American Moonshot

by Douglas Brinkley

  It is both brazen and disingenuous for a U.S. president to say that a mission cannot fail. As Kennedy knew all too well, space launches certainly could fail. Out at the White Sands Proving Ground, rockets scuttling around the pad and then blowing up were commonplace. From 1957 to 1961, for every rocket launch success at Cape Canaveral, there had been two disasters. The Mercury Seven themselves, on hand to witness the first test of the Atlas rocket that would eventually lift one of them to orbit, watched as it exploded just after liftoff, prompting Shepard to remark, “Well, I’m glad they got that out of the way.” There were plenty of pragmatic reasons for Kennedy not to embrace the risky and expensive moonshot, but the odds were just close enough to push him toward go.

  In truth, nobody knew the Kremlin’s true capabilities or intentions. CIA intelligence estimated that the Soviets probably couldn’t send a human to the moon within ten years, but beating even that schedule would require government funding and industrial mobilization on a near-wartime scale, committing all involved to a breakneck pace until the mission was accomplished. Such an approach was problematic for NASA engineers; Project Mercury was notoriously behind in its much simpler schedules for astronaut suborbital flights. Bugs and glitches were pervasive in the embryonic manned space program. Kennedy knew, as did Khrushchev, that as in any business, a rush order would cost extra.

  In 1961, the U.S. economy was improving from the recession of 1957–58, though not robustly. Inasmuch as Kennedy had the leeway to propose a major new initiative, antipoverty programs appealed to him the most. In the area of natural resource management, he had an abiding fascination with developing a process for seawater desalination, feeling that making fresh water abundantly available in the Middle East and Africa would improve conditions in those regions, where the United States was vying with the Soviet Union for influence. For its part, Congress had already signaled that it would be most receptive to an infrastructure omnibus bill. Rebuilding bridges, highways, and electric utility grids, as well as other New Deal–style public works programs, would strengthen the economy, first through construction jobs and then in increased capacities for growth. In fact, Democratic members of Congress awaited just such a proposal from the White House, presuming that practically every district in every state would benefit. Rather than being pie in the sky, a lunar voyage promised some of the same economic stimulus.

  For NASA administrator James Webb, the real excitement of an accelerated lunar landing program lay in the federal government’s ability to pool resources with corporations and academia to get the job done. Existing science, technology, and aerospace hubs such as St. Louis and Los Angeles would be the most immediate beneficiaries, with new additional high-tech centers sure to emerge coast to coast to handle demand. Enormously complicated systems engineering, along with technological integration requirements, would be mastered via NASA coordination. A tidal wave of advanced scientific knowledge would be unleashed. Webb never lost a chance to stress to Kennedy that most of the jobs created by Project Apollo would be at a high educational level, with a correspondingly high pay scale. From Webb’s perspective, Apollo was something akin to the Tennessee Valley Authority, the Grand Coulee Dam, the Saint Lawrence Seaway, and the Interstate Highway System, all rolled into one. “What we had in mind,” he later reflected, “was to try and build all the elements of a total space competence.”

  Webb did worry, however, that in its zeal to reap political and economic benefits, the White House wasn’t giving adequate weight to the very real technological difficulties inherent in staging the first moonshot. “I’m a relatively cautious person,” Webb recalled. “I think when you decide you’re going to do something and put the prestige of the United States government behind it, you’d better doggone well be able to do it.” But Webb also noted that NASA was ready to execute a moonshot if Kennedy made it a national priority. And a fixed date to toil toward would help organize the all-hands-on-deck effort.

  When working on his May 25 speech, the president was also cognizant of the military aspects of space. One of his burning fears was that Soviet satellites soon would be equipped with nuclear bombs, which could then be launched accurately from airspace directly over a target in North America. Under the president’s directive, the air force worked on antimissile defense prototypes to do battle against this kind of space weapon, but the program was riddled with flaws across its interlocking network of sensors, inceptors, and kill vehicles. With such a defensive shield far from operable, JFK moved steadily on the diplomatic front toward a ban on all U.S. or Soviet nuclear weaponry in space. Lacking a comprehensive safeguard against America’s nuclear adversary, Kennedy instead stressed the need for U.S.–Soviet peaceful exploration of space. The Soviets wanted any such ban to include satellite surveillance, an area in which the American military was heavily invested. While the United Nations was involved initially in the cause of keeping space conflict-free, the obvious fact was that any peaceful future depended on an agreement at the outset between Washington and Moscow.

  For the sake of those bilateral negotiations, Kennedy needed to show the world that the U.S. interest in space was cordial and nonviolent, and nothing more. Just as Antarctica had been demilitarized by a 1960 treaty, why couldn’t space be, too? While American and Soviet diplomats stumbled in their preliminary moves toward talks, the president repeatedly asked his staff to keep the U.S. Air Force from trumpeting its every space-related triumph. Most notably, its X-15 was continuing to nip at speed and altitude records for a reusable craft. Even more advanced was the Dyna-Soar, another airplane-like spacecraft designed to be capable of entering space, orbiting Earth, and then returning. Assuming it received federal government support, the Dyna-Soar was slated for construction starting in 1963, with initial testing in 1964–65. Neil Armstrong, in fact, had been recruited to the Dyna-Soar corps as a consultant pilot. “Every time the Air Force put up a space shot and any publicity was given to it, [Kennedy] just went through the roof,” an acquaintance said later. From the Oval Office, the president would call air force secretary Arthur Sylvester in a rage, asking why he continued to “let those bastards talk.”

