Reaching for the Moon

by Roger D. Launius

  Cobb lobbied extensively behind the scenes for NASA to accept female astronauts and eventually secured a dramatic congressional hearing in July 1962 to explore the possibility of women qualifying for the program. She and fellow pilot Janey Hart, whose husband was the United States senator Philip Hart (D-MI), used Cold War arguments before the House Committee on Science and Astronautics to support their contention that women should fly in space. Sending an American woman into space first, they reasoned, could score a highly visible accomplishment in the space race. NASA officials at this hearing, among them astronaut John Glenn, all insisted that astronauts must be military test pilots and that training women would slow down the astronaut program.

  After two days of testimony, the committee concluded that NASA’s selection process would not be changing anytime soon. The turning point came when Glenn testified to Congress that there was no place for women in that early program. Later, he would admit that his testimony had reflected both the perspectives of NASA’s officials and his personal beliefs at the time. He said he had overcome that thinking in later years. It would be another twenty-one years before an American woman would be sent into space, with Sally Ride serving as a mission specialist on space shuttle flight STS-7 on June 18, 1983. It would be thirty-two years before America sent its first female pilot, Eileen Collins, into space. Shortly before her first launch in 1995, Collins heard the story of the Mercury 13 and invited some of them to Cape Canaveral to witness her launch.

  A Meaning for the First Flights

  The early American and Soviet human space missions had few objectives other than to determine whether or not astronauts and cosmonauts could survive in the exceptionally harsh environment of space. Both programs learned how difficult it was for fragile Homo sapiens to venture into a realm for which it is ill-adapted, resulting in the necessity of designing systems that enable humans both to survive and to complete useful work. As space life scientist Vadim Rygalov from the University of North Dakota remarked in 2008, “Spaceflight is first and foremost about providing the basics of human physiological needs in an environment in which they do not exist.” From the most critical—meaning that its absence would cause immediate death—to the least critical, these include such constants available on Earth of atmospheric pressure, breathable oxygen, tolerable temperature, safe drinking water, digestible food, bearable gravitational pull on physical systems, radiation mitigation, and others of a less immediate nature. Every human spaceflight vehicle, every space suit, every subsystem of even the most simple design takes this as its raison d’être because of the extreme hostility of the space environment.

  Having confronted the challenges and dangers of being among the first beings from Earth to venture into space, the astronauts and cosmonauts rightly became heroes for their respective nations and the remainder of the world. Both sides in the Cold War recognized that their “star voyagers” could be used for propaganda purposes to sway the peoples of various nations to their side. Both groups proved effective for this purpose, and some, such as Yuri Gagarin and John Glenn, became superstars in the public sphere. Sending astronauts and cosmonauts on world tours, having them address Congress and the Politburo, and reaching broad audiences through television created a public frenzy over the space race. Many people around the world paused as major spaceflight events took place during the 1960s to see how these individuals fared. The drama and excitement of the space race found personal connections to millions through the actions of the cosmonauts and the astronauts.

  FOUR

  The Decisions to Go to the Moon

  The decision of President John F. Kennedy in May 1961 to send Americans to the Moon has left an indelible mark on public perceptions of spaceflight and American culture. The Moon, so wrapped up in the human romance, proved the perfect target for Kennedy’s resolve. No other human space mission would have been so innately attractive, so positively viewed in human psyche, so representative of success for a spacefaring nation. That, of course, was the reasoning behind Kennedy’s lunar-landing decision and the reason why American society agreed to support it with significant resources—ultimately $24.5 billion—expended over more than a decade. But the lunar-landing decision has taken on a mythical significance as individuals reflect on it from the more than forty years since it took place.

  In this chapter I revisit the process of public policy formulation that led to the decision to go to the Moon. In so doing I shall seek to answer several core questions about the lunar-landing decision. First, what processes led to the Apollo decision as it unfolded in April–May 1961? Second, what was the relationship of this decision to actions in the Soviet Union, and how did the Soviets respond? Not until 1963 did the Soviet Union reach a decision to make a race to the Moon the key element of its space race strategy, even as it denied such a race was under way.

