Reaching for the Moon

by Roger D. Launius

  Figure 11. Godfather to the astronauts Robert R. Gilruth, left, enjoys a moment of levity during the Gemini 12 mission in 1966. With Gilruth in Houston’s Mission Control Center, from right, are astronauts Charles “Pete” Conrad, Jr., John H. Glenn, Jr., and Alan B. Shepard, Jr.

  In all, the research and development program for the paraglider extended from May 1962 through 1965. The latter date was just before the inauguration of human flights of the Gemini spacecraft the following spring. Indeed, as the program proved less successful than originally envisioned, NASA engineers kept pushing back deployment of the paraglider, suggesting that the first few missions could use conventional parachutes. At one point in 1964, NASA wanted to have the first seven Gemini capsules use a traditional parachute recovery system, with the last three missions employing the paraglider. NASA engineers never did get the paraglider to work properly and eventually dropped it from the program in favor of a parachute system like the one used for Mercury.

  Even as these trials proceeded, the Gemini program entered its spaceflight phase. Following two unoccupied orbital test flights, the first operational mission took place on March 23, 1965. Mercury astronaut Gus Grissom commanded the mission, with John W. Young, a naval aviator chosen as an astronaut in 1962, accompanying him. The next mission, flown in June 1965, stayed aloft for four days and astronaut Edward H. White II performed the first spacewalk. Eight more missions followed through November 1966 (Table 3). Despite problems great and small encountered on virtually every mission, the program achieved its goals. As a technological learning program Gemini had been a success, with fifty-two experiments performed on the ten missions. The bank of data acquired from Gemini helped to bridge the gap between Mercury and what would be required to complete Apollo within the time constraints directed by the president. Two major objectives had special emphasis during the Gemini program, spacewalking and rendezvous and docking. These proved difficult but the Gemini program allowed NASA astronauts to practice them and ultimately master the techniques. In both spacewalking and rendezvous and docking, the Soviet program also staged major firsts in the game of one-upmanship with the Americans.

  TABLE 3

  GEMINI MISSIONS, 1965–1966

  Spacewalking

  Both the Americans and the Soviets realized early that true space exploration required astronauts and cosmonauts to be able to leave the spacecraft. In 1965 both national space programs undertook the first spacewalks. With the American Gemini program under way and a slate of announced objectives in place—one of which was spacewalking—Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov beat the United States to the first spacewalk during the Voskhod 2 mission on March 18, 1965. Leonov commented: “What struck me most was the silence. It was a great silence, unlike any I have encountered on Earth, so vast and deep that I began to hear my own body: my heart beating, my blood vessels pulsing, even the rustle of my muscles moving over each other seemed audible. There were more stars in the sky than I had expected. The sky was deep black, yet at the same time bright with sunlight.”

  He pushed away from the vehicle and drifted out 17.5 feet before returning to the spacecraft. A tense few moments ensued when Leonov found that his space suit had ballooned when pressurized and was too rigid to reenter the airlock. He solved the problem by bleeding air from his suit to reduce its size. As Leonov wrote about this experience:

  During my training for this mission, I did a drawing showing how I imagined myself walking in space high over the planet Earth in the outer cosmos. The dream came true, and space walking became a reality with my EVA on Voskhod 2 in March 1965. During the space walk, I was exposed to the vacuum of space for some 20 minutes, considerably longer than expected, due to problems re-entering the spaceship. The pressure difference between air in my space suit and the vacuum of the cosmos expanded my space suit and made it rigid, and I had to force some of the air out of the suit in order to close the lock’s outer hatch.

  The Soviet spacewalk was a blatant attempt to steal the march on the American Gemini effort. There was little accomplished other than the distinction of being first, however, and the mission did not lead to any sustained efforts thereafter. Indeed, the Soviets did not undertake another spacewalk until Yevgeny Khrunov and Aleksei Yeliseyev performed the first two-person spacewalk on January 16, 1969, during the Soyuz 4 and 5 missions.

