American Experiment

by James Macgregor Burns

  The earthbound gave Glenn a tumultuous welcome. His footprints on the deck of the recovery ship were marked with white paint. Schools and highways were renamed in his honor. Four million screaming, shoving New Yorkers jammed Broadway for a ticker-tape parade. Glenn addressed a joint session of Congress—“I still get a real hard-to-define feeling when the flag goes by”—and met with a fascinated admirer at the White House.

  Ten months before Glenn’s flight—and six weeks after Gagarin’s—John Kennedy had taken the first step of a journey whose end he would not see: “Now it is time to take longer strides—time for a great new American enterprise—time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on earth. … I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.” The United States, he declared, had never before “made the national decisions or marshalled the national resources required for such leadership.”

  Congress enthusiastically acceded to the President’s request. With a goal so distant in time and in place, Kennedy had dramatically lifted the Soviet-American space rivalry to a different plane: over the longer run, American economic and technological superiority would provide a crucial advantage, if indeed the Soviets dared to compete at all. And if some in the scientific community believed that $20 billion would be better spent on unmanned flights, they for the most part kept silent, knowing that $20 billion would not be forthcoming without the goal of a manned moon landing.

  Before the decade was out—on July 20, 1969—a fragile lunar module hovered above the moon’s rocky surface. Four hundred thousand workers, two hundred colleges and universities, many thousands of corporations had joined forces to produce this moment. As the world watched transfixed, the lander, Eagle, first separated from its command ship, Columbia. While Michael Collins waited in Columbia, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin looped into their own orbit around the moon’s surface. Twelve minutes before landing Houston transferred control to Eagle: “You are go. Take it all at four minutes. Roger, you are go—you are to continue powered descent.”

  At 33,500 feet crisis threatened—the navigational computer was overloading near its limit. If it exceeded that limit the mission would have to be aborted. Armstrong searched the surface for a suitable landing spot, and found only rough ground which would destroy the module. As Armstrong took navigational control from the computer, Aldrin read vital figures from the control panel. The attitude control handle in Armstrong’s right hand tilted the spacecraft in any direction; the thrust control handle in his left moved the craft horizontally. The computer maintained control over rate of descent.

  Fuel was low, but still Armstrong rejected site after site. Finally he found his spot. A few tense moments as the craft eased down. Then he spoke: “Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed.”

  As the exploratory Mercury and Gemini had pioneered Apollo’s way to the moon, so too did Apollo cut a path for the space-laboratory Skylab missions in 1973 and 1974 and the joint American-Soviet Apollo-Soyuz of 1975. Pioneer and Mariner probes surveyed Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus. Between 1957 and 1984, nearly 14,000 objects had been launched into space and some 5,000 of them remained in earthly orbit, including telecommunications satellites of the Department of Defense, the National Weather Service, AT&T, and RCA.

  On Sunday morning, April 12, 1981, four IBM computers, with a fifth as backup, kicked into gear and took over launch control. Majestically, a giant new rocket rose slowly from its platform, a truly space-age spacecraft strapped to its back. The crew could feel the swing of the vehicle and the surge of power as the booster rockets fired. The ground shook with the thrust of space shuttle Columbia’s main engines, running at 104 percent of their rated power. The craft accelerated as it left the earth; its engine ran more efficiently at higher altitudes, and the burning of fuel lightened the vehicle. At launch plus eleven seconds the crowd three miles below saw Columbia roll over in the sky onto its back and felt and heard the roar. After eight minutes the main engines had burned out, and Columbia achieved orbit.

  After two days the engines were again turned on to slow the craft and it began its descent out of orbit. Four hundred thousand feet above the earth Columbia still traveled twenty-five times the speed of sound. Nothing this big had ever been brought back to earth, much less landed on an airstrip. Computers again assumed control to perform split-second navigational functions. Its speed down to four times the speed of sound, Columbia crossed California’s northern coast and started its descent into the Mojave Desert. Across the state Columbia’s sonic booms drew people’s attention skyward. At Edwards Air Force Base, hundreds of thousands of persons watched as the world’s first reusable manned spaceship, under its pilot’s control, glided in and gracefully touched down at 225 miles per hour.

  Over the next five years, the American shuttle fleet flew twenty-three more missions, and NASA set an ambitious schedule of fifteen flights in 1986 alone. But as early as the second shuttle flight, technicians had noticed that the O-rings—enormous circles of rubber that helped to seal segments of the booster rocket together—had charred. Routine reports were filed, but the problem recurred on flight after flight. Both the shuttle research facility at Marshall Space Flight Center and contractor Morton Thiokol’s people decided they would develop a plan to fix the O-ring seal problem themselves rather than review it with NASA management—but personnel changes and wrangling with Congress delayed action. By the end of 1985 ten flights had experienced seal failures. Rather than break the flight schedule, waivers were signed that allowed the flights to continue despite the threats to safety.

