As the first successful interplanetary probe, Mariner 2 marked a turning point, giving astrophysicists and astronomers a firsthand look at space and opening a new era of exploration that would see probes traveling as far as Pluto. Applauded by space scientists around the world, it was a win for the purely scientific side of space exploration, but it also put the United States firmly ahead of the USSR in the race to explore the solar system.
Kennedy was well aware of an interplanetary mission’s public relations value. On January 17, 1963, as a parallel to the visits of Mercury astronauts after their successful spaceflights, Kennedy fêted the lead scientists behind Mariner 2 at the White House. Standing next to a model of the probe, the president called the voyage “an extraordinary technical accomplishment by the United States,” one that indicated that there was a “broad spectrum of mastery in the field of space, other than the effort of the human probe.” The scientists surrounding JFK were still, in fact, in the thick of analyzing the data from Mariner 2, and the full results would not be announced until late February. Had science been the only consideration for the meeting, Kennedy might have waited until then, but he’d brought the scientists to the White House that day for a specific reason: he was submitting his next federal budget to Congress that very day, and asking Congress to appropriate yet more money for the NASA manned space program.
The total budget was larger than any proposed by any president in history (even by FDR at the height of World War II) and included a conspicuous increase for Apollo and Gemini. The overall earmark for space was $5.7 billion, of which $4.2 billion applied to 1964 and $1.5 billion to future years. The total for space in 1964 would rise 75 percent from 1963 and more than 300 percent over what had been budgeted for 1962. No mere blip after a decimal point, Kennedy’s space program would account for more than 3.5 percent of the nation’s total spending. By 1966, a whopping 5.5 percent of the federal budget would go to the moon program.
James Webb, a masterly Capitol Hill appropriations fund-raiser, was quick to promote the New Frontier budget as “austere,” framing the increase as a reasonable continuation of Congress’s nearly unanimous commitment in 1961 to put an American on the moon within a decade. Being number one in space was expensive, Kennedy said, and NASA would only continue to grow as the United States jockeyed to “maintain a position of world leadership in the exploration and utilization of space.” Showcasing the recent success of Mariner 2, Kennedy’s budget message read like a “State of Space” white paper:
Efforts are being concentrated in the continued development of the complex Apollo spacecraft and the large Advanced Saturn launch vehicle needed to boost the Apollo to the moon. A lunar orbit rendezvous approach will be used to accomplish during this decade the first manned lunar landing. Under this technique the Apollo spacecraft will be boosted directly into orbit around the moon, where a small manned lunar excursion module will be detached and descend to the surface of the moon. It will later return to the orbiting Apollo which will return to the earth.
The recent Mariner flight past Venus attests to the progress we are making in unmanned space investigations. Development of geophysical, astronomical, meteorological, and communications satellites will also continue. This budget provides for strong research efforts aimed at developing the technology needed for advanced space missions, including future manned space flight and unmanned explorations of Venus and Mars.
Kennedy’s hopes for heading off a budget battle were short-lived. In Congress, a strong cadre of fiscally conservative Republicans set out to block NASA’s astronomical growth, supported by a cabal of concerned Democrats. Former president Eisenhower continued to snipe that “anybody who would spend $40 billion in a race to the moon for national prestige is nuts.” In Fortune, journalist Arthur Krock charged the Kennedy administration with manipulating the press to cheerlead for NASA and other New Frontier initiatives. Furthermore, Krock charged Kennedy with exhibiting a “bristling sensitiveness to critical analysis” unmatched in U.S. presidential history. He even went so far as to suggest that JFK’s public relations blitz, anchored in flattering newspaper editors and TV moguls, was counter to Thomas Jefferson’s understanding of freedom of the press. “We have had limited success in managing news,” Kennedy sardonically countered Krock, “if that is what we have been trying to do.”
Krock’s criticism about White House’s press co-option was particularly biting because he’d been a reliably pro-Kennedy reporter throughout the president’s political career. Regarded as the dean of Washington journalists after winning the Pulitzer Prize for Correspondence in 1935 and 1938, Krock had promoted Kennedy’s first book, Why England Slept (1940), far and wide. Then, in 1946, at the request of his old sponsor, confidant, and friend Joseph Kennedy Sr., he’d helped promote the young JFK in his first run for Congress. Somewhere along the line, Krock’s relationship with the elder Kennedy soured, and now newspapers all over America were quoting his criticisms of the president. “The official [White House] release of information in the areas of nuclear and space exploration are not determined on whether the American public that pays is entitled to the facts,” Krock wrote. “Nor is safeguarding the national security the determining factor, though this is always the explanation for concealment. The controlling policy factor is whether the release will or will not improve our ‘world image,’ and give this government a lead in the psychological sector of the cold war.”
