American Moonshot

by Douglas Brinkley

  ON APRIL 14, Kennedy addressed the issue of NASA with considerably more vigor, convening a meeting of space advisors Webb, Wiesner, Sorensen, and Dryden, as well as David Bell, his administration’s budget director. Bell’s job was to remind Mercury enthusiasts in the group that every dollar spent on space took a dollar away from domestic programs that affected men, women, and children in real time. Or, alternatively, every space dollar raised taxes on all Americans. There was a slim overlap of what the nation could not afford to miss and what the country could actually afford to do. All presidents deal with the same conundrum all day long, across an array of issues, but in the case of space, the potential costs were gargantuan.

  Because Time correspondent Hugh Sidey was present for much of the meeting, Kennedy gave something of a theatrical performance that afternoon, as he tilted his chair back precipitously, ran his fingers through his thick hair, and laid out his dilemma. Whenever Gagarin was mentioned, the president would bristle. “Is there any place we can catch them?” he asked, according to a record of the conversation. “What can we do? Can we go around the moon before them? Can we put a man on the moon before them? What about Nova and Rover? When will Saturn be ready? Can we leapfrog?”

  Sometimes in history, a single word or concept can trigger a blinding flash that illuminates a presidency or the life of the nation. Leapfrog, a word Kennedy first used in his 1960 letter to Princeton University student William Everdell, became that kind of word, taking on a life of its own in NASA culture. Rather than suggesting NASA should skip the methodical steps needed to thoroughly and safely achieve plans already in place, the president was pushing for an audacious goal beyond manned-orbital spaceflight, where the Soviets already owned bragging rights. “If somebody can just tell me how to catch up,” JFK implored at the meeting. “Let’s find somebody—anybody. I don’t care if it’s the janitor over there, if he knows.” Picking arguments apart, asking probing questions, Kennedy sought allies for his bold contention that the next NASA move had to be very dramatic. But with Lyndon Johnson away in Africa and Asia, the president was deprived of the fervid support his vice president would likely have offered for something as phenomenal as a moonshot.

  “It was not much of a discussion,” Sidey recalled, noting that the others present sidestepped JFK’s leapfrog question by asking for more time to ponder. But Kennedy didn’t have more time. The bell of history had rung. It was time to lead.

  One day before the meeting, an aide had reminded the president that Franklin Roosevelt had announced in the first year of World War II a production schedule of fifty thousand airplanes annually, a target the corporate manufacturing sector said would be impossible to achieve. But the goal was met—and exceeded. Later, though knowing little himself about the science of nuclear physics, Roosevelt created the Manhattan Project, teaming America’s best and brightest scientists under the leadership of J. Robert Oppenheimer to invent the atomic bombs used against Japan.

  While the cause of victory in war could inspire the kind of government-business partnerships, patriotic dedication, and at-all-costs inspiration that drives fast, far-reaching technological advances, huge peacetime infrastructure projects could also harness a nation’s ability to achieve the seemingly unachievable. In its fast-paced history, the U.S. government had completed the Erie Canal in 1825, the Panama Canal in 1914, and the Hoover Dam in 1935—each of them beginning as an engineering challenge and ending as a symbol of national indomitability and excellence. Conquering these supposedly impossible tasks lifted the nation’s spirits, advanced knowledge within an array of professions, and produced immediate innovation-based economic benefits that justified their high federal price tags.

  As a governmental expenditure, the multibillion-dollar leapfrog that Kennedy sought didn’t fit neatly into either the wartime or infrastructure category. It would not immediately open economic floodgates as rural electrification or hydropower dams might. It could not keep America safe from military attack like the production of fifty thousand warplanes. It might be considered a third category, exploration, but the U.S. government had rarely been interested in funding epic journeys simply to fill in maps of Earth or sky. It might also be considered a type of big-stick diplomacy in the vein of JFK’s idol, Thomas Jefferson, who used the Lewis and Clark Expedition and other missions to the American West as part of an ongoing struggle with Spain west of the Mississippi. “Jefferson’s expeditions and much-publicized explorers had been the masks of his conquest,” wrote historian Julie Fenster, “the tools of diplomacy that allowed the stakes to rise without forcing a military response.”