  Preparations for Challenger mission 51-L began on a cold Monday in January 1986. Project manager Allan J. MacDonald warned his superiors that low temperatures affected the O-rings and Thiokol engineers recommended against the launch unless the temperature of the O-rings was at least fifty-three degrees Fahrenheit. But on Tuesday, January 28, at 3:10 A.M., the launch crew began pumping liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen into the giant external tank of Challenger. Reports of surface temperatures were not part of the routine, so the twenty-five degrees of the left booster and the eight degrees of the right were not communicated to the launch room. The flight had already been postponed several times. Children across the country were glued to televisions for this flight of Christa McAuliffe, the first “teacher in space,” part of NASA’s program to loft ordinary citizens. The countdown continued and Challenger was launched. Tremendous pressure from the expanding gases inside the rocket booster strained against the flawed rings. Falling ice, steam, and distance obscured the puff of ominous black smoke as Challenger rose.

  Still seconds into the ascent, Challenger was saved by milliseconds when the melted joint created a temporary seal. At T plus 60 seconds, as the main engines throttled up to 104 percent, rookie astronaut Mike Smith yelled, “Feel that mother go.” But the rocket’s vibrations had broken the temporary seal: the O-ring had failed. At T plus 73, NASA officials witnessed the explosion on their television monitors. Nine miles above the Atlantic, Mike Smith could see the flames outside his window. “Uh, Oh!” he said as the cabin broke from the rocket. It plunged 65,000 feet to the sea in two minutes and forty-five seconds. All seven astronauts died, from asphyxiation or fire or impact, as they smashed into eighty feet of water at 207 miles an hour.

  Time and time again it had taken disasters, whether natural or man-made, to force Americans to do the kind of thinking that, had it been done in advance, might have averted or mitigated them. The deaths of seven astronauts focused the American mind. “More than the Challenger exploded in the blue sky over the Atlantic Ocean,” wrote New York Times science correspondent John Noble Wilford. Thirty billion dollars and fourteen years after the huge shuttle effort began, “we are left full of doubts not only about the shuttles and NASA’s fabled competence, but about the very fundamentals of our national space
policy.” At first the media concentrated on the O-rings—so simple to present graphically and ominously— and other shuttle apparatus. Gradually, as the debate widened and deepened, it was apparent that, as Joseph Trento wrote, “the destruction of Challenger is not a story of technological failure—it is a story of political failure,” a function of policy decisions that emerged from political compromises that in turn reflected conceptual muddle.

  The failure to anticipate and plan against disasters had often had its roots in complacency—over the unsinkability of the Titanic, the safety of hydrogen-filled dirigibles, the permanence of 1920s prosperity, the American inability to lose a war. So with the space program, and the complacency had some justification. John Kennedy had made a solid commitment to put a man on the moon—a commitment no later President could repudiate. It was his way of dramatizing his active leadership in comparison with that of Eisenhower, who, according to a Washington story, had said that unlike Queen Isabella’s patronage of Christopher Columbus, he would not “hock his jewels” to send anyone to the moon. Kennedy had been attacked for grandstanding, playing politics, fighting the cold war in space. But Kennedy had his reasons: national defense, strengthening the aerospace industry, national morale. Above all for him it was a matter of national prestige—Yuri Gagarin’s earth orbit was a challenge. His Vice President agreed; to be “second in space,” advised LBJ, was to be “second in everything.”

  On this issue, as on others, Kennedy shifted later. Two months before he died he proposed before the United Nations that Russians and Americans make the moon flight together. “Let us do the big things together.”

  The spectacular feat of Apollo had captured the world’s headlines and imagination. The moon landing became a symbol of the American will, unassailable proof of superior American technology. But Apollo’s end left NASA “with a vehicle rather than a mission.” What next? The boldest spirits wanted to combine a Mars landing with an earth-orbiting space station and a reusable shuttle, but the political environment was changed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Vietnam, together with the easing of cold war tensions, made a national commitment to an adventure in space on the scale of Apollo impossible. And Apollo’s very success—Apollo 11and five subsequent moon landings—had made the public blasé even about men on the moon. The object now, in John M. Logsdon’s words, “was to make access to orbit routine and relatively inexpensive, and that these objectives could be achieved within a budget substantially less than required for Apollo.” But NASA, with the shuttle program it formally adopted in 1972, made a grandiose mockery of these realistic and coherent objectives. The shuttle design incorporated the “highest possible level of technology,” when simpler, cheaper technology would have served the purpose as well, or better. Because the price of the shuttle was so high, the space station which it had originally been intended to service was indefinitely postponed. And in order to promote the shuttle as the only American launch vehicle, NASA reduced or deferred research and development of alternatives, thus eliminating the possibility of a balanced space program or of a fallback in the event of a shuttle failure or disaster. As Wilford wrote, “NASA mortgaged nearly everything—science, space exploration, the development of new technologies—to build the space shuttle on what was a shoestring budget, as big Government projects go.”

