After gaining these technical opinions, Lyndon Johnson began to poll political leaders for their sense of the propriety of committing the nation to an accelerated space program with Project Apollo as its centerpiece. He brought in Senators Robert Kerr (D-OK) and Styles Bridges (R-NH) and spoke with several U.S. representatives to gauge support for an accelerated space program. Only a few were hesitant, and Robert Kerr worked to allay their concerns. He called on James Webb, who had worked for his business conglomerate during the 1950s, to give him a straight answer about the project’s feasibility. Kerr told his congressional colleagues that Webb was enthusiastic about the program, and “that if Jim Webb says we can land a man on the moon and bring him safely home, then it can be done.” This endorsement secured considerable political support for the lunar project. Johnson also met with several businessmen and representatives from the aerospace industry and other government agencies to ascertain the consensus of support for a new space initiative. Most of them also expressed support.
General Bernard A. Schriever, commander of the Air Force Systems Command that developed new technologies, expressed the sentiment of many people by suggesting that an accelerated lunar-landing effort “would put a focus on our space program.” He believed that it was important for the United States to build international prestige and that the return was more than worth the price to be paid. Secretary of State Dean Rusk, a member of the Space Council, was also a supporter of the initiative because of the Soviet Union’s image in the world. He wrote to the Senate Space Committee a little later, “We must respond to their conditions; otherwise we risk a basic misunderstanding on the part of the uncommitted countries, the Soviet Union, and possibly our allies concerning the direction in which power is moving and where long-term advantage lies.” It was clear early in these deliberations that Johnson was in favor of an expanded space program in general and a maximum effort to land an astronaut on the Moon. Whenever he heard reservations Johnson used his forceful personality to persuade. “Now,” he asked, “would you rather have us be a second-rate nation or should we spend a little money?”
In an interim report to the president on April 28, Johnson concluded, “The U.S. can, if it will, firm up its objectives and employ its resources with a reasonable chance of attaining world leadership in space during this decade”; he recommended committing the nation to a lunar landing. In this exercise Johnson had built, as Kennedy had hoped he would, a strong justification for undertaking Project Apollo, but he had also moved on to develop a greater consensus for the objective among key government and business leaders.
The NASA Position
While NASA’s leaders were generally pleased with the course Johnson was recommending—they agreed for the most part with the political reasons for adopting an aggressive lunar-landing program—they wanted to shape it as much as possible to the agency’s particular priorities. NASA Administrator James Webb, well known as a skilled political operator who could seize an opportunity, organized a short-term effort to accelerate and expand a long-range NASA master plan for space exploration. A fundamental part of this effort addressed a legitimate concern that the scientific and technological advancements for which NASA had been created not be eclipsed by the political necessities of international rivalries. Webb conveyed the concern of the agency’s technical and scientific community to Jerome Wiesner on May 2, 1961, noting that “the most careful consideration must be given to the scientific and technological components of the total program and how to present the picture to the world and to our own nation of a program that has real value and validity and from which solid additions to knowledge can be made, even if every one of the specific so-called ‘spectacular’ flights or events are done after they have been accomplished by the Russians.” He asked that Wiesner help him “make sure that this component of solid, and yet imaginative, total scientific and technological value is built in.”
Partly in response to this concern, Johnson asked NASA to provide him with a set of specific recommendations on how a scientifically viable Project Apollo would be accomplished by the end of the decade. What emerged was a comprehensive space policy planning document that had the lunar landing as its centerpiece but that attached several ancillary funding items to enhance the program’s scientific value and advance space exploration on a broad front:
1. Spacecraft and boosters for the human flight to the Moon;
2. Scientific satellite probes to survey the Moon;
3. A nuclear rocket;
4. Satellites for global communications;
5. Satellites for weather observation;
6. Scientific projects for Apollo landings.
Johnson accepted these recommendations and passed them to Kennedy, who approved the overall plan.
The last major area of concern was the timing for the Moon landing. The original NASA estimates had given a target date of 1967, but as the project became more crystallized, agency leaders recommended not committing to such a strict deadline. Webb, realizing the problems associated with meeting target dates based on NASA’s experience in spaceflight, suggested that the president commit to a landing by the end of the decade, giving the agency another two years to solve any problems that might arise. The White House accepted this proposal.
Decision
President Kennedy unveiled the commitment to execute Project Apollo on May 25, 1961, in a speech on “Urgent National Needs,” billed as a second state of the union message. He told Congress that the United States faced extraordinary challenges and needed to respond extraordinarily. In announcing the lunar-landing commitment he said:
If we are to win the battle that is going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, if we are to win the battle for men’s minds, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take. . . . We go into space because whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share.