  Aware of historical timing, Kennedy sought a manned-space leapfrog that would transform the goal of expanding human knowledge (like Lewis and Clark) into irrefutable proof of American exceptionalism—humbling the Soviet Union without turning the Cold War into a shooting war. If the mission he sought could, in effect, lead to long-term peace with the Kremlin, it would more than cover whatever cost it incurred. Being in the White House only three months hadn’t given Kennedy enough time to reorient NASA policy; but he was poised to do exactly that.

  According to Ted Sorensen, the April 14 meeting was where “Kennedy began to really get the feel of what this whole thing might mean to the Presidency and to the United States.” Now the mission would truly begin: Finding the right space strategy to once again uncork America’s spirit of scientific achievement, engineering ingenuity, and global leadership.

  KENNEDY’S MEETING ON space took place on a Friday evening, breaking up at dusk. About an hour later, the night plunged directly into disaster when a small fleet set sail from Nicaragua, bound for a swampy inlet on Cuba’s southern coast known as Bahia de Cochinos: the Bay of Pigs.

  Launched five days after Gagarin’s flight, the hastily conceived Bay of Pigs invasion, planned under Eisenhower, was an attempt by “Brigade 2506,” comprising fifteen hundred Cuban exiles armed, trained, and funded by the CIA, to topple the Communist government of Fidel Castro, which had itself overthrown the pro-U.S. Batista regime two years before. Overly complex and poorly conceived, with little margin for setbacks, the invasion was doomed from the outset. News of the plans leaked within the Cuban community of southern Florida and was soon transmitted to Castro’s government. The counterrevolutionaries came under immediate fire as they began their landing, soon finding themselves outmanned and outgunned by the twenty thousand troops and air support Castro had ordered to the beaches. In and around the Bay of Pigs, Brigade 2506’s hopes dwindled after just one day, although the battle lasted officially for three. Hundreds were killed on both sides, including some Americans, and more than a thousand Cuban Americans were taken prisoner. The debacle was a demeaning defeat for the anti-Castro forces, for the CIA, and ultimately for the White House, where Ted Sorensen recalled Kennedy as “anguished and fatigued” and in “the most emotional, self-critical state I had ever seen him.”

  On Monday night, April 17, Kennedy hosted a gala at the White House, maintaining a cool and graceful demeanor for guests while still seething inside. Soon enough, though, he retreated to the Rose Garden in his white tie and tails, unable to maintain the charade any longer. In the span of one stinging week, the young president had been thoroughly embarrassed both militarily and scientifically. To some extent, it was his own fault: he’d been ill prepared, governing as though through a sideview mirror, and his lack of resolute leadership had been successfully exploited by the Soviet Union and its client state, Cuba.

  By itself, the failure of the Bay of Pigs invasion may not have influenced American space policy. However, following on the heels of the Gagarin flight, it made for a nasty one-two punch that damaged Kennedy. The press poured criticism down on him. He was plagued with the inexorable pressure of time. After stumbling into the Cuban mess, he was learning the hard way, in the course of a crucial thirty-day span, that the federal government didn’t lead itself. His political survival dictated that he become more involved in and closely attached to the foreign policy issues t
hat defined his sense of the United States and its position in the world. At one White House meeting, his brother Robert, the attorney general, ripped into the CIA. “All you bright fellows,” RFK said. “You got the president into this. We’ve got to do something to show the Russians we’re not paper tigers.”

  THE FUROR OVER the lopsided Bay of Pigs defeat continued for months, and as Kennedy surely suspected in the Rose Garden on April 17, it would go on to stain his legacy forever. On April 19, when Cuban forces mopped up the last remnants of Brigade 2506, the president scheduled a meeting with Vice President Johnson and Webb. Reflecting on the April 14 meeting about space policy, JFK asked LBJ to investigate the status of NASA’s programs and his opinion on the best possible leapfrogging mission. A five-point memo issued by the president for Johnson on April 20 laid out two overriding concerns: settling on the right mission and ensuring that NASA and related agencies were capable of delivering an all-out, do-or-die effort to make that mission happen. That memorandum stands as a clear manifesto of the president’s thinking in the aftermath of Gagarin’s flight:

  1. Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the Moon, or by a rocket to land on the Moon, or by a rocket to go to the Moon and back with a man. Is there any other space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win?

  2. How much additional would it cost?

  3. Are we working 24 hours a day on existing programs? If not, why not? If not, will you make recommendations to me as to how work can be speeded up?

