American Moonshot

by Douglas Brinkley

  One proposal, dubbed Project Orion, suggested using a series of atomic explosions to propel a spacecraft at high velocity, with great fuel efficiency. At first “it looked screwball,” Johnson told a congressional committee in 1959. “It doesn’t look so screwball today. . . . You use little bombs, and you use a lot of them. The trick is the creation of a spring mechanism on the platform.” The platform would provide a barrier between the nuclear bombs and the spaceship, somehow protecting astronauts onboard from the bombs’ concussions. While thermal nuclear propulsion in rocketry was the kind of research undertaken through ARPA contracts, the agency ultimately decided against bomb-powered spaceflight.

  Having excoriated the Eisenhower administration the previous autumn over mismanagement of national security, Kennedy was not actively involved with ARPA’s plans to reorganize American space exploration. When, on March 17, Project Vanguard finally sent a navy satellite into orbit, Kennedy retired his space jokes. Running for reelection to the Senate, he instead switched gears, homing in on a recent National Intelligence Estimate that forecast the Kremlin would have a “first operational capability with up to ten prototype ICBMs” somewhere between mid-1958 and mid-1959. Such a nuclear arsenal in the hands of a leader like Khrushchev, who regularly threatened to “bury capitalism,” was represented to Kennedy as the most dangerous threat the United States had ever had to face—the possibility of total annihilation.

  JFK also began taking control of some of the less decorous aspects of his personal narrative. Speaking that March at the Gridiron Club, during a glittering evening of status-conscious Washingtonian satire for which he prepared as though it were a Harvard final exam, Kennedy pulled from his jacket pocket what he said was a telegram, claiming it had just arrived from his “generous daddy.” Poking fun at himself, he then pretended to read his father’s faux message aloud: “Dear Jack, don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.” From that point on, he drew roars from the audience, often at his own expense. It was a hilarious night overall, and a watershed for Kennedy. After living ten years in Georgetown, he was at last part of the Washington establishment on his own terms: an independent Democrat, beholden to nobody.

  In fact, Kennedy’s Gridiron jest belied the actual plan for his Senate campaign. Knowing full well that Joe Sr. would pour nearly unlimited funds into the coming presidential campaign, Jack was adamant that his Senate reelection campaign be bare bones. Not wanting the image that “Daddy buys my votes” to have a glimmer of truth in 1958, he made sure his campaign team was disciplined and effective in its own right. Hard as it might have been on his health, he returned to Massachusetts regularly and circulated around the nation tirelessly, delivering speech after speech.

  On February 6, 1958, as noted, the Senate voted to establish a Special Committee on Space and Astronautics to map a more aggressive U.S. space policy. Lyndon Johnson had steamrolled the resolution through the Senate and succeeded with a 78–1 vote. The lone dissenter was Allen Ellender of Louisiana, a Democrat who rejected all new committees as a matter of principle. The new Senate committee was chaired by Johnson. Soon thereafter the House created its own Select Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration. Seizing on the post-Sputnik moment, both these legislative bodies were geared to advocate civilian space relevancy over those in the military. In the deliberations, Kennedy was merely a yes vote, while Johnson seized on space with assiduity. “LBJ was eager to get out front in space because it was the new national toy,” White House speechwriter Bryce Harlow believed. “He was trying to get to become President of the United States . . . so LBJ wanted to get in front of the space race so that everybody would say, ‘oh, that’s our leader.”

  In the Senate, both Kennedy and Johnson vigorously championed a bill that was gathering steam: the National Defense Education Act (NDEA). Promising funding to encourage studies in the sciences and related subjects, the proposal was controversial in that it initiated direct federal aid for public schools, as well as universities and individual students. Some saw this as the beginning of the end for local control of public schools. The book Why Johnny Can’t Read and What You Can Do About It, published by Harper and Row, had hit the best-seller list, and Kennedy rode the wave. Nathan Pusey, the president of Harvard, joined JFK in insisting that a larger percentage of the GNP be directed toward education. Kennedy believed that science education was the critical component of American success in the space race. Today’s high-schoolers would be tomorrow’s physicists and astronomers. He supported the bill and also proved his ability to balance fairness with his ardent anticommunism by arguing against a provision requiring loan applicants to sign a loyalty oath. Once the NDEA was enacted, it indeed laid the groundwork for advancements in space by putting hundreds of thousands of students on track to what might be called science/space technology literacy.

