American Moonshot

by Douglas Brinkley

  John F. Kennedy collaborated with James Webb of NASA on prioritizing Project Apollo in the early 1960s.

  Bettmann/Getty Images

  Webb took over at NASA on February 14, calming Wiesner-related nerves among the agency’s nineteen thousand employees by reassuring them of his commitment to manned space missions. It was music to the ears of Mercury astronaut commander Alan Shepard, who was slated to become the first American in space by mid-March. After conducting a thorough review of the administration’s budget and goals, Webb recommended to Kennedy that the NASA allocation be increased by over $300 million in order to fast-track Saturn booster rockets, with the eventual aim of sending Apollo astronauts to go around the moon. This was a bold strategic gambit. Webb understood that the federal budget is not only a practical map of actual expenditures, but also a symbolic one that highlights a White House’s priorities. And Webb knew that no matter what JFK said privately about peaceful space exploration, militarization of space was always part of the equation.

  According to space historian John Logsdon, it was at that mid-March budget meeting that “John Kennedy, perhaps for the first time . . . had the chance to get a clear picture of the space policy and budget issues requiring his decision.” Countering military concerns that setbacks in Mercury testing would reflect badly on the air force (whose Atlas rockets would boost some Mercury modules into orbit), Webb convinced Kennedy that U.S. manned space efforts had to be continued. Tireless Soviet rocketeers such as Sergei Korolev, Mikhail Yangel, Valentin Glushko, and Vladimir Chelomey were working around the clock, preparing to launch a Vostok 1 cosmonaut in space. With the multidisciplinary game of sending humans beyond Earth’s atmosphere already well along, the new president would get pilloried by the public if he abdicated to the Soviets prematurely. Driving his points home, Webb detailed how the space effort was a great global advertisement for American technological prowess and would also benefit the U.S. military establishment—a view shared, he hoped, by Secretary of Defense McNamara, a Harvard Business School MBA and recent Ford Motor Company president who recognized that the manned space program had the potential to produce valuable spin-off technologies and capabilities.

  “We feel there is no better means to reinforce our old alliances and build new ones,” Webb told Kennedy. “Looking to the future, it is possible through new technology to bring about whole new areas of international cooperation in meteorological and communication satellite systems. However, the extent to which we are leaders in space science and technology will in large measure determine the extent to which we, as a nation, pioneering on a new frontier, will be in a position to develop the emerging world force as a basis for new concepts and applications in education, communication and transportation, looking toward more viable political, social and economic systems for nations willing to work with us in the years ahead.”

  Kennedy agreed with the thrust of Webb’s wide-angle thinking. He knew, more than any politician of the Cold War era (with the possible exception of LBJ), that the U.S. space race with the Soviets was not only a clash of cultures, economies, and governing systems, but also a challenge to the American democratic way of life. And Americans, he knew, could be motivated by that dare to rise to greatness. Putting an astronaut in space, perhaps even one bound for the moon, was good for the spirit of the nation. In Webb, JFK had a tireless advocate who would bring definition to his administration’s space policy. Though the new NASA administrator did not know much about astrophysics or rocket payloads, he had a keen grasp of the politics of space that synced with Kennedy’s futuristic New Frontier vision. If Webb could run NASA like a well-oiled bureaucratic machine and could maintain friendships with powerful Democratic lawmakers such as Robert Kerr and Albert Thomas, the president would find the right inspirational words to bring the nation along for the great manned space race ride.

  On April 12, 1961, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in outer space. President John F. Kennedy was embarrassed that the Soviet feat took place on his White House watch. It helped spur his decision to back a U.S. effort to go to the moon.

  Popper Ltd./ullstein bild/Getty Images

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  Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard

  Everyone has oceans to fly, if they have the heart to do it. Is it reckless? Maybe. But what do dreams know of boundaries?

