Even after Gagarin and the Bay of Pigs, during the month preceding the May 1961 speech announcing Apollo, Kennedy had his brother, Robert F. Kennedy, quietly assess the Soviet leadership’s inclinations toward taking a cooperative approach to human space exploration. In addition, NASA Deputy Administrator Hugh L. Dryden undertook a series of talks with Soviet academician Anatoly A. Blagonravov. Kennedy also instructed Wiesner to convene the President’s Science Advisory Committee, a panel populated with representatives from outside NASA, to come up with ideas for possible cooperative missions with the Soviets, including an international lunar base. In a memo ironically written the same day as JFK’s Apollo speech, Eugene B. Skolnikoff, who was on Wiesner’s staff, proposed, “We should offer the Soviets a range of choice as to the degree and scope of cooperation.” As Kennedy speechwriter Ted Sorensen remarked, “It is no secret that Kennedy would have preferred to cooperate with the Soviets on space exploration.”
Within two weeks of giving his bold May 25 speech, Kennedy met Khrushchev at the Vienna summit and proposed making Apollo a joint mission with the Soviets. The Soviet leader reportedly first said no, then replied, “Why not?” and then changed his mind again, saying that disarmament was a prerequisite for U.S.-USSR cooperation in space. On September 20, 1963, Kennedy made a well-known speech before the United Nations, in which he again proposed a joint human mission to the Moon. He closed by urging, “Let us do the big things together.” In public the Soviet Union was noncommittal. Pravda, for example, dismissed the 1963 proposal as premature. Some have suggested that Khrushchev viewed the American offer as a ploy to open up Soviet society and compromise Soviet technology. Although these efforts did not produce a cooperative venture—Kennedy was assassinated two months after his U.N. speech and Khrushchev deposed the next year—the fact that Kennedy pursued various forms of space cooperation until his death suggests that he was unsure that a U.S.-only Apollo program was the best course.
Finally, one interpretation of the Apollo decision emphasizes Kennedy as visionary leader—as essentially a space cadet—committed to expanding the human presence throughout the solar system. In this scenario the Apollo decision was merely the first step in an expansive effort to explore and colonize the heavens. Kennedy therefore approved Apollo because he was a visionary who saw space exploration as a noble, worthy goal in its own right. Even without Cold War competition, even without Soviet successes in space, Kennedy would have made his decision to go to the Moon and stuck with it because he considered exploration an objective good. This “romantic” view of space may be attractive—allowing those holding it to cast JFK as a latter-day Columbus or Lewis and Clark—but there is no evidence to support the belief.
Space enthusiasts might like to believe that one of their own occupied the White House and set the nation on a bold spaceflight adventure. Instead, Kennedy maintained a studiously ambivalent record on space exploration before the Gagarin flight of April 1961, neither firmly pro nor con. Journalist Hugh Sidey noted that on assuming the presidency, Kennedy “seemed to know less” and to be “less interested in” space than in virtually any other major policy area.
Finally, recently released tape of a White House meeting on November 21, 1962, between President Kennedy and NASA Administrator Webb demonstrates beyond all dispute the error of the romantic approach. When asked to more aggressively support a broad range of spaceflight activities, Kennedy responded, “I am not that interested in space.” The major reason he was expending so much money on Apollo, he said, was because of its importance in the Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union.
All of this suggests that JFK’s Apollo decision was much more complex and involved than most have generally believed. It is, at best, an ambivalent representation of the rational actor approach to decision making in recent American history. In part because of this, the Apollo program left a divided legacy for NASA and the aerospace community. The Apollo decision created for the space agency an expectation that the direction of any major space goal from the president would always bring NASA a broad consensus of support and provide it with the resources and license to dispense as it saw fit. Something NASA officials have been slow to understand is that Apollo had not been conducted under normal political circumstances and would not be repeated.
The Apollo decision was, rather, an anomaly in the national decision-making process. The illusion of the “golden age” of Apollo has been difficult to overcome, and moving beyond the Apollo program to embrace future opportunities has been equally difficult.
