Chasing the Moon

by Robert Stone

  On America’s third-place, also-ran network, ABC, the man on the beat was a new science reporter, thirty-two-year-old Jules Bergman, who during the next quarter century would cover every American crewed space mission for the broadcaster. Along with Cronkite, Bergman became the TV journalist most often associated with the American space program during the 1960s and early 1970s.

  Cronkite’s patriotic enthusiasm for his nation’s first piloted spaceflight was evident. At the moment Shepard took manual control of Freedom 7, Cronkite emphasized that this was something Gagarin had not done. And in truth, Cronkite was noting an important distinction between the two programs: As early as 1959, NASA officials had determined that its astronauts would be active pilots of the spacecraft, as it was conceivable that their individual skills would be needed to successfully execute a mission. In contrast, the Soviet designers favored automated systems that prevented the first Russian cosmonauts from taking dynamic control of their spacecraft. Their primary role was as propaganda; there was little for them to do in space other than return home alive.

  When reporting on Shepard’s flight, Soviet newscasts took pains to emphasize that the United States had only performed a brief suborbital mission, while Gagarin had completed a full orbit of the Earth. But the public response in the United States was anything but subdued. The flight of Freedom 7 sparked an outpouring of national pride not seen in years. Neither the television networks nor the White House was prepared for the overwhelming reaction. And the White House’s new resident was taking notice.

  On a sunny morning three days after Shepard’s flight, a trio of Marine helicopters landed on the White House lawn. Emerging from the last helicopter were Alan Shepard, his wife, and Lieutenant Colonel Powers, who were greeted by the president and Mrs. Kennedy and Vice President Johnson. As James Webb, the other astronauts, and assorted congressmen looked on in the Rose Garden ceremony, the president awarded Shepard the civilian NASA Distinguished Service Medal.

  A few minutes later Kennedy was due to address the annual convention of the National Association of Broadcasters. Newton Minow, who had been actively working to make the first telecommunications satellite a reality, had received a call from the White House, asking him to accompany the president to the event.

  While waiting outside the Oval Office, Minow saw Kennedy gesture to him. “I’ve got Commander Shepard and Mrs. Shepard in my office. What do you think about taking him to the broadcasters’ convention?”

  “That would be absolutely perfect,” Minow told him.

  Kennedy then told the Shepards the plan and said to Minow, “You come with me. I want to change my shirt.”

  In the White House living quarters, Kennedy proceeded to do just that, all the while engaging in conversation with Minow, who was feeling a bit awkward.

  “So, what do you think I should say to the broadcasters?” the president asked.

  Fumbling a bit and somewhat intimidated, Minow suggested he might want to talk about the difference between the way the United States conducted its missions in the open and the way they were done in the Soviet Union. “In the United States we invite radio and television broadcasters to be there and to provide the American people with an account of what is going on. In the Soviet Union, nobody really knows what happened—whether it was a success or a failure. Everything is hidden. You should thank the broadcasters for carrying the entire story of Shepard’s flight.”

  On the way to the Sheraton Park Hotel, Minow noticed that the president was in an ebullient mood. He was basking in the moment, which had come after weeks of criticism for the Bay of Pigs and Gagarin’s flight. The president and the country suddenly felt good about something they had accomplished.

  At the hotel there were rousing cheers and applause as Kennedy introduced the nation’s broadcasters to someone he described as the country’s “number-one television performer…[with] the largest rating of any performer on a morning show in recent history.”

  The station owners and network executives loved it. And then, in an address that Minow believes was almost entirely improvised, Kennedy artfully enlisted the broadcasters as partners in America’s space program by using emotion to meld their innate patriotism with their responsibility as the electronic gatekeepers of a free and open society.

  “There were many members of our community who felt we should not take that chance,” Kennedy told the audience. He was not only answering those who disagreed with his decision to broadcast the launch on live TV but also subtly countering critics of the piloted space program itself, such as former president Eisenhower, academic scientists, and his own science adviser, Jerome Wiesner. “But I see no way out of it,” Kennedy continued. “The essence of free communication must be that our failures as well as our successes will be broadcast around the world. And therefore we take double pride in our successes.”

  Kennedy then asked his audience, whom he praised as the “guardians of the most powerful and effective means of communication ever designed,” to fulfill their national responsibility when promoting the country’s defense of freedom. As Shepard stood by his side, Kennedy made an emotional appeal to enlist the broadcasters’ partnership. Just what he had in mind would be revealed to the nation two weeks later.

  Ironically, Kennedy’s well-received speech to the National Association of Broadcasters was quickly overshadowed by the address Minow delivered the next day, an open challenge to television executives to deliver on the medium’s enormous promise rather than merely providing “a vast wasteland” of entertainment. He urged the broadcasters to expand their offerings by calling upon a wider array of existing American talent, creativity, and imagination and to have the courage to experiment and include diverse voices and points of view. Minow’s speech was subsequently called “the Gettysburg Address of Broadcasting.”

