Although von Braun had originally objected to the lunar orbit rendezvous plan championed by John Houbolt, he began falling into line as the method gained traction. On November 7, 1962, that flight mode indeed became NASA’s official selection. To facilitate the system, NASA chose the C-5, an upgrade from von Braun’s C-1 rocket. Designed in a grand collaboration between NASA and the private sector, the rechristened Saturn V would have three stages, stand 363 feet tall, and weigh 3,100 tons. To lift that hulking weight, the first stage had five huge engines that could generate millions of pounds of thrust by burning liquid oxygen. Together, they would send about 100,000 pounds (45 metric tons) of spacecraft all the way to the moon. The Saturn V, the longest rocket built, used Boeing, North American Aviation, and Douglas Aircraft as primary contractors.
Because the Saturn V rocket was so large and complicated to construct, NASA divided the task among contractors. The first stage would be built by Boeing at Michoud Operations in New Orleans, an enormous indoor facility along the Mississippi River–Gulf Outlet. In October 1961, NASA also announced the establishment of the Mississippi Test Facility to test large Saturn boosters for Apollo. The second and third stages were assigned to North American Aviation and Douglas Aircraft Company, respectively. A NASA contractor built a specially enlarged airplane, known as the “Super Guppy,” to carry the third stage to whichever testing site was chosen to trial-run Apollo rockets. The larger first and second stages would be transplanted by barge to Cape Canaveral for the assembly phase. IBM also was added to the first-wave lead contractor list for Saturn V.
Over the summer and fall of 1961, however, before those facilities became fully operational, NASA had to confront the stark fact that it wasn’t technologically prepared to execute a moonshot. Beyond the sheer power difference between the converted ballistic missiles used to launch Mercury and the Saturn V being planned for Apollo, there was a massive difference in technical complexity. “As planning for Apollo began,” recalled NASA deputy administrator Robert Seamans, “we identified more than 10,000 separate tasks that had to be accomplished to put a man on the moon. Each task had its particular objectives, its manpower needs, its time schedule and its complex interrelationship with many other tasks.”
To structure its development and mastery of space travel’s technical intricacies, NASA adopted systems engineering (step by step). The one-man crews of Project Mercury were already proving that an astronaut could function in Earth’s orbit and return alive. In the next phase, known as Project Gemini, two-man crews would perfect the techniques of rendezvousing and docking in space. Additionally, Gemini would prove that humans could survive in space for up to two weeks, during which time astronauts would venture outside the capsule for humans’ first attempts at spacewalking. The Apollo phase would begin once the successes and research data accumulated by Mercury and Gemini had been digested. Using three-man crews, Apollo would begin testing its orbiter and lander in Earth and lunar orbits. Only when all these steps were perfected would an Apollo mission attempt to carry out the moon landing.
According to Webb, President Kennedy expected the collective effort required for Gemini and Apollo to include as many states, governments, universities, and corporations as possible, all playing a transformative role at multiple levels and locales. In later years, Webb told a surprising story about JFK’s mandate, describing a visit from “a sophisticated senior official of a large corporation” holding many aerospace contracts. Webb recalled, “He hit me right between the eyes with the question: ‘In the award of contracts are you going to follow 100 percent the reports of your technical experts, or are there going to be political influences in these awards?’”
“My answer was just as direct,” Webb wrote. “‘In choosing contractors and supervising our industrial partners,’” he told the executive, “‘we are going to take into account every factor that we should take into account as responsible government officials.’ This meant that NASA officials would be required to meet President Kennedy’s basic guideline—that we would not limit our decisions to technical factors but would work with American industry in the knowledge that we were together dealing with factors basic to ‘broad national and international policy.’”
From Webb’s managerial perspective, the largesse of Kennedy’s moonshot plan was akin to Eisenhower’s building interstate highways, a massive public works undertaking that continued throughout the 1960s and provided enormous economic stimulus across the nation. That priority recalls a sardonic comment made by Shepard. Asked what he’d thought about in the moments before his historic Mercury flight, he replied, “The fact that every part of this ship was built by the lowest bidder.”