While JFK might not have disagreed with that last premise, he would certainly have protested Krock’s contention that he was disregarding national security, a preoccupation that was in fact central to his policy directives. To Kennedy, who was presiding over the most perilous period of the Cold War, “peacetime” didn’t exist in the usual sense, and every measure of national accomplishment (technological, military, economic, social, and moral) needed to be weaponized in the competition for geopolitical influence. Under the president’s direction, certain activities at NASA may have been concealed or, at other times, sugarcoated, but Krock was exaggerating the White House’s media manipulation. From Kennedy’s perspective, NASA had to generate a plethora of positive publicity in order to keep congressional appropriations rolling. The world could see the results of what had already been accomplished: in only two years as president, having given NASA the funding it needed, Kennedy had taken the United States from launching its first Mercury astronauts to exploring Venus, revolutionizing satellite communications and meteorological technology, and even creating new scientific disciplines such as bioastronautics and space medicine. Now Americans had to understand the importance of NASA’s next space steps, and that meant widespread publicity. It meant a new monthly column by von Braun in Popular Science, to help explain Apollo’s objectives. It meant photo spreads in Life magazine to highlight the family lives of the Gemini astronauts. It meant ticker-tape parades and Oval Office receptions for returning space heroes. As Arthur C. Clarke wrote and as Kennedy surely understood, “The eyes of all ages are upon us now, as we create the myths of the future at Cape Canaveral in Florida and Baikonur in Kazakhstan. No generation has been given such powers, and such responsibilities. . . . If our wisdom fails to match our science, we will have no second chance.”
The reality that eluded critics such as Eisenhower and Krock was that Kennedy’s New Frontier of technology had seized young Americans’ imaginations, and the further that NASA progressed toward the moon, the more their imaginations would soar with it. When Eisenhower gave his farewell address, for example, there were virtually no computer science programs at American universities. But by 1963, such departments had been established at Stanford, MIT, Carnegie Mellon, the University of Utah, the University of Illinois at Urbana, and the University of California, Berkeley. To be sure, some impetus for the surge came from federal funding provided by the National Defense Education Act of 1958, which itself was a response to Sputnik and the perceived education gap between U.S. and Soviet universities. As we have seen, Senator Kennedy had been a supporter of that legisl
ation, calling the race for Cold War advantage “a race of education and research,” and now he was confident that advanced computer technology would extend the American edge over the USSR in communications satellites and space probes such as Mariner 2. Under Kennedy, it became tantamount to a national duty for students to study physics, mechanical engineering, and computer programming, and NASA’s high-profile advances were a constant reminder of what was possible. “Remember when NASA was advertising Tang as its big contribution to the civilized world?” recalled Bob Taylor of the Pentagon’s information processing agency, referencing the orange powdered drink that became associated with NASA astronauts. “Well there was a better example” in the computer science advances the agency made possible.
EARLY IN APRIL 1963, under intense congressional pressure to slash $700 million from the Apollo program, Kennedy asked Lyndon Johnson, in his role as head of the National Aeronautics and Space Council, to conduct a thorough review of NASA expenditures, objectives, and programs. Even though JFK and LBJ weren’t personally close, they were in complete alignment on the moonshot goal, and the vice president went right to work. What Kennedy treasured about Johnson was that he was in cahoots with the Southern bloc of Democratic senators such as Walter George, Richard Russell, and Herman Talmadge—powerful allies of Project Apollo. Before the review was completed, Johnson advised his boss to constantly argue that “our space program has an overriding urgency that cannot be calculated solely in terms of industrial, scientific, or military development.” If lawmakers criticized NASA, LBJ suggested they be called out as soft on communism. Timidity wouldn’t be tolerated. Johnson wanted Kennedy to go directly to the American people, alerting them that the “future of society is at stake” if the NASA budget was reduced.
On May 13, Johnson wrote Kennedy a personal note and attached a thoughtful memo that would serve as New Frontier artillery against lawmakers, journalists, and pundits who questioned the prioritization of Gemini and Apollo as national security imperatives. Johnson’s report brilliantly laid out how the moon landing would reap massive long-term benefits in international prestige, scientific breakthroughs, and economic benefits nationwide:
I. BENEFITS TO NATIONAL ECONOMY FROM NASA SPACE PROGRAMS
1. It cannot be questioned that billions of dollars directed into research and development in an orderly and thoughtful manner will have significant effect upon our national economy. No formula has been found which attributes specific dollar values to each of these areas of anticipated developments, however, the “multiplier” of space research and development will augment our economic strength, our peaceful posture, and our standard of living.
2. Even though specific dollar values cannot be set for these benefits, a mere listing of the fields which will be affected is convincing evidence that the benefits will be substantial. The benefits include:
a) Additional knowledge about the Earth and the Sun’s influence on the Earth, the nature of interplanetary space environment, and the origin of the solar system as well as of life itself.
b) Increased ability and experience in managing major research and development efforts, expansion of capital facilities, encouragement of higher standards of quality production.
c) Accelerated use of liquid oxygen in steelmaking, coatings for temperature control of housing, efficient transfer of chemical energy into electrical energy, and wide-range advances in electronics.
d) Development of effective filters against detergents; increased accuracy (and therefore reduced costs) in measuring hot steel rods; improved medical equipment in human care; stimulation of the use of fiberglass refractory welding tape, high energy metal forming processes; development of new coatings for plywood and furniture; use of frangible tube energy absorption systems that can be adapted to absorbing shocks of failing elevators and emergency aircraft landings.
