The Long Space Age
Page 20
Contrary to the traditional conception of Goddard having been financed almost entirely by private philanthropists, military funding represented a large portion of the funds that he received to develop his rockets. Depending on the comparative metric used, military funding in fact provided some 75 percent of the level obtained from Goddard’s more lauded private benefactors. Nonetheless, the majority of Goddard’s funding was still provided by private sources—a fact that the broader narrative of spaceflight history, with its focus on the heavily government-funded space race, has yet to fully incorporate.
Table 3.1. Robert Goddard’s Funding, 1917–1945
Sources: Goddard, R., The Papers of Robert Goddard, vol. 1 (New York, 1970); see text of chapter 3 for specific source references. PWC-ratio equivalent value and GDP-ratio equivalent value calculations done using measuringworth.com.
The extent of the private philanthropic support that Goddard drew upon is quite impressive. No less than five separate bequests provided him with funding: those of James Smithson, Thomas Hodgkins, Frederick Cottrell, Andrew Carnegie, and Daniel Guggenheim. None of these mostly deceased philanthropists had been personally interested in spaceflight technology. Even Daniel Guggenheim, who provided the funds while still alive, was motivated to do so principally out of the interest of his son Harry and the persuasion of Charles Lindbergh. This underscores the critical importance of well-connected patrons in Goddard’s career. Goddard had a variety of such patrons that provided him with institutional support and connections to funding: Charles Walcott, Charles Abbot, Wallace Atwood, Charles Lindbergh, Harry Guggenheim, and George Lewis. Not only was Goddard’s progress driven forward by his own intrinsic interests, he was also able to connect with patrons who either shared his interests directly or who saw alignment of their own intrinsic interests with what Goddard was seeking to achieve.
As we have already seen in the history of the American Observatory Movement, the private funding attracted by Goddard is not an anomaly in the history of space exploration. On the contrary, Goddard’s program can be seen as part of a continuum of private funding for American space exploration going back for more than a century. Both as a share of total economic resources and in terms of equivalent production worker compensation, Goddard’s career funding falls far short of the level of funding lavished on many of the nineteenth- or early-twentieth-century observatories. Nevertheless, at over $70 million in 2015 GDP-ratio terms, Goddard received over the course of his career a level of funding not dissimilar to what might be required for a nontrivial NASA technology development program of the twenty-first century. Or to put it into a more historical context, the next privately funded liquid-fuel rocketry program to receive similar funding in the United States would not occur until the first private launch-vehicle efforts of the 1980s.
The fact that Goddard’s project funding, while substantial, was far below what could be obtained by American observatories can be attributed in part to the limited signaling ability of Goddard’s early research and development program. With his rockets at a prototype phase and with so many fits and starts to his experimental programs, Goddard was unable to provide the type of signal that could command the private funds he required: given the stage of his research, it was often enough of a signal of far-sighted beneficence for his institutional funders at Clark University and the Smithsonian to fund him at all. When signaling did become a motivating concern, as in Abbot’s impatience for a spectacular and newsworthy flight, patrons could be easily disappointed.
Nevertheless, the notion that a wealthy benefactor would come along to support the ambitious professor’s rocket to the Moon was a common assumption among the American public—who had come to expect such an arrangement from the spaceflight fiction of the previous century—and indeed one did. As had been expected by the early American intellectuals of spaceflight, the most significant financial support for Goddard came from private-sector individuals who shared with Goddard a deeply felt intrinsic desire to explore the limits of flight. The support that Goddard received from Harry Guggenheim and Charles Lindbergh was substantial—but not substantial enough. Though the long-awaited start to American spaceflight technology development had arrived—and the project funded, as expected, by a philanthropically minded, wealthy American—the funding that emerged was nowhere near what was required for the realization of high-altitude liquid-fuel rocketry. As Goddard knew from an early age, the armaments budgets of the Western powers were a far easier and more generous source of funding for technological research if one was prepared to develop weapons—and to achieve his dream of spaceflight, Goddard was.
The extent and enthusiasm of Goddard’s pursuit of military funding was significant. As a result of his efforts and exertions to interest the military in rocketry development, the first military funding that was used for spaceflight development research came not in the Second World War, as is commonly believed, but during the First World War—with Goddard’s pioneering multicharge solid rocket development program conducted in secret at the workshop of the Mount Wilson Observatory. After the Great War, Goddard continued to enthusiastically and consistently pursue military funding, including for the development of gas warfare technology under the Chemical Warfare Service. In all, he worked with and lobbied for support from a good portion of the technical branches of the U.S. military, including the Army Signal Corps, Army Ordnance, Navy Ordnance, Navy Aeronautics, and the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics. Although the bulk of Goddard’s military funding came only late in his career, in 1942 and 1943, it was a very substantial part of his overall program support. Nor did Goddard’s pursuit of weapons-related funding support stop with the government. He pursued with equal vigor, if less success, numerous private-sector technology companies with interests in military sales: the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, Rockwood Sprinkler, DuPont, Glenn L. Martin, Curtiss-Wright, and General Electric. In short, Goddard was a man whose own intrinsic desire for spaceflight, and a future among the planets, was so deeply felt that he was willing to try every avenue he could to make it happen. In the early twentieth century, it simply seemed to him that the most promising avenues available were the ones that led to war.
