Like the message inscribed on the Apollo 11 plaque, this global audience was not spontaneous. In the 1960s the United States initiated the largest government-sponsored public relations campaign in history to encourage foreign audiences’ sense of participation in US spaceflight. From organizing hundreds of thousands of space exhibits and film screenings to creating a global communications infrastructure so people could follow the first lunar landing to small gestures like US diplomats coauthoring space-themed songs with local musicians, the United States proactively cultivated a global community connected through shared experiences with spaceflight.8
These global connections did not start with the moon landing. Long before Apollo 11, the world had been growing increasingly interconnected. The pace of this interconnection intensified in the late nineteenth century with the development of new transportation and communication technologies. This period was also marked by the importance of Europe in world events. Industrialization paired with imperialism ensured Europe’s dominance in international affairs through the early twentieth century. Although people, goods, and information traveled around the world at a quicker rate than ever before, globalization also exacerbated divides within societies, between the powerful and the weak, between the wealthy and the poor, and between the West and the non-West.9
As the world became more and more interconnected throughout the twentieth century, the character of globalization began to change. Two factors distinguish this era: First, the United States took a more assertive role in world affairs. Embracing its newfound position of global superpower and driven by an interest in containing the spread of Communism, the US government actively pursued political and economic influence while also promoting American culture abroad. Second, the cold war era saw a rise in the consciousness of the interdependence of humankind. Whereas Western-based technology and ideology drove nineteenth-century globalization, in the mid-twentieth century millions of people around the world participated in and shaped this process. This consciousness of interdependence did not erase diversity and division but instead enhanced our awareness that we all live in one interconnected world. These two factors—what distinguishes this moment in history—are intertwined. This is where the moon landing comes in.10
On May 25, 1961, just four months after assuming office, US president John F. Kennedy proposed Project Apollo at the tail end of an address to a joint session of Congress on “urgent national needs.” “These were extraordinary times,” Kennedy began. “Our strength as well as our convictions have imposed upon this nation the role of leader in freedom’s cause.” The battle was taking place in what Kennedy called the “lands of the rising people”: Asia, Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East. A global revolution was under way, and if the United States did not act decisively, “the adversaries of freedom” would “ride the crest of the wave—to capture it for themselves.”11
Kennedy’s ominous warning reveals a great deal about why a nation would commit itself to sending humans to the moon, the most expensive civilian technological endeavor ever undertaken by the United States. At the beginning of the twentieth century, colonial powers governed most of Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and the Middle East. Nearly a billion people were under colonial rule, more than a third of the world population. In the 1940s, World War II upended the global order. It left the European powers socially and economically devastated while propelling the United States to superpower status. A wave of independence movements led to the disintegration of European empires. Between 1945 and 1970 the number of nations increased nearly fourfold. In 1960 alone—the year Kennedy was elected president—seventeen African colonies became independent nations.12 With European countries retreating from empire after World War II, and the emergence of new states, the geopolitical order of the world was undergoing a profound transformation. The United States and Soviet Union stepped in, competing to create a global coalition aligned with their respective ideologies. The United States sought to foster and spread liberal democracy, but the Soviet Union advocated Communism.13
Simultaneously, the introduction of nuclear weapons at the end of World War II upended how wars were waged. The US and Soviet Union staged proxy wars and launched covertly backed coups, but much of their geopolitical influence came from soft power rather than coercive force. Nuclear stalemate and US-Soviet rivalry elevated the significance of propaganda and psychological strategy in this period.14 As Kennedy put it in his May 25 address, the Soviet Union’s “aggression is more often concealed than open.” The Soviets did not fire missiles but sent arms, agitators, aid, and propaganda to fight this war. The “adversaries of freedom” were consolidating their territory and threatening the “hopes of the world’s newest nations.”15
The cold war was “a battle for minds and souls as well as lives and territory,” Kennedy told Congress and the American people on May 25. It was not simply a matter of superpower conflict but instead a deeply ideological confrontation that pitted capitalism against socialism. It took place on every continent, and it frequently played out in newly independent nations.16 The United States must act as a model, Kennedy argued. In addition to strengthening the American economy, the United States must invest in the economic and social progress of other nations as a bulwark against socialist influence.