Then he added: “I believe 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 earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”
Robert Gilruth and Wernher von Braun reacted to the Kennedy decision differently. Gilruth admitted, “Frankly, I was aghast. . . . I wasn’t at all sure it could be done.” Nonetheless, he accepted the task at hand and made the most of it, though sometimes reluctantly because of concerns for the lives of the astronauts. Von Braun embraced the decision as the culmination of a lifetime of ambitions. Both gave it all they had, sometimes disagreeing about priorities and methods but always keeping the final objective in the distance.
Previously, the American civil space program had been operating at a measured pace, with appropriate long-term goals. In 1959, just over a year after NASA began operation, it prepared a formal long-range plan that announced that its goal in the 1960s “should make feasible the manned exploration of the moon and nearby planets, and this exploration may thus be taken as a long-term goal of NASA activities.” The plan called for the “first launching in a program leading to manned circumlunar flight and to a permanent near-earth space station” in the 1965–1967 period. It also called for the first human flight to the Moon at an unspecified time “beyond 1970.”
Kennedy threw out the long-range plan by making the Apollo commitment in 1961. In so doing he also overturned the orderly approach to space exploration established during the Eisenhower administration, one that led to the long-range plan and an incremental growth in the budget to about 1 percent of all monies expended by the federal government. Eisenhower had refused to fall prey to public hysteria after the Sputnik launches in 1957, and set in place only with some reluctance NASA as an independent Executive Branch agency in 195
8. Eisenhower took small steps because he possessed a long-term vision for defeating the Soviet Union in the Cold War without head-to-head competition across a broad spectrum. Indeed, he was committed to achieving without undue cost the development of scientific and technical capability both to gain access to space and to operate therein, but this had to be balanced against a wide range of other concerns.
In the crisis over Sputnik, Ike had felt intense pressure from an alliance of diverse interests to establish a cabinet-level federal entity to carry out a visible program of space exploration, something he had always thought unnecessarily expensive and, once created, almost impossible to dismantle. With the creation in 1958 of NASA, an organization with less power and stature than others wanted, Eisenhower was able to deflect the coalition of interests that advocated an exceptionally aggressive space program. In so doing, he thwarted the goal of establishing a large, independent bureaucracy with expensive accelerated programs to race the Soviet Union into space and to accomplish spectacular feats that would impress the world.
Kennedy, however, had a much less refined strategy for how to win the Cold War, and accordingly a greater capacity to view each problem as if he were in a death match. Each confrontation with the Soviet Union took on spectacular proportions and desperate characteristics for Kennedy. For example, had Eisenhower been in office in 1961, it is doubtful that he would have responded to international setbacks with a similar lunar-landing decision. Instead, he probably would have sought to reassure those stampeded by Soviet successes and explain carefully the long-term approach being taken by NASA to explore space. A hint of the Eisenhower approach came in 1962, when he remarked in an article: “Why the great hurry to get to the moon and the planets? We have already demonstrated that in everything except the power of our booster rockets we are leading the world in scientific space exploration. From here on, I think we should proceed in an orderly, scientific way, building one accomplishment on another.” He later cautioned that the Moon race “has diverted a disproportionate share of our brain-power and research facilities from equally significant problems, including education and automation.”
Kennedy’s decision to race the Soviets to the Moon fundamentally altered the space program then under way at NASA, and whether one agrees that this was a positive alteration is very much a matter of perspective. For instance, it placed on hold an integrated space-exploration scenario centered on human movement beyond this planet and involving these basic ingredients accomplished in essentially this order:
1. Earth orbital satellites to learn about the requirements for space technology that must operate in a hostile environment;
2. Earth orbital flights by humans to determine whether it was really possible for humanity to explore and settle other places;
3. Development of a reusable spacecraft for travel to and from Earth orbit, thereby extending the principles of atmospheric flight into space and making space operations routine;
4. Construction of permanently inhabited space stations to observe Earth and from which to launch future expeditions to the Moon and planets;
5. Human exploration of the Moon with the intention of creating Moon bases and eventually permanent colonies;
6. Human expeditions to and eventual colonization of Mars.
Specifically, because of Apollo, NASA lost the rationale for a space station, objective 4, viewed by everyone both then and since as critical for the long-term exploration and development of space.