JFK and the Limits of Presidential Leadership
In announcing the Moon-landing commitment, President Kennedy had correctly gauged the mood of the nation. His decision was met with strong initial support. No one seemed concerned either about the difficulty or about the expense. Congressional debate was perfunctory and NASA found itself literally pressing to expend the funds committed to it during the early 1960s. Like many political decisions, the decision to carry out Project Apollo was an effort to deal with an unsatisfactory situation, in this case the global perception of Soviet leadership in space and technology. As such, Apollo was a remedial action ministering to a variety of political and emotional needs floating in the ether of world opinion. Apollo addressed these problems effectively, and was worthwhile if measured only in those terms. In announcing Project Apollo, Kennedy put the world on notice that the United States would not take a back seat to its superpower rival. John Logsdon commented: “By entering the race with such a visible and dramatic commitment, the United States effectively undercut Soviet space spectaculars without doing much except announcing its intention to join the contest.” It was an effective symbol, just as Kennedy had intended.
It also gave the United States an opportunity to shine. The lunar landing was so far beyond either U.S. or Soviet capabilities in 1961 that the early lead in space activities taken by the Soviets would not predetermine the outcome. Kennedy’s commitment gave the United States a reasonable chance of overtaking the USSR in space activities and of recovering a measure of lost status.
Even though Kennedy’s political objectives were essentially achieved with the decision to go to the Moon, other aspects of the Apollo commitment require assessment. Those who wanted to see a vigorous space program, a group led by NASA scientists and engineers, obtained their wish with Kennedy’s announcement. An opening was present to these partisans in 1961 that had not existed at any time during the Eisenhower administration, and they made the most of it. Into the overall package supporting Apollo, they inserted additional programs that they believed would greatly strengthen the scientific and technological return on the investment to go to the Moon. In addition to seeking international prestige, this group proposed an accelerated and integrated national space effort incorporating both scientific and commercial components.
A unique confluence of political necessity, personal commitment and activism, scientific and technological ability, economic prosperity, and public mood made possible the 1961 decision to carry out an aggressive lunar-landing program. It then fell to NASA and other organizations of the federal government to accomplish the task set out in a few short paragraphs by the president. By the time the goal would be accomplished in 1969, few of the key figures associated with the decision would still be in government leadership positions. Kennedy fell victim to an assassin’s bullet in 1963, and Wiesner returned to MIT soon afterward. Lyndon Johnson, of course, succeeded Kennedy as president but left office in January 1969, just a few months before the first landing. Webb resolutely guided NASA through most of the 1960s, but his image was tarnished by, among other things, a 1967 Apollo accident that killed three astronauts; he retired from office under something of a cloud in October 1968. Hugh Dryden and several early supporters of Apollo in Congress died during the 1960s and never saw the program successfully completed.
In some respects, Apollo reflected the peak of what some have called the “imperial presidency.” This is the term often given to the aggrandizement of p
residential power that came during the administrations of John F. Kennedy, Lyndon B. Johnson, and Richard M. Nixon. The development prompted a number of commentators to criticize the ease with which chief executives overwhelmed other centers of power in the United States. By the time of the Watergate affair, which brought down the Nixon administration in 1974, the expansion and abuse of presidential power relative to the Congress and courts had created a full-blown governmental crisis. Beginning in the mid-1970s, historians and political scientists like Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., warned that deference to the president had upset the traditional system of checks and balances.
The Soviets Decide to Race America to the Moon
By May 1961, when the Americans formally announced their intention of landing on the Moon by the end of the 1960s, Soviet aspirations were very real but publicly unstated. When asked about racing the Americans, Soviet officials persistently denied any such objective. Regardless, Korolev, Glushko, Mishin, and many in the Kremlin were intent on besting the Americans in a head-to-head Moon race. Korolev persisted in proposing various schemes to pursue a Moon landing. He recognized the necessity of a large booster designed to hoist seventy-five tons into orbit, and persuaded Khrushchev in 1962 to approve development of the N1 Moon rocket.
