Part of a generation that equated space travel with Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon, Kennedy might have been nervous over his grandiose promise. Sorensen, perhaps in overstatement, claimed the president was inwardly panicking, believing that his challenge was being received with “stunned doubt and disbelief by the members of Congress, both Democratic and Republican.” New York Times reporter Alvin Shuster wrote that the Senate and House Republican leaders scribbled notes, stared at their hands, and brushed their hair back. When Kennedy finished his speech with more talk of freedom around the world, the audience perked up again, with thunderbolts of applause.
In the limo back to the White House, the president was downcast, worried he had choked, his face full of perplexity. Even though his talk was interrupted eighteen times with applause, he felt the pledge had fallen flat. The Apollo challenge was intended to be his big calling card at the upcoming Vienna summit with Khrushchev. Now he was bewildered. With the virtue of hindsight, he determined that his moonshot plea should have been leaked to other news agencies besides the New York Times the previous day, to get Congress and the press energized in advance. Catching lawmakers by surprise, before they had time to internalize what a presidential pledge meant to their careers, had, Kennedy feared, been clumsy. Sorensen commiserated with him.
All this second-guessing was for naught. To JFK’s surprise, the next day’s Washington Post labeled his speech “spectacular.” Canvassing an array of congressmen in a “cloakroom consensus,” the Post concluded that some of Kennedy’s smaller, domestic proposals were probably doomed, but that the hefty request for Apollo funding would go through. “He tossed the ball to us,” said one member of Congress in the Post, “and don’t think for one moment that anyone up here is going to drop it.” On the Democratic side, Senator Hubert Humphrey of Minnesota led the huzzahs. “The president is ahead of Congress,” he gushed, “but not much ahead. And unless I’m mistaken, the country is right up there with him.” For many Americans, it seemed as if fate were summoning the nation on a lunar voyage, and a cautious, incremental approach wouldn’t take it there. A giant leapfrog seemed both an admirable goal for a superpower and necessary if the Cold War were to be won.
Considering that NASA’s total accomplishment in manned spaceflight to date was Shepard’s short suborbital flight of three weeks before, Kennedy’s decision to shoot for the moon was extra bold. It was also an about-face from the cautious first weeks of his administration. As NASA deputy administrator Robert Seamans admitted, the New Frontiersmen went in just a few months from “doubting the value of any human spaceflight” in the Wiesner Report to calling exploration of the moon “essential.” A big part of the president’s calculus was that Shepard had proved that space exploration was a TV bonanza flush with undeniable theatrics. If JFK could have a Mercury launch semiregularly, it would be good for his poll ratings. From slowly stated countdowns to roaring liftoffs and victorious treks into space, Kennedy would be the chief political beneficiary. The payoff in these TV broadcasts would be a successful splashdown and recovery followed by the president congratulating his astronaut.
Few in the main game of U.S. politics opposed the moonshot gambit outright, although some did grouse about the mission’s eye-popping price tag. In a Senate Finance Committee hearing, Republican John J. Williams of Delaware suggested that with additional NASA expenditures, “our debt may reach the moon before we do.” Senator Prescott Bush of Connecticut, a Republican, carped that Kennedy’s moonshot, coupled with a probable refusal to raise taxes, would “unleash the forces of inflation.” The president’s own father, Joseph Kennedy, was apoplectic about the plan. “Damn it, I taught Jack better than that!” he lashed out at White House aides. “Oh, we’re going to go broke with this nonsense! I told him that I thought it was ridiculous.” Former president Eisenhower also fumed that JFK (whom he privately derided as “Little Boy Blue” blowing his horn) had changed the political dynamic and oversold the necessity of a lunar voyage in a speech he deemed “almost hysterical.” In early October, spurred on by former NASA administrator Keith Glennan, Ike told faculty at the Naval War College that for Kennedy to “make the so-called race to the moon a major element in our struggle to show that we are superior to the Russians is getting our eyes off the right target.” The former president, critical even of the Peace Corps, couldn’t comprehend that the calculus behind the moonshot also included the prospect of new technological development that would drive American economic growth and global influence for decades to come.