In fact, it was not that simple. Webb could have made Shepard feel much better, or worse, with the knowledge that each part was actually made by the company or university or government arm that fit into an overall scheme for U.S. progress in aeronautics, missile technology, computer science, and military aviation. Cost and technical quality were factors in the decision, but they weren’t the only ones. Even if a single factory or a single city could have made every part required for the Apollo missions inexpensively and exquisitely, Webb believed the president wouldn’t have approved. Kennedy wasn’t interested in merely producing a rocket and lunar module to beat the Soviets. He was into building an era, the Space Age, as his enduring legacy. Part of JFK’s vision was to bring the American South and Southwest into the world of cutting-edge technology.
Of those 10,000 tasks that had to be accomplished in order to put a man on the moon, 9,998 could wait, but two were extremely pressing: choosing a site for the Apollo launchpad and choosing a location for NASA’s new manned space project headquarters. Since Cape Canaveral fell within the ten-mile buffer zone between the launchpad and human habitation that was required under NASA guidelines, it was initially assumed that it could not host the Apollo launches. New sites under consideration included the Gulf Coast of Texas, isolated areas of Hawaii, Christmas Island in the Pacific Ocean, and various military bases in desert regions of New Mexico, California, and Nevada. But none of those alternatives had quite the geographical advantages of Cape Canaveral, which among other things boasted proximity to Port Canaveral, a deep-water harbor that could easily accommodate large ships bringing materials to NASA. On August 24, NASA announced that it had found a workaround that would allow it to employ Canaveral for the Apollo launches: buying eighty thousand acres of orchard land on Merritt Island and points between the cape and the Florida mainland, at a cost of $750 per acre, or $60 million all told.
The transformation of this part of the eastern Florida coastline had been slow during the early years of satellite launches, but the floodgates opened once NASA announced this decision. Traffic surged, schools were built, and tract housing sprang up to accommodate the twenty thousand workers who would soon be manning the space facility. “The American test site,” Walter Cronkite remembered, “was set up on a remote, snake-infested swamp called Cape Canaveral on the Florida coast east of Orlando. As the test site grew, so did the nearby villages of Cocoa Beach and Titusville, until they replicated every boomtown in every bad movie ever made—cheap hotels, bars, girlie joints, their wares proclaimed in gaudy neon. This was the environment into which reporters lucky enough to be assigned the space beat plunged.”
When David Brinkley of NBC News visited Cape Canaveral not long afterward, he showed that his interest lay in the landscape of Earth, not the moon. In his wry way, he investigated the mentality that had changed a quiet stretch of beach land into the amoral boomtown described by Cronkite. While on the air, Cronkite concentrated on what was good about Cape Canaveral, but Brinkley used his airtime to interview those at the hub of the NASA wheel and to lament that “while the jazzy and new were booming in Cocoa Beach, the old and the quiet were left to die.” The difference in the two reactions to “Koo-Koo Beach,” as it was newly dubbed by the locals, reflected Brinkley’s more complicated, humanitarian outlook and Cronkite’s focus on the big stor
y.
Amid slapdash human development, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall was giving thought to protecting the area’s natural habitat. On his recommendation, Kennedy soon green-lighted what soon became the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge on a thirty-five-mile barrier island in the buffer zone next to the NASA launch areas. Officially an overlay of the Cape Canaveral Launch Center, and subject to closure when NASA activities demanded, the refuge is home to more than five hundred different species of wildlife (including alligators, scrub jays, and manatees) and more than a thousand varieties of plants. It’s also part of a major bird migration corridor, with seven distinct habitats for nesting and feeding, proving that aviaries and aeronautics can coexist.