  —AMELIA EARHART

  The first hundred days of Kennedy’s presidency, while dazzling in style compared with the Eisenhower era, were short on tangible accomplishments, beyond the establishment of the Peace Corps on March 1, 1961. National Security Advisor McGeorge Bundy famously compared the young administration to the Harlem Globetrotters novelty basketball team: a collection of experts capable of anything they chose to do; they only had to decide. Therein lay the difference and the reason that the Kennedy team hadn’t “made a basket,” as Bundy put it in the April 3 issue of The New Republic: they had to decide, with constancy, which policy opportunity to fight for first.

  Absent the urgency of a historical moment, we’ll never know where Kennedy might have chosen to focus his attentions, because on April 12, 1961, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human to journey into outer space. Taking off from Kazakhstan’s Baikonur Cosmodrome aboard Vostok 1, a two-module spacecraft propelled by a modified version of the mammoth R-7 rocket that had launched Sputnik, Gagarin completed a single low orbit with no serious problems, returning to Earth just 108 minutes after liftoff. The bracing New York Times headline said it all: “Soviet Orbits Man and Recovers Him; Space Pioneer Reports: ‘I Feel Well’; Sent Messages While Circling Earth.” With that jarring Soviet success, Kennedy’s political honeymoon ended abruptly.

  The Soviets had chosen their first cosmonaut wisely. Air force major Gagarin was extremely photogenic, whip smart, fearless, physically fit, and a delightful extrovert with a constant twinkle in his eye. He looked every inch the Soviet hero, with a life story to back it up. Born on a collective farm in the village of Klushino (renamed Gagarin after his death in a 1968 airplane crash) and trained as a foundryman at a steel plant near Moscow, he, along with his family, had been battered by the famine and privation of World War II. After induction into the Soviet Army, he attended aviation school and rose through the ranks of the Soviet Air Force. In 1960, he was among thousands of candidates screened for the cosmonaut program, during which a Soviet Air Force doctor evaluated his personality: “Modest; embarrasses when his humor gets a little too racy; high degree of intellectual development evident in Yuri; fantastic memory; distinguishes himself from his colleagues by his sharp and far-ranging sense of attention to his surroundings; a well-developed imagination; quick reactions; persevering, prepares himself painstakingly for his activities and training exercises, handles celestial mechanics and mathematical formulae with ease as well as excels in higher mathematics; does not feel constrained when he has to defend his point of view if he considers himself right; appears that he understands life better than a lot of his friends.” Rising through the selection and training process, he became one of the Sochi Six, an elite, Mercury-like group selected for special manned space training.

  The Kremlin well knew the immense geopolitical benefit of beating the United States in technological know-how. Laika the dog had become posthumously famous as the first Earth creature in outer space, symbolizing Soviet technological prowess to countries around the globe. Nikita Khrushchev, a fine propagandist, knew that his first cosmonaut would drive the USSR’s prestige even higher, his mission ranking with the voyages of Ferdinand Magellan and Christopher Columbus in the history of human exploration. “The road to the stars is steep and dangerous,” Gagarin later admitted. “But we’re not afraid. . . . Spaceflights can’t be stopped. This isn’t the work of one man or even a group of men. It is a historical process which mankind is carrying out in accordance with the natural laws of human development.”

  As Major Gagarin prepared for his takeoff that April, he was unusually quiet—though not nervous, as judged by his h
eart rate. The thought that he might be soaring to a fiery death occurred to him but didn’t haunt him; how his private life would irrevocably change if he returned to Earth as a space pioneer did. Their imaginations inflamed by state media, the Soviet people would see him as the living embodiment of Communist excellence. Self-aware and self-contained, Gagarin knew fame would be a double-edged sword.

  While the Vostok 1 rocket was similar to that used for Sputnik, the space vehicle mounted at its tip was far larger, weighing 5 tons compared with Sputnik’s minuscule 184 pounds. It included the cramped capsule into which Gagarin was strapped (or suspended, as he later recalled) and another module containing retrorockets intended to guide the vehicle back to Earth. Fearing that the effects of zero-gravity conditions would cause their cosmonaut to become lightheaded or incoherent, the Soviets had designed Vostok 1 to be piloted by ground personnel, with Gagarin taking control only in case of emergency. Video and radio communications monitored his mental state throughout the mission, satisfying experts at flight control that his faculties were unimpaired.

