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Though Eisenhower wasn’t enthusiastic about a space program, he knew that in light of Soviet accomplishments, the United States would have to have one. The Soviets were developing a manned space flight, and America would follow suit. The first NASA administrator, Keith Glennan, announced the plan. By November 1958 he had organized a small Space Task Group, an impressive assembly of engineers headed by Robert Gilruth, who may have wondered if it was a great career move.3 So far, Congress and the president had authorized the Mercury Project, but its scope wasn’t too promising. The plan was that a man riding in a capsule atop of a Redstone rocket would be lobbed into the atmosphere. On a later mission, he would be launched into orbit on the Air Force’s Atlas. It was true that by April 1959 the Task Force had hired seven Mercury astronauts who would be a part of these missions, but no one knew what would happen after that. Could people function in space? Unknown. What purpose would they serve? Unknown. What price tag? Incredibly expensive. An Exotic Idea Keith Glennan thought beyond these problems. He had been giving some serious thought to what seemed at the time a preposterous idea. He wanted to plan a program for a manned space flight to land on the moon. To support it, he called on the brilliant spacecraft designer for the Space Task Group, Max Faget. He asked Faget to address an informal seminar meeting at NASA headquarters on Washington’s Lafayette Square, near the White House. Faget’s task was to tell the assembled members, including the brilliant rocket scientist, Wernher von Braun, how a lunar landing mission might be accomplished. He laid out a preliminary and tentative plan: on the first trip an astronaut would just loop around the moon to get a good look at it. Faget said he pictured the pilots looking down at it with binoculars. On subsequent missions they would look for landing sites and take reconnaissance photos. Finally, they would go down and land. He recalled later, "The thinking at that time was very primitive."4 But it was a start, and soon Glennan had formed the Goett Committee, named for its chairman, senior engineer, Harry Goett. The committee was asked to look into the idea further. At a meeting in May 1959 these engineers identified nine steps in a manned space flight schedule, with a lunar landing as number seven. By June they were promoting a manned lunar landing as the next goal after Mercury. By early 1960, they had gotten support from Eisenhower to accelerate the Saturn superbooster program, which would build rockets big enough to launch a manned satellite to the moon. By late January, the Goett Committee had a name for the new spacecraft: it would be called Apollo. Reality Check Yet the idea of a moon landing could not have seemed more remote. That past September, the Space Task Group was scheduled to launch Big Joe, an Atlas missile carrying the first Mercury capsule. The writers of Apollo: Race to the Moon related that the capsule had literally being altered with a tool purchased from Sear’s in Orlando. Though aspects of the flight were very encouraging, it failed to meet the goals of the mission, and the press reported it as a "bust." Up until this point, President Eisenhower had conceived of the space program as a scientific research mission run by civilians. After Big Joe, he revised his thinking, signing an executive order moving Wernher von Braun and his rocket engineers from their work on military ballistic missiles to the NASA program.5 It was an important "infusion of talent" into the agency, but there were still big problems. By the fall of 1960, the Eisenhower administration seemed unsympathetic to the space program and slashed the NASA budget for the next year. In a reversal of a previous directive, Eisenhower cut the second stage of the Saturn program. Without that, even if the United States had manned spacecraft, they would be relegated to low-orbit flights, without the thrust for moon landings. Worse than the budget cuts, though, was the cold hard fact that after the Mercury program there might be nothing. The president had expressed an opinion that "further tests and experiments will be necessary to establish if there are any valid scientific reasons for extending manned space flight beyond the Mercury program."6 A New View
Disturbing News Had NASA leaders known what Kennedy was considering, they wouldn’t have liked it. For one, Kennedy suggested dissolving the National Aeronautics Space Council, which was the liaison between NASA and the White House. Eisenhower had sat as its chairman; Kennedy wasn’t interested. Only at the insistence of Vice President Elect Lyndon Johnson was the council saved. Johnson agreed to be the chair. Since his days as Senate leader, Johnson had supported the space program, telling a Democratic Caucus session as early as 1958, "Control of space is control of the world."9 Kennedy wasn’t as enthusiastic, and neither was the man he appointed to head his Committee on Space, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor named Jerome Weisner. The committee was very much against the idea of a manned space flight. In the Weisner Report, which he presented to Kennedy, he said that the only satisfactory parts of the U.S. space program were the scientific, unmanned space probes. According to Weisner, manned space flight was much too risky, and its only real benefit was promoting public relations. Furthermore, he said, instruments could do a better job than man in space, and they "didn’t talk back."10 In any case, as soon as the Weisner Report was released, Kennedy announced that Weisner would be his special assistant for science and technology. Though morale at NASA sunk lower and lower, the Space Task Force continued with its plan to go to the moon. By now, President
Kennedy had appointed James E. Webb as the chief administrator
of NASA. By March 1961 Webb had been filled in on the Manned Lunar
Landing Program, and the Space Task Force team had briefed
him in a lengthy strategy session. He took its wish list to the
president, requesting appropriations for several items. Though
Kennedy approved the resumption of the second stage Saturn project,
funds for the detailed design of the Apollo spacecraft
were put indefinitely on hold. Undaunted, the Apollo Liaison Group
held a planned three-day meeting starting Monday, April 10, 1961.