  Kennedy and the Early Definition of Space Policy

  On May 25, 1961, President Kennedy announced to the nation a goal of sending an American to the Moon before the end of the decade. This decision involved much study and review before it was made public, and tremendous expenditure and effort to make it a reality by 1969. Only the building of the Panama Canal rivaled the Apollo program as the largest nonmilitary technological endeavor ever undertaken by the United States; only the Manhattan Project was comparable in a wartime setting. The human spaceflight imperative was a direct outgrowth of it; Projects Mercury (at least in its latter stages), Gemini, and Apollo were each designed to execute it.

  In 1960 JFK, a U.S. senator from Massachusetts between 1953 and 1960, ran for president as the Democratic candidate, with party wheelhorse Lyndon B. Johnson as his running mate. Using the slogan “Let’s get this country moving again,” Kennedy charged the Republican Eisenhower administration with having done nothing about the myriad social, economic, and international problems that festered in the 1950s. He was especially hard on Eisenhower’s record in international relations, taking a Cold Warrior position on a supposed “missile gap” (which turned out to be fictitious): the United States, Kennedy claimed, lagged far behind the Soviet Union in ICBM technology. He also invoked the Cold War rhetoric envisioning a communist effort to take over the world and used as his evidence the 1959 revolution in Cuba, which brought leftist dictator Fidel Castro to power. The Republican candidate, Richard M. Nixon, who had been Eisenhower’s vice president, tried to defend his mentor’s record, but when the results were in, Kennedy was elected, with a narrow victory margin of 118,550 out of more than 68 million popular votes cast. His Electoral College victory was more decisive, by a margin of 303–219.

  Kennedy as president had little direct interest in the U.S. space program. He was not a visionary enraptured with the romantic image of the last American frontier in space and consumed by the adventure of exploring the unknown. He was, on the other hand, a Cold Warrior with a keen sense of realpolitik in foreign affairs, and he worked hard to maintain a balance of power and spheres of influence in American-Soviet relations. The Soviet Union’s nonmilitary accomplishments in space forced Kennedy to respond and to serve notice that the United States was every bit as capable in the space arena as the Soviets. Of course, to prove this assertion, Kennedy had to be willing to commit national resources to NASA and the civil space program. The Cold War realities of the time therefore served as the primary vehicle for an expansion of NASA’s activities and for the definition of Project Apollo as the premier civil space effort of the nation. Even more significant, from Kennedy’s perspective the Cold War necessitated the expansion of the military space program, especially the development of ICBMs and satellite reconnaissance systems.

  While Kennedy was preparing to take office, he appointed an ad hoc committee headed by Jerome B. Wiesner of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to offer suggestions for American efforts in space. Wiesner, who later headed the President’s Science Advisory Committee under Kennedy, concluded that the issue of “national prestige” was too great to allow the Soviet Union leadership in space effo
rts; therefore the United States needed to enter the field in a substantive way. “Space exploration and exploits,” Wiesner wrote in a January 10, 1961, report to the president-elect, “have captured the imagination of the peoples of the world. During the next few years the prestige of the United States will in part be determined by the leadership we demonstrate in space activities.”

  Wiesner also emphasized the importance of practical nonmilitary applications of space technology—communications, mapping, and weather satellites among others—and the necessity of keeping up the effort to exploit space for national security through such technologies as ICBMs and reconnaissance satellites. He tended to deemphasize the human spaceflight initiative for very practical reasons. American launch vehicle technology, he argued, was not well developed, and the potential of placing an astronaut in space before the Soviets was slim. He thought human spaceflight was a high-risk enterprise with a low chance of success. Human spaceflight was also less likely to yield valuable scientific results, and the United States, Wiesner thought, should play to its strength in space science, where important results had already been achieved.

