It was the flight of Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first man of the Space Age, that induced Kennedy to demand a mission that would one-up the Soviets. NASA administrator James Webb had previously tried to get approval for the Apollo program in March 1960 and had been rebuffed. But Gagarin’s flight on April 12, 1961, led to a new media outcry, as The New York Times declared Gagarin’s flight new evidence of “Soviet superiority” while the Red Square celebrations were carried globally by the BBC.75 Less than a week after Gagarin’s feat came the humiliating Bay of Pigs invasion on April 17–19—the failure of which constituted another powerful signal, albeit an unintended one. Even before that, Kennedy had ordered a full-scale inquiry into the space program and had decided that some response was needed, although most sources agree that he had yet to make a final decision on his course of action.76 After the Bay of Pigs, he sent Vice President Johnson a memo asking:
1. Do we have a chance to beat the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the moon, or by a rocket to land on the moon, or by a rocket to go to the moon and back with a man? Is there any other space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win?
2. How much additional would it cost?
3. Are we working 24 hours a day on existing programs? If not, why not? If not, will you make recommendations to me as to how work can be speeded up?77
The second and third questions are process related, but the first addresses the root issue: Is there a way to win? The perception of competition is taken for granted. The question is, What space achievement can the nation undertake that would let the world know that America is superior to the Soviet Union? Kennedy had clearly come to appreciate the general signaling value of space exploration and was determined to make use of that characteristic as a means of repositioning America’s global reputation.
Johnson’s consultations and responses indicated his agreement with this position, noting, “This country should be realistic and recognize that other nations, regardless of their appreciation of our idealistic values, will tend to align themselves with the country which they believe will be the world leader—the winner in the long run. Dramatic accomplishments in space are being increasingly identified as a major indicator of world leadership.”78 The political and signaling nature of the decision to go to the Moon is further underscored by the omission of the President’s Science Advisory Committee from Johnson’s consulting process. When it came time for the joint submission of a response plan by James Webb of NASA and Department of Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, competition for global leadership was portrayed as the prime motivator of space exploration: “This nation needs to make a positive decision to pursue space projects aimed at enhancing national prestige. Our attainments are a major element in the international competition between the Soviet system and our own”79 (emphasis in original). As Kennedy saw it, NASA’s goal was “the preservation of the role of the United States as a leader,” and “to demonstrate to a watching world that it is first in the field of technology and science.” 80
Kennedy, McNamara, and Webb all perceived the way in which space exploration acted as a signal of national abilities and character. Kennedy’s Rice University speech in September 1962, in which he announced his intention to pursue the Apollo program, evoked intrinsic values, calling the exploration of space “one of the great adventures of all time.” It emphasized the signaling aspect of space activities, stating that a country must engage in space exploration endeavors “because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.” 81 Landing on the Moon, Kennedy saw, would be an effective signal of American supremacy because it would be an objective measure of national skills and, above all, because it was hard and costly—the root of an effective signal. In his address to Congress on the matter, he further noted the potential “impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take.” 82 He also explicitly made the connection between the power of a signal and its cost: “no single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind . . . and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.” 83 The signaling effect was the fundamental basis for Kennedy’s support for the Apollo program, as is clear when he proclaimed that “if we are to go only halfway, or reduce our sights in the face of difficulty, in my judgment it would be better not to go at all.” 84 Here Kennedy portrayed the Apollo program as a winner-take-all competition, not something that could be justified on its own intrinsic merits, but something that could only be justified in the context of a competitive imperative. Kennedy had clearly understood the holistic signaling character of space exploration, as had James Webb: “In the minds of millions, dramatic space achievements have become today’s symbol of tomorrow’s scientific and technical supremacy. There is, without a doubt, a tendency to equate space and the future.” 85 Robert McNamara spelled out his own understanding in even more detail: “All large scale space programs require the mobilization of resources on a national scale. They require the development and successful application of the most advanced technologies. Dramatic achievements in space, therefore, symbolize the technological power and organizing capacity of a nation. It is for reasons such as these that major achievements in space contribute to national prestige. This is true even though the scientific, commercial or military value of the undertaking may, by ordinary standards, be marginal or economically unjustified.” 86 McNamara understood the process through which space-related achievements signaled national power and had even come to see that the signal was the only valid political justification for undertaking the enterprise. For all the major decision-makers who enabled the Apollo program, the resources were seen as dedicated to national prestige—recognition of the signaling function of space exploration.