Hoping to persuade Congress not to fund the moonshot, Eisenhower privately told Republicans at an off-the-record Capitol Hill meeting that “anybody who would spend $40 billion in a race to the moon for national prestige is nuts.” But his entreaties fell on deaf ears. Spooked by Soviet successes in space and spurred by Kennedy’s aspirational vision, both houses of Congress quickly approved huge increases in NASA’s budget. NASA boosters were fond of taunting, “No bucks, no Buck Rogers.” The rationale for Kennedy’s moonshot was most honestly stated by Senator John Stennis, the chairman of the Armed Services Committee, who days after the president’s speech offered this statement for the Congressional Record: “Space technology will eventually become the dominant factor in determining our national and military strength. Whoever controls space controls the world.”
But Project Apollo didn’t come without other costs. With the NASA moonshot now the cornerstone of the New Frontier, the administration’s focus shifted away from a major antipoverty program it had been considering for Appalachia, the Deep South, and struggling cities. “It will cost thirty-five billion dollars to put two men on the moon,” National Urban League president Whitney Young complained. “It would take ten billion dollars to lift every poor person in this country above the official poverty standard this year. Something is wrong somewhere.”
WITH THE EXCEPTION of Webb, Dryden, and Seamans, few at NASA foresaw the challenge coming their way. Chris Kraft, NASA’s first flight director, was writing a report at the Mercury Control Center at Cape Canaveral that May 25 when he turned on CBS News to watch Kennedy’s speech. “My head seemed to fill with fog and my heart almost stopped,” Kraft recalled. “Did he say what I thought I heard?” Telephoning Webb, a flabbergasted Kraft tried to ascertain what this meant in terms of NASA budgets and research timetables. Kraft also called members of the Mercury team, who were all in a state of happy bewilderment. In his memoir, Flight: My Life in Mission Control, Kraft inventoried the prevailing sentiments in his shop: “We’ve only put Shepard on a suborbital flight . . . an Atlas can’t reach the moon . . . we have mountains of work just to do the three-orbit flight . . . the moon . . . we’ll need real spacecraft, big ones and a lot better than Mercury . . . men on the moon, has he lost his mind? . . . Have I?” Robert Gilruth, chief of the Space Task Group, leader of the American manned space program, had only one word for Kennedy’s arbitrary deadline of 1970: “aghast.”
There’s an old engineers’ saying that their slide-rule tribe typically overestimates what can be accomplished in a year and underestimates what can be accomplished in a decade. Kraft’s NASA team certainly hoped this aphorism was true, because Project Mercury was already behind schedule even as the president was committing them to an exponentially more difficult Apollo goal. But if the men and women at Mercury Control in Cape Canaveral were excitedly baffled by Kennedy’s speech, von Braun and the other rocketeers at Huntsville’s Marshall Space Flight Center were beside themselves with glee. Alabama was regularly in the news for all the wrong reasons. Birmingham, only a hundred miles from Huntsville, was racked by systemic racism, white supremacy, and police antagonism against African Americans. But due to Kennedy’s pledge, the focus in northern Alabama shifted virtually overnight to making America proud of the new family of Saturn launch vehicles being developed there for an eventual moonshot.
The race to the moon was on. In practical terms, Kennedy’s May 25 speech to Congress put Huntsville at the vortex of the New Frontier. Only sixte
en years earlier, von Braun had been working for the Nazis at Peenemünde, aiming to destroy London and Antwerp. Now he was the indispensable partner of a popular young U.S. president determined to use his rockets to go to the moon. If there really was something called the American dream, von Braun was living it beyond his wildest imagination. Unwaveringly self-confident, an energized von Braun claimed no worries about achieving Kennedy’s moonshot goal by late 1969, as long as the federal funding came through. “Of course, the moon [had] a romantic connotation for me as a young guy,” von Braun recalled, “but I must confess, that as soon as President Kennedy announced we were going to land there within this decade, I began to identify it more and more with the target in space and time. . . . It was a constant reminder, ‘We’ll get you before this decade is out.’”
