American Moonshot

by Douglas Brinkley

  Webb, full of gumption, would soon prove the indomitable linchpin of the Apollo effort, working with his two major deputies, Dryden and Seamans, to pull together the multiple strands and streams of American space research and align them into a single efficient and mighty effort. There was the Space Task Group, which was responsible for managing Project Mercury and would also assume the burden of overseeing the technical aspects of Project Apollo. In Pasadena, Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory was already scientifically studying and mapping the moon. Responsibility for launching rockets was being handled by NASA’s Office of Launch Vehicle Programs, Marshall Space Flight Center, and the U.S. Air Force. Ultimately, the list of contributors to the Apollo effort would include some twenty thousand companies and more than four hundred thousand individual citizens—practically if not literally stretching to the moon and back.

  Somewhat surprisingly, President Kennedy sent Edward R. Murrow to represent the White House at the Tulsa conference. The former CBS News broadcaster had recently joined the administration as head of the U.S. Information Agency (USIA). Murrow had taken the job on the stipulation that he’d be afforded a high degree of access to White House decision making, telling JFK, “If you want me in the landings, I’d better be there for the takeoffs.” At first glance, the president and Murrow seemed like an ideal pair to sell the moonshot to American taxpayers. Murrow had been raised in difficult economic circumstances in the state of Washington, where a first-rate public education left him with a nimble mind and remarkable communication skills. While Kennedy steadily matured during the course of his political career, almost willing himself into projecting self-assurance, Murrow seemed to have been born with an overflow of confidence. During World War II he had become famous reporting from London’s streets with a CBS Radio microphone during the harrowing Battle of Britain, describing in photo-clear language the carnage he was seeing. When Murrow said a building was on fire, you could almost smell the smoke. Throughout the war, he recruited a crackerjack team of foreign correspondents who collectively became known as the Murrow Boys.

  Back home after the war, Murrow’s popularity skyrocketed as he expanded his media reach into the new medium of television. Although he was a product of commercial broadcasting, with all its dependence on advertisements and sponsors, he maintained his high standards and integrity in reporting the news, telling the truth as he saw it. On evening programs now hallowed in TV history, Murrow pushed past the corporate stance of cowardly neutrality and lashed out, most famously, at the reprehensible tactics of Joseph McCarthy, which led to the Wisconsin senator’s being condemned by lawmakers in the mid-1950s.

  Murrow’s first major public appearance as USIA director came at the National Press Club in Washington the day before Kennedy’s moonshot speech. Discussing the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, he surprised the audience by speaking out against racial segregation in the South, including that in the nation’s capital. Murrow lamented the fact that America’s backward Jim Crow segregation policies forced accredited diplomats from African countries such as Ghana and Nigeria to live in a restricted way. “Landlords will not rent to them,” Murrow said, “schools refuse their children, stores will not let them try on clothes, beaches ban their families.” Emphasizing both the duties of our shared humanity and the damage such prejudice can cause in international relations, Murrow noted that the images of police violence against Freedom Riders in Jackson, Mississippi, that very week, broadcast to the world by newspapers and television, cost America “as much influence as anything the Soviets might do.” Clearly stating his own priorities just one day before Kennedy’s moonshot announcement, Murrow asked, “Is it possible that we concern ourselves too much with outer space and far places, and too little with inner space and near places?”

  The Associated Press account of Murrow’s speech was carried in newspapers large and small. Out of an address of more than an hour on a range of topics, it highlighted his juxtaposition of America’s focus on space while civil rights inequities and systemic poverty existed even in the nation’s own capital.

  Traveling to Tulsa, Murrow continued to be candid, preaching civil rights in front of space geeks. In a segment of the conference devoted to the use of satellites for global communications and weather forecasting, most of the speakers enthused about the potential benefits for humanity, if only the Americans and Soviets could agree on a peaceful satellite policy. But Murrow sounded a warning note, arguing that everything that seemed open and egalitarian about satellite communication also threatened to enable the spread of what he melodramatically called “filth” to households worldwide.

