American Moonshot

by Douglas Brinkley

  On December 5 at the United Nations, the U.S. delegation submitted a resolution on the peaceful uses of space. Heavily promoted by Ambassador Adlai Stevenson, it called for a registry of satellites, cooperation on weather satellites, and extension of communication via satellites to all nations as soon as possible. The Soviet Union responded negatively. Kennedy expected nothing less, but he still needed such an agreement.

  Two days later, Glenn’s mission, named by him Friendship 7 (in homage to his fellow Mercury cohorts), was suddenly delayed. This caught nearly everyone at NASA by surprise, especially Glenn. The reasons for pauses and postponements ranged widely. One was the undeniable fact that NASA’s “hurry-up plans,” in the words of Associated Press reporting, were too rushed amid too much Cold War tension. Another was the fear that a Friendship 7 disaster just before Christmas would cripple NASA permanently, drying up its congressional funding. Public doubts about the moonshot would grow. The equally tense negotiations over the UN satellite resolution were another consideration. From Kennedy’s point of view, the double-whammy PR disaster that would ensue were Glenn to be incinerated on liftoff and his satellite treaty to fail at the United Nations made the December launch too risky. Timing was everything in politics and diplomacy, and JFK simply wasn’t ready to gamble his long-term peaceful plans for space on a made-for-TV “keeping up with the Soviets” launch. And then there was the official NASA reason for delays: mechanical problems. Deeming the president’s caution reasonable, Glenn accepted the postponement without public complaint, even though inside he was desperate for the launch to happen.

  Khrushchev played on Kennedy’s equivocations to his geopolitical advantage. The Soviet premier gave another of his bombastic televised speeches, which seemed to be directed mainly at the American president, pounding his fist repeatedly as he bragged about the superiority of his country’s nuclear arsenal. The Soviets were known to have renewed atmospheric nuclear testing, which had prompted the United States to conduct its own atmospheric exercises on a similar scale. Khrushchev’s speech seemed to portend an end to all JFK’s hopes for serious disarmament, or at least for an effective test-ban treaty.

  One aspect of Khrushchev’s provocative speech stabbed at another of Kennedy’s priorities. Underscoring Dr. Dornberger’s impression that the Soviets’ main goal was to dominate the battlefield of space, Khrushchev boasted more than once about his nation’s ability to arm rockets of the kind that had already put Soviet cosmonauts into orbit. If that capability became a reality, then the demilitarized idea of a moon voyage would be absurdly naïve.

  The speech was meant to intimidate the United States but it came across as primarily hyperbolic blather. Nevertheless, within two days, the USSR made the truly surprising announcement that it would support the “peaceful uses of space” resolution. The agreement gave Kennedy a major win, blemished temporarily over the Christmas holiday when Defense Secretary Robert McNamara announced that he was authorizing research into equipping U.S. rockets with nuclear weapons. After the press pounced, McNamara backed away from the controversial claim.

  ON DECEMBER 7, 1961, the twentieth anniversary of Pearl Harbor, Dr. Robert Gilruth of NASA revealed to Kennedy the plan to develop a two-person spacecraft as the necessary bridge between Mercury and the moonshot. Alex Nagg from NASA headquarters in Washington dubbed the effort Project Gemini, after the constellation that included the twin stars Castor and Pollux, a sign of the zodiac controlled by Mercury.

  On December 22, McDonnell Aircraft of St. Louis was given the government contract to develop Gemini capsules, following up on their success building more than twenty Mercury capsules since 1959. One stipulation was that the first Gemini capsule had to be manufactured within fifteen months. After that, a new capsule would be delivered to NASA every sixty days. “Gemini’s a Corvette,” Gus Grissom recalled of the upgrade. “Mercury was a Volkswagen.” Meanwhile, the Titan II, to be assembled by Martin Marietta of Baltimore, was selected as Gemini’s launch vehicle; it was a modified ICBM developed by the U.S. Air Force. The company also had test stand facilities in Littleton, Colorado. On January 15, 1962, Gilruth explained NASA’s three new “Project” organizations to the public: one organization for Mercury, one for Gemini, and one for Apollo—all civilian, of course, though that public image belied the agency’s deep collaboration with the military. And new Earth landing systems for both normal atmospheric entry and various abort contingencies were being developed at considerable cost to avoid the mishaps of Liberty Bell 7.