Empirical matters and economic lessons of history aside, we have also seen that the willful pursuit of military funding extends back to the very start of the history of American spaceflight. There was no halcyon age when the leading spaceflight pioneers did not look to increasing military budgets to search out mutually beneficial relationships, particularly in wartime. The road to the stars was paved, if not necessarily with blood itself, then at least with a sincere willingness to improve bloodshedding capacity in the service of the nation. Robert Goddard, in both his technical acumen and his lust for military funding, was thus the equal of his great German competitor, Wernher von Braun, for they were competitors, on opposites side of the Second World War and in the direct competition for that great goal of Goddard’s life—the development of a high-altitude rocket. The strategies they employed to achieve that goal were shaped by a shared belief—that, as von Braun put it, “the Army’s money was the only hope for big progress toward space travel.”204 As with Wernher von Braun, the life of Robert Goddard thus serves not only as an inspirational story of technological vision and persistence but as a cautionary one as well, one that should remind us of some of the dangers that can arise from an obsessive dedication to spaceflight.
The military interest in delivering payloads long distances, which Goddard had worked hard to cultivate, would become overriding after the development of the nuclear bomb dramatically increased the potential for devastation that could be encapsulated in a “payload.” Henceforth, space technology would become inextricable from matters of national defense, and the military demand for it would create a nationwide industrial base for advanced aerospace technologies from which almost all subsequent spaceflight and space exploration projects would benefit. At the origin of American liquid-fuel rocketry technology, however, there was simply an indiv
idual who desired to make spaceflight a reality. He had committed to dedicate his labor to its development over the course of many decades, and he had worked to create exchange and patronage relationships with the people and institutions that he thought could help him realize his near-term goal of a high-altitude rocket flight—a goal that was one step in his long-term objective of the navigation of interplanetary space, which in turn was part of an ultralong-term vision of a human migration to other star systems.
With this perspective in mind—and after examining in detail Goddard’s career as the first practical developer of spaceflight technology and its first significant fund-raiser—it becomes possible to understand the development of space exploration in simplified terms. Space exploration as an economic outcome can be thought of as the result of the interaction of people who have intrinsic motivations for space exploration, who either self-support their efforts, if they have the resources to do so, or who enter into exchanges with others—with political, military, commercial, philanthropic, scientific, or other space exploration interests—on some basis for resources in order to pursue their space exploration objectives. Robert Goddard’s career and space technology development program conforms to this pattern, as does much of the history of astronomical observatories covered in the previous two chapters. We turn now to that most famous example of space exploration—the Cold War space race—where the producers of space exploration entered into an economic exchange of unprecedented size and created the technology for human spaceflight.
4
IN THE EYES OF THE WORLD: THE SIGNALING VALUE OF SPACE EXPLORATION
One can predict with confidence that failure to master space means being second-best in the crucial arena of our Cold War world. In the eyes of the world, first in space means first, period; second in space is second in everything.
—Lyndon Johnson, April 1961
According to the conventional history of spaceflight, the Space Age began in 1957 with the launch of a small metallic sphere with radio antennae into orbit around the Earth. What had begun as the private ambition of a small cadre of individuals became a geopolitical event of major significance. Over the next decade, the two superpowers of the planet, the governments of the United States of America and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, would compete with each other to be the first to exhibit increasingly impressive, complex, and costly abilities in space in what became popularly known as the space race. The race into space resulted in an explosion of robotic probes out into the solar system, the first voyages of humans to the surface of the Moon, and the first long-term space habitations. In the history of technology, there are few events that match the Space Age in terms of political and cultural significance. In economic terms, the era remains unequaled in the amount of resources that were allocated to those engaged in the exploration of space.
As an epochal event, the dawn of the Space Age has engendered an extensive historical literature. Far from being underinvestigated, the period suffers from the opposite problem: the competing and complementary narratives are so numerous that the event has become overdetermined. This is particularly true for the American space program, which has borne the full force of academic analysis. The growth and evolution of the American space program has been portrayed as a result of Cold War competition for prestige, as a matter of national pride, as a military necessity, as part of the rise of technocracy, as a “Second Reconstruction” program for the American South, as the realized goal of spaceflight revolutionaries, as incremental policy development by the NASA bureaucracy, as an evolutionary inevitability for expanding life, or as all of the above and more.1 One might question the value of adding another voice to this cacophony. Yet it argues by its sheer dissonance for another attempt to sort through the differing viewpoints and attempt a consolidated analysis of the exchange mechanism by which spaceflight activities acquired their extensive funding in the Cold War context.