  Shocking many attendees, Murrow continued to represent the argument that NASA was a distraction from the real societal problems America faced in 1961, though he also reluctantly admitted that Apollo offered the brightest hope for enhancing national pride. Murrow believed part of the risk of Kennedy’s space strategy was the uncertainty of whether the New Frontier America of outer space could really coexist with America’s troubled “inner spaces.” That, too, would be learned before the decade was out.

  Just how committed Murrow was to civil rights became apparent in the coming weeks, when he challenged Webb over NASA’s having no African American astronauts. Webb told Murrow that astronauts needed to have very specific aeronautical qualifications, and there were no black test pilots. Taking the matter up with Kennedy directly, Murrow urged the White House to insist on diversity. “The first colored man to enter outer space, will, in the eyes of the world, be the first man to have ever done so,” Murrow wrote, cognizant that a vast majority of the world’s population was non-Caucasian. “I see no reason why our efforts in outer space should reflect with such fidelity the discrimination that exists on this minor planet.”

  Despite genuine criticisms from the right (over cost) and left (over the diversion of resources from social justice and antipoverty initiatives), congressional leaders found it easy to move Kennedy’s moonshot idea toward a vote in July. The one expected Democratic adversary, the thorniest burr in the New Frontier saddle, was Senator William Proxmire. Complaining about the unnecessary emphasis on speed in NASA’s beat-the-Soviets goals, the Wisconsin senator claimed that the space race was warping the U.S. educational system by siphoning off scientific talent from America’s universities and by eating up funds that could be used to educate a new generation of scientists. He dismissed Kennedy’s idea that the space program itself was supposed to inspire students to pursue such careers; the increase in space activity during the 1950s and the torrents of publicity surrounding it had led in the opposite direction. “The Russians are now graduating some 125,000 engineers and scientists a year,” Proxmire said, “compared to our 45,000. That is in contrast with the situation 10 years ago when we were graduating about 55,000—more scientists then than we are now—and the Russians were graduating about 36,000. These statistics are of deep concern. What we have to do is concentrate on scientific education rather than on these spectacular leaps to the Moon as a first priority.”

  The world of science also contained critics of Kennedy’s accelerated moon mission. U.S. News and World Report printed an interview with Dr. Hans Thirring, former head of the Institute for Theoretical Physics, in Vienna, who compared the idea of a manned moon voyage to attaining perpetual motion, moving the Rocky Mountains to another location, or turning an animal into a different species—“not an utter physical impossibility” but presented with “economic impossibilities.” From a purely empirical perspective Thirring felt Kennedy’s timeline for landing an astronaut on the moon infeasible. “I am quite sure it will not be done within the next 10 years,” he said. “And I think it very likely not to happen within the next 30 or 40 years.”

  Thirring advocated for sending an unmanned vehicle to the moon first, and other notable scientists agreed with him. Dr. Robert Boyd, a British physicist who had worked closely with NASA since 1959, thought that a human in space was “really rather a nuisance.” Holding that the massive expen
diture planned for the moonshot could be better spent on medical research, Boyd concluded that “I’m not saying that it’s unwise, for example, of the United States to do manned space flights. This may, in fact, be the best political thing they can do in the circumstances in which they find themselves. But just taking humanity as a whole and the question of what we would do if we were all sane men, I think we wouldn’t be spending money sending man into space. . . . Personally I am rather sorry that, frequently, science is dragged in as the justification for what I really regard as a political exercise.”

  The arguments of Murrow, Proxmire, Thirring, and Boyd had merit. They pointed to the most daunting risk undertaken by Kennedy: by backing the moonshot with $20 to $40 billion, he seemed to be turning his back on poverty, civil rights, education, environmental conservation, and medical research. A similarly massive government expenditure in any of these areas would have made a huge near-term difference in people’s lives. By prioritizing the moon voyage, Kennedy was gambling on an even larger long-term boost, but he also had to accept the very real possibility of coming up short. If the Apollo program ended in embarrassment or tragedy, all the paeans to the nobility of having made one’s best effort wouldn’t stack up against the likelihood of what might have been accomplished if he had embraced another field as the heart and soul of the New Frontier, and with the nation’s full financial backing. This was the dark side of the moon program, the persistent voice whispering at the societal good that could have been accomplished by devoting more than $20 billion to, say, finding a cure for cancer or building high-speed trains from coast to coast.