Next, Kennedy called for additional funds for “the world-wide struggle to preserve and promote [American] ideals.” During the early cold war, Soviet and US leaders invested heavily in what today we call public diplomacy, a combination of national advocacy and propaganda. Mass communication in particular played a leading role in this process. Drawing on the tools of radio, television, film, photographs, exhibits, and other forms of media, the USSR and the US produced wide-ranging programming with the hope of shaping or reshaping the politics, economics, culture, values, and social relationships of other nations.17
Finally, after more than thirty minutes of outlining an extensive plan, Kennedy added one more “urgent national need”: Project Apollo. For Kennedy, sending humans to the moon and returning them safely back to Earth was part of the “battle going on around the world between freedom and tyranny.” It was not simply about securing American prestige and projecting technological capability. Spaceflight was affecting “the minds of men everywhere, who were attempting to make a determination of which road they should take.” It was time for the United States to take a leading role in space exploration, “which in many ways may hold the key to our future on earth.”18
Importantly, Project Apollo was not the only “urgent national need” proposed to Congress and the American people on May 25, 1961. Although we usually remember this speech for Kennedy’s call to send humans to the moon, the first thirty minutes reveal a context that is critical for understanding how and why the United States pursued lunar exploration. This geopolitical context does not simply add details to the story of the Apollo program; it also “changes its terms,” as Mary Dudziak once wrote.19 Project Apollo played a strategic role in US attempts to align the values and interests of the emerging, postcolonial world order with those of the United States rather than those of the Soviet Union.
Perhaps ironically, President John F. Kennedy was not a space enthusiast. Shortly after the Soviet Union launched Sputnik in 1957, over drinks at Boston’s storied Locke-Ober Café, he supposedly told rocket guidance pioneer Charles Stark Draper that all rockets were a waste of money. As a US senator and then later during his 1960 presidential campaign, Kennedy paid little attention to the future of space exploration beyond its impact on his electability. But in 1961 the young president proposed the most ambitious space program in national history when he announced Project Apollo before a joint session of Congress. This quick about-face was not a reversal in Kennedy’s attitude toward spaceflight. Instead, the president recognized that lunar exploration had the potential to restore America’s geopolitical standing in the wake of Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin’s April 1961 mission—the first human spaceflight in history—and the failure of the CIA-backed Ba
y of Pigs invasion during the same month. No other project, he argued, would be “more expensive” or “more impressive to mankind.”20
Project Apollo was an enormous national investment. Sending men to the moon cost the United States the equivalent of hundreds of billions today, more than eighteen times what the country spent on the Panama Canal, more than five times the expense of the Manhattan Project, and even more than the Eisenhower administration’s interstate highway system. Before the decade was out, Project Apollo had employed a workforce of hundreds of thousands, initiating a warlike mobilization of federal resources. A moon shot’s broad appeal, Kennedy explained, could advance US diplomatic goals without resorting to “hard” and expensive military power.21
But when the United States invested in Project Apollo, it invested in more than lunar exploration. Along with developing space suits and rockets, the United States developed an accompanying public relations campaign that spanned the globe. Over the 1960s, through hundreds of thousands of film screenings, exhibits, pamphlets, books, radio broadcasts, spacecraft tours, astronaut appearances, and the distribution of space buttons and press packets, the US not only told the story of America’s space program; it actively cultivated a global audience that was interested in and engaged with spaceflight. All the while, the US built up a global communications infrastructure that enabled this audience to watch the first lunar landing live—all together. Hundreds of millions of people around the world shared this first-ever moon landing experience in unison.
In the early 1960s the United States showcased its space program to demonstrate the nation’s technological, economic, and political superiority on the world stage. By the end of the decade, public diplomats’ approach to space programming had shifted notably. No longer were space feats employed primarily to highlight American prestige and power. Instead, the emphasis of this programming portrayed spaceflight as a global accomplishment undertaken “for all humankind.” This was a direct response to the voices of people around the world whom the US tried to influence. As public diplomats listened to audiences on each continent, from cities to rural areas, from children to presidents, they shifted their messaging from a demonstration of power to one of inclusiveness, from technological and scientific might to one of humanity and unity.
Project Apollo did not win the cold war contest between capitalism and socialism. But it had a very real, concrete impact on US foreign relations. Countless reports from US ambassadors and diplomats describe how the space program—and associated public diplomacy events—created goodwill, offered opportunities to meet with local politicians, and drew record-breaking audiences to exhibits and embassy events. Apollo did not erase the effects of US militarism, civil rights injustices, poverty, and other negative marks on the nation’s image abroad. But it did—if only temporarily—displace newspaper headlines that threatened to tarnish the US image overseas. As Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman later reflected, “It cast the country in a favorable light at a time when there were many things that cast it in an unfavorable light… the Apollo program did much more than just advance the country scientifically and technically, it advanced it in my opinion diplomatically just as much.”22 Kennedy and Nixon saw the advantages of scheduling international trips on the heels of popular spaceflights. Nixon’s 1969 tour of Southeast Asia and Romania was code-named Operation Moonglow because of the expectation that Apollo 11’s popularity and prestige would lend their sheen to the president’s new foreign policy initiatives. Even to this day, more than fifty years after Apollo 11, a “moon shot” remains a powerful and motivating symbol, an endeavor that is simultaneously aspirational and transformational, that is bigger than one country and encompassing all humankind.