  The first American spacewalk came on June 3, 1965, when Astronaut Ed White floated out of the Gemini 4 capsule. That was a simple affair, floating in space, but NASA soon learned that performing useful functions while weightless was more challenging. The second Gemini spacewalk nearly proved deadly. On June 5, 1966, astronaut Eugene Cernan departed the Gemini 9-A spacecraft in Earth orbit to conduct a pivotal extravehicular activity. It was only the second time an American astronaut had ever ventured outside of a capsule to expose the body to the extreme environment of space. Cernan quickly learned that anything he did in microgravity took more energy than anticipated, and his body overheated. This overtaxed his space suit’s environmental system. His helmet visor fogged over, making it impossible to see, sweat poured into his eyes, and his heart raced to more than three times its normal rate. He lost nearly ten pounds from dehydration. Finally, after more than two hours, and one and a half orbits of Earth, a drained Gene Cernan made it back inside his Gemini spacecraft after failing to complete most of the objectives of his EVA.

  At the same time, NASA learned valuable lessons both about the fragility of the human body in the extreme environment of space and the care to be taken to accomplish useful work while in zero gravity. Its engineers redesigned space suits to provide more robust life support. Additionally, led by Buzz Aldrin, the astronauts developed procedures to more effectively conduct useful work while weightless. Aldrin’s work on spacewalking made it possible to depart the spacecraft and do something useful in the vacuum. Systematically and laboriously, Aldrin worked to develop procedures necessary to conduct spacewalks. He went into a large swimming pool to simulate the experience of zero gravity, and this step of the testing taught engineers how to modify the space suit to keep it from hindering movement by ballooning up and to keep it from either superheating or chilling the astronaut inside. Aldrin eventually confirmed the soundness of the new suit and the procedures developed for EVA during Gemini 12 in November 1966, spending more than five hours outside the spacecraft and performing several functions necessary for the Moon landings.

  Likewise, the rendezvous and docking of two spacecraft proved more difficult than envisioned. Holding a Ph.D. in astronautics from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Aldrin again played a significant role in developing the necessary procedures. His dissertation had offered the theoretical basis for orbital rendezvous, and it provided the basis for the maneuvering and docking of two spacecraft in Earth orbit. Demonstration of this task proved successful only after many failures. For example, on March 16, 1966, Neil A. Armstrong flew his first space mission as command pilot of Gemini 8 with David Scott. During that mission, Armstrong piloted the spacecraft to a successful docking with an Agena target spacecraft already in orbit. Although the docking went smoothly and the two spacecraft orbited together, they began to pitch and roll wildly. Armstrong undocked the Gemini and used retrorockets to regain control of his craft, but the astronauts had to make an emergency landing in the Pacific Ocean. After subsequent trials, however, by the end of the Gemini program rendezvous and docking was routine activity that astronauts performed as a part of the normal mission duties. Soviet cosmonauts did not have similar success until much later. Indeed, all their spacecraft were remotely piloted for docking maneuvers until the era of the International Space Station in the twenty-first century.

  World Opinion Shifts

  Throughout the first years of the space age, public opinion in the United States gave weight to the demonstrations of success made by the USSR. The Soviets’ list of accomplishments was long, and most Americans thought the game of one-upmanship was being won by the Soviets. This was borne out in responses to
public opinion polls on the question (Graph 1). For most of the time during the late 1950s and at the start of the 1960s, the Soviets were viewed as in the lead. This perception began to shift in the middle part of the decade as the Gemini program began to come to fruition. It never relented thereafter. By the completion of the Moon race the United States was viewed globally as the leader in science and technology to which all other nations wanted to be attached.

