Kennedy’s missile gap was a direct descendant of the “bomber gap,” the mid-1950s fear that the Soviets had a strategic bomber force bigger than America’s. But U-2 reconnaissance flights over the USSR soon proved this to be a fable. Just as Kennedy was propagating the “missile gap” fallacy, U-2 photographs proved that the Soviets were behind in ICBM development. JFK wasn’t given this CIA intelligence until the summer of 1960. Like most U.S. senators in 1958, he had been briefed on the Corona intelligence satellite program, which Eisenhower approved that year. None of this mattered to him. His “missile gap” spiel was a winner. At heart, Kennedy was set in the technocratic idea that the federal government needed to play a huge role in spurring social change at home and abroad through the bankrolling of technological innovation and military modernization.
ON OCTOBER 1, 1958, President Eisenhower signed an executive order to put the National Aeronautics and Space Act into effect by transferring “Certain Functions from the Department of Defense to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.” But sorting out civilian versus military control remained a tricky proposition. After all, rockets and satellites used very similar technology, infrastructure, and personnel regardless of whether they were deployed for military, scientific research, or communications purposes. Plus, the military was deeply territorial of the field. Von Braun and ABMA’s commander, Major General John Medaris, insisted that control of outer space was the sine qua non of national greatness and that the army had to lead the way. And when Medaris was asked in 1958 if outer space was going to become an active Cold War battleground, he snapped, “As sure as anything in the world.”
Medaris kept fighting, asserting to the Defense Department that giant boosters were needed for army rockets (though he couldn’t cite a single military reason) and calling Eisenhower’s plan to have NASA take over ABMA’s Redstone and Jupiter-C rocket development “rather disastrous.” This disapproval was shared by most top army brass, including such World War II air power generals as Carl Spaatz and Nathan F. Twining, who were dismayed that Eisenhower, of all people, seemed intent on punishing the army. Some, such as Medaris, eventually retired in protest, but all their carping was for naught. On October 21, 1959, after months of bickering, Eisenhower announced he would transfer ABMA, its massive new Saturn project, and von Braun’s Huntsville rocket team from the army to NASA in the coming year. Finally, space exploration and space technology were no longer only the purview of the U.S. military. Like its predecessor, the NACA, NASA would pursue astronomy and astronautics in the interest of scientific knowledge and engineering excellence, rather than building ICBMs for war. Inventing NASA didn’t mean that peaceful exploration of space and military usage could be divided with ease in the organization: the overlap between civilian and military spheres remained. The legislation that had created NASA specified that it make open to defense agencies “discoveries that have military value or significance,” and defense agencies were in turn to provide “information as to discoveries which have value of significance” to NASA.
WHEN NASA OPENED its doors in the fall of 1958, it had eight thousand employees, an annual budget of $100 million, and a main office in a brownstone in Northwest Washington (once the home of First Lady Dolley Madison), near the White House. Of course, the new agency was built on the foundation of the NACA, which had been set up back in 1915. The NACA’s Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, in Virginia; Ames Aeronautical Laboratory, near San Francisco; Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena; and Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory, in Cleveland, were all incorporated into NASA, along with the two NACA test-flight facilities: the High-Speed Flight Research Stations at Edwards Air Force Base, in California (for high-speed-flight research), and Wallops Island, Virginia (for research rocket launches).
Furthermore, as noted, on July 1, 1960, the old ABMA facility in Huntsville was officially incorporated into NASA as the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, dedicated to providing launch vehicles for space exploration. Eisenhower toured von Braun’s Space Science Laboratory and inspected a Saturn I rocket model, which would soon become the largest rocket ever built at the time. The two men were distrustful of each other, but for the sake of NASA they were cordial. Speaking before a huge crowd of ten thousand Alabama workers, Eisenhower praised von Braun’s work. “No doubt this mighty rocket system makes its presence known loudly—possibly too loudly—in Huntsville,” he said. “But it is a significant forward step in our conquest of space and for growth in human comprehension.”
Outside military circles, the creation of NASA wasn’t headline news. Root questions about its specific mandates were relegated to the inside pages of those newspapers that even noticed them. Within NASA, administrators had worked hard to guarantee a smooth transition. “Employees had been reassured for several weeks by the NACA headquarters and by Langley management that they were to come to work as always and do the same things they had been doing,” historian James Hansen explained. “Their jobs already had much to do with the nation’s quickly accelerating efforts to catch up with the Soviet Union and launch America into space. As NASA personnel, they were to keep up the good work.” On October 11, 1958, little more than a week after it became operational, the infant NASA launched Pioneer 1, a three-stage Thor-Able rocket carrying a scientific instrument package intended to measure cosmic radiation between Earth and the moon and to collect information about the lunar surface. Although it was intended to prove that America was in the space race for real, Pioneer 1 failed to achieve lunar orbit, and plunged back into Earth’s atmosphere after forty-three hours, having transmitted back a small quantity of useful scientific information.
