American Moonshot

by Douglas Brinkley

  5

  Spooked into the Space Race

  The notion of a “race” with the Soviet Union permeated Cold War thought, and it applied not only to space but to nuclear arms.

  —YANEK MIECZKOWSKI, EISENHOWER’S SPUTNIK MOMENT (2013)

  As John F. Kennedy started his congressional career in early 1947, the Cold War was on, full bore, with the United States and the Soviet Union shoring up their influence in a divided Europe. In following years, advanced intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and high-altitude reconnaissance plane innovations would forever change the notion of warfare. Having read so many history books, Kennedy prided himself on being able to make quick summaries of pressing global situations and offer pragmatic recommendations. JFK relied on the power of family ties, trust fund, and personal freedom—he was an island unto himself, questing for the present moment.

  For Jack, 1947 was a year of both visibility and irrelevance. An eligible bachelor and nightclub habitué, and possessed with a mercurial attractiveness, he moved into a town house on N Street, in Washington’s Georgetown neighborhood. He cut a dashing figure as one of the youngest lawmakers in town, balancing a social life in the fast lane with a minor reputation for occasional eloquence on the House floor. Still, Kennedy was often bored during his first term, full of indifference, realizing quickly that a low-ranking member of the minority party had little of importance to do on Capitol Hill. Perhaps in response, he traveled frequently, not only back to New England but also around the country, speaking to almost any group that would invite him.

  In official Washington, dollars and cents ruled the agenda. Having spent a third of a trillion dollars on the war, the federal government had war bonds to repay, both as an obligation and also in the interest of fueling the postwar economy. Another pressing expense was financial assistance to nations devastated during the war. Speaking at Harvard on June 5, 1947, Secretary of State George Marshall presented the outline of a plan that would “help the Europeans help themselves” by pumping more than $13 billion (almost $150 billion in 2019 dollars) into rebuilding war-ravaged Western Europe: stabilizing currencies, budgets, and finances; promoting industrial, agricultural, and cultural production; and facilitating and stimulating international trade relationships. In occupied Japan, a similar program under General Douglas MacArthur was beginning its work of rebuilding the war-ravaged island nation along capitalist lines.

  Most Americans believed that the Soviet Union, having lost more than twenty million lives in World War II, must also be focused completely on the task of infrastructure rebuilding—a casual assumption that played to the Soviets’ advantage in missile and nuclear bomb development. Because the Kremlin maintained what science-fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke called “an almost impenetrable veil of secrecy,” U.S. intelligence services had little idea how rapidly the Soviets were in fact developing their capacity in nuclear weaponry and advanced rocketry. After World War II, Sergei Korolev, principal designer of the future Soviet space program, had been tasked by Stalin to build powerful ICBMs. Initiating a systematic exploitation of German guided missile technology, by 1946 they were already working on ballistic missiles with a range of nearly two thousand miles. Within fifteen years, they would make technological leaps that would lead to the first nuclear-tipped ICBMs and would also propel Russian cosmonauts toward space. Soviet engineer Mikhail Ryazansky also spearheaded a cabal of scientific specialists who pioneered new radar and radio navigation technology. As the Kremlin innovated a large-scale missile program, the United States, von Braun rightfully complained between 1945 and 1951, had “no ballistic missiles worth mentioning.”

  While the Soviets built, the U.S. military engaged in squabbles fueled by an interservice rivalry. With budgets down from their stratospheric wartime levels, the various armed services jockeyed for every congressional appropriation and threw elbows while they did. The new National Security Act also threatened their autonomy, placing the army, navy, and marines under the authority of a new National Military Establishment (later, the Department of Defense) and separating the U.S. Army Air Forces (AAF) out into its own service, the U.S. Air Force (USAF). Amid these budgetary and administrative struggles, the development of rockets chugged along slowly on multiple tracks across the armed forces as engineers explored their potential as weapons, research tools, launch vehicles for satellites, and vehicles for space exploration.