The participants in the formulation of post-Sputnik American space policy referred consistently to “prestige” in justifying their funding requests. It is therefore not surprising that the concept of prestige-based competition has attained a preeminent explanatory position in the subsequent historiography. This has been the case since the earliest attempt at comprehensive analysis in Vernon Van Dyke’s 1964 work Pride and Power.2 The concept has since retained its prominent position, from Walter McDougall’s Pulitzer Prize–winning account, The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age, in 1985, through to John Logsdon’s comprehensive new summary, John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon, published in 2010.3 Although prestige, a political concept popular in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, can be a useful frame for understanding the political motivations behind the space race, there is a modern concept from economics and biology that provides more explanatory heft—the concept of signaling, which emphasizes the ability of spaceflight activities to credibly transmit information about those undertaking them.
This chapter argues for understanding the competition of the Cold War space race, and the history of spaceflight more broadly, within a signaling framework. Such an approach acknowledges the force of prestige in space history but enfolds that concept within a broader conceptual framework, one that widens the explanatory scope and is also able to explain important historical events that do not fit the “prestige competition” thesis, such as Kennedy’s willingness to cooperate with the Soviets to go to the Moon, and the evolution of the Space Station Freedom program into the International Space Station. Understanding the space race in the context of signaling also provides a new perspective on the domestic and international reactions to Sputnik, on Eisenhower’s unsuccessful attempts to limit what he saw as a “prestige race,” on the growth of space programs outside of the United States and the Soviet Union, and on the decreasing American political interest in spaceflight in the later part of the twentieth century. A signaling analysis also helps to explain how the legacy of the Apollo program has shaped and misshaped American space policy and created popular but misleading perceptions of U.S. space capabilities and the organizational competencies of NASA.
In order to appreciate the political value of spaceflight as a signaling device, we must disaggregate the political demands for space technologies from other applications—such as for military, commercial, or scientific purposes. In parsing this problem, it is helpful to refer to the taxonomy presented in one of the founding documents of the U.S. space program. In the historical narratives that search for the social, political, and economic forces behind the creation of NASA and the U.S. space exploration agenda of the 1960s, pride of place is rightfully given to the 1958 “Introduction to Outer Space” report. It was prepared by Eisenhower’s Presidential Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) under James Killian’s leadership. In it, four motives are listed as to why space technology is a priority, and these deserve to be quoted at length:
The first of these factors is the compelling urge of man to explore and to discover, the thrust of curiosity that leads men to try to go where no one has gone before. Most of the surface of the earth has now been explored and men now turn to the exploration of outer space as their next objective.
Second, there is the defense objective for the development of space technology. We wish to be sure that space is not used to endanger our security. If space is to be used for military purposes, we must be prepared to use space to defend ourselves.
Third, there is the factor of national prestige. To be strong and bold in space technology will enhance the prestige of the United States among the peoples of the world and create added confidence in our scientific, technological, industrial, and military strength.
Fourth, space technology affords new opportunities for scientific observation and experiment which will add to our knowledge and understanding of the earth, the solar system, and the universe.4
The assertion of the Science Advisory Committee that the first of the factors is the deeply felt need to extend ourselves into the unive
rse suggests an important phenomenon often overlooked in the political history of space exploration. As we have seen, this intrinsic interest to explore has been identified as one of the most important motivations behind the dedication of successive generations of Americans to the challenges of spaceflight. As we have also seen with the stories of John Quincy Adams, George Ellery Hale, Robert Goddard, and others, the role of the individual is central to this. It is not so much that humanity feels a compelling urge to explore and discover, but rather that some individuals are determined to go boldly where no one has gone before, that some individuals turn to the exploration of outer space because of a primordial urge to do so. What this means, in economic terms, is that there is a segment of the population that is motivated to supply their intellect, capital, and labor for space exploration projects with limited sensitivity to the monetary reward for doing so.
Of the other three forces, I would argue that only two of them can rightfully be considered motives for space exploration per se. The prestige, science, and military motives have all received significant attention in the secondary literature. However, if we are examining specifically the field of spaceflight and space exploration, as opposed to space activities more generally, only prestige and science, in addition to the satisfying of intrinsic preferences, can be considered as direct objectives. As we have seen with Goddard, there is a close and even symbiotic relationship between military motives and space exploration. The military has gained a number of important capabilities from the efforts of engineers dedicated to space exploration, while those in pursuit of the planets have often leaned on the military in order to acquire the resources for their projects. Fundamentally, however, military objectives have not yet been themselves a motive for space exploration; thus far, they represent a separate need and service with their own separable demands.