Instead of building the infrastructure necessary for sustained space exploration, as a space station could have done, JFK committed the nation to a sprint to the Moon as a demonstration of American technological virtuosity, but ultimately it was a demonstration that had little application beyond its propaganda value. Of course, even though the project was not undertaken to advance scientific understanding so much as to resolve Cold War rivalries, one could argue that the scientific return of Apollo was significant. In reality, however, had we found something of interest on the Moon, instead of an aborted space-exploration program, Apollo would have been the vanguard of an armada of spacecraft from Earth. As it was, the belief of most Americans became “been there—done that,” and they pushed for decreased funding for NASA and emphases on other projects after the Moon landings. The dreams of sustained human exploration in the solar system were trashed in the perceptions of Apollo as being something only mildly worthwhile for narrow scientific purposes.
The Apollo Decision as a Model of Public Policy Formulation
Analysts have offered four basic approaches to interpreting the Apollo decision-making process in the more than forty years since Kennedy stood before the American people and declared that we should send astronauts to the Moon. By far the most influential of these interpretations is the conception that Kennedy made a single, rational, pragmatic choice to undertake the U.S. sprint to the Moon as a means of competing with the Soviet Union for international prestige during the height of the Cold War. The president and his advisers therefore undertook an exceptionally deliberate, reasonable, judicious, and logical process to define the problem, analyze the situation, develop a response, and achieve a consensus for action. The timeline progressed from point to point with no cul-de-sacs and few detours from problem definition to sensible decision. It was all so neat and tidy! As such, it has served as a model for public policy formulation.
This argument begins with the assertion that JFK’s space policy was a relic of the Cold War struggle between the United States and the Soviet Union, and that it revolved around the question of international prestige. In this view, Apollo was a clear result of competition between the world’s two superpowers to win the “minds of men” to a specific economic and political system. In essence, the Apollo program was nothing less than the “moral equivalent of war.” It sought to weaken the Soviet Union while enhancing the United States.
There is much to recommend this interpretation, and its study as a model of outstanding policy formulation is appropriate. Its main strength is its insistence that the American effort to land on the Moon served as an enormously effective response to a Cold War crisis with the Soviet Union. At the same time, the most significant problem with this interpretation is its unwavering belief that individuals—and especially groups of individuals, even competing ones—logically assess situations and respond with totally reasonable consensus actions. Since virtually nothing in human existence is done solely on a rational basis, this is a difficult conclusion to accept.
A second interpretation of the Apollo decision suggests that Kennedy’s tortured background and aggressive tendencies affected his decision making, causing him to take a more combative approach toward the Soviet Union than required and necessitating his “winning” at whatever challenge came his way. At some level, Kennedy may have even created crisis situations wherein he reaffirmed his quintessential masculinity and enhanced his own dominance over everyone and everything. Most of these analyses depict JFK in an unfavorable light and focus on his tendencies toward the overarching competitiveness, general recklessness, and Machiavellian ambition instilled in all the sons of Joseph P. Kennedy, Sr. These character studies view Kennedy as an individual who had to dominate all, and who unconsciously, or in some cases deliberately, created situations calculated to demonstrate his mastery. His harsh treatment of women, as an ardent and destructive philanderer, demonstrated this fact, as did his competition with all others in sports, business, and politics. This competition may have prompted Kennedy’s tendency as president continually to evoke crisis in his decision making.
According to the second analysis, President Kennedy’s assertive self-confidence may have provided an important element of the “Camelot mystique,” but carried to a logical conclusion it also led to tense Cold War situations in which on more than one occasion nuclear holocaust became a possible outcome. At the same time, that assertiveness hid a Kennedy weakness for indecisiveness and procrastination until pressed to take a stand. That, coupled with the lack of any essenti
al ideology beyond basic anticommunism and faith in active government, ensured that there was more to the Apollo decision than rational action.
Instead of taking a long view, proponents of the second theory propose, Kennedy engaged in fear-mongering about supposed Soviet strength in space juxtaposed against American weakness, and responded with a lunar-landing decision both spectacular in its reach and outrageous in its cost. Kennedy, because of his competitive nature, was apparently anxious to strap on six-guns and shoot it out with Khrushchev at the OK Corral. This was true despite his recognition that it might not have been the most effective way to deal with the Soviet Union.
A third explanatory approach toward understanding the Apollo decision suggests that Kennedy may have been more oriented toward cooperation with the Soviet Union in space than most people realized. This theory focuses on Kennedy’s appeal to Khrushchev in his inaugural address for a cooperative effort in exploring “the stars,” and the entreaty in the following state of the union address for a joint development of space research for purposes of weather prediction, communications, and exploration.
Reaching for the Moon Page 10