Although prestige might be a sufficient explanatory concept for the early history of the decision to go to the Moon, Kennedy’s offer to Khrushchev of a cooperative lunar landing has complicated narratives that put prestige at the center. Within a month of his speech to Congress announcing his intention for a manned Moon mission, Kennedy suggested the possibility of a joint lunar expedition to Khrushchev. This occurred at the June 4, 1961, Vienna Summit, where Kennedy pursued the idea with Khrushchev over lunch but received an ambiguous response and no commitment.87 Khrushchev later warmed to the idea after the orbital flight of John Glenn, however, and suggested cooperation in his congratulatory note. Kennedy and the State Department worked to develop concrete proposals, including two tandem weather satellites, tracking stations, and satellite communications. The result would be brief discussions between technical representatives on both sides, but enthusiasm for the cooperation faded due to general disagreement on disarmament. Although Kennedy reiterated the idea as late as September 1963 in a speech to the United Nations, his assassination two months later put an end to the prospect. The abortive attempt to create a cooperative lunar program thus left no major programmatic legacy, but it did leave a historical challenge to those seeking to explain the events of the space race solely on the basis of competition for prestige.
One rejoinder is that, regardless of Kennedy’s intentions, the relatively broad base of support for the Apollo program suffered erosion when a cooperative venture was proposed—thus suggesting that a competitive dynamic was indeed the driving force that sustained the American space program. Kennedy’s apparent change of course for Apollo created a backlash that drained political support and is likely to have played a part in the cuts by the Manned Space Flight Subcommittee of $259 million for fiscal year (FY) 1964, $120 million directly from Apollo, plus a further reduction of $90 million on the House floor. In the heated discussion of the FY 1964 budget, a Republican amendment to the bill was added that prohibited the use of any funds for a joint human lunar landing with any Communist nation. The political demand for space exploration as a competitive signaling opportunity clearly outweighed any inclination toward cooper
ation.
A signaling interpretation makes it possible, however, to incorporate Kennedy’s offer of cooperation into the same framework as the competition for prestige. Because of the substantial resources required for a lunar landing, Kennedy’s willingness to contemplate sharing the massive project with the Soviet Union was a way of providing a strong signal of openness toward substantive and broad-based overall cooperation. Indeed, Kennedy’s overture on the Apollo program was the first explicit offer of a program of large-scale cooperation between the two superpowers since the Second World War. Instead of the costliness of space exploration being used to signal superpower leadership over a perceived rival, Kennedy was using it as a credible signal of a general willingness to cooperate. The fact that he repeated the offer at the United Nations in 1963, in spite of congressional concerns, is of particular significance. In the wake of the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis, when conflict between the superpowers had brought the world to the brink of nuclear war, Kennedy understood the value of seeking to redirect the signaling power of the space program toward building trust and confidence.
The power of space exploration to signal cooperative commitment was recognized in the United States as early as the legislation that created NASA—the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958. The House Select Committee reporting on the legislation saw international cooperation at the heart of the new agency: “It is necessary to make real, aggressive efforts at forming international programs, at developing the purely international frame of mind in which lies this earth’s only ultimate stability.” 88 The committee further declared that the new space agency “must be organized first as an active agent of international cooperation and ultimately as the basis for an international organization.” 89 Senator Lyndon Johnson alluded poetically to the way in which cooperation through space programs might lead to peace: “Men who have worked together to reach the stars are not likely to descend together into the depths of war and desolation.”90 A study by the staff of the House Space Committee in 1961 directly recognized the mechanisms through which resource expenditure on space exploration could contribute to peaceful international relations, noting that “the absorption of energies, resources, imagination, and aggressiveness in pursuit of the space adventure may become an effective way of maintaining peace.”91 At the root of this theory was a recognition that mutual expenditure of resources on an expensive and high-visibility project would send a credible signal of cooperation and would bind the behavior of both parties toward joint endeavor.
The intent to signal cooperation was at the fore in the first post-Apollo spaceflight program—the 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP). ASTP featured no fundamentally new operational or technological knowledge nor any significant gain in military knowledge for either side. It was, however, at the time the most resource-intensive project of cooperation between the two sides and was part of the culmination of the détente process. Although the mission itself did not happen until 1975, its origins can be dated back to an exchange of letters in 1962 between Kennedy and Khrushchev after the Vienna meeting. With both agreeing in principle to increased cooperation, Kennedy asked his administration to prepare “new and concrete proposals for immediate projects of common action.”92 NASA, the White House, and the State Department prepared a list of space projects that could serve as the first such action. This led to the first discussions between NASA Deputy Director Hugh Dryden and Anatoli Blagonravov, former president of the Academy of Artillery Sciences and then Soviet representative to the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space. These negotiations led to the first concrete projects of cooperation—in data exchange and satellite tracking. These projects were important in the buildup to détente and in providing the groundwork for ASTP. Nixon and Brezhnev signed the agreement that included ASTP in 1972 as part of a number of cooperative undertakings meant to signal political commitment to détente.93
The official U.S. budget for ASTP was around $300 million ($3.2 billion in 2015 GDP-ratio terms), although that did not fully include the cost of the Apollo Command Module, Apollo Service Module, and Saturn 1B rocket, which had already been constructed for the Apollo lunar program.94 Of this expenditure, only $10 million was for scientific work. As Olin Teague, chair of the House Space Committee acknowledged, it was “strictly a political, psychological effort.”95 That ASTP’s significant expenditure was justified purely on its signaling benefit is widely accepted; in fact, this reinforced its potency as a signal with respect to Soviet-U.S. cooperation.