  At ARPA, Roy Johnson received a proposal in March 1958 that caught his fancy. Sporting the catchy name “Man-in-Space-Soonest” (MISS), the idea originated at the air force’s Air Research and Development Command, one of the many groups that had sprouted up throughout the military over which ARPA was supposed to ride herd. Within days, Johnson expressed his support for the $133 million program, telling the press, “The Air Force has a long-term development responsibility for manned spaceflight capability with the primary objective of accomplishing satellite flight as soon as technology permits.” The plan called for an eleven-step protocol, with each step constituting the launch of a more refined and sophisticated space vehicle, leading to the ultimate goal of a “Manned Space Flight to the Moon and Return.” The total projected cost of landing an American on the moon by 1965 was $1.5 billion (off by $24 billion and four years, as it turned out).

  Even before the initial ARPA disbursement came through, the air force began work on MISS. Rudimentary plans were debated, scientists were contracted, and astronauts were recruited. Accordingly, the USAF asked Dr. Edward Teller, the so-called father of the hydrogen bomb, and several other members of the scientific technology elite to study the issue of human spaceflight and make recommendations for the future. Teller’s group concluded that the air force could place a human in orbit within two years, and urged that the department pursue this effort. Teller understood, however, that there was essentially no military reason for undertaking this mission and chose not to tie his recommendation to any specific rationale, falling back on a basic belief that the first nation to do so would accrue national prestige in a general manner. In early 1958, Lieutenant General Donald Putt, the USAF deputy chief of staff for development, informed NACA director Hugh Dryden of the air force’s intention of aggressively pursuing “a research vehicle program having as its objective the earliest possible manned orbital flight which will contribute substantially and essentially to follow-on scientific and military space systems.” Putt asked Dryden to collaborate in this effort, but with the NACA as a decidedly junior partner. Dryden agreed, but insisted on a nonmilitary lead in the effort. In the fall of 1958, the newly established NASA gained authority of MISS. It laid the groundwork for Project Mercury.

  While space historians have often ignored or dismissed MISS as an underfunded effort, it accomplished three important things over the summer of 1958. First, it identified an easily quantified objective: a manned flight into space. Second, the eleven-step guideline provided a framework for realistic discussions about Americans in space. Third and most important for manned space in the coming decades, MISS proactively named the men who would venture into space.

  That summer, nine names made the air force MISS list, all of them high-altitude test pilots who also fit the profile of being smaller, lighter men. Four fearless X-15 test pilots were on the roster: Iven Kincheloe, Joe Walker, Jack McKay, and Neil Armstrong. Also listed was Scott Crossfield, an aviation engineer from California who from 1946 to 1950 had worked in the University of Washington’s Kirsten Wind Tunnel, and who was slated to fly the X-15 even while helping to engineer it. Bob Wh
ite, a New York City native, was equally at home in the cockpit and at the drawing board, having worked as a systems engineer at the Rome Air Development Center in upstate New York before seeking a billet at Edwards Air Force Base as a test pilot. Bob Rushworth was a stalwart of air force combat and experimental aviation. Alvin White (no relation to Bob White) was a World War II hero with a degree from the University of California, Berkeley. Bill Bridgeman, at forty-two the oldest of the MISS candidates, had risen from obscurity, flying relatively slow airplanes in the war and immediately afterward, and then becoming a flashy, record-breaking test pilot by 1951.