  But the attraction of the moon went beyond what Dr. Boyd had called “a political exercise” for JFK. It appealed to the president as a Kennedy, as someone who had absorbed his parents’ ultracompetitive attitude as well as the underdog outlook inborn from their Irish-Catholic heritage. Worries that the United States was lagging behind the USSR in space didn’t intimidate Kennedy; more likely, they had the opposite effect. Traveling Europe and the Pacific as a young man, JFK had seen firsthand the inspirational role America played in people’s everyday lives. Opinions of its culture might vary, but American exceptionalism was widely embraced, and was too valuable a commodity to lose. The president’s wartime role as a PT boat captain, part of a cadre chosen for quick thinking and leadership, gave him a natural bond with the NASA astronauts, who had been handpicked for those same qualities and more. Even his association with Hollywood, via friends such as Frank Sinatra and Dean Martin, gave him an understanding of the need for patriotic heroes, manufactured or not. To Kennedy’s mind, Alan Shepard was the New Frontier’s John Wayne, an exemplar of American bravery and can-doism in the name of national greatness.

  As the icing on the cake, Kennedy brought to the moonshot decision the experiences of his own political career. For fifteen years, he’d experienced Americans’ fascination with his youth, radiance, potential talent, and physical vitality. He represented America’s future without even uttering a word. And it was for these reasons that voters who met JFK were, even if they fought against it, instantly captivated by him. The most vivid experiences of his life—both his public life and the one he hid from the world (his poor health, philandering, Joe, the grislier details of the PT-109 incident)—carried him to the decision to go to the moon. His philosophy of courage was that life is short, bold steps forward are immortal, so act. Apollo, he understood, transcended party politics and regional differences. It was a story unto itself. Why not create a generation of space heroes? Why not use NASA as a venture to jump-start American technology? Even the eventual price tag of $20 to $40 billion, a staggering amount in 1961, was almost natural for Kennedy, who had seen his father, Joe Sr., spend vast fortunes to get what he wanted on Wall Street or in Hollywood, never with cause for regret.

  FAITH THAT VON Braun and his team could develop the proper Saturn rocket for a moon launch was widespread in Kennedy administration national security circles. But the flight mode—how to land astronauts on the moon and bring them back alive—was still fiercely debated. “What was difficult for us were so many unknowns with getting there,” recalled Chris Kraft, then NASA’s sole flight director. “It sort of made us all question whether it was possible or not.”

  Luckily, NASA wasn’t working in a vacuum. Earlier in the spring, a NASA committee had begun pondering the best general design for a possible lunar landing, and major U.S. aerospace firms had been doing cost analysis configuration control, and probability reports. A trio of prominent companies (Martin, Convair, and General Electric) had already started designing possible three-person Apollo capsules, hoping to secure a massive government contract if the mission was approved. Other companies were developing the onboard and ground-control systems that would be needed, including computers, navigation, flight control, thermal protection, and life support. Without a decision on the flight mode, however, nothing von Braun or others built would get off the ground in Cape Canaveral.

  Within the space world, debate centered on the precise rocket staging, trajectory, and rendezvous needed to bring Apollo astronauts to the moon and back. NASA was weighing three primary options. Topping the list was direct ascent (DA), in which an enormous rocket would lift off from Earth and plow for the moon, landing and then blasting off for home once the job was done. Although this concept required the smallest number of orbital maneuvers, the big disadvantage was that the proposed Nova rocket would have to be substantially larger than any rocket that von Braun was working to build. Perfecting the rocket for a lunar mission would have proved a difficult enough challenge, but physically the rocket was deemed too gargantuan to produce at NASA’s new Michoud facility in Louisiana and too enormous to test at what eventually became the John C. Stennis Space Center near Bay St. Louis, Mississippi.