  In the air force, Major General Curtis LeMay, a war hero then serving as deputy chief of air staff for research and development, believed that any future space program should be under the domain of air operations. Born in 1906 in Columbus, Ohio, LeMay had commanded the 305th Operations Group and the Third Air Division in the European Theater during World War II. A dashing fighter pilot able to loop and dive with the best, he ran strategic bombing operations against Japan toward the end of the war. After V-J Day, LeMay was assigned to command the U.S. Air Force in Europe and to deal with the nonstop crisis in Berlin, which was then divided among American, British, French, and Soviet zones of occupation. LeMay commissioned the research-and-development arm of Douglas Aircraft, in Southern California, to answer two fundamental postwar questions: How could satellites benefit the U.S. military? How could space travel advance humanity? He gave the aerospace corporation three weeks to report back.

  Douglas Aircraft’s RAND unit (which took its name from a contraction of the term research and development) had been created immediately following World War II, by a number of military and industry leaders, including General H. H. “Hap” Arnold, who’d served as head of the U.S. Army Air Forces until 1945. Arnold understood that military science was accelerating at a mind-boggling rate, one that would affect all the service branches, but aviation in particular. His insistence that academia, industry, and the military had common goals and would benefit from cooperation was revolutionary during the transition from war to peace, paving the way for decades of expansion in all three sectors.

  The 321-page Douglas Aircraft RAND report was delivered on May 2, 1946. Titled Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship, this document described future military uses for Earth-orbiting artificial satellites, including surveillance and missile guidance. It suggested a raft of civilian possibilities, too, notably in communications and meteorology. The RAND report, the work of fifty researchers, presented two conclusions that offered infinite potential for the air force. First, a satellite vehicle with appropriate instrumentation would become one of the most revolutionary military, scientific, and communication tools in the twentieth century. Second, this type of satellite could inflame the aspirations of mankind. “Whose imagination is not fired by the possibility of voyaging out beyond the limits of our earth, traveling to the Moon, to Venus and Mars?” the report asked. “Such thoughts when put on paper now seem like idle fancy. But, a manmade satellite, circling our globe beyond the limits of the atmosphere is the first step. The other necessary steps would surely follow in rapid succession. Who would be so bold as to say that this might not come within our time?”

  The various RAND findings were discussed in detail at a top-secret conference called to consider the idea of uniting the navy and air force in satellite development. The cost of launching a satellite was estimated at around $150 million and to be ready by 1951. Representatives of the two branches, however, couldn’t agree, and military officials looking for a compromise soon lost interest. The RAND study was filed away.

  Turning away from the RAND satellite recommendations, the navy used its prerogative in late 1946 to order the development of a rocket ultimately named the Viking. Created by Baltimore’s Glenn L. Martin Company (later part of Lockheed Martin) in conjunction with the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, the Viking was built on the basis of the V-2 but was a distinctly American effort, even incorporating some ideas by the late Robert Goddard. “The U.S. Navy wanted no part of the haughty Germans, no matter how talented they were,” wrote historian and NASA veteran Doran Baker. The Viking was developed principally to g
ather upper atmospheric and ionospheric data that would help predict weather and would communicate via satellites. It would prove a huge boon to America’s military and commercial aviation industries in coming decades. At the White Sands Proving Ground in New Mexico, test launches of the Viking were able to carry research instruments to altitudes of up to 158 miles.

  A captured German V-2 rocket just after takeoff at Launching Complex 33 at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. The launch was part of an experimental program carried out by the U.S. Army’s Upper Atmosphere Research Panel.

  Schenectady Museum; Hall of Electrical History Foundation/CORBIS/Getty Images

  The U.S. Army was continuing its own missile work, relying heavily on German technology and expertise from Fort Bliss. When the Dora-Mittelbau war crimes trial ensued in 1947 at Dachau, the U.S. Army Ordnance Corps made it clear that the von Braun team (the Peenemünders) had eluded any charges. Unscathed by the Dachau trial, in the fall of 1948 von Braun’s team began contemplating the development of Earth-orbiting satellites. The Committee on Guided Missiles requested that von Braun’s Fort Bliss–White Sands desert team design a way for the army to pioneer the science of satellite carrier-rocket development. Shortly after Christmas, James Forrestal, now the first “secretary of defense,” publicly declared that the Pentagon was looking into the workability of artificial satellites. This was just a preliminary launching by the U.S. government looking into Earth satellite vehicles. Documents from 1949 show that the RAND Corporation had convinced the Pentagon of the satellite’s potential for surveillance, reconnaissance, communications, and intimidation, suggesting that the “mere presence in the sky of an artificial satellite would have a strong psychological effect on the potential enemy.”