Beyond its immediate US foreign relations dividends, Apollo and its associated media campaign propelled the evolution of globalization in the twentieth century, a transformation that shaped the world we live in today. It cultivated the consciousness of global interdependence through its far-reaching circulation of icons and images—such as views of Earth from space or of the cratered moon—that formed a shared visual culture; the dissemination of space discourse to every corner of the Earth, such as the phrase “for all mankind”; and, most importantly, the creation of a global community linked by their shared experience of following the moon landing together. Looking at how the content and tone of this programming changed over time reveals that it was not static or one-sided. Instead, it resulted from a dialogue between US government officials and the populations around the world they sought to influence. Apollo contributed to a heightened awareness of global interdependence, but not social and political homogenization. Millions of people on each continent participated in the moon landing, and although they drew on shared Apollo imagery and phrases, they did so to express their own interests and visions of the future. After the moon landing, the world was still deeply divided on racial, economic, religious, national, and ideological lines. But Apollo helped us see how we are connected, how in spite of our differences our futures are tied together, that we share one beautiful and verdant planet, suspended in outer space.
1
THE LAUNCH OF THE SPACE RACE,
1946–1957
The most important component of our foreign policy is the psychological one.
—HENRY KISSINGER, 1955
At the launch range near Tiura-Tam, Kazakhstan, Soviet rocket designer Sergei Korolev and his team used caution. Korolev had barely slept in weeks. Anxious that the United States would beat the Soviets into space, he had moved the launch of the artificial satellite Sputnik up a few days to October 4, 1957. Just before dawn on October 3, he personally convoyed the train carrying the rocket and satellite from the assembly building.
“Let’s accompany our first-born,” Korolev told his staff.1
They joined him, walking alongside the train track as the vehicle made its way to the launchpad. Tiura-Tam was a sparsely populated stop on a rail line among Kazakhstan’s desert steppes. When planners selected the site for the launch facility, the entire vegetation in the area amounted to three trees standing beside the train station. Plagued by frequent dust storms, soaring temperatures in the summer, and bone-chilling cold in the winter, it was a place to launch rockets but not much else.2
By the evening of October 4, the rocket was ready, but Korolev was still nervous. He had the staff check and then double-check the nearly hundred-foot-tall R-7 rocket, now standing erect on the launchpad. The stakes were too high, and Korolev was too stubborn, to let any slipups stand in his way. Earlier in the day when the unseasonably warm weather threatened the satellite’s delicate instruments, staff on the launchpad covered the payload with a large white cloth, hoping that this would bring down the temperature. It did not work. Next, they tried shooting cool air from a hose into the payload fairing, which seemed to do the trick. At last, under the illumination of large floodlights, the final checks were complete.3
Sergei Pavlovich Korolev, or “SP” to his team, was about to realize his lifelong dream of spaceflight after laboring for years under unimaginably harsh conditions. As with many other early rocket pioneers, H. G. Wells’s and Jules Verne’s fantastical space exploration capers first sparked his imagination. But while his German counterpart Wernher von Braun used the workforce of Nazi concentration camps to build his beloved V-2 rocket, Korolev labored in a prison camp. In 1938, at the age of thirty-one, he had been snatched from his home in the middle of the night and sent to a gulag as part of Stalin’s purges. After nearly seven years in prison, Korolev’s health had diminished, but his devotion to spaceflight remained intact. As he stood on the launchpad at Tiura-Tam, about a dozen years had passed since he had been released from the prison camp. Here he was, a chief designer in the Soviet space program, about to launch the first satellite into space.4
A scant ten minutes before the launch, Korolev finally felt confident that everything was in order. He left the pad—already evacuated and silent by this time—and joined staff at a nearby bunker. Insi
de, nearly a dozen people sat at six command-and-control panels monitoring the rocket and satellite. Tensions were high. Only the operators sat while the rest of the personnel stood stiffly, waiting in anticipation. Korolev’s eyes moved between the various instruments and the body language of the operators, scanning them for any sign of trouble. As a deputy in the bunker recalled, “If anybody raised their voice or showed signs of nervousness, Korolev was instantly on the alert to see what was going on.”5
Unlike American rocket launches, the Soviet space program did not use a countdown, no three, two, one… blastoff. A voice over a loudspeaker announced the minutes until readiness and commands like “key to drainage.” When the voice said “Pusk!” (Launch!), a young lieutenant pushed a button, initiating ignition. The rocket did not spring from the launchpad at this point. Over a minute passed as steam vented around the base of the rocket, and the engines ignited and then started their preliminary thrust process, before the operator finally announced “Pod’em!” (Liftoff!).
Vibrations from the engines pounded the walls of the small bunker. At first the rocket seemed stuck, hovering over the ground. But soon the four boosters with their hundreds of tons of thrust propelled the R-7 into the inky blackness of outer space. A little over five minutes after the launch, Sputnik separated from the core rocket booster and began its first orbit.
“It’s too early to celebrate,” Korolev warned his apprehensive staff.
Not until Sputnik completed its first ninety-six-minute trip around the Earth and the radio engineer picked up Sputnik’s now iconic “beep-beep-beep” and shouted “It’s there! It’s there!” did Korolev announce that it was time to send word to Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev.6
Operation Moonglow Page 2