  LIKE MOST OTHER Americans, John Kennedy started 1962 concerned about the space race. In his State of the Union address, he acknowledged that the United States might not win: “This nation belongs among the first to explore [the moon]. And among the first, if not the first, we shall be.” It wasn’t the strongest of promises. But Kennedy ably gave himself cover just in case the Soviets pulled off a moonshot. “Our aim,” the president continued, “is not simply to be first on the Moon, any more than Charles Lindbergh’s real aim was to be first to Paris. His aim was to develop the techniques and the authority of this country and other countries in the field of the air and the atmosphere.” That point is arguable; the Orteig Prize of twenty-five thousand dollars had loomed large for Lindbergh, and its sponsor specifically stipulated that it would go to the aviator who was first, not “among” the first, to fly nonstop between New York and Paris. Nonetheless, Lindbergh was not the only “among the first” to fly nonstop across the Atlantic Ocean, the British duo of John Alcock and Arthur Brown, most notably, having accomplished that feat in 1919. Having grown up in that era, JFK knew that Lindbergh’s fame was not diminished in the least by Alcock and Brown.

  Like a doctor speaking to a patient’s family before a serious operation, Kennedy was trying to lower his audience’s high expectations. A genius at reading public sentiment, he understood that American citizens were aware that the United States might lose the race to the moon, and he wanted to assure them that was all right. If that were to occur, Kennedy would try to minimize the Soviet achievement, as Eisenhower had done after Sputnik. Regardless of the Soviets, NASA was still going to the moon, because first or not, going to the moon was a noble venture. Kennedy then charged onward in the speech to the more upbeat topic of the strides that had been made toward “peace in space” and the myriad of wonders that satellite technology would enable.

  Kennedy was far more specific about space exploration in his first one-on-one conversation with John Glenn while the astronaut was waiting for his Friendship 7 mission to be cleared following problems with the Atlas rocket fuel tanks, which led to postponements on January 16 and then again on January 20. Glenn was, in fact, surprised to receive a summons to the White House in early 1962. He and Kennedy had a casual chat, “one human being to another—as one ‘guy’ to another, if you will,” the astronaut recalled a couple of years later of his February 5 meeting. “He just wanted to talk about what was planned on the flight and I went into some of the details of what we expected to experience. . . . He brought up whether we felt very personally every possible thing had been done to ensure our safety and I told him that when we first came into the program one of the things we were told, by [Space Task Group chief Robert] Gilruth, was that we had veto control over anything that was to occur on the project. That at any time we, as experienced test pilots, saw something going on that we didn’t like or there was an area that we thought needed more testing or anything that we weren’t satisfied with, to let him know. . . . The President thought that was an excellent way to conduct such a project.”

  Impressed that Glenn had won the Distinguished Flying Cross five times and flown fifty-nine missions in the South Pacific, sometimes with baseball great Ted Williams as wingman, Kennedy asked so many questions (about g-forces, rocket control, and NASA planning) that the astronaut offered to come back with models of the Mercury-Atlas 6 and Mercury capsule Number 9 he’d soon be riding. The president agreed, and Glenn returned to the White House days later for an even longer
discussion. The constancy of Glenn’s code of honor was something Kennedy was deeply impressed with. It reminded him of his deceased brother, Joseph Kennedy Jr. “John tries to behave,” a friend of Glenn told a Life reporter, “as if every impressionable youngster in the country were watching him every moment of the day.”

  Realizing that Glenn was a man of honest faith, persistence, and the instinct for courage, Kennedy initiated a warm friendship with his next Mercury astronaut, one that transcended the obvious fact that both were banking heavily on the success of Friendship 7. Meanwhile, Glenn, who had flown hundreds of daunting navy missions in training props, warplanes, and experimental jets over the previous twenty years, realized that he needed to address the possibility that he might die during his Mercury spaceflight. For the first time, he spoke to each of the members of his family about this dreaded possilibity, hoping to ensure that none of them had, or would have, any regrets.