  Along with the famous images of the young president and his family, a number of the most idealistic and visionary speeches ever delivered—like Minow’s—define the Kennedy era and continue to stir the emotions of listeners more than half a century later. Kennedy gave only a handful of speeches about space exploration, but in them he captured the essential aspirational vision that served to explain America’s space program of the 1960s. And no speech was as pivotal as the one he delivered to an open session of the U.S. Congress on May 25, 1961, which was titled a “Special Message on Urgent National Needs” but was later known as “the moon-shot speech.”

  Prior to this address, there had been no groundswell of public interest for a dramatic, expensive space venture. In a Gallup poll conducted shortly beforehand, nearly 60 percent of the respondents were opposed to spending billions from the national treasury to put an American on the Moon. Rather, Kennedy was exercising a leadership initiative. He delivered his speech when his approval rating was at an extraordinarily high 77 percent. Kennedy’s address was carried on live television at 12:30 P.M., in spite of grumbles from the networks about keeping it under an hour.

  Framing the situation of the lagging American space program in terms of competing ideologies—democracy versus communism—President Kennedy requested an additional 7 to 9 billion dollars over the next five years to fulfill the dream that the space advocates had been urging since the early 1930s. “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.” Geopolitics established the agenda and the goal; science and exploration were secondary.

  Despite the huge projected expense to the national economy, little vocal opposition followed it. Republican newsletters published the following week were far more critical of the president’s other domestic programs. Gagarin and Shepard had ushered in the age of human spaceflight, and in the emotion of the momen
t the inevitable destiny of the species in the stars went unquestioned.

  Although newspapers had already published front-page intimations of the president’s moon-program proposal, some at NASA were caught off guard by Kennedy’s speech. Robert Gilruth, who had visited the White House after Shepard’s flight, first heard news of the speech when he arrived in Tulsa to attend a space conference. He was aghast at what NASA was facing. At their meeting a few days earlier, Gilruth had told Kennedy, “I’m not sure we can do it, but I’m not sure we can’t.” But Gilruth, only four years older than the president, sensed in Kennedy a youthful recklessness that might have been a factor in his decision. “He was a young man. He didn’t have all the wisdom he would have had if he’d been older. [Otherwise] he probably never would have done it.”

  Cornered by a journalist at the Tulsa conference, Wernher von Braun provided a quotation crafted for American readers: The United States is “back in the solar ball park. We may not be leading the league, but at least we are out of the cellar.”

  The singular importance of Kennedy’s May 25, 1961, speech may appear to place it as an isolated incident. However, it coincided with another major story unfolding at the time. The day before Shepard’s flight, the first Greyhound bus carrying thirteen Freedom Riders into the American South left Washington, D.C., destined for Louisiana. Most of them were college-age students motivated by Kennedy’s call to service, volunteering to challenge the existing racial-segregation laws.

  The Greyhound bus never arrived in Louisiana. Eleven days into its journey, a mob of people—many of them members of the Ku Klux Klan—attacked and burned the bus in Anniston, Alabama, one hundred miles south of Huntsville. The attackers assaulted many of the students, even attempting to burn them alive inside the bus. On May 20, a crowd armed with baseball bats, broken bottles, and lead pipes attacked another Freedom Rider bus in Montgomery, Alabama.

  Besides proving to be a decisive moment in the emerging American civil rights movement, the attacks on the Freedom Riders attracted network journalists equipped with the new lightweight 16mm news cameras that had become available only in the past year. The great news stories of the 1960s would be covered differently than before. Portable 16mm film cameras were taken into space, to the jungles of Southeast Asia, and to the streets of Selma, Alabama, to tell the news with an immediacy and emotional impact that previous generations had never seen.

  Had it not been for television, many contend, the civil rights revolution would not have occurred when it did. “When television viewers saw dogs being unleashed against kids who were marching for freedom and saw the violence on their screens, the conscience of America was awakened,” explained Newton Minow. “And that had a lot to do with changing public opinion.” The images from the South were also affecting America’s reputation as a beacon of freedom for the rest of the world. This proved particularly problematic in the newly independent, non-aligned countries of Africa, Latin America, and Asia, which after decades of colonialism were becoming of strategic and economic interest to the two opposing Cold War superpowers.

  An addition to the Kennedy administration roster was a government outsider recognized by most American television viewers: journalist Edward R. Murrow, who for more than two decades served as the voice and conscience of CBS News. By 1960, Murrow had grown increasingly disaffected with his relationship with the network and its chairman, William Paley. The CBS chairman’s chilly reaction to a Murrow speech criticizing television’s failure to deliver on its potential, and Murrow’s rivalry with the younger Walter Cronkite, prompted the veteran newsman to accept Kennedy’s invitation to oversee the United States Information Agency (USIA), charged with shaping America’s public image abroad.

  During mid-1961, as the images from Cape Canaveral and Alabama filled newspapers and newsreels, Murrow wondered if negative stories of racial prejudice might be countered by a more inspiring space-related story that would appeal to foreign readers. Murrow typed out a quick memo to his fellow Carolinian James Webb, which asked: “Why don’t we put the first non-white man in space? If your boys were to enroll and train a qualified Negro and then fly him in whatever vehicle is available, we could retell our whole space effort to the whole non-white world, which is most of it.”

