NASA Archive/Alamy Stock Photo
Ohio-reared astronaut John Glenn poses on January 20, 1962, during a training session before his February 20, 1962, NASA spaceflight aboard the Mercury capsule Friendship 7, in which he would become the first American to orbit the Earth. After visiting the Seattle World’s Fair in 1962 Glenn’s capsule found a permanent home at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C.
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Godspeed, John Glenn
Let’s do the John Glenn Twist! Yeah! Oh!
Round and Round and a-round
Three times around the world he goes,
Up in space, Orbitin’ in space
And the whole wide world knows. Knows.
—RIO DE FRANCISCO, “THE JOHN GLENN TWIST,” 1962
Within sixteen days of Gus Grissom’s triumphant flight on July 21, 1961, Kennedy was faced with the unwelcome obligation of congratulating Khrushchev on yet another manned launch, one that represented a striking advance in space exploration. The president was staying with his wife and two children at their home on Cape Cod for a long-planned weekend of sailing and relaxing along the sun-drenched beaches. Due to Soviet military maneuvers in Berlin and CIA-intercepted rumors about new Soviet space activities, it turned into a working vacation. Rather than invite old friends to Hyannis Port, JFK asked Adlai Stevenson to be his guest. Now the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, the two-time Democratic presidential nominee stayed in one of the white clapboard guesthouses in the Kennedy compound.
It was a maddening weekend. Kennedy’s forebodings about the international situation were correct. Late on Saturday night, August 5, U.S. intelligence informed him that the countdown had begun for a Soviet rocket launch. Before the exact nature of this latest Vostok mission was fully known, the president was made aware by the CIA that it was due to lift off at about 2:00 a.m. (Eastern Daylight Time) on Sunday, August 6. Going to bed early, JFK expected the Soviet space mission to be over by the time he woke up. So great was the technological leap of the spaceflight, however, that it was still under way and going strong the next morning. Kennedy pondered his options for a fitting American response. Stevenson recalled the president as being composed and alert, but stewing—constantly running his fingers through his tousled hair in frustration with the rising stakes for the space game between the United States and the Soviets, and disheartened that his Cape Cod downtime had been snatched away.
Gus Grissom’s flight had been suborbital, lasting barely fifteen minutes. The full-orbiting Vostok 2, by contrast, broke every record on the books. Just four months earlier, Gagarin had circled Earth once and made history. One can imagine hearts at NASA sinking as Vostok 2 cruised past that mark, then past the three orbits that many Soviet scientists believed to be the absolute limit of human endurance in space, then past five, then ten. Eventually, Vostok 2 made an astonishing 17.5 orbits of Earth in just over a day’s time.
The cosmonaut piloting the Vostok 2 was Gherman Titov, an expert skier and gymnast who, at twenty-five, was the youngest person ever to fly in space. Always pushing the “edge of the envelope” as a test pilot he was also the first person ever to nap in space, a feat that seemed extraordinary to a generation still wide-eyed by the thought of spaceflight. Titov actually slept for thirty minutes during the flight. With life-support equipment and radio and television devices monitoring his condition, his mission proved that astronauts or cosmonauts no longer had to operate on an anxiety-ridden red alert; they could relax, live, work, and sleep in space, suffering little more than the space version of motion sickness. In fact, sometime during his thirteenth orbit, Titov, after a fitful start to slumber, became so comfortable that he overslept his nap. This fact brought many smiles at the secret Star City, outside Moscow, where Soviet cosmonauts trained, lived with their families, and benefited from village school facilities and a shopping district.
Piloting Vostok 2 personally—unlike the previous “man-in-a-can” flights, controlled from Earth—Titov still had time to snap photographs from his cockpit. He also used a Konvas-Avtomat movie camera to film Earth for ten glorious minutes before reentry. Ejecting once his capsule had pierced the atmosphere on return, he parachuted to a landing near Krasny Kut, Saratov Oblast, six hundred miles southeast of Moscow. Having fulfilled the Soviet dream, an unqualified winner, he was then driven three miles to where his capsule had made a hard-impact landing, to recover his film and journal.
Titov became a hero as excitement electrified the USSR, his name uttered with reverence across the land. In the United States, by contrast, the cosmonaut was perceived as just another dastardly Communist spoiler. Members of Kennedy’s inner circle, especially Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. and Ted Sorensen, privately fumed to Webb that NASA should have given their boss advance notice of the Titov mission. What astonished NASA officials was that Vostok 2 had achieved goals they had earmarked for their sixth and last Mercury mission, still four flights down the list. The gap between the U.S. and Soviet space programs had grown, not shrunk.
Vostok 2 was a serious concern for Kennedy that weekend at Hyannis Port, but it wasn’t the only one. In light of a heavy migration of people from East Germany to the capitalist-democratic enclave of West Berlin, the Soviet Union was making increasingly firm demands that the isolated city be reunited with the Communist nation that fully surrounded it. Sweeping aside NATO objections regarding Berlin as ludicrous, Khrushchev increased ground troops in East Germany, boosted Kremlin military spending by a third, accelerated the Soviet space program, and ratcheted up his rhetoric on Soviet nuclear superiority. In Moscow, the Twenty-Second Congress of the Communist Party of the USSR had unleashed inflammatory ultimatums at America.
Over that very weekend, while Kennedy awaited reports at his Cape Cod home, negotiators from Britain, France, and the United States were engaged in high-level talks in Paris, determined to fashion a coordinated response to Khrushchev’s insistence on a unified Communist Berlin. Refusing to buckle under Kremlin pressure and determined to protect Western interests in the divided city, Kennedy made a highly visible show of American military preparations in West Germany. Aides worried that the Berlin confrontation might turn the Cold War into a shooting war in Europe, perhaps even a nuclear war. However, even during the crisis, Kennedy continued pursuing U.S.-Soviet cooperation, seeking a nuclear test ban treaty, engagement in space, and a global agreement on the use of communication satellites, which was opposed by the USSR.
