Operation Moonglow

by Teasel Muir-Harmony

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  I have had the good fortune of accruing immense debt from generous colleagues, friends, and family during the long life of this project. First, I want to acknowledge and thank the participants in Project Apollo public diplomacy who shared their time and recollections with me: Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, Frank Borman, Simon Bourgin, Ken Bryson, Charlie Duke, Don Eyles, Conan Grames, Beverly Gray, Fred Haise, Michio Horikawa, James Lovell, Jack Masey, Beverly Payeff-Masey, Harrison Schmitt, David Scott, and Erik Tandberg.

  A special thanks is owed to Michael Collins, who answered all of my space diplomacy questions over the years with his characteristic graciousness and good humor. As should be readily apparent in these pages, his insights and stories shaped my thinking about Apollo and its relationship to the world. I feel immeasurably lucky for our conversations. I thank Ann Collins Starr and Kate Collins as well, for their support of this project and all the work they do to preserve the legacy of Apollo.

  This project began at MIT more years ago than I would like to count. It benefited from the History, Anthropology, Science, Technology and Society program as well as the wisdom and work of John Durant, Mike Fischer, Karen Gardner, Stefan Helmreich, Merritt Roe Smith, and Larry Young. Rosalind Williams, David Kaiser, Leo Marx, and David Mindell guided this project, lending encouragement and good advice at each stage. I am deeply appreciative of their support and mentorship.

  During the life of this project I was fortunate to receive fellowships and scholarly homes at the Royal Institute of Technology (KTH); the Consortium for the History of Science, Technology and Medicine; the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Foundation; the Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum; and the American Institute of Physics (AIP). For their hospitality, thoughtful questions, and conversations, I thank my friends and colleagues at KTH and the University of Gothenburg, including Anna Åberg, Dag Avango, Mats Fridlund, Johan Gärdebo, Sabine Höhler, Arne Kaijser, Sverker Sörlin, and Nina Wormbs. The consortium provided an ideal community for a budding historian of science and technology. I wish to thank the many friends and colleagues I gained in Philadelphia, in particular Simon Joseph, Julia Mansfield, Rebecca Onion, Sheila O’Shaughnessy, Emily Stanback, and especially Babak Ashrafi. From the Adler’s Webster Institute I thank Lauren Boegen, Marv Bolt, Jennifer Brand, Misty DeMars, Sara Gonzales, Jodi Lacy, Jill Postma, and Bruce Stephenson for sharing their expertise in astronomy and public history. From AIP, I thank Melinda Baldwin, Charles Day, Greg Good, Paul Guinnessy, Stephanie Jankowski, and Melanie Mueller whose collegiality and feedback shaped this project.

  Like a bad penny, I have kept on returning to the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum for more than a dozen years. The five positions I have held at the Smithsonian have not only been formative to this project, but I owe much of my knowledge of and appreciation for the role of spaceflight in society to the opportunities afforded by being part of such a vibrant community. I would especially like to thank Chandra Bhimull, Chris Browne, Luca Buvoli, Paul Ceruzzi, Pete Daniel, Jim David, David DeVorkin, Jim Fleming, Alexander Geppert, Hunter Hollins, Monique Laney, Roger Launius, Jennifer Levasseur, Cathy Lewis, Neil Maher, Esperanza Mayobre, Patrick McCray, Valerie Neal, Allan Needell, Anke Ortlepp, Richard Paul, Tony Reichhardt, Matt Sanders, Matt Shindell, Ellen Stofan, Jim Thomas, Deborah Warner, Margaret Weitekamp, Collette Williams, and Lisa Young. I add an additional note of appreciation to Martin Collins for his thoughtful and charitable mentorship.

  Michael Neufeld generously read and edited every chapter of this book, offering both his expert eye and encouragement. He is a model colleague, and I am deeply indebted to his encyclopedic knowledge, precision, and insights. John Logsdon helped by sending me dozens of archival documents, providing opportunities to speak with Project Apollo participants, sharing his vast expertise, and providing his incisive chapter edits.

  Much of the material in this book had its first run in conference presentations and lectures, and benefited immeasurably from the thoughtful critique of colleagues. In particular, I wish to thank Bill Barry, Laura Belmonte, Nicholas Cull, Brian Etheridge, Steven Grundman, Scott Knowles, John Krige, Bhavya Lal, Hallvard Notaker, Kathy Olesko, Kendrick Oliver, Irene Porro, Marc Rodriguez, Giles Scott-Smith, Eran Shalev, Asif Siddiqi, David Snyder, John Soares, Jenifer Van Vleck, and Audra Wolfe.