  American concerns about this perceived lead by the Soviet Union in space sparked the decision to send American astronauts to the Moon during the 1960s, of course, but it manifested itself in a fundamental manner in terms of swaying support toward the American geopolitical coalition. The competition in space revolved, first, around ensuring that allies in the Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union remained in the American camp. Second, lassoing newly emerging nations—especially those recently achieving their independence from European colonial rule—into the American orbit. The fear that there would be more nations like Cuba, whose 1959 leftist revolution led by Fidel Castro had established a Soviet beachhead in the Western Hemisphere and led to years of covert operations against him, permeated American thinking. Preventing that eventuality by impressing these nations with American technological verisimilitude became a major part of what American strategy for the space race engendered.

  Graph 1. Is Russia Ahead of the United States in Space?

  Source: Gallup Polls; wording of questions differed slightly.

  Effective leaders of emerging nations such as Indira Gandhi in India played the United States and the USSR against each other. In an effort to obtain the best results for her advancing nation, especially in technological and economic development, Gandhi made deals with both sides. Enthralled by early success in space exploration by the Soviet Union and the United States, Indian scientist Vikram Sarabhai sought relationships and cooperative space efforts with both powers. He engineered the creation of the Indian National Committee for Space Research (INCOSPAR) in 1962 and its successor the Indian Space Research Organization (ISRO) in 1969. India worked with the Soviet Union to develop and launch its own satellite, Aryabhata, which orbited on April 19, 1975, to conduct experiments in X-ray astronomy and solar physics, and to measure ionized gas in the upper atmosphere. At the same time India’s scientists and engineers built strong ties to NASA for cooperative projects and were involved as key investigators on several scientific probes launched by NASA in the 1960s and 1970s.

  TABLE 4

  FIRST TEN NATIONS IN SPACE AFTER USA/USSR, 1962–1974

  Other nations came into the American sphere of space exploration in the latter half of the 1960s, as perceptions began to shift in favor of the demonstrated success of the Gemini program and the achievement of the Moon-landing effort. A case in point was Pakistan, which since 1961 had been eager to enter the “space club,” a loose confederation of nations engaging in spacefaring activities, as a means of demonstrating that it deserved a seat at the table of world governance. Impressed by both American and Soviet successes, Pakistan eventually entered agreements with the United States to cooperate on scientific efforts. These examples were repeated many times around the globe, and from the time of the first cooperative ventures with American allies in the 1960s, a multination consortium of efforts blossomed during the post–space race era of the decades that followed (Table 4).

  Could the Moon Race Have Become a Cooperative Program?

  John F. Kennedy’s decision to send Americans to the Moon by the end of the decade, announced in May 1961, was a visible challenge to the Soviet Union to demonstrate technological supremacy in space exploration. The winner would gain prestige among the nonaligned nations of the world, perhaps swaying them into the winner’s Cold War coalition. The competition was real, it was impressive, and it opened the treasury to achieve that greatest of all endeavors, setting foot on another body in the solar system. And the Soviet Union took Kennedy’s bait, beginning its own aggressive effort in 1964 to reach the Moon before the Americans.

  But what if the United States and the USSR had undertaken the Moon-landing program cooperatively rather than as a competition? It is more than an academic question. As we have seen, there were genuine efforts to make it a joint program, from JFK’s appeal to Khrushchev in his inaugural address almost to the end of Kennedy’s truncated term in office. Of course, no cooperative venture materialized. What might have been had Kennedy lived, had Khrushchev been able to hold on to power? After they were gone, the game of one-upmanship continued, but as the sixties progressed, the Soviet Union registered fewer successes. In part that was because the Americans had developed and were systematically working to achieve a Moon landing, in part it was because the towering presence of Sergei Korolev had passed from the scene and no one else was able to hold together the competing factions inside the Soviet technical bureaucracy. The result was a race to the finish, but the only nation making a creditable effort was America. NASA had a national mandate, sufficient resources, and clear direction; it completed an impressive Moon-landing program during the 1969–1972 era.

  SIX

  Creating the Moon-Landing Capability

  The race to the Moon that the United States and the Soviet Union undertook led to sophisticated expressions of technological capability on both sides. Charting these developments consumes this chapter, and both national efforts certainly registered positive results in the face of unique challenges and tragic accidents. Putting a human on the Moon in 1969 was a feat of astounding technological virtuosity. Landing there six times, as the Americans did, was overwhelmingly significant. Project Apollo succeeded because it was a triumph of management in meeting enormously difficult systems engineering and technological integration requirements.