  Gagarin’s 108 minutes in flight were nearly all above the sixty-two-mile (one-hundred-kilometer) mark recognized as the boundary between Earth’s atmosphere and space. With all the aerodynamics working as planned, he completed a single orbit of Earth and then headed toward touchdown in a rural area near the Volga River. After reentry the capsule properly deployed its parachute, but still slammed to the ground with such force that its six-thousand-pound bulk bounced several times before coming to rest. Fortunately, Gagarin was not on board: he had ejected at seven kilometers (4.4 miles), parachuting safely into a farmer’s field. The fact that the Soviets had not engineered a means for Gagarin to return inside his space vehicle was one indication that the Kremlin was rushing to get its man into space first, however rudimentary his mode of return.

  For many years, the Soviet Union guarded the secret of Gagarin’s parachuting from the capsule. The Fédération Aéronautique International (FAI), the official body recording aerospace records, required that for a record to be awarded the pilot must land with the vehicle. To maintain the Soviet record that Gagarin had landed with Vostok 1, the Kremlin perpetuated a lie until the 1990s. In addition, to preserve the exaggeration that Gagarin had circumnavigated the Earth, the Soviets fabricated the locations of the launch and landing; in reality, the orbit was not quite the entire circumference of the Earth.

  In April 1961, the U.S. government did not know about Gagarin’s fudges and in-flight tribulations. Kennedy dutifully sent a telegram to Soviet premier Khrushchev, congratulating him on the historic launch, but the president was shaken by the fact that the Soviets had beaten America in the manned-space race. He feared, as his naval aide put it, that he was “walking on thin ice” and that the GOP and the press would excoriate him for the Soviet win. At an afternoon news conference, when asked about the Soviet space juggernaut, Kennedy responded with a sprightly, half-distraught air, acknowledging that indeed “we are behind” on manned spaceflight, but refreshingly, he refused to heighten expectations for NASA. “However tired anybody may be—and no one is more tired than I am,” he said in a wistful tone, “it is a fact that it is going to take some time.”

  Kennedy’s honest answer lacked the inspirational rhetoric of his “Ask Not” inaugural address, perhaps reflecting the fact that he’d yet to recognize space as the marquee goal of his New Frontier, and as the most visible American way to win the Cold War. On the campaign trail it was easy to mock the Eisenhower administration for the “missile gap.” But he was now commander in chief. The sheer financial cost of Mercury and Apollo was daunting. Understandably, he wanted to ponder his space policy options in his first months in the White House without feeling hemmed in. Recalling a meeting held on the very day Gagarin orbited Earth, speechwriter Ted Sorensen later noted that JFK “had no real grasp of the enormous technology involved and remained skeptical about the cost and importance of space missions.” The president, however, knew that putting a man in space was the new sine qua non of global prestige. Forced to dwell on Gagarin for even a few seconds, Kennedy turned testy, swatting the conversation away. Yet for the next couple of weeks he filled his black aviation bag with NASA reports for bedtime reading.

  Time magazine’s Hugh Sidey, perhaps the top White House correspondent in the spring of 1961, with frequent access to Kennedy in the Oval Office, called the president’s disposition to Gagarin’s accomplishment “disturbing.” When the space race was evoked, the conversation petered out. Overall, Sidey admired JFK—unobjectively so, critics carped—but he also knew that Kennedy’s long-standing criticism of Eisenhower’s go-slow approach to space had hit reality after his own inauguration. Once armed with CIA intelligence that the United States was in fact ahead of the Soviets in the less-newsworthy but tangibly more significant development of ballistic missile technology, Kennedy had adopted much the same cautious position toward space as his predecessor. Rather than focusing on headline-grabbing space launches, Kennedy was looking elsewhere for measurable accomplishments—mainly, fixing an economy burdened with rising unemployment, slumping profits, and depressed stock prices in order to define the New Frontier as being about economic prosperity.