  FRIENDSHIP 7 WAS an airtight, watertight, and soundproof marvel of compact engineering, containing more than ten thousand components, seven miles of wiring, and shielding able to protect its pilot from both Arctic cold and three-thousand-degree heat. Built by McDonnell Aircraft in St. Louis, the capsule boasted a recessed fiberglass couch (specially contoured to fit Glenn’s body); a gleaming instrument panel with more than one hundred dials, switches, and lights; a wide-angle window and periscope; and a parachute, recovery gear, and emergency exit system.

  On February 20, 1962, Glenn awoke at 1:30 a.m. for his fourteenth scheduled attempt at launch. For once the sky was serene and unclouded, the Atlantic calm, and nobody could think of a reason not to make a go. The final countdown for Friendship 7 began a little after nine that morning, with the launchpad bathed in sunshine. Word spread that in a little more than eighty minutes the marine astronaut would lift off on the 125-ton Atlas-Mercury 6, en route to circling the planet. It would be only a minor exaggeration to say that the least nervous person in the country was Glenn himself, lying on his back stoically, his pent-up frustration over the long delays had transformed into well-focused hope and faith as the clock ticked down. “Don’t be scared,” Glenn telephoned his wife, Annie, who was at their home in Arlington, Virginia, their two children at her side. “Remember I’m just going down to the corner store to get a pack of gum.”

  At 9:47 a.m. Eastern time, the Atlas rocket fired 367,000 pounds of thrust and rose with an initial slowness that some observers thought majestic and others thought worrisomely hesitant. That Atlas vehicle had a relatively low thrust-to-weight ratio. As the propellant burned, the vehicle became lighter and accelerated faster. Scott Carpenter, serving as astronaut capsule communicator for the mission, wished for his friend “Godspeed, John Glenn.” Even though Glenn’s earphones didn’t pick up Carpenter’s parting message, the salutation was caught on tape, went viral within NASA culture, and Walter Cronkite of CBS News turned it into the catchphrase of the entire Mercury flight. Tom O’Malley, General Dynamics’ test director, prayerfully added, “[M]ay the good Lord ride with you all the way.”

  In living rooms from coast to coast, America vibrated with anticipation as it watched Glenn’s Atlas rocket soar skyward, with coverage on every TV network. At that moment, commuters in New York City left their trains empty while they stayed glued to televisions in Grand Central Terminal. Millions of schoolchildren around the country watched as well, on sets borrowed and brought in just for that day. In Dover, Ohio, businesses locked their doors so that employees could watch the historic launch on TV or listen to the play-by-play on the radio. In Trenton, New Jersey, a bank robber got away with almost nine thousand dollars that Wednesday morning and then stopped for a quick drink at a bar, where he ended up staying to watch Glenn’s flight on television. The police caught up with him there. In Grand Rapids, Michigan, a judge and jury were hearing testimony in a case involving a stolen television when the judge suggested they turn the TV on to watch the launch—which they did. Up the road in Detroit, operators at Michigan Bell Telephone reported to their bosses that there might have been an equipment failure, because their usual heavy load of calls had completely dried up in the moments before liftoff.

  Eyes and ears all across America were fixed on Glenn. In Salt Lake City, folks brought transistor radios into restaurants and listened to the nail-biting coverage. At a coffee shop fortunate enough to have a television, an employee reported packed crowds who “watched as though they were spellbound.” In spring training for their inaugural season, the New York Mets were practicing leading off first base when Casey Stengel, never the most easygoing manager in baseball, stopped the drills so his ballplayers could watch the launch. On site at Cape Canaveral, tears flowed as Friendship 7 moved past its initial hesitancy and headed toward the heavens. Even the most cynical reporter called out, “Go, baby, go!”