Merritt was one of four natural areas along America’s coastlines that Kennedy created around this time as part of a push for seashore conservation. The Kennedy years, in fact, gave birth to the modern ecological movement after the president embraced the findings of Rachel Carson’s visionary book Silent Spring (1962), which called attention to the effects of pesticides and other human contaminants on natural ecosystems. NASA went on to play an important role in raising consciousness among Americans about becoming better environmental stewards. Photographs of Earth taken from space (including the famous “Blue Marble” photo showing our planet illuminated for the first time) fostered a sense of global community. NASA’s weather satellites improved hurricane and blizzard forecasting and also collected evidence that air pollution was causing a greenhouse effect, raising the temperature of the planet. Other scientific evidence collected by NASA during the Kennedy years proved that Mars and Venus were dead planets, and in the 1960s, people began to worry that this could someday happen to Earth as well.
THE OTHER MAJOR decision was where to build Apollo’s headquarters. Back in 1958, the town of Greenbelt, Maryland, had been chosen as the site of a spaceflight center that would later be named for Robert Goddard. As NASA’s first flight operations campus, it transformed the surrounding area, drawing hundreds of researchers and engineers. Many municipalities envied or resented Greenbelt’s good fortune. When NASA announced that another flight center would be needed for the Apollo program, city development boosters, chambers of commerce, members of Congress, and Kennedy’s own vice president began lobbying for their hometowns.
If the story of NASA’s economic effect on suburban Maryland and the Florida coast was transparent, the mechanism that brought the Manned Spacecraft Center to Houston was the opposite: a brew of back rooms, boardrooms, barbeques, and Texas politics bubbling thick. The story began when the Humble Oil and Refining Company, the Texas-based precursor to ExxonMobil, began seeking development opportunities for thousands of acres of scrubland it had acquired between Houston and the Gulf Coast. In a deal with Rice University, the company agreed to donate a portion of that acreage to the university, contingent upon its seeking a contract to build a federal research facility on the site.
That’s when George R. Brown, said to be the richest person in the Lone Star State, got involved. Brown had made much of his fortune as a principal with the international road-and-dam-building firm Brown and Root. He’d attended Rice for a few years as a young man, served on the university’s board of trustees for twenty-five years (fifteen of them as its president), and in 1961 he set his sights on a Rice-NASA partnership, a deal that would heighten the university’s prestige while also opening construction opportunities for his firm. If Brown could pull off bringing the Manned Spacecraft Center to Houston, the economic windfall would rank in Texas history with the discovery of oil at Spindletop in 1903 and the building of the Houston Ship Channel in 1914. Overnight, Houston would once again become a boomtown.
As an exercise in rock-hard politics, the power behind the Houston decision rested squarely on two men: Congressman Albert Thomas and Vice President Lyndon Johnson. Thomas, George Brown’s roommate at Rice, had represented Texas’s Eighth District (which included Houston and, by extension, Brown and Root) in the House of Representatives since 1937. Johnson also had close ties to the top players at the construction firm, having both granted and received myriad favors over their long relationship. As chair of the Space Council, he’d already made sure Brown was consulted by April 1961. In the course of the council’s meetings, Brown learned of the proposed $60 million budget for a new space center. Months ahead of others, Houston’s power brokers were in talks with prominent politicians about a course of action to lure NASA’s manned space flagship facility.
Through Brown’s offices, Humble Oil committed to donating to Rice University about sixteen hundred acres of the Clear Lake area in southern Houston. The school, in kind, agreed to donate a thousand of those acres to NASA, while selling the rest at a cost above market rate to the space agency for the Manned Spacecraft Center. In other words, if the plan came to fruition, Humble would avoid the appearance of a bribe to NASA and Rice would receive $1.8 million for land it had never really owned. Rice had been tuition-free since its founding in 1912 (though it would begin charging fees in the mid-1960s), so new revenue was a perennial problem.