e) Improved communications, improved weather forecasting, improved forest fire detection, and improved navigations.
f) Development of high temperature gas-cooled graphite moderated reactors and liquid metal cooled reactors; development of radioisotope power sources for both military and civilian uses; development of instruments for monitoring degrees of radiation; and application of thermoelectric and thermionic conversion of heat to electric energy.
g) Improvements in metals, alloys, and ceramics.
h) An augmentation of the supply of highly trained technical manpower.
i) Greater strength for the educational system both through direct grants, facilities and scholarships and through setting goals that will encourage young people.
j) An expansion of the base for peaceful cooperation among nations.
k) Military competence. (It is estimated that between $600 and $675 million of NASA’s FY [fiscal year] 1964 budget would be needed for military space projects and would be budgeted by the Defense Department, if they were not already provided for in the NASA budget.)
While Kennedy was very grateful to Johnson for his reassuring recommendations, he also turned to von Braun for a booster shot of fortitude. In early May, the president made a return visit to Huntsville for an earthshaking static firing of a Saturn booster stage. From a safe bunker, he watched the locked-down rocket roar, his greenish-gray eyes dancing like those of a delighted boy. “That’s just wonderful!” he shouted. “If I could only show all this to the people in Congress!”
If Kennedy couldn’t bring a Saturn rocket to Capitol Hill, he could at least project the excitement of another space shot, one that occurred the following week when Gordon Cooper took off aboard Faith 7 for the sixth and final launch of Project Mercury. Cooper, a native Californian and veteran air force pilot, was already a familiar face to the TV-watching public, having served as capsule communicator (CAPCOM) for Alan Shepard’s first suborbital spaceflight and for Scott Carpenter’s Aurora 7 mission. And Cooper could certainly barnstorm, a fact he showed off two days before liftoff by buzzing the NASA offices at Cape Canaveral in an F-102 jet. That stunt didn’t gain him any brownie points with Webb, but his gallant performance in space on May 15 more than made up for this irrepressible horseplay.
If Americans’ interest in Mercury had waned as launches, orbits, and splashdowns became semiregular events, Cooper’s spaceflight reignited the fascination by adding both duration and suspense. As planned, the journey would begin on May 15 and last almost a day and a half—more than all previous Mercury missions combined. As had become his habit, Kennedy watched TV coverage of the liftoff from his White House bedroom and Oval Office side room. Seven hundred fifty miles to the south, Cooper pretended he was on his own, actually falling asleep in the cockpit as he awaited countdown. At 8:06 a.m., Faith 7 executed a flawless takeoff, starting Cooper on a flight that would last more than thirty-four hours.
Throughout his mission, Cooper was connected by radio with two NASA flight directors (working in shifts) and with his fellow astronauts, and if all had gone according to plan, he may have been best remembered for an in-flight calmness that bordered on ennui. Instead, on the afternoon of May 16, during Cooper’s third-to-last orbit, Americans got a dose of tense drama when a short circuit deactivated the spacecraft’s automatic altitude and flight-control system. Instead of relying on autopilot for reentry, Cooper would have to take her down the old-fashioned way. “I had to initiate retrofire,” Cooper later explained, “use the window view for attitude reference, and control the spacecraft with the manual proportional system.” Despite carbon-dioxide levels rising, the unflappable Cooper’s reentry and splashdown were even more accurate than those of previous Mercury missions. With precision akin to hitting a floating bull’s-eye, Cooper brought Faith 7 down just 4.5 miles from the designated prime recovery ship, 81 miles south of Midway Island.
Six days later, Major Cooper was standing in the White House Rose Garden to receive his NASA Distinguished Service Medal from the president. The public ceremony was far more lavish than some of the recent homecomings from space, and Kennedy’s remarks on the occasion were clear, h
istorically based, and partial to lunar expedition:
I know that a good many people say, “Why go to the moon,” just as many people said to Lindbergh, “Why go to Paris.” Lindbergh said, “It is not so much a matter of logic as it is a feeling.”
I think the United States has committed itself to this great adventure in the sixties. I think before the end of the sixties we will send a man to the moon, an American, and I think in so doing[,] it is not merely that we are interested in making this particular journey but we are interested in demonstrating a dominance of this new sea, and making sure that in this new, great, adventurous period the Americans are playing their great role, as they have in the past.
Flashing his trademark humor, along with his personal identification with the astronauts, JFK also made reference to Cooper’s piloting skills and meditative calm at the end of his mission. “One of the things which warmed us the most during this flight,” Kennedy said, “was the realization that however extraordinary computers may be, that we are still ahead of them and that man is still the most extraordinary computer of all. His judgment, his nerve, and the lessons he can learn from experience still make him unique and, therefore, make manned flight necessary and not merely that of satellites. I hope that we will be encouraged to continue with this program.” That hope would be tested throughout late spring, as Kennedy faced the first serious opposition to the expansion of America’s space program.
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