In August 1964 Korolev persuaded Khrushchev to back a fullblown lunar-landing program, though responsibility for only part of the effort was assigned to Korolev. Rival design bureaus were brought under Korolev’s leadership. The project known as L3 called for the landing of cosmonauts on the Moon before the Americans. The L3 spacecraft would be launched into orbit on the N1 rocket, now with a mandated payload capacity of ninety-five tons. At the same time, Khrushchev gave a Korolev rival, Vladimir Chelomey, a parallel project, known as the LK-1, to send two cosmonauts around the Moon. Korolev and Chelomey thereafter competed for primacy in the space efforts of the Soviet Union and never were able to obtain the resources necessary to be fully successful.
With an alternative space program now operating under Chelomey, another longtime Korolev rival, Valentin Glushko, threw in his lot with Chelomey and built an excellent engine for the LK-1 Moon rocket. With Glushko refusing to support Korolev’s Moon effort, Korolev turned to a loyal but untested rocket engine designer named Nikolay Kuznetsov. He tapped Kuznetsov to produce engines for the N1. It proved a huge gamble that did not pay off: Kuznetsov built a fine engine, the NK-33, but it did not have enough power to loft the mighty N1 launcher for a Moon shot. To overcome the lack of lift power, the N1 used thirty NK-33s to power the first stage, and the engineers never were able to get them to work effectively together. Each rocket test was a failure.
Figure 10. Two N1 Moon rockets appear on the pads at Baikonur in early July 1969. The N1 was designed for the Soviet space program’s human lunar missions. In the foreground is booster number 5L with a functional payload for a lunar-orbiting mission. In the background is the IMI ground test mockup of the N1 for rehearsing parallel launch operations. After takeoff the rocket collapsed back onto the pad, destroying the entire pad area in a massive explosion.
Beyond this, infighting took place at every turn. After Khrushchev’s overthrow in late 1964, Korolev campaigned to take over Chelomey’s circumlunar project. He failed but engineered the cancellation of the LK-1 in October 1965. Korolev accepted the use of a Soyuz spacecraft to send cosmonauts around the Moon powered by a new rocket that Chelomey was developing, the Proton. Korolev promised to undertake a circumlunar mission by late 1967, the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. By the end of 1965 the Soviet program was anything but unified; it was planning two distinct components in a circumlunar flyby with cosmonauts and a landing. Both of these were intended to beat the Americans.
Korolev’s premature death in January 1966 compounded the confusion. His longtime deputy, Vasily Mishin, took over management but could not contain the rival factions in the Soviet space program. As this took place, the Soviet Union officially denied any Moon-landing program at all.
FIVE
The Game of One-Upmanship
The space race began with a series of space spectaculars, with the Soviet Union enjoying early and sustained success until the mid-1960s. This effort represented a high-water mark of Nikita Khrushchev’s premiership, and he exploited it to the fullest. Seemingly, the communist state’s rocketeers enabled one stunning success after another until the American Gemini program in 1965, which demonstrated superb American capability. In those first eight years of the space age, it looked as if the Soviet Union did everything right in spaceflight, and the United States appeared at best a weakling without the kind of capabilities that the command economy of the “workers’ state” in the Soviet Union had been able to muster. The United States had to mobilize to “catch up” to the apparent might of its Cold War rival. Robert Gilruth, who led the NASA center that handled human spaceflight, and Wernher von Braun, who built the rockets used for Apollo, are central to this story. As surely as the several crises in Berlin—the blockade and airlift, the wall—and the other flashpoints of competition, this game of “one-upmanship” served to fuel the antagonism and steel the resolve of both sides in the Cold War.