Mercury astronaut Deke Slayton considered May 25, 1961, one of the gold-starred days in American history. No longer did astronauts have to worry about job security. What impressed him most about the moonshot speech was the brash “by the decade’s end” challenge. “What Kennedy did with the moon program was to pick a goal people could relate to,” he recalled. “It has to be something under ten years; if you give people a thirty-year goal, they won’t waste time thinking about it, it’s too far away.”
THE SOVIET UNION was deeply startled by Kennedy’s moonshot speech. Did the United States have the technology for a lunar landing? Had NASA already developed a network of tracking stations? Was the president merely grandstanding? Were his words just propaganda, or was the United States really putting an Apollo moonshot on the front burner? Earlier that year, the Kremlin had issued public declarations about sending cosmonauts to the moon and building a base there, but Sergei Korolev, the top Soviet rocket scientist, was far more committed to launching a huge orbital station and eventually staging manned missions to Mars and Venus. After May 25, Khrushchev denied that America and the USSR were in a space race to the moon, but records unearthed from the KGB archives after the Soviet Union’s dissolution showed that Khrushchev had indeed secretly pursued two ultimately unfulfilled moon missions. First, in 1962, spurred on by Kennedy’s challenge, Korolev persuaded the Soviet premier to develop an N1 moon rocket. Two years later Korolev again convinced the Kremlin to back a full-bore lunar project. The program known as L3 called for the landing of Soviet cosmonauts on the lunar surface before the Americans. The L3 rocket would be launched into orbit on the N1 rocket, now with a mandated payload capacity of ninety-five tons.
Neither the U.S. moonshot nor the Soviets’ own space projects would have been plausible were it not for the humongous size of both countries’ economies, which were robust enough to allocate 2 percent of their gross national product on a high-risk lunar voyage. “This and the fact that these nations decided to compete,” NASA administrator Thomas Paine explained decades later, “is what would propel us to the moon.” On the tech side, advances in liquid-fueled rocketry and digital computing put the tools of spaceflight in the hands of a willing nation.
If presidential greatness is, in the phrase of Harvard professor Richard Neustadt, the “power to persuade,” then Kennedy had achieved greatness once again with his May 25 speech. In ten minutes, he’d jump-started what space historian Walter A. McDougall called “the greatest open-ended peacetime commitment by Congress in history,” boosting NASA’s annual operating budget considerably. For Ted Sorensen, the speech confirmed that the New Frontier was at heart about the “spirit of discovery.” Now Kennedy, having put serious chips on that singular lunar number, was about to discover how many large and small hurdles NASA had to overcome for his herculean gamble to pay off.
President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson tour NASA facilities in Huntsville, Alabama. The U.S. government developed ballistic rockets, under the guidance of Wernher von Braun, called Redstone, Jupiter-C, Juno, and the Saturn 1B at the Marshall Space Flight Center there.
Bob Gomel/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images
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Searching for Moonlight in Tulsa and Vienna
No commitments have been made, but I believe it is going to be of great importance to develop the intellectual and other resources of the Southwest in connection with the new programs the Government is undertaking.
—JAMES WEBB TO LYNDON JOHNSON, MAY 23, 1961
As fate would have it, the first National Conference on Peaceful Uses of Space had been scheduled for May 26, the day after JFK’s speech to Congress, in Tulsa, Oklahoma. Suddenly, the assembled aerospace industry leaders and technologists had a new focus, and a new impetus. Leading aerospace companies wanted a piece of the Apollo action. According to Business Week, the meeting hall was “seething with excitement,” with the three major television networks scrambling to provide live coverage. Ambitious scientists could be seen circulating among sharp-eyed industry leaders and excited government administrators. With Kennedy’s moon pledge, the New Frontier’s dining table was set, and every business executive and technologist in Tulsa was clamoring for a prime cut of the main course: congressional appropriations for space hardware.