To fill the job of NASA’s first chief administrator, Eisenhower approached Air Force General Jimmy Doolittle, who had helped guide the United States through the Sputnik, Vanguard, and Explorer events. However, Doolittle refused, opting instead for a more lucrative position as chairman of the board of TRW Space Technology Laboratories. The NACA director Hugh Dryden, a respected aerodynamicist, was also in the running, until his appearance before the House Select Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration proved a bust; he offered that sending a man into space “has about the same technical value as the circus stunt of shooting a young lady from a cannon.”
Following the false starts of Doolittle and Dryden, Eisenhower nominated T. Keith Glennan, president of the Case Institute of Technology (today’s Case Western Reserve University), in Cleveland. From 1950 to 1952, Glennan was head of the Atomic Energy Commission (a new federal agency) and had excelled. His appeal to Eisenhower was his fiscally conservative viewpoint. Glennan feared that the United States was rushing into a fast-water “socialist stream,” and he rejected the proposition that “the federal government is a 365-day Santa Claus and that the national treasure is an inexhaustible storehouse of largesse.” He was easily confirmed. Furthermore, Dryden disappointed hardened Cold Warriors on the committee when he said that “the prospective space programs are not such as to leapfrog the Soviets immediately or very soon.” Following Sputnik, they wanted a NASA administrator who wanted to beat the Soviets and seize U.S. leadership in space exploration.
Hugh Dryden became NASA’s first deputy administrator. Just three months after NASA was founded, Glennan and Dryden proclaimed Project Mercury America’s first manned space mission and named Robert Gilruth, a talented test engineer, to lead a new Space Task Group at the renamed Langley Research Center dedicated to jump-starting the mission. (The group’s base of operations would remain at Langley until NASA relocated manned space research to Houston in 1962.) NASA promised that a Mercury astronaut would be rocketed into space within three years.
Historian Walter A. McDougall wrote that once NASA was established, the big question was a Hamlet-like pondering over whether “to race, or not to race” the Soviets in space. Eisenhower was against both the militarization of space and trying to one-up the USSR feat by feat. The dilemma the president faced—one that Senator Kennedy exploited—was that each
time the Kremlin put space points on the board, American critics charged that the Cold War was being lost. “One purpose of Eisenhower’s strategic posture was to restrain those elements in government and society willing to jettison limited government and financial restraint in order to prove American superiority,” McDougall wrote. “Racing with the Soviets for space spectaculars ran against his grain.”
Regardless of Eisenhower’s cautionary approach to the space race between the United States and the USSR, the competition was on. By the fall of 1958, America had launched four orbiting satellites to the Soviet Union’s three. The Soviet satellites were heavier, which was a credit to their advanced rocketry. While Explorer 1 was lighter, it was able to perform many of the same functions, which was a credit to American ingenuity. The U.S. satellites also uniformly orbited at a higher altitude than their Soviet counterparts. In anticipation of manned flight, the Soviet space program had performed more animal experiments in their laboratories, while the Americans felt confident that they had amassed more supporting data on the challenges of humans in space. On October 5, 1958, the New York Times correctly opined that “the balance sheet of a year of effort since Sputnik I would seem to indicate that the United States was not as far behind at the time of the launching of the first satellite as was then imagined.”
The Soviets had enjoyed an early advantage because their space-related activities were streamlined, with the central government in Moscow overseeing all developments in IRBMs, ICBMs, satellites, and space exploration. But the Kremlin didn’t yet realize what an advantage unfettered capitalism would be to the Americans’ new space agency. Established with the cooperaton of the army, air force, and navy, NASA became the lucky beneficiary of an astounding, interconnected network of industrial contractors and aerospace firms that had invested in the development of long-range missiles even before the civilian agency’s creation, and of an even wider net of innovators and suppliers that would join the effort as the space race wore on. For example, there was simply no entity in the Soviet Union as dynamic as North American Aviation’s Rocketdyne Division, the leading designer and manufacturer of liquid-fueled engines for most of the army and air force missiles during the Truman and Eisenhower years. When tight Communist control competed with free-market capitalism on the playing field of large-scale innovation, the Americans outshone the Soviets, and space wasn’t the only beneficiary.
At Langley, the Space Task Group was beginning another NASA tradition: leveraging space-related research for the benefit of commercial air transport. NASA partnered with aviation companies such as Boeing of Seattle, Convair’s Astronautics division of San Diego, General Electric of Philadelphia, the Martin Company of Baltimore, and McDonnell Douglas of St. Louis. Having shed their NACA smocks for NASA ones, Langley engineers were still modernizing in the realm of flight research and wind tunnel testing, solving a variety of problems related to the transonic flow regime (mach.8-1.2) through the implementation of swept-wing design. During World War II American pilots had controllability problems with some planes’ suddenly diving down and accelerating to transonic speeds; these problems had to be rectified at the NACA. They also invented the idea of grooved runways, which offer better grip for aircraft tires in heavy rain. Any way one peered into the looking glass, the truth was that most aerospace-related research and development had military applications. John F. Kennedy understood that if the nation’s goal was beating the Soviets in space, U.S. military and civilian aims had to be integrated.