  Among the X-15 pilots themselves, Joe Walker of Pennsylvania was already a legend of sorts. During World War II he earned the Distinguished Flying Cross by flying weather reconnaissance flights for the army air corps. Once the war ended, Walker left the air corps and joined the NACA’s Aircraft Engine Research Laboratory, in Cleveland. There he met his hero Jimmy Doolittle. Something of a daredevil, Walker would fly test planes to unprecedented altitudes. While Chuck Yeager became famous in 1947 for being the first person to break the sound barrier, it was Walker who logged more hours and went higher and faster on the X-15 than any other American pilot. On his inaugural X-15 flight, he was surprised by the sheer brute thrust of its rocket engines. “Oh my God!” he screamed into the radio as his body vibrated madly. The flight controller comically responded, “Yes? You called?” By 1951, Walker was relocated to the High-Speed Flight Research Station, in Edwards, California. With experience in practically every new type of chase plane or fighter jet, Walker was an obvious choice for the air force’s MISS group in 1958.

  Denying that he wanted to break the speed records, Neil Armstrong was skeptical about the MISS program. The decorated Korean War pilot was not especially interested in sleek rockets or spaceships, insisting that he preferred planes with wings, which the X-15 had. Armstrong volunteered, and with the other candidate astronauts was put through several days of medical testing at Edwards Air Force Base. The patriotic Armstrong, in his non-flashy Ohio way, spoke for the rest of the corps when he said that if the country needed a Man-in-Space-Soonest, he was “in the line-up.”

  With this lineup, MISS put faces on those American test pilots who, it was thought at the time, would someday conquer space. But this MISS program wasn’t publicized. President Eisenhower refused to seek headlines in mid-1958. That however, would change, with personal publicity soon becoming a hallmark of American space exploration. The air force promoted only a few articles about the MISS roster. But once Time, Life, Collier’s, and Newsweek turned von Braun into the Space Maestro of the 1950s, astronauts—as the aviators turned space travelers were now called—were also poised on the brink of fame.

  If Eisenhower hadn’t been convinced previously of the need for an American presence in outer space, the six months since Sputnik had brought him a long way around from his naturally conservative fiscal beliefs—his modus operandi, he often claimed, was saving taxpayers “every possible dime.” In sending the legislation for a new space agency to Congress in April 1958, the president admitted that public relations had become the master. “The highest priority should go of course to space research with a military application,” he explained, “but for national morale, and to some extent national prestige, this should likewise be pushed through a separate agency.” Infuriating army, navy, and air force brass, the new space agency was to be run by civilians. Trying to calm the military’s disgruntlement, the president promised generals and admirals that every branch of the armed services would still play a major role in all space-related White House decisions.

  ON APRIL 2, 1958, President Eisenhower spoke before a joint session of Congress to champion the creation of a civilian National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which would incorporate the existing National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), headquartered in Washington, DC, with laboratories in Hampton, Cleveland, and the San Francisco Bay area. Lyndon Johnson of Texas wasted no time in embracing Eisenhower’s call. Working with Senator Styles Bridges (R-New Hampshire), Johnson cosponsored the Senate version of the NASA bill and resisted arm-twisting efforts to militarize the adolescent American space program as the two senators worked on the legislation in bipartisan tandem with the Eisenhower administration.

  The bill’s controversial proposal for civilian control of NASA led to months of negotiations on Capitol Hill, as the small contingent of space advocates in Congress was overwhelmed by the horde of legislators who demanded a say in military matters. Ultimately, the exact nature of NASA’s work was delineated as “exercising control over aeronautical and space activities sponsored by the United States,” with the military services retaining control over “activities peculiar to or primarily associated with the development of weapons systems, military operations, or the defense of the United States.”

  Washington lawmakers sought expert opinions from the brightest minds working the aerospace beat for ideas on how NASA should function. Many thoughtful space leaders were put off by Lyndon Johnson’s claim that the “conquest of space” was a Cold War military necessity. “General Donald Putt recently called for an Air Force base on the moon,” director of Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory W. H. Pickering scoffed at the U.S. Air Force’s anti-NASA reluctance. “These and similar statements, I believe, are nonsense. The direct military value of a space program is almost zero. Satellites may have some value for reconnaissance or communications, though from a Russian point of view this would appear to be quite minor. Space vehicles capable of journeys to the moon or beyond appear to me to be of no military significance.”

