Operation Moonglow

by Teasel Muir-Harmony

  Copyright © 2020 by Teasel Muir-Harmony

  Cover images: NASA; © Feng Yu / Shutterstock.com; © oleschwander / Shutterstock.com; photo by Ken Hotchkin, Ken Hotchkin Collection, State Library of Western Australia 281436PD, sourced from the collections of the State Library of Western Australia and reproduced with the permission of the Library Board of Western Australia.

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  First Edition: November 2020

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Muir-Harmony, Teasel E., author.

  Title: Operation moonglow : a political history of project Apollo / Teasel Muir-Harmony.

  Description: First edition. | New York : Basic Books, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. |

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020017479 | ISBN 9781541699878 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781541699861 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: Project Apollo (U.S.)—History. | Space flight to the moon—History. | Space. | Science. | Astronauts.

  Classification: LCC TL789.8.U6A5 M86 2020 | DDC 629.45/4—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020017479

  ISBNs: 978-1-5416-9987-8 (hardcover); 978-1-5416-9986-1 (ebook)

  E3-20201016-JV-NF-ORI

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Preface

  Introduction: Moonrise

  1 The Launch of the Space Race, 1946–1957

  2 Sputnik and the Politics of Spaceflight, 1957

  3 A Space Program for All Humankind, 1958–1960

  4 If We Are to Win the Battle, 1960–1961

  5 John Glenn and Friendship 7’s “Fourth Orbit,” 1961–1963

  6 “The New Explorers,” 1963–1967

  7 “Riders on the Earth Together,” 1968–1969

  8 Making Apollo 11 for All Humankind, 1969

  9 One Giant Leap, July 16–July 24, 1969

  10 Operation Moonglow, August 1969

  11 Giantstep: The Apollo 11 Diplomatic Tour, 1969

  Afterglow

  Acknowledgments

  Discover More

  About the Author

  Notes

  For my parents, my first teachers.

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  PREFACE

  “Not since Adam has any human known such solitude as Mike Collins is experiencing,” a NASA official commented when the Columbia spacecraft swung behind the moon on July 20, 1969.1

  Collins would spend the next forty-eight minutes orbiting the far side of the moon, blocked from all radio communication with his crewmates, Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, who were on the other side of the lunar surface, as well as the rest of humanity back down on Earth. He felt this isolation “powerfully.”2 Outside his window, the vastness of space—teeming with stars—contrasted sharply with the darkness of the lunar surface below. On board Columbia, a spacecraft he affectionately dubbed his “mini-cathedral,” Collins occupied his time busily preparing the ship for his crewmates’ return. While Armstrong and Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the surface of the moon, Collins experienced the solitude of space, floating nearly a quarter million miles from Earth—alone on a spacecraft with no ability to talk to any other person.3 He jested, “If a count were taken, the score would be three billion plus two over on the other side of the moon, and one plus God only knows what on this side.”4

  This sense of solitude would not last long. What impressed Collins most on his return to Earth was not the isolation of space travel but its unifying effects. When I spoke with Collins almost fifty years after the flight, he told me, “I thought that when we went to different countries that people would say you Americans achieved XYZ.”5 But what he discovered on returning to planet Earth was the opposite of what he experienced orbiting the far side of the moon: a profound sense of community.

  Collins explained to me that everywhere the astronauts went, “It was ‘we.’ We human beings—‘We did it, we did it.’ That was the punch line, everywhere we went.” As the Apollo 11 crew circled the world on a postflight diplomatic tour, touching down in twenty-seven cities in twenty-four countries, they observed the same refrain: “We did it.”6

  That use of we instead of you Americans or you astronauts attests to the profound sense of collective participation felt by billions of people when humans first set foot on the moon. It also hints at the growing awareness of global interconnection—or the sense that we are part of one global village—that arose alongside, and in part, because of the Space Age.

  As Neil Armstrong climbed down the Eagle’s ladder and took “one small step” into the dusty lunar regolith, a record-breaking global audience waited with rapt attention. Never before had so many people come together to witness an event. But it wasn’t just the numbers that made this audience exceptional. The sense of participation and global unity shared by billions of people around the world became one of the most significant consequences of the first lunar landing, with reverberations that affect us to this day.

  During our conversation Collins added an essential point: this use of we around the world must have been “worth its weight in gold” for the US State Department and US Information Agency.7 As he knew well from his years as an astronaut followed by his tenure as the assistant secretary of state for public affairs, the unifying effects of Project Apollo were not just spiritual; they were also political.