  While many researchers in El Paso, Pasadena, Hampton, and at air force bases such as Edwards, Wright-Patterson, and Kirtland were looking to space as the next frontier, others were making history within Earth’s atmosphere. On October 14, 1947, a West Virginia test pilot named Chuck Yeager, a master of aerial evasion and dive-bombing, strapped in for a test flight of the Bell X-1 experimental aircraft, nicknamed Glamorous Glennis, after his wife. Launched from the bomb bay of a Boeing B-29 Superfortress over the Rogers Dry Lake in California’s Mojave Desert, Yeager’s X-1 reached an altitude of 43,000 feet and a speed of 700 miles per hour, marking the first time a plane had exceeded the speed of sound in level flight.

  Following World War II, the United States went aviation crazy. Even though mass transportation was still the domain of ships, trains, and automobiles, commercial airlines such as Eastern were making inroads with passenger cabins designed for comfort. Cities started building airplane terminals with bonds to be paid out in thirty or forty years. With a plethora of trained pilots, commercial aviation routes were established almost like the old pioneer routes of the nineteenth century’s era of westward expansion. During Truman’s presidency two reliable routes were opened for transcontinental air travel: the New York–Chicago–San Francisco route in the north and the New York–St. Louis–Los Angeles route to the south. Electronic navigation and anti-icing technology, both developed during the war, soon allowed for all-weather flying, though fog and snow caused groundings. Despite subpar safety standards, every year, more and more Americans were using commercial aviation as their preferred mode of long-distance travel. Still, too often local newspapers ran horrific stories of wings falling off, midair collisions, and crashes on landing. Aviation technology would have to improve before air travel was truly embraced with mass appeal.

  ON JUNE 24, 1948, long-simmering tensions in divided Berlin came to a boil when Stalin ordered the closure of all land routes to the parts of the city controlled by American, British, and French forces. It was a power play aimed at starving out the Western powers and forcing them to abandon Berlin, located 110 miles within what was the Soviet zone of postwar German occupation, an area soon to become the German Democratic Republic. But the maneuver didn’t work. From June 28 to May 11, 1949, the three nations launched the Berlin Airlift, a massive effort that successfully supplied the citizens of Berlin with food, fuel, and medicine. The U.S. Air Force, which continued flying supplies until 1949, scored a major humanitarian triumph with the dropping of foodstuffs and medical provisions, as more than two hundred thousand sorties carried in over 1.5 million tons of supplies to the surrounded city.

  The successful U.S. airlift helped Truman defeat his Republican challenger, Thomas Dewey of New York, in November’s presidential election, surprising pundits. Kennedy was also reelected, and enough other Democrats took formerly Republican seats to regain control of the House of Representatives. Two years into his political career, JFK had proved surprisingly businesslike in the job, with his congressional offices in Washington and Boston having a reputation for crackerjack staff and unassailable constituent service. He also proved to be a bright, solicitous colleague and was well liked on Capitol Hill. Nobody thought he was a workhorse. But he was his own man, a stand-alone, never part of a faction or clique. Although he usually voted with fellow Democrats, he made no effort to curry favor with such power brokers as Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn or Majority Leader John McCormack—something that was unheard of for a junior representative. It was as if Kennedy’s good looks, great wealth, and war-hero status allowed him the privilege of being an island unto himself on Capitol Hill. Speaking frankly, Rayburn called Kennedy “a good boy” but “one of the laziest men I ever talked to.”