  Kennedy accepted only part of what Wiesner recommended. He was committed to conducting a more vigorous space program than had Eisenhower, but he was more interested in human spaceflight than either his predecessor or his science adviser. This was partly because of the drama surrounding Project Mercury and the seven astronauts that NASA was training. Wiesner had cautioned Kennedy about the hyperbole associated with human spaceflight. “Indeed, by having placed the highest national priority on the MERCURY program we have strengthened the popular belief that man in space is the most important aim for our non-military space effort,” Wiesner wrote. “The manner in which this program has been publicized in our press has further crystallized such belief.” Kennedy, nevertheless, recognized the tremendous public support arising from this program and wanted to ensure that it reflected favorably upon his administration.

  But it was a risky enterprise—what if the Soviets were first to send a human into space, what if an astronaut was killed and Mercury was a failure—and the political animal in Kennedy wanted to minimize those risks. The earliest Kennedy pronouncements relative to civil space activity directly addressed these hazards. He offered to cooperate with the Soviet Union, still the only other nation involved in launching satellites, in the exploration of space. In his inaugural address in January 1961 Kennedy spoke directly to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and asked him to cooperate in exploring “the stars.” In JFK’s state of the union address ten days later, he asked the Soviet Union “to join us in developing a weather prediction program, in a new communications satellite program, and in preparation for probing the distant planets of Mars and Venus, probes which may someday unlock the deepest secrets of the Universe.” Kennedy also publicly called for the peaceful use of space, and the limitation of war in that new environment.

  In making these overtures Kennedy accomplished several important political ends. First, he appeared to the world as the statesman, seeking friendly cooperation rather than destructive competition with the Soviet Union, knowing full well that there was little likelihood that Khrushchev would accept his offer. Conversely, the Soviets would appear to be monopolizing space for national, especially military, benefit. Second, Kennedy minimized the goodwill that the Soviet Union enjoyed because of its own success in space vis-à-vis the United States. Finally, if the Soviet Union accepted JFK’s call for cooperation, it would tacitly be recognizing the equality of the United States in space activities, something that would also boost American prestige on the world stage.

  The Soviet Challenge Renewed

  Had the balance of power and prestige between the United States and the Soviet Union remained stable in the spring of 1961, it is quite possible that Kennedy would never have advanced his Moon program, and the direction of American space efforts might have taken a radically different course. Kennedy seemed quite happy to allow NASA to execute Project Mercury at a deliberate pace, working toward the orbiting of an astronaut sometime in the middle of the decade, and to build on the satellite programs that were yielding excellent results both in terms of scientific knowledge and practical application. Jerome Wiesner reflected: “If Kennedy could have opted out of a big space program without hurting the country in his judgment, he would have.”

  Firm evidence for Kennedy’s essential unwillingness to commit to a strong space program came in March 1961 when the NASA administrator, James E. Webb, submitted a request that greatly expanded his agency’s budget for fiscal year 1962 in order to permit a Moon landing before the end of the decade. Kennedy’s budget director, David E. Bell, objected to this large increase and told Webb that he would have to obtain the president’s explicit commitment to make the lunar program a part of the administration’s effort “to catch up to the Soviet Union in space performance.” At White House meetings March 21–22, 1961, Webb and Bell debated the merits of an aggressive lunar-landing program before Kennedy and Vice President Johnson, but in the end the president was unwilling to obligate the nation to a much bigger and more costly space program. Instead, in good political fashion, he approved a modest increase in the NASA budget to allow for development of the big launch vehicles that would eventually be required to support a Moon landing.

  A nonchalant pace might have remained the standard for the U.S. civil space effort had not two important events forced Kennedy to act. The Soviet Union’s space effort counted coup on the United States one more time not long after the new president took office. On April 12, 1961, Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space with a one-orbit mission aboard the Vostok 1. The chance to place a human in space ahead of the Soviets had now been lost.