  Gearing Up for Project Apollo

  The first challenge NASA leaders faced in meeting the presidential mandate in 1961 of a Moon landing was to secure resources. While Congress enthusiastically appropriated funding for Apollo immediately after the president’s announcement, NASA Administrator James E. Webb was rightly concerned that the momentary sense of crisis would subside and that the political consensus present for Apollo in 1961 would abate. He tried, albeit without much success, to lock the presidency and the Congress into a long-term pledge to support the program. While the politicians had made an intellectual commitment, NASA’s leadership was concerned that they might later renege on the economic part of the bargain.

  Initial NASA estimates of the costs of Project Apollo were about $15 billion through the end of the 1960s, a figure of nearly $200 billion in 2018 dollars. Webb quickly stretched those initial estimates for Apollo as far as possible, sometimes evening doubling them, with the intent that even if NASA did not receive its full budget requests, as it did not during the latter half of the decade, it would still be able to complete Apollo. At one point in 1963, for instance, Webb highballed estimates for Apollo funding through 1970 at more than $35 billion. This was just to give breathing space for the program if necessary. A tally of Apollo costs presented by NASA to Congress in 1973 stood at $25.4 billion in current dollars. That remained NASA’s official characterization of Apollo costs until a 1979 analysis, presented in Graph 2, revised the number downward to $21,347,641, with the single highest expenditure in any year coming in 1969, the year of the first two Moon landings. As it turned out, by consistently overestimating the costs, Webb was able to sustain the momentum of Apollo through the decade, largely because of his rapport with key members of Congress and with Lyndon B. Johnson, who became president in November 1963.

  Project Apollo, backed by sufficient funding, was the tangible result of an early national commitment in response to a perceived threat to the United States by the Soviet Union. NASA leaders recognized that while the size of the task was enormous, it was still technologically and financially within their grasp, but they had to move forward quickly. Accordingly, the space agency’s annual budget increased from $500 million in 1960 to a high point of $5.2 billion in 1965 (Table 5). The NASA fund
ing level represented 5.3 percent of the federal budget in 1965. A comparable percentage of the $4.09 trillion federal budget in 2018 would have equaled more than $216 billion for NASA, whereas the agency’s actual budget then stood at less than $20 billion. The money spent on Apollo was a significant amount to be sure, but GDP, a measure of the total output of the American economy, for 1965 was nearly $4.3 trillion. NASA’s share of that amount was 0.07 percent—7 one hundredths of a percent. The nation could afford to go to the Moon even if it was a significant investment.

  Graph 2. Apollo Costs by Year In billions of contemporary dollars. The official estimate provided to Congress in 1973 was $25.4 billion.

  Sources: Chariots for Apollo: A History of Manned Lunar Spacecraft (NSA SP-4205, 1979), appendix H, 409–411; House Subcommittee on Manned Space Flight of the Committee on Science and Astronautics, 1974 NASA Authorization, Hearings on H.R. 4567, 93/2, part 2, p. 1271.

  Out of the budgets appropriated for NASA each year approximately 50 percent went directly for human spaceflight, and the vast majority of that went directly toward Apollo. Between 1959 and 1973 NASA spent $23.6 billion on human spaceflight, exclusive of infrastructure and support, of which nearly $20 billion was for Apollo. In addition, Webb sought to expand the definition of Project Apollo beyond just the mission of landing humans on the Moon. As a result, even those projects not officially funded under the Apollo line item, such as the Ranger, Lunar Orbiter, and Surveyor satellite probes, could be justified as supporting the mission.

  TABLE 5

  OVERALL NASA BUDGET IN BILLIONS OF DOLLARS

  (UNCORRECTED FOR INFLATION)

  Year

  Amount