  4. In building large boosters should we put emphasis on nuclear, chemical or liquid fuel, or a combination of these three?

  5. Are we making maximum effort? Are we achieving necessary results?

  If Kennedy’s impatience could be read in his April 20 memorandum, Johnson’s steadfast ambition could be as easily read in the dateline on his response: April 28, only eight days after receiving the president’s requests for answers. Most of Johnson’s quickly compiled memorandum told JFK why NASA was important in terms of international relations, making the salient point that “dramatic accomplishments in space are being increasingly identified as a major indicator of world leadership.” Johnson had cast a wide net compiling his response, receiving important input from not only Webb, Dryden, and NASA deputy administrator Robert Seamans, but also von Braun, science advisor Wiesner, Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, air force general Bernard Schriever, navy admiral John Hayward, budget director Bell, and three nongovernment leaders: George Brown of engineering and construction firm Brown and Root, Donald Cook of American Electric Power, and Frank Stanton of CBS. Johnson’s evaluation contended that the United States had greater resources than the USSR for attaining space supremacy, but that the country lacked the willpower and drive to marshal those resources in a dramatic fashion. But one point in the April 28 memo from Johnson seemed to capture Kennedy’s full attention:

  Manned exploration of the moon . . . is not only an achievement with great propaganda value, but it is essential as an objective whether or not we are first in its accomplishment—and we may be able to be first. We cannot leapfrog such accomplishments, as they are essential sources of knowledge and experience for even greater successes in space. We cannot expect the Russians to transfer the benefits of their experiences or the advantages of their capabilities to us. We must do these things ourselves.

  Johnson’s “Evaluation of Space Program” document was thought provoking. However, Kennedy hadn’t asked if or why America needed a major goal in space; he had asked which and how. The vice president’s memo allowed that circumnavigation of the moon and a manned trip there could be accomplished by 1966 or 1967, but then it slid back to a recommendation that less complicated NASA goals could be attained more rapidly.

  Although everybody of importance at NASA and among the president’s cabinet and scientific advisors weighed in on what Kennedy should prioritize, it might well be that a letter from von Braun, dated the day after Johnson’s memo, made a better and more persuasive argument. A genius at cutting to the chase, von Braun named and ranked four possible goals for the space program, including establishing an orbiting space laboratory (“we do not have a good chance of beating the Soviets”), circumnavigation of the moon, and placement of a radio transmitter on the lunar surface (“a sporting chance”). Von Braun saved his highest grade, “excellent chance,” for landing a crew on the moon. “The reason,” he explained, “is that a performance jump by a factor 10 over [the Soviets’] present rockets is necessary to accomplish this feat. While today we do not have such a rocket, it is unlikely that the Soviets have it. Therefore, we would not have to enter the race toward this obvious next goal in space exploration against hopeless odds favoring the Soviets.”

  Von Braun was the “somebody—anybody” whom Kennedy had sought at the April 14 meeting. Ever since they served together helping to select Time’s Man of the Year in 1953, they had been political allies of sorts, tied together by a shared repugnance for Eisenhower’s low-key response to the Soviet technological advances in space. Von Braun was the ally who could bring the kind of burning vision and take-charge aggressiveness to space exploration that JFK himself was intent on bringing to government. In that respect, he was similar to J. Robert Oppenheimer, who provided scientific leadership to Roosevelt’s Manhattan Project. Sensing his opening to build a moon rocket, von Braun gave clear and concise answers to the president’s five questions about how the United States could leapfrog the Soviets in space. In the most formidable example of can-doism NASA had available, he stated that the technological journey would be tough, but a moon landing was attainable. To get to the moon, NASA would have to develop a launch vehicle far more powerful than von Braun’s eight-engine Saturn; but it could be done—and von Braun, having worked on the Nazis’ hyperaccelerated V-2 program during the war, knew precisely what could be expected of scientists on a grueling round-the-clock schedule. “We were being rushed—as usual,” von Braun recalled, “by Russia’s great strides.” But, he contended, “with an all-out crash,” he believed NASA could accomplish landing men on the moon in 1967–68.