  On the other side of the Capitol Building, in the upper chamber, another New Englander recently arrived on the Hill had chosen a different way of making a name for himself. Even before the U.S. nuclear attack on Hiroshima in 1945, the forward-thinking Connecticut senator Brien McMahon had adopted atomic technology as his area of expertise in Congress. In the years after the war, he deemed the July 1945 test detonation of the first atomic bomb in New Mexico “the most important thing in history since the birth of Jesus Christ.” After V-J Day, McMahon believed the United States had a vested national security interest in remaining the world’s only atomic superpower. Serving as chair of the Senate Special Committee on Atomic Energy, McMahon became known for the rest of his congressional career as “Mr. Atom Bomb” for his authorship of the Atomic Energy Act of 1946, which created the Atomic Energy Commission to control nuclear weapons development and nuclear power management, stripping this authority from the military. At the same time, McMahon concerned himself with the geopolitical import of atomic weapons, at one point delivering a sober-minded speech in the Senate proposing various diplomatic ways of assuaging Soviet fears that the United States would initiate atomic war.

  American officials were confident not only in their atomic monopoly, but also that the United States was sitting on top of the world technologically, politically, and economically. On April 4, 1949, the country had joined Belgium, Canada, Denmark, France, Iceland, Italy, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, and the United Kingdom in creating the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) to resist Soviet expansionism. Shortly thereafter, the Soviet blockade of Berlin ended with the reopening of access routes from western Germany to the city. Having proved a seemingly limitless ability to resist Stalin’s draconian tactics, and having inflicted considerable damage on Soviet-controlled eastern Germany’s economy via a retaliatory trade embargo, the newfound Western alliance seemed indomitable. Truman himself, buoyed by his 1948 election victory and the validation of his foreign policy in Berlin, was confident that the USSR lagged behind on every measure of power in the postwar world, including atomic weaponry.

  Soviet and ex-Nazi rocket specialists were working on an improved version of the V-2, with a power plant capable of a thrust yield of at least eight hundred thousand pounds—fifteen times greater than the wartime V-2. Because the USSR lacked America’s network of strategic air bases around the world, Stalin was betting on intercontinental ballistic missiles to project Soviet power abroad.

  In the early postwar years, American intelligence sever
ely underestimated the USSR’s atomic capabilities, but that blissful ignorance was soon to be shattered. On the afternoon of September 22, 1949, Senator McMahon received a summons to the White House, where at 3:15 p.m. ushers escorted him into a top-secret meeting with President Truman. Before almost any other American, McMahon heard the disturbing news that, three weeks earlier, at the Semipalatinsk in Kazakhstan, the Soviet Union had detonated its first atomic bomb, nicknamed “Joe 1.” A shocked McMahon promised Truman he would not leak the classified briefing to the press. As he drove home that afternoon, he was full of trepidation. Eyeing happy-go-lucky children on playgrounds, watching their purpose-driven parents doing family errands, he felt his heart sink, cognizant that Americans were in their last carefree hours of postwar innocence. The world was about to get more dangerous and complicated.

  That evening, Truman paced around the White House, sipping bourbon. The world order had changed: there were now two nuclear superpowers. But the president’s greatest fear wasn’t the obvious one: that the Soviets would attack the United States with nuclear weapons. Instead, he intuited that when the public learned that Joseph Stalin had an atomic bomb, the shock could trigger a panic, and recriminations were sure to be unleashed against his administration for having underestimated Soviet capabilities. The next day, when the rest of Congress and the public received the news, lawmakers would have to tread carefully not to frighten the country or fan the flames of war.

  Congressman Kennedy deliberated on the Soviet feat in Kazakhstan for two weeks before speaking out via an open letter to President Truman, warning that the Department of Defense had reneged on its obligation to prepare American citizens to survive atomic warfare. Less interested in how the Soviet scientists had achieved nuclear parity, Kennedy seized the issue of civil defense as his calling card. Remembering the woeful lack of U.S. military preparedness in the 1930s, he wrote of “an atomic Pearl Harbor” unless the United States spent “months and even years” planning ways to resist or respond to and survive the catastrophic event of a Soviet atomic attack.