  Close in the wake of the Gagarin achievement, the Kennedy administration suffered another devastating blow in the Cold War that contributed to the sense that action had to be taken. Between April 15 and 19, 1961, the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba, supported by the administration and designed to overthrow Fidel Castro, failed spectacularly. Executed by anti-Castro Cuban refugees armed and trained by the CIA, the invasion was a debacle almost from the beginning. It was predicated on an assumption that the Cuban people would rise up to welcome the invaders; when that proved to be false, the attack was doomed. American backing of the invasion was a great embarrassment both to Kennedy personally and to his administration. It caused enormous damage to U.S. relations with foreign nations, and made the communist world look all the more invincible.

  While the Bay of Pigs invasion was never mentioned explicitly as a reason for stepping up U.S. efforts in space, the international situation certainly played a role as Kennedy scrambled to recover a measure of national dignity. Wiesner reflected, “I don’t think anyone can measure it, but I’m sure it [the invasion] had an impact. I think the President felt some pressure to get something else in the foreground.” T. Keith Glennan, NASA administrator under Eisenhower, immediately linked the invasion and the Gagarin flight as the seminal events leading to Kennedy’s announcement of the Apollo decision. He confided in his diary, “In the aftermath of that [Bay of Pigs] fiasco, and because of the successful orbiting of astronauts by the Soviet Union, it is my opinion that Mr. Kennedy asked for a reevaluation of the nation’s space program.”

  Reevaluating NASA’s Priorities

  Two days after the Gagarin flight, Kennedy again discussed the possibility of a lunar-landing program with Webb, but the NASA head’s conservative estimates of a cost of more than $20 billion for the project was too steep, and Kennedy delayed making a decision. A week later, at the time of the Bay of Pigs invasion, Kennedy called Johnson, who headed the National Aeronautics and Space Council, to the White House to discuss strategy for catching up with the Soviets in space. Johnson agreed to take the matter up with the Space Council and to recommend a course of action. It is likely that one of the programs that Kennedy explicitly asked Johnson to consider was a lunar-landing program, for the next day, April 20, 1961,
he followed up with a memorandum to Johnson raising fundamental questions about the project. Kennedy wanted to know whether “we have a chance of beating the Soviets 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?”

  While he waited for the results of Johnson’s investigation, this memo made it clear that Kennedy had a pretty good idea of what he wanted to do in space. He confided in a press conference on April 21 that he was leaning toward committing the nation to a large-scale project to land Americans on the Moon. “If we can get to the moon before the Russians, then we should,” he said, adding that he had asked his vice president to review options for the space program. This was the first and last time that Kennedy said anything in public about a lunar-landing program until he officially unveiled the plan. It is also clear that Kennedy approached the lunar-landing effort essentially as a response to the competition between the United States and the USSR. For Kennedy the Moon-landing program, conducted in the tense Cold War environment of the early 1960s, was a strategic decision directed toward advancing the far-flung interests of the United States in the international arena. It aimed toward recapturing the prestige that the nation had lost as a result of Soviet successes and U.S. failures. It was, as political scientist John M. Logsdon has suggested, “one of the last major political acts of the Cold War. The Moon Project was chosen to symbolize U.S. strength in the head-to-head global competition with the Soviet Union.”

  Lyndon Johnson probably understood these circumstances very well, and for the next two weeks his Space Council diligently considered, among other possibilities, an earlier lunar landing than the Soviets could accomplish. As early as April 22, NASA’s Hugh L. Dryden had responded to a request for information from the Space Council about a Moon program by writing that there was “a chance for the U.S. to be the first to land a man on the moon and return him to earth if a determined national effort is made.” He added that the earliest this feat could be accomplished was 1967, but that to do so would cost about $33 billion, which was $10 billion more than the whole projected NASA budget for the next ten years. A week later Wernher von Braun, director of NASA’s George C. Marshall Space Flight Center and head of the big booster program needed for the lunar effort, responded to a similar request for information from Johnson. He told the vice president, “We have a sporting chance of sending a 3-man crew around the moon ahead of the Soviets” and “an excellent chance of beating the Soviets to the first landing of a crew on the moon (including return capability, of course).” He added that “with an all-out crash program” the United States could achieve a landing by 1967 or 1968.