  The research for this book relied heavily on the expertise and generosity of archivists and colleagues at the National Archives and Records Administrations, the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Archives, the Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library and Archives, the Richard M. Nixon Presidential Library and Archives, the Boston University Archives, the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum Archives, the Library of Congress, the MIT Archives, and the Smithsonian Institution Archives. I am especially thankful to the archivists and librarians at the NASA History Program Office, including Colin Fries, John Hargenrader, and Elizabeth Suckow; Patti Williams at the NASM archives; Nobumichi Ariga for guiding me through Japanese archives; Anja Kolzsch and Helmuth Trischler for hosting me at the Deutsches Museum; Rory Cook at Science Museum London; Karl Erik Andersen at the National Library of Norway; and Frode Weium at the Norsk Teknisk Museum. I am grateful to colleagues at the US State Department who have supported this project in various ways, including Dinah Arnett, Jane Carpenter-Rock, Heiko Herold, Molly Kress, Hillary LeBail, Wibke Reincke, and Eitan Schiffman.

  I am grateful to Howard Yoon, my literary agent at Ross Yoon Agency, for his advocacy of this project. At Basic Books I thank Rachel Field, TJ Kelleher, and Katie Lambright. An additional note of gratitude is owed to Melissa Veronesi and Donald Pharr for their patience and generosity.

  To my many friends and colleagues who have offered encouragement, guest rooms, conversation, feedback, tours of their cities during research trips, company at launches, humor, and kindness, thank you. In particular, I wish to acknowledge Poppy Alexander, Etienne Benson, Martins Blums, Jonathan Coopersmith, Elise Crull, David Deen, Angela Deen, Nate Deshmukh, Aaron Divine, Chris Divine, Rebecca Dobrow, Ethan Dobrow, Xaq Frolich, Emily Gibson, Matt Hersch, Chihyung Jeon, Patricia Kanngiesser, Toby Elliman, Angelina Long Callahan, Jason Callahan, Yanni Loukissas, Larry McGlynn, Diane McWhorter, Lisa Messeri, Zara Mirmalek, Emily Miraldi, Canay Ozden-Schilling, Tom Ozden-Schilling, Matt Ogle, Rebecca Perry, Claire Scoville, David Singerman, Leo Slater, Eden Savino, Ellan Spero, Michaela Thompson, John Tylko, Janice Norcutt, Ben Wilson, Uri Mariash, and Beatka Zakrzewski.

  Profound gratitude is due to my family, my unstinting champions: Ayr, Brooke, Clementine, Blue, Violet, Asa, Alex, Amos, Arla, and Arrow. And to Zeke Emanuel for his endless wells of confidence and optimism for me and my work, and his willingness to edit draft after draft of this book.

  Finally, my greatest debt—as always—is owed to my parents, Michael and Rebecca. I dedicate this book to them in appreciation for all the lessons they have taught me.

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  Credit: Claire Scoville

  Teasel Muir-Harmony is a curator of the Apollo Collection at the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum and teaches at Georgetown University. She earned a PhD from MIT and previously held positions at the American Institute of Physics and at the Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum. Muir-Harmony is the author of Apollo to the Moon: A History in 50 Objects and a contributor to the television series Apollo’s Moon Shot. She lives in Washington, DC.

  NOTES

  PREFACE

  1. Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon (1969; reprint, New York: Random House, 2014).

  2. Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journey (New York: Ballantine, 1975), 409.

  3. “EP-72 Log of Apollo 11,” NASA History Division, https://history.nasa.gov/ap11ann/apollo11_log/log.htm.

  4. Collins, Carrying the Fire, 408.

  5. Michael Collins, interview with author, M
arch 23, 2016.

  6. Collins interview.

  7. Collins interview.

  8. John Dower, Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II (New York: W.W. Norton, 1999), 30.

  9. Asahi Shimbun, August 20, 1945, quoted in Dower, Embracing Defeat, 494.

  10. USIS Tokyo to USIA Washington, September 4, 1962, Box 258, Folder “Outer Space, 14.B.5, Outer Space Exhibits, June–December 1962, Part 2 of 2,” Entry 1613, RG 59, NARA.