Soviet Rocket Development from the R-7 to Soyuz
In both the United States and the Soviet Union a powerful rocket was required to undertake a Moon race. A rocket must be used to overcome the force of gravity holding everything to the surface of this planet. In 1728 British scientist Sir Isaac Newton showed that a cannonball fired from atop a mountain could orbit Earth—that is, if it could travel fast enough and there was no air to slow it down. The bigger the charge used to fire the cannonball, the faster and farther it would travel before Earth’s gravity pulled it to the ground. If it achieved enough speed, the downward curve of its path would match the curve of Earth. The cannonball would continue to fall toward the Earth but never actually land—it would be in orbit. Newton calculated orbital speed at 14,500 and 18,000 miles per hour, or between 4 and 5 miles per second, depending on altitude, drag, and other factors.
Harnessing the considerable energy necessary to reach Earth orbit became possible only in the aftermath of technology developments of World War II. However, from orbit it takes far less energy to go someplace else. There is an old saying in the space-exploration community: because of the energy required to escape Earth’s gravity, once you reach orbit, you are “halfway to anywhere” you want to go.
While the definition has evolved over time, current international practice defines space as 100 kilometers (62 miles) above Earth. Even 62 miles up, the atmosphere is still dense enough to drag down satellites and spacecraft. They must be boosted to a height approaching 225 miles for normal orbital activities. Space vehicles such as those flown during the space race routinely fly at this altitude.
Building the technology to reach this realm above Earth, and to send spacecraft beyond it, proved challenging. The first to do so were the powerful partners and rivals Sergei Korolev and Valentin Glushko, whose contributions made possible the early successes of the Soviet Union. The large ICBM built by Korolev, the R-7, and powered by Glushko’s rocket engines enabled a long list of firsts to be piled up by the Soviet Union.
The R-7, first built as a ballistic missile (SS-6) in the late 1950s but never a practical weapon system because of the lengthy time necessary to prepare it for launch, became famous as the rocket used by Korolev to orbit Sputniks 1 and 2 as well as the first cosmonauts. It consisted of a core stage surrounded by four strap-on boosters. About two minutes into flight the four strap-ons separated from the core; after the core ran out of fuel, additional upper stages fired.
This became a highly flexible and reliable system for Soviet space launches, and Korolev and Glushko modified it with more advanced upper stages and more efficient engines over time. The version that launched Gagarin in 1961 was known as Block Ye and could orbit about five tons. Another modification with a more powerful upper stage provided the lift for the Voskhod flights of the mid-1960s. Another variant
, which became known as Soyuz, began flying in November 1966. Numerous Soyuz variations—Soyuz-L, Soyuz-M, Soyuz-U, and Soyuz-U2—have launched hundreds of payloads into orbit.
American Launchers: Redstone, Atlas, and Titan
While the Korolev/Glushko effort kept to a basic design for its launch vehicles—modifying and upgrading as necessary to provide greater capability—the American approach relied on a succession of designs specific to the mission envisioned. All the early American space race launchers were based on military ballistic missile designs modified for human spaceflight. The Redstone—which launched the first American satellite into orbit and the first two Americans into suborbital flights in 1961—emerged from the rocket team headed by von Braun, leading a cadre of able rocketeers, some of whom had accompanied him from Germany at the end of World War II. Von Braun christened the team’s first American missile on April 8, 1952, in recognition of its development at Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Alabama, where the U.S. Army concentrated its rocket development activities.
A direct descendant of the German V-2 rocket of World War II, the Redstone’s liquid-fueled engine burned alcohol and liquid oxygen and produced about seventy-five thousand pounds of thrust. Nearly seventy feet tall and slightly less than six feet in diameter, it formed the basis of the army’s proposal to launch the first human into space even before the establishment of NASA. With the unlikely name of Project Adam, the proposal called for the use of a modified Redstone booster to launch a pilot in a sealed capsule along a steep ballistic, suborbital trajectory. The capsule would reach an altitude of about 150 miles before splashing down by parachute in the Atlantic missile range east of Cape Canaveral, Florida, where von Braun had established launch facilities.
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