Tulsa, a city built on the rising fortunes of the oil industry, had been chosen for the aerospace summit due to the influence of Oklahoma’s wily Democratic senator, Robert S. Kerr, the chair of the Senate’s Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences. When it came to promoting NASA and cutting taxes Kerr was Kennedy’s most valuable ally on Capitol Hill. Arranging for NASA to partner with the Tulsa Chamber of Commerce to sponsor this conference, Kerr had also induced Kennedy to address the participants via a telephone link from the White House. The president spoke for three minutes, his voice strong yet low-key. Noting that the conference’s subject “deals with the very heart of our national policy in space research and explorations, to which I devoted a good deal of my speech yesterday before the Congress,” he nevertheless downplayed the challenge the moonshot represented for the nation, instead focusing on the benefits of space research and the responsibility to maintain U.S. leadership in the field. The word moon was not uttered once by the president, but there was no mistaking the subtext. Everybody in Tulsa knew what JFK meant.
If Kennedy was subdued in tone, the participants were not. Senator Kerr led the cheerleading, his commitment to NASA having grown a thousandfold in the previous twenty-four hours. He envisioned Sun Belt cities—Houston, San Antonio, Dallas, Oklahoma City, and Tulsa, in particular—becoming NASA boomtowns. “The costs will be tremendous,” a buoyed Kerr said of Project Apollo in his keynote address, “but the rewards will be unlimited.” Newsweek backed Kerr up, speculating that a moonshot would drive record profits at companies such as North American Aviation, Space Technology Laboratories Inc. of TRW, and Lockheed Missiles and Space Company.
Other speakers at Tulsa spoke of the various benefits to computer science and aerospace engineering. For Apollo to put an astronaut on the moon, new program management and systems integration approaches would have to transpire in the technocratic NASA culture. Dr. Abe Silverstein, NASA’s director of spaceflight, looked to ancient history in order to put the future into perspective. “Man has progressed,” he told the conference, “from the inside of the cave by accepting challenges.” Silverstein made clear to the conference that NASA was looking to buy technology in six distinctive areas: launch vehicles, command vehicles (which would also serve as return capsules), command capsule propulsion units, lunar landers and ascent stages (which return astronauts from the lunar surface to lunar orbit), communication and tracking networks, and ground infrastructure. The most critical components of the Apollo effort, Silverstein made clear, were the command/return vehicle and rockets designed to launch payloads into low Earth orbit.
Max Faget, principal developer of the Mercury capsule, was fixated in Tulsa on the idea that the new generation of space capsules shouldn’t be as claustrophobic as the tiny Mercury capsule. Envisioning a new spacecraft that was roomy and open, he decided that the base diameter for the Apollo capsule should be at least fourteen feet (approximately two and a
half times Mercury’s diameter). Meanwhile, Apollo manager Robert Gilruth, hungry for corporate bids and proposals, promised to send 1,350 invitations to various representatives of government and industry for a conference to be held July 18–26 in Washington, DC.
Von Braun, speaking with gravitas as director of the Marshall Space Flight Center, spoke directly to the many space hardware suppliers in the audience. His Tulsa speech was technical in nature, describing the Saturn I rocket, which would launch that October. Von Braun had originally built the Saturn I to loft Pegasus satellites into orbit. But his rocket was, he said, an all-purpose military booster ideal for Kennedy’s moon challenge. Before long he sought to replace the Saturn I with a new derivative Saturn IB, which offered a more powerful upper stage and cutting-edge instrumentation.
After a full day of well-thought-out speeches by what United Press International described as “one of the greatest concentrations of space experts,” Webb took the stage to deliver an upbeat spiel that not only summed up the mood at the Tulsa conference but also raised the stakes on Kennedy’s initiative. While the president had said that America could put a man on the moon if the nation made a gangbuster effort, Webb contended that the country had to go to the moon. Offering the heaviest artillery of logic and imperative thinking about JFK’s lunar initiative to date, Webb suggested that for Congress to reject Project Apollo funding would be a gross dereliction of duty. “We have the scientists, we have the technology, we have the resources and we have the power and knowhow to do the job,” Webb told the audience. “Not to do it would jeopardize the nation’s future.”
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