  Nonetheless, Gagarin’s flight was a public relations disaster that was hard to ignore. Just hours after Webb learned of the Soviet feat, he wrote Keith Glennan, his predecessor, about his nagging concern that the American system lacked a galvanizing ingredient: “My own feeling, in this, and many other matters facing the country at this time, is that our two major organizational concepts through which the power of the nation has been developed—the business corporation and the government agency—are going to have to be reexamined and perhaps some new inventions made.” Webb believed there was no talent deficiency per se in the Kennedy administration, NASA, the U.S. military branches, the private sector, or academia—only a lack of a grand collective goal that transcended mere containment of Soviet expansionism.

  Kennedy may have been somewhat aloof at that point but, realizing that the United States would have to send a Mercury astronaut into space soon, he asked Webb to have NASA work double shifts. Following this direct order to grind out a solution, engineers at Huntsville and Hampton tested timetables, calculations, and probabilities. Under pressure from the president, NASA narrowed the field for its first manned mission to two candidates. Either John Glenn or Alan Shepard, each training hard and competing in Virginia and Florida, would be the first American in space, and he’d get there soon.

  When Shepard first learned that Gagarin had rocketed into orbit, he was livid. On March 24, NASA had scrubbed his planned mission due to a technical problem. Shepard, by training and personal disposition, wanted to beat the Soviets, not play second fiddle. It frustrated him that Eisenhower’s old science advisor George Kistiakowsky had spooked the president by warning that NASA wasn’t yet ready for manned space, and that if a Mercury astronaut were prematurely launched on a Redstone rocket, the attempted suborbital flight would be “the most expensive funeral man has ever had.” Chris Kraft, the first NASA flight director, summed up the post-Gagarin frustrations at Cape Canaveral perfectly: “I didn’t like it worth a damn,” he recalled. “But the only thing to do was get back to work and do our jobs.”

  Unable to endure any more asleep-at-the-wheel criticism amid the mounting national self-doubt that followed Gagarin’s flight, Kennedy faced the fact that the New Frontier needed a defined space policy. While the world lionized “Ga-Ga” (as Gagarin was affectionately nicknamed), the American public was troubled and astonished by the Soviet feat, and felt diminished by the USSR’s space propaganda win. “Of course, we tried to derive the maximum political advantage from the fact that we were first to launch our rockets into space,” Khrushchev admitted in his memoirs. “We wanted to exert pressure on the American millions—and also influence the minds of more reasonable politicians—so that the United States would start treating us better.”

  Life magazine canvassed people
from around the world, finding that in all corners of the globe, people knew the score: USSR, 1; United States, 0. An African student in Paris told Life that “the Americans talked a lot. Russia kept silent until success came. The results speak for themselves.” (When flying over Africa, Gagarin had acknowledged citizens of the continent “trying to break the chains of imperialism.”) A German office worker said, “This makes one realize Soviet boasts of ultimate superiority may not be groundless after all.” An Egyptian youth summed it up: “The Americans are licked.” None of those interviewed by Life mentioned the undeniable and very dull fact that U.S. Earth satellites, while lacking a cosmonaut with a movie star’s smile, were even then netting essential astrophysical data for future space exploration. Nor did they know that the Saturn 1 rocket that von Braun’s team was developing at Huntsville, with its first-stage thrust of 1.5 million pounds, was technologically far superior to the Soviets’ guided-rocket capabilities.

  At home, even though Kennedy maintained a 70 percent approval rating in the polls, there was an almost tangible sense of an administration slipping backward and losing support. Even in the first hundred days, Kennedy was already eyeing his reelection effort in 1964. For history’s sake, he needed to validate his razor-close win over Nixon in 1960. In part, that was a natural continuum for a hard-driving, ambitious politician. But that competitive imperative also sprang from JFK’s desire to make the United States the world’s sole superpower and guarantor of global peace.