Group members had no way of knowing that their optimistic attitudes
were warranted, because "all of the equations were about
to change."11 That Thursday the
president called a meeting in the White House Cabinet Room with
his space advisors, including Weisner, NASA head James Webb, and
his deputy, Dr. Hugh Dryden. He wanted to know: What is the status
of America’s space program, and was there any way to compete
with the Soviets? They gave Kennedy the news: most likely the
Soviets were going to be the first to put crews of two and three
into orbit, the first to establish a space station, and the first
to circumnavigate the moon. If the United States wanted to compete,
it would have to jump ahead a step.17 Kennedy asked, "Now,
let’s look at this. Is there any place we can catch them?
What can we do? Can we leapfrog?" NASA deputy Dryden told
him there was one chance, and that would be to support a "crash"
program, as big as the atomic bomb Manhattan Project of
World War II. Such an intense program might put a man on the Moon
in ten years. It would be a gamble, and it would cost $20 billion.
Kennedy was startled at the price tag. "Can’t you fellows
invent some other race here on earth that will do some good?"
But nothing held the fascination of a flight to the moon. The
president ended the meeting saying that they had to figure a way
to catch up. As he said, "There’s nothing more important."18
On May 21, 1961, President John F. Kennedy took up the political and patriotic banner of the space race, and, at last, embraced it. Standing before Congress to deliver a special message on "urgent national needs," he asked for an additional $7 billion to $9 billion over the next five years for the space program. He did not justify the needed expenditure on the basis of science and exploration, but placed the program clearly in the camp of competing ideologies: If we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, 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 from which road they should take.22 Then, he took the "next step," the one his space advisors had told him was so important: First, I believe that 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 the 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.23 With Kennedy’s full support, NASA was able to accomplish its goals with dizzying speed. In June and July, right after the speech, detailed specifications for spacecraft hardware were completed. By August, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology Instrumentation Lab had a contract for an Apollo guidance system. In September, NASA selected Michoud, Louisiana as a production facility for Saturn rockets. In November, the Saturn C-1 was launched, and on and on it went. As one Task Force engineer noted, "I could hardly believe we could move so fast. In those days, you could do things with a half-page memo."24 The dramatic NASA event that would raise the passions of the public even more was taking place at Cape Canaveral. It was John Glenn in Friendship 7 this time, Tuesday, February 20, 1962. Again, the world exulted as Glenn cried, "Capsule is turning around. Oh, the view is tremendous. . . . Cape is go, and I am go!"25 President Kennedy was there to greet him upon his return. "This is a new ocean," he said, "and I believe America must sail upon it." Time, covering the event, commented: "In terms of national prestige, Glenn’s flight put the U.S. back in the space race with a vengeance, and gave the U.S. and the entire free world a huge and badly needed boost."26 That the space race
was about the United States and the "free world" could
not have been more apparent than in Kennedy’s remarks at
Rice University in September 1962: President John F.
Kennedy’s leadership in "sending a man to the moon and
returning him safely to the earth" is undeniable. Once he
gave his leadership and support, the slow, lumbering movement
of America’s space program gained remarkable momentum. But
like a doubter who is finally converted, once he overcame his
reluctance, he put the full force of his persuasive gifts behind
it. On the day before he was assassinated in Dallas, President
Kennedy spoke at the dedication of the Aerospace Medical Health
Center at Brooks Air Force Base in Texas. The president used a
story by the Irish writer, Frank O’Connor. Kennedy had read
that when O’Connor was young, he and his boyhood friends
would trudge across the country until they came to a seemingly
insurmountable wall. Fearing they would not have the courage to
go over the wall without some extra motivation, they would toss
their caps over, and then, as O’Connor had said, they had
no choice but to follow. Speaking as much for himself as for the
country, he said, "This nation has tossed its cap across
the wall of space and we have no choice but to follow it."28
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