Cooperative efforts in space were also used as visible signals of alliance building with existing allies by both sides. By the end of 1962, the United States had made arrangements for cooperation in space activities with sixty-one countries, with a specific focus on sounding-rocket development in countries ranging from Canada to Pakistan.96 The Soviet Union signed cooperative agreements on space activities with France in 1966, and the Interkosmos program saw the participation of cosmonauts from thirteen Soviet allies, from Afghanistan and Bulgaria to Syria and Vietnam. The United States responded with collaborative initiatives on the Space Shuttle program with Canada and West Germany, and invited flights with nationals from Mexico and Saudi Arabia. Although the inclusion of foreign nationals on already-scheduled flights had a relatively low marginal cost to the Soviet Union and the United States, they were nonetheless high-value tokens of favor for the partner countries who could not sustain the cost of developing their own spaceflight capabilities. Veblen noted the way in which this type of cooperation is also part of signaling leadership and superiority: “As wealth accumulates on his hands, his own unaided effort will not avail to sufficiently put his opulence in evidence by this method. The aid of friends and competitors is therefore brought in by resorting to the giving of valuable presents and expensive feasts and entertainments.”97 Looking at these actions through a signaling framework allows the separate motivations of “prestige” and “peace”—of competition and cooperation—to be understood as functioning through the same mechanism.
While providing a unifying context for space exploration policies aimed at both peace and prestige, signaling theory also provides new insight into other important events in American space history. This includes understanding how concerns over negative signaling contributed to the decision by the Nixon administration to develop the space shuttle. Negative signaling is an aversionlike phenomenon that, as Veblen explained, arises out of the arms race of conspicuous consumption: “it is much more difficult to recede from a scale of expenditure once adopted than it is to extend the accustomed scale in response to an accession of wealth.”98 This results in a lock-in effect, whereby an “element of the standard of living which set out with being primarily wasteful, ends with becoming, in the apprehension of the consumer, a necessary of life.”99 Or, as it is more colloquially put—a luxury, once acquired, becomes a necessity. Once a signal has been established, it becomes difficult, even politically impossible, for the signaler to cease the signaling activity, as it would cause a significant loss of reputation. Within this context, there is significant evidence to suggest that such a loss aversion to negative signaling has been an important element in the resource allocations for spaceflight in the post-Apollo period.
Nixon’s decision to develop the space shuttle is a good example of the role that concerns over negative signaling have played in the American space program. Beginning in 1969, NASA began to search for a new program to follow Apollo. The agency initially proposed to develop a series of expensive elements for a space exploration architecture that would eventually lead to a landing on Mars. The Nixon administration, however, had read the public mood, which was against additional expensive spaceflight extravaganzas, and vetoed NASA’s initial proposals until the agency was left with a single element of this elaborate architecture—the space shuttle.100 It was a close fight for even this new expenditure.101 The negotiation and principal budgetary discussion for the space shuttle took place between NASA and the Office of Management and Budget
(OMB) and was not an initiative of the president in the way that Apollo had been for Kennedy. That such a major space program was established first within the broader government bureaucracy is itself a sign of the acceptance that large space exploration expenditures had achieved within government budgets. The argument that ultimately carried the day, however, was one that highlighted the signaling value of spaceflight—and more specifically the negative signal that the failure to pursue a new spaceflight project would send.
When NASA administrator James Fletcher made his case for the space shuttle, his first point was a simple statement, that “the U.S. cannot forego [sic] manned space flight because for the U.S. not to be in space, while others do have men in space, is unthinkable, and a position which Americans cannot accept.”102 Caspar Weinberger, deputy director of the OMB, who had significant purview over NASA’s budget and was generally hostile to new NASA requests, echoed Fletcher’s statement. Weinberger was very blunt about the signal that would be sent if the United States failed to commit to a new spaceflight program: “It would be confirming in some respects, a belief that I fear is gaining credence at home and abroad: that our best years are behind us, that we are turning inward, reducing our defense commitments, and voluntarily starting to give up our super-power status, and our desire to maintain world superiority.”103 Interestingly, Weinberger did not have a strong opinion as to what the major new spaceflight program should be—space shuttles and nuclear rockets were just two options that seemed acceptable to him—only that there should be one. On the memo, Nixon wrote “OK” and “I agree with Cap” to indicate that he supported Weinberger’s analysis.104
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