  General Jimmy Doolittle of the U.S. Air Force worried that the establishment of NASA meant the dissolution of the NACA. Since World War I, the Langley Research Center had been a pioneer in aviation research. Having served as chairman of the NACA right up until 1956, Doolittle knew virtually every employee there by name. “While we [the NACA] knew that missiles would have a very important place, while we knew that space must be explored, we were hesitant to turn over to the missile people and their supporters all of the funds that we had been receiving for the development of the airplane and associated equipment,” Doolittle wrote. “In retrospect, I think we all agree that we were wrong.”

  When Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 on July 29, some generals and admirals dissented. Didn’t Eisenhower understand the horrific consequences of Sputnik? Did he really believe all that International Geophysical Year nonsense? Space was rapidly being militarized by the Soviets; therefore, America should follow suit. Speaking for many career soldiers, Lieutenant General Gilbert Trudeau, the head of U.S. Army Research and Development, expressed utter dismay. “I just can’t believe,” he said, “that anyone would take the capability of the most capable element in the Nation to explore space and do away with it.” Trudeau was just one of a chorus of pissed-off military officers. Dozens of Pentagon denizens insisted that outside civilian control over their aerospace research spelled doom. Of course, the Department of Defense and its predecessor, the War Department, had exerted such civilian power since the founding of the nation in 1789, and the Pentagon was stocked with civilian administrators. But that was different in one respect: while military personnel were trained to use intimidation and force to maintain the security of the United States and its interests abroad, NASA lacked that motivation, not being subordinated to military objectives. As Lyndon Johnson put it, space exploration for science’s sake was the civilian agency’s purported mandate (at least for public consumption).

  Senator John F. Kennedy was still regularly using space exploration as a wedge issue with which to attack President Eisenhower. In a speech in western Pennsylvania on April 18, 1958, he delivered the bitter pill that “Americans were no longer the paramount power in arms, aid, trade or appeal to the underdeveloped world. We are acting largely only in reflex to Soviet initiative.” With the verve of a political powerhouse who had finally hit his stride, JFK suggested inste
ad that “the United States for once appeal to the world with constructive solutions and our own vision of the future.” To Kennedy, trying to beat the USSR in the near vacuum of outer space, satellite by satellite, was untenable. Instead, the senator from Massachusetts asserted, the United States needed to rally toward the cause of beating the Soviets in intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) and ICBM technology and accelerating the production schedules of the Atlas, Thor, Jupiter, and Titan rockets.

  At the same time that Kennedy was delivering his anti-Eisenhower campaign speeches, an influential report appeared to support his positions. Deterrence and Survival in the Nuclear Age (commonly referred to as the Gaither Report, after H. Rowan Gaither, the chairman of a blue-ribbon commission whose aim was to offer Eisenhower advice on how to deal with the Soviet Union following Sputnik) called for a tougher stance with Moscow, more money for military research and missile development, and increased U.S. conventional forces. It also recommended that the United States develop an invulnerable second-strike force, warning of a threat that could become critical by 1959 or early 1960 because of the “unexpected Soviet development of the ICBM.” Kennedy embraced the Gaither Report as his personal white paper on the campaign trail and in press releases, while arguing his concern that the Western democracies possessed little reliable information about the USSR’s military and technological strengths and weaknesses. Even the most elementary facts were unavailable—the locations of railroads and bridges, the locations of factories and the nature and volume of their production, the size and readiness of the Soviet army, navy, and air force. The Soviet Union, JFK complained, was tightly wrapped in ominous secrecy.

  On August 14, 1958, Kennedy put a new phrase into the American lexicon, earning himself a prominent citation in the Oxford English Dictionary. Speaking on the floor of the Senate, he said, “Our nation could have afforded, and can afford now, the steps necessary to close the missile gap.” That “missile gap” became Kennedy’s calling card, wielded as a campaign cudgel even though its contention—that the Soviets had hundreds of ICBMs whereas the United States hadn’t deployed a single one—proved to be a fiction. In the wake of JFK’s assertions, the air force and the CIA sparred over how advanced the Soviets actually were. Air force analysts backed Kennedy’s notion that the USSR had stockpiles of ICBMs. The CIA disagreed, insisting that there were fewer than a dozen. (Declassified documents would later show the CIA was right: at the time in question, the Kremlin had only four ICBMs.)