  More than forty million American homes had tuned in to the Glenn mission. Traveling seventeen thousand miles an hour, three times faster than Shepard had, Glenn described the African coast, gorgeous rainbow radiance, and blazing blue bands glowing around Earth. “Wonderful as man-made art may be,” Glenn would write of his space odyssey, “it cannot compare in my mind to the sunsets and sunrises, God’s masterpieces.” On CBS, the invariably enthusiastic Cronkite anchored for ten straight hours, with the banner “Man in Orbit” splashed across the screen beneath him. With no live cameras aboard the spacecraft (as there would be for journeys later in the decade), Cronkite and the other space anchors painted a picture with words for their TV audience, marveling at Glenn’s stoic composure, cooped up in a claustrophobic capsule with just over twenty-four hours of breathable air. Ensconced much more comfortably at the CBS News Cape Canaveral facility, Cronkite became the maestro of the historical moment, whose dissemination through TV and radio, according to the New York Times, “united the nation and the world . . . in a common sharing of the excitement, tension and drama” around the flight.

  However, all was not going well with Glenn’s mission. Mercury Control in Florida was jarred by a telemetry signal “segment 51” from Friendship 7, indicating that the heavy-duty heat shield was probably loose. Glenn was told about the malfunction by astronaut Gordon Cooper over the radio. Without one erg of emotion, Glenn acknowledged the technical problem but stayed calm and carried on. Back at Cape Canaveral, the collective nervousness was palpable, and technicians began to discuss emergency plans. The capsule’s designer, Max Faget, was consulted on the vessel’s aerodynamics. Lieutenant Colonel John “Shorty” Powers, the Project Mercury information officer, told the TV networks that if the heat shield became unhinged, Glenn’s life would be in danger. Even if the shield were only slightly loose, that could complicate the planned ocean splashdown. Fear mounted at NASA and around the world that Friendship 7 might incinerate, that the aerodynamic effects of reentry could tear the capsule wide open. “I knew that if the shield was falling apart,” Glenn later wrote, “I would feel the heat pulse first at my back, and I waited for it.”

  Before long, Glenn lost radio contact with Mercury Control due to a technical malfunction. Nobody knew the status of Friendship 7. It was the first blackout in a manned spaceflight, a ghastly four-and-a-half-minute silence amplifying the incredible distance between Glenn and the world. The tension was so great that, for millions of viewers, time froze. When radio contact was restored and Glenn again spoke to Mercury Control, a collective sigh of relief could be heard at NASA. Their astronaut still had a fighting chance of survival. The descent back to Earth proved a wild and bumpy ride, but the primary parachute opened as planned when Friendship 7 reached 10,800 feet. At 2:42 p.m. Eastern time, the capsule splashed down in the Atlantic, about forty miles off course. For a long spell, Glenn sat in the bobbing capsule, sweating profusely—he’d been trained not to open the hatch prematurely. “How do you feel?” Shepard asked from Mission Control. “Oh, pretty good,” Glenn said. “What is your general condition? Are you pretty well?” Shepard continued to inquire. “My condition is good,” said Glenn. “But that was a real
fireball, boy. I had great chunks of retro-pack breaking off all the way through.”

  Drenched in sweat, Glenn shed his harness, clutched his survival kit, and prepared to make an emergency exit if necessary. He didn’t have to. In short order, the destroyer USS Noa arrived. Glenn opened the hatch door, made a fast exit, and once aboard the navy ship, was taken immediately to medics on the aircraft carrier USS Randolph. The whole operation was a giant win for NASA. Although dehydrated and five pounds lighter than when he stepped into the spacecraft, Glenn was in good shape. Kennedy called him with words of praise and pride. No longer was America “second best” in space.

  Once the astronaut was retrieved, the world delighted with an outpouring of love and excitement that easily surpassed what had greeted the previous Mercury astronauts on their return. Jubilant space mania was in the air. An Ohioan with the scruples of a Boy Scout had orbited Earth three times in just under five hours—once every 88.29 minutes, a total of 81,000 miles, at a speed of 17,545 miles per hour and an altitude of 160 miles. Glenn, the “Clean Marine,” became the most famous heroic explorer of the American century since Charles Lindbergh. “The best moment,” Cronkite wrote in a syndicated column, “was when Shorty Powers announced from Mercury Control: ‘We have a hale and hearty astronaut.’”