  This book arose from the right combination of intention and accident. Sitting in the US National Archives on an August afternoon in 2007, I was researching how scientific programs affect culture and politics. Taking the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory’s global network of satellite tracking stations as my jumping-off point, I spent the summer reading memos, reports, letters, and any other archival material I could get my hands on. In the archive’s airy reading room, I focused on the Smithsonian’s close relationship with the Tokyo Astronomical Observatory, a Meiji-era institution established in 1888.

  The material I had been reviewing told me about the day-to-day workings of the cooperative international project at the observatory, but it seemed like something was missing. I had just read John Dower’s Embracing Defeat, a masterful study of the postwar reconstruction of Japan from within. “What matters,” Dower stresses, “is what the Japanese themselves made of their experience of defeat.”8 What role did science play in the larger story of US-Japanese relations in this period? I knew that the effects of the US use of two atomic bombs during World War II echoed far beyond 1945. As an article published
in the Japanese newspaper Asahi Shimbun less than a week after Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s surrender famously explained, “We lost to the enemy’s science.”9 How were the astronomers at the Tokyo Astronomical Observatory, as well as people throughout Japan, viewing US science and technology a decade after the war? And how was the US marshaling its scientific and technological programs in support of the nation’s political interests in Japan? With Dower fresh on my mind and some hours left in my day, I requested a few boxes from a collection that seemed promising.

  What I found, tucked neatly in cream-colored folders, was a story that would come to dominate my life for over the next decade and transform how I understood the relationship between science, power, and globalization.

  Holding up a US Information Agency field report dated September 4, 1962, I read, “The Friendship 7 Exhibit in Tokyo was held at the Takashimaya Department Store July 26th through 29th from 10:00 a.m.–6:00 p.m. daily, and was viewed by over half a million people, a crowd exceptional in size even by Tokyo standards.”10 Five hundred thousand people. Five hundred thousand people in just four days. Could a small space capsule really have attracted such an enormous crowd? I read on. Several hundred police and guides, it continued, “channeled the crowd up nine flights of stairs, zig-zagged them across the roof and brought them down nine flights of stairs to the exhibit.”11 The scale and level of interest in the exhibit are hard to comprehend. This crowd was exceptional in size not just by Tokyo standards but by any other standards. Clearly, the department-store space capsule exhibit suggests a passionate enthusiasm for the US space program in Japan. But what is the larger significance of this popularity? I knew that John Glenn became a national hero within the United States after his flight. The country conferred the status of celebrity on him. But what did his space capsule mean to people in Japan? Why did they wait in a five-hour line to walk by his small, charred vehicle? Does this story hint at something larger, something more fundamental about the ties between early spaceflight and foreign relations?

  Luckily, I did not have to wait long to start finding the answers to these questions. That summer I had a fellowship at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (NASM). The day after first reading about Glenn’s space capsule exhibit in Tokyo, I returned to my office in the Space History Department to ask curators what they knew about the exhibit. Although a few had heard of a capsule tour, it was not an episode anyone knew about in detail. I returned to the archive to find out more.

  As I delved further into those cream-colored folders, I soon discovered that this record-breaking exhibit was no chance event. Instead, this modest capsule display exposed a nuanced political tactic at the core of US grand strategy in the early 1960s. At the height of the cold war, both the US and the Soviet Union were mobilizing their vast technical and scientific resources to wield global influence. They built transnational ties through scientific exchanges and education. They attempted to influence and at times divert the trajectory of other national scientific and engineering research programs. And as in the case of the Friendship 7 exhibit in Tokyo, they attempted to foster political alignment through demonstrations of scientific and technological preeminence. The wildly popular space capsule exhibit in Tokyo was just one part of a much larger, more extensive US initiative to spread liberal democratic values. Spaceflight spectaculars, and their promotion abroad, were by design aimed at winning over international public opinion, countering anti-American sentiment, and, most importantly, shaping the emerging global order. The Toyko exhibit was not the first time, nor would it be the last, that the Kennedy administration looked to spaceflight as an essential arm of US diplomacy.

  What I learned is that the moon landing and diplomacy were profoundly and intricately allied. From the very start, US politicians weighed the soft-power potential of space exploration as they evaluated which programs to fund.12 They argued over the psychological benefits of being “first” in space. They created a global communications infrastructure explicitly so people around the world could follow US space successes. They spent millions of taxpayer dollars on space-themed films, exhibits, press releases, buttons, lectures, and radio broadcasts to promote and leverage international interest in spaceflight. They hired polling firms on every continent that repeatedly assessed the effectiveness of space propaganda. And through years of feedback and fine-tuning, they honed a powerful message that bound global progress with US space accomplishments.