  11. USIS Tokyo to USIA Washington, September 4, 1962.

  12. Joseph Nye Jr. coined the phrase “soft power,” defining it as attractive or co-optive power, as opposed to “coercive power” or “hard power.” Governments often use both in concert. See Joseph Nye Jr., Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 1990), and Joseph Nye Jr., Soft Power: The Means to Success in World Politics (New York: PublicAffairs, 2004).

  13. Collins interview.

  INTRODUCTION: MOONRISE

  1. Robert C. Seamans Jr., Project Apollo: The Tough Decisions (Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, 2005), 113.

  2. Courtney Brooks, James Grimwood, and Loyd Swenson, Chariots for Apollo: A History of Manned Lunar Spacecraft (Washington, DC: NASA Special Publication-4205, 1979), chapter 13.

  3. Dwight Chapin to H. R. Haldeman, “Status Report on Apollo 11 Project,” July 1, 1969, Outer Space-3 File, Richard Nixon Presidential Library, Yorba Linda, CA (hereafter RNPL); William Safire, “Of Nixon, Kennedy and Shooting the Moon,” New York Times, July 17, 1989, A17.

  4. Chapin to Haldeman, “Status Report”; Safire, “Of Nixon”; Seamans, Project Apollo, 113; Brooks, Grimwood, and Swenson, Chariots for Apollo, chapter 13.

  5. National Archives Identifier 6922346, Richard Nixon Presidential Library and Museum Identifier 1979-12. The phone is part of the collection at the RNPL.

  6. The astronauts thanked the president, commented on the privilege of representing all mankind, and then spent the rest of their stay on the lunar surface deploying a science package, collecting moon rocks and soil, and taking what would become iconic photographs. Brooks, Grimwood, and Swenson, Chariots for Apollo, chapter 14.

  7. Buzz Aldrin, Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon (New York: Crown Archetype, 2009), 54.

  8. Looking at Project Apollo through the lens of diplomatic and transnational history reveals how the production and transfer of knowledge is a malleable, variable process that was connected to the local, regional, and global, and was not simply a diffusion of Western science and engineering information. For a discussion of the circulation of (techno)science, see John Krige, ed., How Knowledge Moves: Writing the Transnational History of Science and Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019).

  9. This process of globalization has roots in sixteenth-century voyages of exploration and commerce. See Alfred Eckes Jr. and Thomas Zeiler, Globalization and the American Century (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 6. On the increase of global society, see Emily Rosenberg, ed., A World Connecting, 1870–1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

  10. Akira Iriye, ed., Global Interdependence: The World After 1945 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014), 5, 847.

  11. Papers of John F. Kennedy, Presidential Papers, President’s Office Files, Speech Files, Special message to Congress on urgent national needs, May 25, 1961, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston (hereafter JFKL).

  12. Mark Philip Bradley, “Decolonization, the Global South, and the Cold War, 1919–1962,” in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, ed. Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 464–465.

  13. The broad front of the competition—especially aggressive interventionalist tactics—was often discordant with the ideological claims of each superpower. Words and deeds did not always align. Odd Arne Westad, “The Cold War and the International History of the Twentieth Century,” in The Cambridge History of the Cold War, ed. Melvyn P. Leffler and Odd Arne Westad (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 4.

  14. See Nye, Bound to Lead and Soft Power.

  15. John F. Kennedy, “Message to Congress on the Nation’s Urgent Needs,” May 25, 1961, Office of the Clerk, General Records, 1791–2010, 87th Congress (1961–1963), Records of the United States House of Representatives, NARA.

  16. Historian Odd Arne Westad has called it a competition “for the society of the future.” Westad, The Cold War (New York: Basic Books, 2017), 4.

  17. Historian Jason Parker usefully describes public diplomacy as “a multifront media war, launched by the superpowers in pursuit of strategic and psychological gains, to win [people] over.” Parker, Hearts, Minds, Voices: US Cold War Public Diplomacy and the Formation of the Third World (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 3. For a history of US public diplomacy, see Nicholas Cull, The Cold War and the United States Information Agency: American Propaganda and Public Diplomacy, 1945–1989 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008).