  And then he sent a second copy to Robert Kennedy. At the bottom Murrow added, “Hope you think well of the attached idea. It is practically an orphan.”

  Webb had also been thinking about how powerfully space-age imagery might affect public opinion and support. While he agreed that positive benefits might result from Murrow’s proposal, he thought it difficult to implement. It could also enrage some of the staunch segregationist congressmen representing the Southern states that had NASA centers. Nevertheless, Webb added that he would keep it in mind, likely hoping this would be the last he would hear of the matter. It was not.

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  ALMOST IMMEDIATELY AFTER Kennedy made his landmark address to Congress, he began having second thoughts. The expense was enormous. And after flying a single astronaut on a fifteen-minute flight, no one at NASA had a clear idea how they would get a crew all the way to the Moon and back.

  In early June, less than a month after his announcement, Kennedy flew to Vienna for his first—and what proved to be only—meeting with Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. There was no formal agenda, but the discussions did not go well. By their conclusion Khrushchev left the meeting convinced that his Western adversary was as naïve and reckless as his recent actions had suggested. But largely overshadowed by subsequent events was a brief discussion about space that had taken place between the two leaders. Kennedy had made a bold and unexpected overture to Khrushchev, proposing that in a public gesture of cooperation the two superpowers combine their resources and venture to the Moon jointly.

  At first it appeared that Khrushchev was open to the idea, but the next day he rejected it. When he returned from the summit, Khrushchev explained to his son Sergei that if the two superpowers worked together, keeping Soviet secrets would be impossible. The United States would discover that the Russian ICBMs were far less efficient than they had claimed. Kennedy’s proposal went nowhere, but he refused to abandon the idea.

  The president’s request for more than a half billion dollars for accelerated space exploration was approved by Congress and signed into law the day of the second Mercury Redstone mission, piloted by Gus Grissom, on July 21, 1961. Within days of its passage, advertisements began to appear in trade publications. The defense and aerospace contractor General Dynamics enticed engineers and scientists “just a cut above the average” to consider relocating to San Diego. The ad featured an illustrated montage showing a smiling middle-class couple engaged in water-skiing, tennis, swimming, and golf, promising the immeasurable rewards of working on the country’s space program while raising a family in Southern California’s resort-like climate.

  After President Kennedy’s space budget was approved by Congress in mid-1961, American aerospace contractors ran trade advertisements to lure additional engineers and scientists. Honeywell touts the coming Apollo program with an early visual conception of the three-man moon ship.

  Far more difficult tasks faced the leaders at NASA. Specifically, they needed to determine the best method for successfully accomplishing Kennedy’s challenge on time and on budget. NASA had previously undertaken a long-term study of a moon landing as a thought experiment, but the details of how to accomplish Project Apollo—as it had been named in mid-1960—were still very much up for debate.

  A decade earlier, in his Collier’s article, Wernher von Braun had proposed a landing on the Moon using multiple large vehicles assembled near a revolving space station in low earth orbit. A few years later he proposed launching men from the Earth to the Moon in a single gigantic rocket. After jettisoning the large stages that boosted it into space, a single piloted vehicle would then proceed to the lunar surface and subsequently
return to Earth, much like the British Interplanetary Society’s moon-ship scenario of 1939. In contrast to the “earth-orbital rendezvous” approach utilizing the space station, this straight-line approach became known as “direct ascent.” In fact, neither method was practical given the current state of technology in the early 1960s. Additionally, both plans required that hundreds of pounds of fuel and provisions needed only for the final return journey travel to and from the lunar surface with the astronauts.

  With Kennedy’s 1970 deadline hanging over everyone’s head, building von Braun’s massive spinning space station for the earth-orbital-rendezvous scenario was too complicated to be a viable option. And while few doubted that von Braun’s Saturn rocket could eventually get men to the Moon, the trick of landing on its surface and then launching from lunar gravity to return to Earth added another order of magnitude of complexity. NASA’s brain trust next gravitated toward accepting an earth-orbital-rendezvous plan in which a moon vehicle would be assembled in earth orbit from components launched on multiple rockets.

  Gradually a third option, which had been dismissed in earlier discussions, was given another look. It was a risky scenario but offered strategic advantages. Known as “lunar-orbit rendezvous,” it was championed by John Houbolt, a young aerospace engineer from NASA’s Langley Research Center. It proposed launching together on a single rocket two individual small spacecraft—the Apollo and a lunar-landing bug. They would then separate during lunar orbit. The bug would descend to the Moon, land, and then return to lunar orbit. The two craft would rejoin in lunar orbit, the empty bug would be jettisoned, and the entire crew would return to Earth in the Apollo spacecraft. It was an unorthodox proposal as it required multiple rendezvous and dockings far from the Earth, something no one was certain could be routinely accomplished in the weightlessness of space. It also entailed designing separate guidance, environmental, and propulsion systems for both spacecraft, a redundancy many believed would add unnecessary complications.