  The second alternative was the Earth orbit rendezvous (EOR) approach. For EOR, multiple boosters would launch spacecraft in rapid succession and they would be joined in Earth’s orbit into a full spacecraft. That ship would then fly to the moon, land, discard a module, and return home in a similar fashion to the DA method. Von Braun’s Huntsville team promoted this solution because it mitigated the necessity of contracting a huge Nova-class vehicle while they also built more Saturn rockets. The catch, however, was the multistage complexity of the orbital assembly.

  The distant third idea was the lunar orbit rendezvous (LOR), a concept championed by Dr. John C. Houbolt of NASA’s Langley Research Center. While the Jet Propulsion Laboratory had proposed a modified rendezvous profile where refueling would occur on the lunar surface, the primary LOR profile was to conduct any refueling in Earth orbit (not on the moon). Under Houbolt’s plan, this type of sortie would use a powerful three-stage rocket to launch an assembly of three spacecraft into orbit: a modular command module (CM); a service module (SM), containing main propulsion, fuel cells, and attitude-control systems; and a lunar module (LM), a newfangled contraption to reach the moon’s surface. In lunar orbit, two astronauts would use the LM to land while one crewman remained with the combined command service module (CSM) in a “parking orbit” around the moon. Once scientific experiments on the moon’s surface were complete, the LM would ascend back to lunar orbit and rendezvous with the CSM, which would then fly the three-man crew back to Earth. The big advantage to this LOR approach over Nova was the single-vehicle launch. Furthermore, from a technical standpoint, the LOR payload had a much smaller mass, which made it possible to develop a rocket that would not be as colossal as Nova. The downside to LOR was that the astronauts had no means of escape should any rendezvous maneuver flounder. NASA understandably worried about the public relations abomination of dead astronauts floating around in a stable lunar orbit or if they got marooned on the moon.

  As of 1961, Houbolt’s idea of docking two spacecraft in orbit was purely theoretical. NASA engineer Laurence K. Loftin Jr. summed up opposition to the LOR concept perfectly: “We thought it was too risky,” he said. “Remember in 1961 we hadn’t even orbited Glenn yet.
We certainly had done no rendezvous yet. And to put this poor bastard out there, separate him in a module, let him go down to the surface and fire him back up and expect him to rendezvous. He didn’t get a second chance; it had to be dead right the first time. I mean that seemed like a bit much.”

  The businesslike Loftin spoke for most NASA executives when he said the LOR was an engineering pipe dream—fine in the drawing room, but a probable disaster if implemented. “Houston’s first reaction to Houbolt’s suggestion was rather negative,” von Braun confirmed. “While conceding that in principle it should be possible to save launch weight by leaving part of the fuel required for the return flight in lunar orbit, rather than soft-landing it on the moon and carrying it out of the lunar gravitational field again, Houston felt that Houbolt’s equipment and weight assumptions for the lunar module had been highly unrealistic. For instance, his original LM concept did not have a pressurized cabin for the ascent stage and the LM guidance and control system for the tricky descent to the lunar surface was considered an inadequate rig ‘consisting of a plumb bob and a reticle.’”

  For Glennan, Eisenhower’s NASA administrator, the fact that the agency was still debating how to bring an astronaut back alive from the lunar surface meant the game was over before it began, giving him reason to label Kennedy’s speeded-up moonshot as high-stakes folly. Poisoning the well on Capitol Hill against Apollo became Glennan’s hobby in retirement. Regularly, he’d tell NASA leaders and old cohorts that the president and von Braun were on ego trips. Lobbying Webb, Glennan said, “No, Jim, I cannot bring myself to believe that we will gain lasting ‘prestige’ by a shot we may make six to eight years from now. I don’t think we should play the game according to the rules laid down by our adversary.” Webb, rich in recent accomplishment and enjoying JFK’s full backing for his agenda, dismissed Glennan’s dissent as sour grapes. For Webb, going to the moon on a “crash” basis didn’t leave room for intellectual musings, Monday-morning quarterbacking, or go-slow Cassandras. His standard defense of Apollo was that while Kennedy’s moonshot was extremely audacious, so, too, had been the Panama Canal, D-day, and the Manhattan Project.