’s space program.

  Disgusted that he lost, Eisenhower had established what amounted to a “design contest.” “It is a contest to get a satellite into orbit,” von Braun fumed, “and we [the army] are way ahead on this.” According to Time, in the aftermath of the president’s 1955 decision, von Braun was “specifically ordered to forget about satellite work.” All von Braun could do now was hunger for a president not named Eisenhower; he’d have to wait Ike out to find genuine enthusiasm emanating from the White House for fast-tracking satellites and, eventually, spaceships aimed at the moon. And he quietly worked with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena to be ready for a Redstone (army) launch with a satellite in case the Vanguard (navy) failed.

  Dr. Wernher von Braun (right) with President Dwight D. Eisenhower (center) at dedication of Marshall Space Flight Center (Huntsville, Alabama) in 1960. Eisenhower never fully trusted von Braun because of his Nazi past.

  Donald Uhrbrock/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images

  This little boy is playing with a toy Sputnik satellite, which was manufactured by Loo/Maggie Magnetic in 1957. The real Sputnik was launched into space by the Soviet Union on October 4, 1957, creating a wave of awe and fear.

  ullstein bild Dtl./ullstein bild/Getty Images

  6

  Sputnik Revolution

  The Russian word Sputnik, used for the satellite, briefly became the most famous word in the world.

  —ISAAC ASIMOV, EXPLORING THE EARTH AND THE COSMOS

  Somehow it’s fitting that John F. Kennedy and Wernher von Braun first met at Pathé Studios in New York City just after Thanksgiving in 1953. They had been chosen by Henry Luce of Time to help nominate Konrad Adenauer, just reelected chancellor of West Germany, as the magazine’s Man of the Year, to be announced after Christmas. Both Kennedy and von Braun were exceptional at the art of public discourse and attracting media attention—qual
ities that helped Luce sell magazines. That afternoon at Pathé Studios, the two looked like clones, wearing Brooks Brothers suits with handkerchiefs in their lapel pockets, white shirts and dark ties, and polished black wingtips on their feet—an Eastern establishment uniform of sorts. Kennedy was the hotshot young Democratic senator from Massachusetts, while von Braun had become the darling of national magazines because of his fantastical determination that Americans were going to the moon and, eventually, Mars. “Senator and Mrs. Kennedy were there and I brought my wife [Maria] along,” von Braun recalled. “We had to wait for about an hour until the show was ready for us. During this hour, I had a long conversation with Senator Kennedy, while my wife talked a bit with Mrs. Kennedy.”

  Right away the New England politician and the army rocketeer got along famously. Jovial and relaxed, enjoying easy banter, proud to already be successful men of the world, they bonded over shared memories of World War II. What surprised von Braun most about his hour chat with Kennedy was that the PT-109 incident was never mentioned. Instead, Jack explained how his older brother, Joe Jr., died in an aviation mishap that was closely related to the ballistic missile technology von Braun was developing in Peenemünde. “I remember that he said the accident occurred with an obsolescent type of bomb aircraft that had been loaded to the gills with explosives,” von Braun recollected in 1964. “The idea was that the plane would be piloted by the Senator’s brother up to a certain altitude and then set on autopilot, at which time the pilot, still over friendly territory, would bail out. The autopilot and navigation gear, still somewhat experimental, were rigged in such a way that, upon reaching the destination in level flight, the plane would dive into the target. It seems that the aircraft climbed to the prescribed altitude, but during the transfer to autopilot mode, it suddenly blew up.”

  What von Braun, a quick study, surmised was that Senator Kennedy was haunted by his brother’s death. There was apparently no banter about Operation Paperclip, the limited precision of guided ballistic missiles, or the Soviets’ testing their first thermonuclear weapon. For Kennedy, fighting to stop Nazi Germany from acquiring ballistic missile superiority was what Joe had died for. Now the new enemy was the Soviet Union, and JFK, devoid of animosity toward the former Nazi engineer, was expressing his pride that they were both avatars of increased military funding so the United States could achieve long-range missile and satellite supremacy. While President Eisenhower distrusted von Braun for his Hitlerian past, Kennedy adopted the stance that the German rocketeer had simply been swept up in the German nationalism of the 1930s and ’40s: von Braun was German, so naturally he had served his government loyally.

  After their green-room chat, Kennedy and von Braun went on television to sing the praises of Adenauer, agreeing that West Germany should be admitted into NATO. Von Braun discerned that what got JFK’s juices flowing most about missile technology was his belief that his brother hadn’t died in vain on that high-risk mission, that ballistic missiles had become the coin of the realm of the Cold War square-off. In the mid-fifties, as Kennedy and von Braun lavished praise on Konrad Adenauer, the fast-paced race was on between the United States and the USSR for long-range missile superiority. “The senator pointed at the close relationship of the work his late brother was pursuing with guided missile development and said that missilery had come a long way since those pioneering days,” von Braun recounted. “He had been following the work of myself and my associates in missile development with the greatest interest.”