  Having received the consensus from Johnson, Webb, Dryden, and von Braun that a moonshot was a difficult but credible option, Kennedy continued to consider his next move as other developments battled for his attention. Internationally, the fallout from the Bay of Pigs fiasco had yet to subside, even as he and his brother were secretly arranging a summit meeting with Khrushchev, to be held in Vienna on June 4. Domestically, the Congress of Racial Equality had begun grabbing headlines with its so-called Freedom Riders campaign, organizing mixed-race groups of young people to travel by bus from Washington, DC, to New Orleans as a way of protesting the nonenforcement of Interstate Commerce Commission rules prohibiting racial discrimination in interstate travel. Like the rest of America, the president watched television coverage with dismay, as the Freedom Riders faced beatings and other violence at the hands of white bigots in Southern states.

  Preoccupied with these and other matters, Kennedy contemplated America’s lunar future only in fleeting moments as NASA continued to prepare for the more immediate future of a manned Mercury flight. For over a year, Americans had been hearing that such a mission was close, but the success of Gagarin’s flight had upped the ante. In response, NASA made the bold but risky decision that it would encourage television and radio coverage of the eventual launch, offering a vivid contrast to the secrecy insisted upon by the Soviets, who were fearful of the optics should their launches fail. JFK himself dreaded the risky launch for the same reason, fearing that any technical malfunction, glitch, or human tragedy broadcast to the world would be blamed on his White House.

  A new launch date of May 5 was announced. On May 4, Lieutenant Commander Victor A. Prather, a navy flight surgeon working for NASA, prepared for one final test of the full-pressure Mark IV space suits that had been created for the Mercury astronauts by B.F. Goodrich. The day began hopefully. Prather and anot
her scientist, Malcolm Ross, flew in a Strato-Lab V balloon to a height of 113,740 feet (21.5 miles), a manned-balloon altitude record for decades to come. The flight lasted nearly ten hours and ended as planned, with a smooth landing in the Gulf of Mexico. There, Prather’s copilot, Ross, was plucked from the water by a navy helicopter after almost falling back into the sea while trying to grasp the sling lowered for him. When it was Prather’s turn, the same problem occurred. The sling had been designed for people in wetsuits or street clothes, not cumbersome twenty-five-pound space suits. With little room to hold on, Prather slipped, fell, and was pulled under as water rushed into the open face guard of his suit. Navy divers couldn’t get to him in time, and he drowned—giving NASA, and Kennedy, a reminder of the deadly peril of rushing astronauts into space prematurely.

  EVEN THOUGH PRATHER’S flight ended tragically, it had also fulfilled its mission, allowing NASA to send one of the Mercury Seven into suborbital flight the very next day, certain of the Mark IV space suit’s efficacy at high altitude.

  That first American in space would be Alan Shepard Jr., a physically fit, towheaded navy test pilot from New Hampshire, whose ancestors had come to America aboard the Mayflower. Proud of being an eighth-generation New Englander, he had grown up on the family farm and attended a one-room elementary school. Obsessed with model planes, at age twelve he built a full-size glider, strapped himself in as if he were Orville Wright at Kitty Hawk, and took flight, sailing at an altitude of some four feet before crashing.

  Shepard grew committed to becoming a top-tier military aviator in the mold of Jimmy Doolittle. When airborne, he had calm judgment and the gift of unflappable concentration. During World War II, he studied at the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis, Maryland, earning his bachelor of science degree in 1944. The next year, he began flight training at Corpus Christi, Texas, and Pensacola, Florida, perfecting the art of aircraft carrier aviation. By 1950 he was admitted to the highly competitive Patuxent River Naval Test Pilot School in Maryland, where he became a military aviation superstar. Going on to test the F-3H Demon, F-8U Crusader, F-4D Skyray, F-11F Tigercat, and F-5D Skylancer, as well as in-flight refueling systems, the flinty Shepard was a standout. Whether it was night-landing on an aircraft carrier in the Atlantic; breaking speed records at Moffett Field, California; or serving as an operations officer for the 193rd Fighter Squadron aboard the carrier USS Oriskany in the western Pacific, he was always the right man for the job. Like JFK, Shepard made no excuses for his eye for the ladies, even as he stayed married to a lovely woman whose lot was to make her peace with his flirtations. Five feet eleven inches with blue eyes, he was nicknamed the “Icy Commander” for his detached and intimidating persona. “He was hard to get to know,” astronaut Gene Cernan said of Shepard. “But once you cracked the surface, he was your friend for life.”