  As Congress grew more interested in the shuttle program, NASA, hungry for more funding, responded by creating still other justifications for the shuttle’s existence. Like any bureaucracy, NASA had to justify its own existence, and it was also heavily cross-pressured by its contractors, for whom the agency had been in the 1960s a bottomless feedbag. NASA countered these pressures in part by encouraging the commercial use of space and space technology—the contractors would be kept busy and business would share the costs. Thus telecommunications companies developed their own satellites and NASA launched them, and the later Apollo flights and the shuttle missions conducted experiments in space manufacture. In 1984, the Reagan Administration stepped up commercial development of space. But by the time of the Challenger disaster, the profitability of space manufacture was still unproven. Nor had the shuttle met the expectation that it would lower the cost of space transportation: instead of a projected $260 per pound of payload, the actual price was over $4,000 per pound—and that would rise to $6,800 when shuttle flights resumed.

  The Reagan Administration also accelerated the militarization of the space program. Eisenhower had set a policy followed by the next three Presidents: top priority to the open, civilian applications of the program, not to military uses. When Moscow was reported to have resumed anti-satellite tests in 1976, President Ford instructed the Defense Department to make development of space weaponry a high priority. When the Soviets in 1981 and again in 1983 offered at the United Nations serious treaty proposals for space arms control, the Reagan White House ignored them and continued to pour money—by the late 1980s billions of dollars a year—into a “Strategic Defense Initiative” whose purpose was to “counter the awesome Soviet missile threat” by developing directed-energy weapons that, shot from satellites or from earth to orbiting reflectors, would intercept Soviet missiles in flight. Scientists urged in vain that such funds be spent instead on a more realistic, multifaceted, balanced, and steady program of space research.

  What, then, was space to be used for? For disinterested scientific exploration? Commercial exploitation? As a new platform for the cold war? The American space effort was a complex interweaving of scientific, military, geopolitical, and commercial influences, resulting in complex policy making and shrouded accountability and responsibility. “Because it is difficult in the pluralistic U.S. policy-making process to reach consensus on policy goals, debates about means to achieve those goals often are used as surrogates,” Logsdon wrote after Challenger. “Substituting choices of means for choices of ends produces effective public policy only when agreement on means implies a decision on goals.”

  Americans followed Soviet space exploits with mortification. The Russian tortoise had got off to an early start, then the American hare had bounded far ahead with the moon landing, but by the late 1980s the hare seemed caught in a brier patch and the tortoise far ahead. A major reason was that the Soviets matched their means, their technology, to their goal of the gradual “evolution of man into space.” They had, said John Glenn, now a United States senator, “a very steady, thoughtful, well-laid-out program.” They used rather crude but low-cost and dependable rockets— “Big Dumb Boosters,” the Americans called them—and had 90 successful launches in 91 tries in 1986, while the United States had only six successes in only nine attempts. Their cosmonauts held every endurance record in space. NASA and the Defense Department had long since rejected proposals for an American Big Dumb Booster. Lacking clear ends, stable planning, and consistent follow-through, the Americans made space decisions on the basis of what would “advance the technology,” filling the policy vacuum with expensive high-tech razzle-dazzle.

  By the end of the 1980s the most poignant symbol of intellectual failure in space was an object significantly not in space but rather grounded, swaddled, and isolated in an eight-story “clean room” in California. This was the Hubble Space Telescope. Lofted into the pure atmosphere far from earth’s surface, the Hubble was programmed to peer almost to the edge of the universe. Its blindfold allegorized the clouded vision of key leaders of the space program.

  The songwriter Neil Young in 1979:

  Out of the blue and into the black

  You pay for this but they give you that

  And once you’re gone, you can’t come back

  When you’re out of the blue and into the black.

  PART V

  The Rebirth of Freedom?

  CHAPTER 14

  The Kaleidoscope of Thought

  IN JULY 1979, THIRTY months after he entered the White House, Jimmy Carter faced a crisis of confidence. It was in part a lack of confidence in him, as people waited in gas lines, worried about energy supplies,
and were squeezed by inflation rising toward an annual rate of more than 13 percent. It was even more the President’s loss of confidence in himself, his leadership, his government. He suddenly postponed what was to have been his fifth speech on the energy crisis and repaired to Camp David to consult and to think.

  For ten days, while the nation waited in curiosity and suspense, Carter talked with over 130 persons from virtually every major segment of society. He solicited and received blunt advice, he later reported. A southern governor told him he was not leading the nation, “just managing the government.” Other admonitions: The nation was confronted with a moral and a spiritual crisis. The real issue was not energy but freedom. Some of his cabinet members were not loyal, he was told. “You don’t see the people enough anymore.” But most of the pleas were for stronger leadership. “Mr. President, we’re in trouble. Talk to us about blood and sweat and tears.” … “If you lead, Mr. President, we will follow.” … “Be bold, Mr. President. We may make mistakes, but we are ready to experiment.”

  Carter came down from Catoctin Mountain in an apocalyptic mood. The crisis of confidence, he told the nation in an intensely hyped television address, was a crisis that “strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our Nation.” People were losing faith “not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy.”

  The symptoms of the crisis, Carter went on, were all around. “For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next 5 years will be worse than the past 5 years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote. The productivity of American workers is actually dropping, and the willingness of Americans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the Western world.”