  From the air force’s perspective, JFK’s stance was just as enraging. When Kennedy took office, the air force had hopes of leveraging a larger role in the administration of space. But air force senior officers soon intuited that the president had embraced von Braun’s Huntsville program. And neither of the two Mercury astronauts initially chosen to go into space—Shepard and Glenn—were in the air force. Knowing well how Congress worked, air force generals recognized that they would lose priority without well-crafted publicity. Plain pride was also at stake. Ever since the inception of an American civilian space program in 1958, air force loyalists had been in a constant state of frustration, baffled as to how they could possibly be sidelined from spearheading most space developments. Many air force generals agreed with Kennedy that space needed to be off-limits to weaponry, yet they believed that NASA didn’t know how to properly put test pilots into space. They were relentless in lobbying JFK on this point, and on the efficacy of the Dyna-Soar. While NASA’s abilities were stretched to the limit just trying to put a “man in a can,” as the Mercury astronauts themselves called their short flights, the Dyna-Soar was regarded in engineering circles as a better program, and was making bigger strides. The constant delays in the Mercury program only fed the air force’s antipathy toward NASA, and its frustration with Kennedy.

  As Kennedy prepared to address Congress about the future of the U.S. space program, a draft of a major study sponsored by the air force was under review in the office of Secretary Sylvester. Called the “Space Plan,” it envisioned manned flights, including trips to the moon, and research into medicine and other subjects. The Space Plan would serve as a valuable document for years, a map of the future of space exploration. Underlying its well-considered predictions, however, lay the contention that leaving the forward edge of space exploration to NASA and maintaining the separation of peaceful and milit
ary space programs was “absurd,” “unsound,” and “arbitrary.” In this report, as it did through every other available avenue, the air force continued to campaign against NASA for sole leadership of the manned space program.

  Therefore, in thinking through the future prospect of a NASA moonshot on an accelerated schedule, Kennedy had to consider the air force’s dissension. This youngest service branch had had powerful friends in Congress, such as Senator Stuart Symington, who had served as Truman’s secretary of the air force. It had a built-in determination to win the East-West rivalry between the world’s superpowers. And it had the Dyna-Soar, which held enormous promise. But the Dyna-Soar was designed with the potential to carry nuclear bombs, making both it and the air force liabilities in the effort to reach an accord with the Soviets on banning such weapons in space. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, in particular, was increasingly suspicious of the air force’s motivations in attempting by every means to gain control of the space program, even if it meant that space would become yet another armed theater of Cold War brinksmanship.

  When all the considerations were weighed, the most uncontroversial path Kennedy could have taken in the spring of 1961 would have been continuing the Mercury manned space program without radical alteration. Pragmatic incrementalism in rocketry had been the American way throughout the Eisenhower administration, and few in Congress were expecting a bold new direction for NASA just a few months into the new presidency. Even Defense Secretary Robert McNamara, who always supported the Apollo program, testified in 1963 that from a military vantage point there was no “man-on-the-moon” requirement. Faced with more pressing priorities, most presidents would have turned away from the moonshot recommendations in the Webb-McNamara Report as nonessential, but some would have seen in them what Kennedy saw. JFK’s idol, Thomas Jefferson, would have blanched at the size of the expenditure (which would make the NASA budget one of the largest in the federal government), but he wouldn’t have been able to resist one of the most monumental advances of scientific discovery in human history. For James K. Polk, the very bigness of the project might have proved an irresistible attraction. Theodore Roosevelt would have regarded the moonshot as a fitting errand for a world power and proof of American exceptionalism writ large. Franklin Roosevelt, his boundless imagination matched by his belief in priming the economic pump, would have seen an opportunity for the federal government to spread prosperity in places like central Florida, the Virginia Tidewater region, New Orleans, Houston, and beyond. Among New Deal–style Democrats in 1961, a NASA moonshot’s potential to bring both white-collar and blue-collar jobs to must-win congressional districts in the Gulf South, Southwest, and Midwest didn’t go unnoticed. With the Deep South’s traditional support for the Democratic Party beginning to slip in the face of demographic change and opposition to the civil rights movement, pumping pork-barrel money into Dixieland would be smart politics for Kennedy.

  On May 9, Kennedy allowed the Webb-McNamara Report—officially, “Recommendations for Our National Space Program: Changes, Policies, Goals”—to be circulated in Congress. Behaving like a patron, Johnson had been the front man on getting the moonshot recommendations on the president’s desk. Had the White House detected screams of outrage from Capitol Hill over its request for an additional $600 million in NASA funding to get Project Apollo going strong, they’d have been able to quietly back away from the moonshot plan before Kennedy’s speech. But the Congress of 1961–62 did not, as a body, view the White House as the enemy camp. In that sense, it reflected the nation at the time. Despite the hard-fought, razor-close election of 1960, the majority of Americans looked forward to seeing what the Kennedy years would bring. There was a fair-minded consensus that Kennedy had, after all, been elected to unite the nation, and in the spring of 1961, Congress, to a surprising bipartisan extent, gave the young president room to lead.