  World leaders such as Khrushchev, Eisenhower, de Gaulle, Churchill, Macmillan, and Adenauer had been born in the nineteenth century; Kennedy and von Braun were, by contrast, beguiling twentieth-century futurists who understood that the key dividing line in geopolitical terms was no longer BC and AD. It was now pre-V-2 and post-V-2, as well as pre-Hiroshima and post-Hiroshima. Standing armies and naval armadas could soon be annihilated into cinder with long-range nuclear missile volleys. “I would raise a question on something entirely different, and invariably I found him most responsive and concise,” von Braun said of Kennedy. “I was greatly impressed by the breadth of his interests and the broad spectrum of his knowledge. In fact, I was so impressed that when we left the studio I told my wife I wouldn’t be surprised if Senator Kennedy would one day be President of the United States.”

  Throughout the fifties, Kennedy kept an interested eye on von Braun. That the Huntsville rocketeer insisted that America could land on the moon in his lifetime lit up JFK’s eternal sense of optimism. And von Braun, who had cowritten the book Conquest of the Moon, published in 1953, wasn’t a lone voice in thinking the American space effort could someday land on the moon. President of British Interplanetary Society Arthur C. Clarke, whose early-1950s books such as The Sands of Mars were popular, publicly insisted that a lunar voyage was doable. Clarke was born in 1917, the same year as Kennedy, and it was part of their abiding faith that in the near future, Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon would metamorphose into real space travelers. At least that was the generational conceit. “When I published my first space novel [Prelude to Space] in the early 1950s, I very optimistically imagined a lunar landing in 1978,” Clarke recalled. “I didn’t really believe it would be done so soon, but I wanted to boost my morale by pretending.”

  IT IS DIFFICULT to determine what Kennedy knew or really thought about ballistic missiles and space exploration from 1953 to 1957 because he was so reflexively critical of Eisenhower’s defense and space policy for his own politicial purposes. In truth, Eisenhower’s space program was not as ineffective as Kennedy had made it seem. In the summer of 1957, six months into Dwight D. Eisenhower’s second term, the president had asked the National Security Council (NSC) to review the space program of the United States to ensure that the level of investment and progress being made was sufficient. He intended to field the first ICBMs and reconnaissance satellites by the time he left office. These capabilities in the new high ground of space would confirm that the United States could compete effectively with the Soviet Union in the Cold War. Eisenhower discovered that between 1953 and 1957 the nation had spent $1.18 billion on military space activities, mostly on ballistic missile and reconnaissance satellite development. “The cost of continuing these programs from FY 1957 through FY 1963,” the NSC reported, “would amount to approximately $36.1 billion, for a grand total of $47 billion.”

  Von Braun, however, considered 1947 to 1957 the lost decade in U.S. space technology research. Like Kennedy he was concerned that the Kremlin had gained long-range missile supremacy over the United States. This fear seemingly became a reality on the night of October 4, 1957, when radio operators working at the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington, DC, picked up a steady A-flat beep emanating from an onboard transmitter, which they identified as a signal from a Soviet satellite in Earth’s orbit. Eisenhower’s incremental approach was given a comeuppance. The device, named Sputnik (“traveling companion of the world”), had been launched from a secluded steppe in southern Kazakhstan aboard a modified Semyorka (“Seventh”) ICBM, and it carried equipment to analyze the density and temperature of the upper atmosphere. Amateur radio operators also picked up the signal, and a few of them (residents of Ohio, Indiana, and California) ran outside and were able to see with the naked eye a strange object streaking across the skies. The next morning, the Naval Research Laboratory announced that the Soviet satellite had successfully orbited Earth. The Kremlin confirmed the stunning report, adding details such as the weight of this “artificial moon” (184 pounds) and its shape (a ball about twenty-two inches in diameter, with four antennae protruding from it). Far heavier and faster than American intelligence agencies had predicted, Sputnik was nevertheless a very simple satellite. The U.S. Army, in fact, had the very design capability to match or outperform the Soviet feat.

  On October 5, the New York Times devoted nearly half its front page to the satellite, under a banner headline of three boldface lines: “Soviet Fires Earth Satellite into Space / It Is Circling the Globe at 18,00
0 M.P.H. / Sphere Tracked in Four Crossings Over U.S.” Other newspapers were equally breathless. America’s pride had been deflated by a satellite composed of a battery, a radio transmitter, and a fanlike cooling device, orbiting the Earth elliptically every ninety minutes at an altitude of between 140 and 560 miles. All the U.S. government could do was ask the seventy thousand members of the American Radio Relay League, a society of ham radio buffs, to help them track the Soviet beeps.

  For a few days, the world was captivated by this polished sphere of aluminum, magnesium, and titanium that had pushed beyond the bounds of Earth, extending the hand of man and forever changing perceptions of the possible and impossible. As the philosopher Hannah Arendt wrote in the prologue to The Human Condition, published the following year, Sputnik was an event “second in importance to no other, not even the splitting of the atom.” Tracking the satellite became a cause for global excitement, and science museums and planetariums reported a surge in telephone calls asking how to spot the man-made miracle. Without the tension of the Cold War, the Soviet launch might have been hailed throughout the United States as a scientific accomplishment on par with Marie Curie’s discovering of radium or Guglielmo Marconi’s inventing the radio. But with America and the USSR locked in geopolitical combat, feelings were mixed. To some, Sputnik felt less like an uplift of humanity and more like a body blow, prompting fear that if the Soviets could launch a satellite into space via a superlong-distance R-7 missile, then perhaps they could also annihilate parts of the United States with nuclear-armed ICBM rockets.