At the end of 1958, NASA launched Pioneer 3 (the first U.S. satellite to ascend to an altitude of 63,580 miles), while the air force achieved the first long-distance flight of an ICBM (anAtlas 12B, which flew more than 6,300 miles). Three weeks later, another Atlas ferried a communications relay satellite into orbit as part of Project SCORE (Signal Communication by Orbiting Relay Equipment), which broadcast President Eisenhower’s Christmas message to the world—the first voice sent from space. The development that gave America its greatest edge over the Soviets in 1958 came courtesy of the private sector. Working separately, electrical engineers Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor invented the monolithic integrated circuit, also known as the microchip—with that innovation, transistors, resistors, capacitors, and connecting wiring, all previously separate components, could be placed onto a single small “chip” of semiconductor material. This tiny, integrated circuit would soon lead to the development of portable, efficient, and affordable high-speed communication systems, revolutionizing both space exploration and terrestrial technologies.
In preparation for manned Project Mercury spaceflight, NASA modified the U.S. Navy’s jet aircraft suits (the inside lined with neoprene-coated nylon, the exterior aluminized nylon) for surviving galactic conditions. Recognizing that a hard-shell suit was unworkable, NASA designers made soft silver suits that could furnish oxygen, regulate temperature, enhance flexible movement, generate communications, and shield against solar radiation. At NASA, the hunt for astronauts was on.
Many names that should have been shoo-ins were absent from the lottery. Iven Kincheloe, once on track to become America’s first astronaut with the air force’s now-defunct MISS program, had been killed the previous summer on a test flight after ejecting too late from a crashing plane for his parachute to open. Two other men in the MISS group were above forty, and deemed too old. Neil Armstrong, for his part, chose not to apply, remaining loyal to his work on the X-15. Chuck Yeager, the first man to break the sound barrier, also declined to apply. His lack of a college degree would have made him ineligible in any case. NASA’s insistence on academic credentials reflected the dual role envisioned for NASA’s astronauts: not just “a man in a can,” as some aviators had said disparagingly, but contributing to the ongoing engineering of their flights in the manner of X-15 engineer-pilot Scott Crossfield.
While Armstrong passed on the Mercury program, another Korean War veteran from Ohio, John Glenn, looked on it as a “tonic.” Considered an overgrown Boy Scout by other test pilots, full of gentlemanly manners and a quarterback’s drive, Glenn believed from the outset that NASA would move the United States into space in an organized way—one that would also advance his career. Glenn’s guiding light was merit: a challenge fought for and achieved by sheer willpower and self-conquest over natural limitations.
At the time of Pearl Harbor, Glenn was a twenty-year-old student at Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio. Hungry for combat action, he left his engineering studies to join the armed forces. After stints with the U.S. Army Air Corps and naval aviation, he was given a commission in the marines and acquitted himself well, flying Corsair fighters in the Pacific Theater. After the war, he remained in the Marine Corps, accepting relatively dull assignments with equanimity. Even after the United States entered the Korean War, Glenn initially remained stuck stateside in administrative posts, a “non-entity,” as a friend termed him. Finally ordered into the war in early 1953, he flew Panther jets with the marines’ “Tomcat” squadron before being seconded to the air force, where he began flying transonic fighter jets for the Twenty-Fifth Fighter-Interceptor Squadron and was credited with three kills in dogfights.
Glenn returned home from Korea a highly decorated hero, and was able to fly the most advanced jet airplanes of the era. Hoping to get a serious aviation education, he sought admission to the test pilot school at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, in Maryland. As Glenn was aware, he was ill prepared for this elite institution in one respect: he still lacked a college degree. Even without completing his bachelor’s at Muskingum, he used enthusiastic recommendations from his superiors in Korea to win a coveted place at Patuxent River. And then, after pulling every string to get in, he nearly quit. He just didn’t speak the same language as the college-trained pilots at the school. The word used for Glenn at such times was dogged. Patching together courses at local colleges and getting tutoring when he could, he managed to stay abreast of his training and graduate from Patuxent with distinction.
Ironically, Glenn’s persistence in learning about aeronautical engineering, combined with his certification as one of the navy’s newest test pilots, earned him a desk job in Washington examining airplane designs. At pains to understand how all aircraft worked, he heard talk of a proposed supersonic cross-country flight to stress-test the Pratt and Whitney J-57 jet engine, and he volunteered for the assignment. On the morning of July 16, 1957, he took off from Los Alamitos Naval Air Station in California, piloting his Vought F-8U Crusader at a speed of over 725 miles per hour and touching down at New York’s Floyd Bennett Field 3 hours, 23 minutes, and 8.4 seconds later, setting a new transcontinental record. This supersonic event turned Glenn into a minor celebrity, earning him an appearance on the television show Name That Tune, partnered with the child star Eddie Hodges. When NASA started thinking in earnest about its first astronaut class at the end of 1958, Glenn was certain that he was “in a pretty good position” to join it. Among navy aviators, he was known as the best man to land safely if something went wrong with a craft’s controls or if the wind didn’t cooperate on final approach.
American Moonshot Page 20