  With an American moonshot being recommended by all except Wiesner and a few Eisenhower holdovers, LBJ left the United States for a whirlwind trip to Southeast Asia; he wouldn’t return until May 24. This allowed Kennedy time to prepare his planned speech to a joint session of Congress on May 25 without leaks or further input from his vice president. Ever since the Shepard success, the president was elbowing LBJ out of the picture, determined to make sure that the Apollo moonshot was interpreted by the press as his initiative. The White House had purposely let the New York Times know a day in advance that Kennedy would be pushing for a NASA voyage in his upcoming address to Congress.

  AS THE MORNING of May 25 arrived, Kennedy was busy making last-minute modifications to his speech, which had been drafted by Willis Shapley of the Bureau of the Budget and Theodore Sorensen. Originally, JFK had thought of declaring that America would put a man on the moon by 1967, the fiftieth anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution. But wisely he went with the “end of the decade,” to buy NASA more time. Even on the limo ride from the White House to the Capitol, the president was still editing furiously; having been a member of the House and Senate for fourteen years, he wasn’t a fan of long-winded speeches. The talk was crafted to be forty-five minutes long, but by ad-libbing three additional paragraphs, he brought the final length up to forty-seven. Wiesner, though chairman of the White House’s Science Advisory Committee, had advised him to avoid the word science in his address; the president concurred.

  With the speech in his suit coat pocket, the president entered the chamber, shook hands, and strode to the podium. Johnson, in his capacity as Senate president, sat behind JFK at stage right, beside Speaker of the House Sam Rayburn on the left. Nearly everybody in Congress seemed in good springtime spirits. A masterly orator, Kennedy intended to build the rhetoric up slowly, with domestic and foreign policy requests, and then hit lawmakers smack between the eyes with the moonshot gambit. Like a whale after a deep plunge, the president was coming up to spout and breathe life into NASA’s Project Apollo.

  Just after 12:30 p.m., following a round of polite applause, Kennedy began the address in a strong, confident voice, describing plans to affirm his so-called Freedom Doctrine by financially supporting troubled nations aspiring to democracy, for the global enrichment of humanity. He offered a domestic jobs program and then confirmed his forthcoming summit with Nikita Khrushchev in Vienna. He requested money for foreign aid, offering “our skills and our capital and our food” for countries, among them Vietnam, “upon whom our hopes for resisting the Communist tide . . . ultimately depend.”

  For the first half hour, Kennedy spoke in a steady voice, soberly discussing increased military spending and disarmament negotiations with the Soviets and receiving commensurately businesslike applause. Listening to the audio recording decades later, one can almost sense that he was holding back a bit, setting up his audience for the jolt of excitement to come. Then, finally, it came: “If we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny,” he said with rising urgency, “the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere who are attempting to make a determination on which road they should take.”

  Framing NASA’s moonshot as a choice between tyranny or freedom was smart Cold War politics, the surest path to persuade Congress to open its purse. Kennedy knew that GOP conservatives would find it hard to resist a lunar voyage framed as a way to prove democratic capitalism’s superiority to single-party communism. He didn’t resist the temptation, as Eisenhower had, to equate space accomplishment with excellence in government. Instead, JFK posited that a government that could send a man to the moon must be superior in all else as well. “We go into space,” he added, “because, whatever mankind must undertake, free men must fully share.” Now was the time, he said, “to take longer strides, time for a great new American enterprise, time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on earth.”

  Mentionin
g the Soviets’ successes in building powerful rockets and satellites, Kennedy stressed that the United States had to compete harder. “For while we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first, we can guarantee that any failure to make this effort will make us last,” he said. “We take an additional risk by making it in full view of the world; but as shown by the feat of Astronaut Shepard, this very risk enhances our stature when we are successful.” And then the president laid out the grand challenge that would come to define his administration and legacy: “I believe this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”

  According to Sorensen, Kennedy “sensed . . . that his audience was skeptical, if not hostile” to his moon challenge. Even though this assessment was false, it caused the president to lose confidence. In closing, his voice didn’t soar, as it had in his “Ask Not” inaugural speech. His brows were suddenly drawn back a bit, as if questioning his own act. After speaking for more than a half hour with only one inconsequential stutter, he was suddenly tripping over words. There was a note of distraction in JFK’s voice as the speech concluded. The audience couldn’t help but sense his discomfort. Standing before an assembly of his government, with tens of millions of Americans tuned in on TV and radio, he heard only stony silence and subdued applause rather than the epochal excitement that should have greeted the notion of sending an American hurtling 230,000 miles through nothingness, to another world, by 1970. Jeers might have been preferable. Nonetheless, his brazen moonshot call was among the most courageous statements and greatest gambles ever made by an American president.