  As the story of Project Apollo makes clear, people—not just advances in transportation, trade, and communication—shape and propel the process of globalization. Individuals have advanced our awareness of interconnection and have created experiences that unite us. Mike Collins cogently captured this when he explained to me, “The response we got—we human beings have landed on the moon—it was the ‘giant leap,’ as Armstrong put it.”13 Each person I spoke with over the past decade amplified and sharpened the significance of “we” in the story of lunar exploration. Buzz Aldrin and I laughed about his exploits with Italian paparazzi while he traveled the world after his flight. As I walked along a riverbed in western Japan with artist Michio Horikawa, he reflected on how the collection of moon rocks prompted his deeper appreciation for the rocks here on Earth. From the shiny offices of a design firm in Manhattan, World’s Fair exhibit designer Jack Masey explained why space exploration was such a potent form of propaganda. In Oslo, Erik Tandberg, a television personality, told me how he became the “Norwegian Walter Cronkite.” Over a long lunch at Apollo astronaut Jim Lovell’s restaurant north of Chicago, I heard the story of the global Christmas Eve broadcast from the moon. And while celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the first lunar landing with Neil Armstrong at MIT, I spoke with him about the diplomatic responsibilities of astronauts and the sense of international participation shared around the globe. He told me in his quiet and unassuming way that this was an essential piece of the Apollo story that should be told. And so I took his advice.

  Introduction

  MOONRISE

  Shortly after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin took their first steps on the moon and before they planted an American flag into the lunar soil, they unveiled a plaque mounted to the lunar module and read its inscription: “Here Men from the Planet Earth First Set Foot Upon the Moon, July 1969, A.D. We Came in Peace for All Mankind.” Above the inscription an image of the Earth’s two hemispheres—simple and solid like block prints—depicted an undivided planet with no political boundaries, as it is seen from outer space. The Apollo 11 crew and President Nixon’s names and signatures flanked the bottom of the plaque.1 Crafted by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), the White House, and other US government staff, this inscription, the outline of the Earth, and the signatures, although quite concise, signaled a set of values—openness, progress, religion, inclusivity, service, and universality—melding them into a symbolic representation of US leadership.

  Well in advance of the Apollo 11 mission, NASA’s head of public relations and the assistant administrator for international affairs widely solicited advice for the plaque. Consulting with the Smithsonian Institution, the Library of Congress, the archivist of the United States, the NASA Historical Advisory Committee, the Space Council, and congressional committees, NASA finalized a first draft of the plaque.2 President Nixon’s advisors and speechwriters tailored the text and image to fit the interests of the administration. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) notified White House staff that the Soviet Union’s robotic spacecraft might land on the moon first, beating the Apollo 11 crew to the surface. In response, speechwriter and advisor Pat Buchanan proposed that the plaque read “set foot” as opposed to “landed.” William Safire, another speechwriter, edited the phrase “we come in peace” to “we came in peace,” in order to disassociate it from “something you’d say to Hollywood Indians.” The addition of “A.D.” to the date, remarked Safire, was a “shrewd way of sneaking God in.”3 The last phrase on the plaque, “for all mankind,” served as the motto o
f America’s Space Age, populating dozens of presidential speeches, international exhibit panels, film scripts, newspaper articles, and radio broadcasts, and appearing in the 1958 Space Act, which framed America’s space efforts.4

  Apollo 11 plaque mounted on the lunar module. (NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION)

  Not long after Armstrong and Aldrin unveiled the plaque on July 20, 1969, President Nixon picked up his minty-green touch-dial phone and called them from the Oval Office.5 First, he congratulated them and then conveyed a message to the broader global audience tuning in to the broadcast that evening. It was a brief statement, but similar to the one on the plaque: the president’s message signaled the major themes that US government officials had been crafting through years of public diplomacy programming. The Apollo 11 crew positioned themselves in front of the TV camera, and then Nixon articulated the significance of the first lunar landing: “Because of what you have done the heavens have become a part of man’s world.… For one priceless moment in the whole history of man, all the people on this earth are truly one.”6

  As President Nixon’s telephone conversation with the Apollo 11 crew underscored, the moon landing extended the scope of human experience in two ways: for the first time in history humans landed on another celestial body; second, they came together to witness an event in larger numbers than ever before. One fifth of the world’s population watched the live television feed from the moon, while hundreds of millions more listened to the radio broadcast. In total, half of humanity followed the flight, a higher portion than for any previous event in history.

  After the Apollo 11 crew returned to Earth, they watched recordings of the television coverage of their mission. Just as hundreds of millions of people had done on July 20, 1969, they saw their moonwalk alongside images of captivated audiences from around the world following the flight. “It seemed like the entire world was having a party,” thought Buzz Aldrin. The event did not just take place on the moon. Recognizing this, Aldrin turned to Neil Armstrong and said: “Hey, look. We missed the whole thing.”7