While Brown worked his considerable salesmanship on James Webb in June and July, Massachusetts, Missouri, Louisiana, and California put together their own strong packages in bids for the space center. Each state had excellent sites that met the prime criteria: they had tracts of available land, water routes for shipping, and universities vying to work side by side with NASA. They didn’t, however, have the hard-driving Albert Thomas, who exerted control over space budgets as chair of the House Subcommittee on Independent Offices Appropriations. Jack Valenti, Thomas’s frequent campaign manager, recalled that the congressman ruled his committee “like a divine right monarch.” Thomas had been known for constraining budgets for the government’s space activities throughout the 1950s. In the midst of the effort to pass Kennedy’s expanded space expenditure bill, he made remarks referring to the search for an ideal site for the new manned space center. “The key to the selection,” Chairman Thomas said, “seems to lie in Congressional approval of the vastly increased budget for space asked by this administration.” That salient point was true.
So it was that Kennedy incurred resentment among the Massachusetts boosters, who couldn’t understand why he didn’t promote his home commonwealth for the Manned Spacecraft Center. Massachusetts had much to recommend it—plentiful acreage, access to the Atlantic sea-lanes, the rocket legacy of Robert Goddard at Clark University, and proximity to top-tier research colleges such as Harvard, MIT, Tufts, and Boston University—but what it lacked was Thomas and his ability to wield power over congressional budgets. With Johnson doing the legwork, the president’s request for funding for a moonshot passed through Congress without interference from Thomas; and by August, Houston’s two leading newspapers, the Chronicle and the Post, began running articles intimating that the city would soon have the Manned Spacecraft Center.
On September 19, 1961, Webb officially announced that Houston had indeed won the prize. NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center would function as the headquarters for the Apollo missions and future human spaceflight programs. An economic development maven, Thomas had tried to lure the Atomic Energy Commission to Houston in the 1950s and failed. But now, thanks to Kennedy and Johnson, NASA was coming to his district to roost.
Shedding its old “Bayou City” moniker, Houston also became known as “Space City, U.S.A.,” as waves of astromania swept the town. Browsing through a Houston Yellow Pages in the immediate years after Webb’s announcement, one sees local pride blindingly obvious in the names of new businesses: Space City Bar-B-Q, Apollo Broadcasting Company, Space Age Laminating Company, Astro Babysitters Agency, and on and on. At the Apollo Restaurant and Lounge, the space burger on the menu was “out-of-this-world.” Even the names of Houston’s new professional sports franchises, the Astros (baseball) in 1962 and the Rockets (basketball) in 1971, had NASA connotations.
Congressman William Cramer of Florida and Senator Benjamin Smith of Massachusetts both slammed K
ennedy for bowing to political heat from the powerful Texans, but the deed was done. In the coming months, the Space Task Group transferred from NASA Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, to Houston, where its members worked in makeshift quarters throughout the city while awaiting completion of the new federal laboratory. Adjacent to the very spot where the Manned Spacecraft Center would be built around the Clear Lake region, Humble Oil spearheaded the formation of the Friendswood Development Company, to create a planned community, known as Clear Lake City, on fifteen thousand acres connected to the NASA compound. Over the years that followed, the company developed homes, apartment complexes, office buildings, restaurants, shopping and recreation centers, and all the necessary amenities of a modern town, drawing many NASA transplants. By the end of the decade, the area’s population exceeded forty-five thousand.
Through the rest of his public career, Webb was vulnerable to criticism that his agency had bowed to the Texans’ political pressure. He shrugged this off with his proof-is-in-the-pudding attitude: Houston pulled off the Apollo program. For Brown, though, the victory was just another proud episode in a long career of federally funded infrastructure deals. That Brown and his crowd crossed ethical and, perhaps, legal lines was a matter of debate for decades. And yet, once the contracts had been signed, those same men typically delivered a first-rate job. That was the case with NASA and Houston: it ended up being a perfectly calibrated match. Everyone from President Kennedy on down received what he wanted in the decision—except, of course, the disgruntled boosters from states like Massachusetts whose bids were rejected. But their time would come. After all, the space program still had 9,998 other tasks to spread around the nation.
Astronaut Gus Grissom climbs into his Liberty Bell 7 spacecraft on July 21, 1961. The Mercury-Redstone 4 rocket successfully launched the Liberty Bell 7 that morning. This was the second in a series of successful U.S. manned suborbital flights.
American Moonshot Page 33