  18. Kennedy, “Message to Congress on the Nation’s Urgent Needs.”

  19. Mary Dudziak, Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 17. Newspapers, astronaut memoirs, historical studies, philosophical essays, and popular publications have all detailed the astronauts’ experience on the lunar surface and considered its significance. And while these authors may gesture to the global “participation” in the flight, it has surprisingly been left unexplored. Recent examples include Douglas Brinkley, American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race (New York: Harper, 2019); Andrew Chaikin, A Man on the Moon (New York: Viking, 1994); Charles Fishman, One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2019); Stephen B. Johnson, The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); Roger D. Launius, Apollo’s Legacy: Perspectives on the Moon Landings (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2019); Neil Maher, Apollo in the Age of Aquarius (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2017); and Matthew D. Tribbe, No Requiem for the Space Age: The Apollo Moon Landings and American Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014).

  20. John Logsdon, John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 6; Kennedy, “Message to Congress on the Nation’s Urgent Needs.”

  21. Logsdon, John F. Kennedy, 2–3; Casey Drier, “How Much Did the Apollo Program Cost?,” accessed October 24, 2019, www.planetary.org/get-involved/be-a-space-advocate/become-an-expert/cost-of-apollo-program.html. Inflation in 2019 dollars adjusted using NASA’s New Start Index for aerospace projects.

  22. Frank Borman oral history interview with author, December 10, 2012.

  CHAPTER 1: THE LAUNCH OF THE SPACE RACE, 1946–1957

  1. Asif Siddiqi, The Red Rockets’ Glare: Spaceflight and the Soviet Imagination, 1857–1957 (New York, Cambridge University Press, 2010), 350.

  2. Mike Gruntman, “From Tyuratam Missile Range to Baikonur Cosmodrome,” Acta Astronautica 155 (February 2019): 350–366; Siddiqi, Red Rockets’ Glare, 350.

  3. Siddiqi, Red Rockets’ Glare, 350–352.

  4. James Harford, Korolev: How One Man Masterminded the Soviet Drive to Beat America to the Moon (New York: John Wiley, 1997), 1; Walter A. McDougall,… The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York: Basic Books, 1985), 36–40.

  5. Siddiqi, Red Rockets’ Glare, 353.

  6. Siddiqi, Red Rockets’ Glare, 353–356; McDougall, The Heavens and the Earth, 61.

  7. William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003), xx; Geoffrey Roberts, Stalin’s General: The Life of Georgy Zhukov (New York: Random House, 2012), 258–259.

  8. His service gained him universal acclaim among Soviet citizens, which in turn made him a threat to the paranoid Soviet premier Joseph Stalin. Instead of awarding Zhukov for saving the Soviet Union from Hitler’
s Nazi forces, Stalin relegated him to an obscure regional command. When Stalin died in 1953, new Soviet leadership saw the advantages of Zhukov’s popularity among the armed forces, and he was able to rise quickly to the rank of minister of defense. Roberts, Stalin’s General, 5–8.

  9. Taubman, Khrushchev, 362.

  10. Sergei Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev and the Creation of a Superpower, trans. Shirley Benson (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000), 259.

  11. Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev, 260.

  12. “Announcement of the First Satellite,” Pravda, October 5, 1957; F. J. Krieger, Behind the Sputniks (Washington, DC: PublicAffairs, 1958), 311–312.

  13. Khrushchev, Nikita Khrushchev, 260.

  14. Although the impact of Rockefeller’s particular report on Eisenhower’s policy making is debatable, the ideas articulated within its more than two hundred pages reflect a larger trend in political theory that framed policy making in the 1950s. In many ways it reflects Eisenhower’s own appreciation of psychological warfare within the larger cold war battlefield. Henry Kissinger, “Psychological and Pressure Aspects of Negotiations with the USSR,” in Psychological Aspects of United States Strategy, November 1955, Psychological Aspects of United States Strategy: Source Book of Individual Papers, Box 10, White House office, Office of the Special Assistant for National Security Affairs, NSC Series, Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, KS (hereafter DEPL). For a discussion and contextualization of the document, see Kenneth Osgood, Total Cold War (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2006), 181–183.

  15. Kissinger, quoted in Niall Ferguson, Kissinger: 1923–1968: The Idealist (New York: Penguin, 2015), 356.

  16. Historians such as Walter McDougall, Stephen Ambrose, and Robert Divine have made this claim. For a historiographical analysis, see Kenneth Osgood, “Before Sputnik: National Security and the Formation of U.S. Outer Space Policy,” in Spaceflight and the Myth of Presidential Leadership, ed. Roger Launius and Howard McCurdy (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), 197–199.