While the many levels of U.S.-Soviet relations intensified the significance of Kennedy’s response to the space news, Titov’s flight and the Berlin crisis converged in public discourse. At the same time as the Pittsburgh Press fretted over the Berlin crisis under the headline “East Germans Fleeing Reds One a Minute,” astronomers at the city’s Allegheny Observatory used high-powered telescopes to catch vivid glimpses of Vostok 2 passing overhead, appearing as “a very bright star.” In Charleston, South Carolina, one newsman reported that Vostok 2 “looked about the size of a marble.” Other commentators were more damning. “You can guess which country appears to be struggling,” said Sir Bernard Lovell, one of Britain’s leading astronomers, “and it is certainly not Russia.” His counterpart in France, Professor Alexandre Ananov of the Astronautic Society, agreed. “I fear,” he said, “the lag can never be made up.” And one Taiwanese official opined, “It is obvious that Khrushchev was going to use the space flight as a weapon intended to intimidate the West on the Berlin issue.”
Choosing to play it cool, a steadfast Kennedy refused to acknowledge publicly that Khrushchev was using space exploration for geopolitical intimidation in Europe. His eventual response, delivered secondhand via Adlai Stevenson on Sunday afternoon, consisted only of a bland statement of “admiration” for Vostok 2, attached to the polite hope that Titov was in good health. Hours passed, then days, and Kennedy wouldn’t elaborate further on the mission. Behind the scenes, he officially instructed NASA to readjust its schedule and speed up the next Mercury
launch.
Khrushchev, however, had plenty to say. Striking while the iron was hot, the Soviet premier delivered a blistering ninety-minute monologue broadcast live to his own nation, but intended for the entire world. In it, he angrily blamed Kennedy and the “degenerate” American political system for taking an aggressive stance regarding West Berlin. Hoping to intimidate JFK, Khrushchev gave an extended description of the nuclear war that would ensue if the United States were not more careful with its routine Cold War “threats.” If a war started over Berlin, Khrushchev promised with visceral antipathy, then the USSR would “strike a crushing blow” against the American homeland. It seemed clear that, from the Kremlin’s perspective, Titov’s triumph was more about the Cold War politics of divided Berlin than about space exploration. Close to home, former secretary of state Dean Acheson saw Khrushchev’s démarche less as a comment on Berlin or outer space than as an attempt to shatter America’s will to resist, while upending U.S. power and global influence by forcing a backdown in Europe and Asia.
With or without Vostok 2 and Kremlin bullying, Kennedy stood fast to his commitment that West Berlin would remain free and independent of East Germany. The Potsdam Conference of 1945—in which three of the wartime Allies (the United States, the USSR, and Great Britain) agreed that people could move freely in any sector of Berlin—was in the U.S. president’s favor, and most UN member countries backed America’s position. East Germany, though, was alarmed by the exodus of professionals, intellectuals, and skilled laborers migrating from East to West, which by August 1961 had reached an average of two thousand per day, principally through West Berlin. Fearing the costs to its economy, on August 13, East Germany began erecting a twenty-seven-mile-long barbed-wire fence dividing socialist East Berlin from the democratic western part of the city. Dubbed an “antifascist protection rampart” by the East and the “Berlin Wall” by the West, it went up unannounced, and over the weeks that followed, it was reinforced by concrete, guard towers, and other fortifications. This alarming, provocative development outraged Kennedy, but since West Berlin still remained in Western hands, he didn’t overreact. Within a few weeks, the crisis had quieted down. “It’s not a very nice solution,” the president said, “but the wall is a hell of a lot better than a war.”
That was true enough. But Khrushchev wasn’t done with his heavy-fisted attempt to intimidate the United States. For the Berlin crisis of August 1961 led immediately into yet another confrontation with the Soviet Union, this time over nuclear testing, an issue that was tied directly to the space race. Kennedy had learned firsthand how the Soviet space program had been used by Khrushchev as a diplomatic and near-military tool at the height of the Berlin crisis. No longer could manned space be compartmentalized as a benign scientific adventure in the cosmos; it was the Cold War.
AT NASA, THE methodical process of putting a human on the moon within ten years had received a prod from Vostok 2, because nothing motivates a bureaucracy like wounded pride. Reorganizing to better manage the agency’s various missions, James Webb established four program offices: Advanced Research and Technology, Space Science, Applications, and Manned Space Flight.
Among Webb’s priorities in the aftermath of Vostok 2 was a refinement of the space hardware NASA had contracted, to better match its evolving mission. Among the early casualties were von Braun’s Mercury-Redstone rockets. According to astronaut Deke Slayton, Vostok 2 “permanently kill[ed] Mercury-Redstone 5” in favor of larger Atlas (air force) rockets.
The Mercury-Redstone Launch Vehicle had been designed specifically for suborbital flights such as those accomplished by Shepard and Grissom. It was America’s first manned space booster. Administrators had originally planned for at least two more such missions before putting an astronaut into full orbit, but on August 18, NASA announced that the data collected from Shepard’s and Grissom’s suborbital missions had been carefully analyzed and more than sufficed. No further Redstone tests would be needed. The federal space agency was speeding up Mercury’s plan to send an astronaut, reportedly, to orbit Earth on a U.S. Air Force rocket.
Generally speaking, “speeding up” a technical process isn’t advisable, especially when human lives are at stake. Acceleration could mean a spaceship torn apart in flight or a disastrous communication failure. But Vostok 2 had forced Kennedy’s hand, and NASA’s. Although quickening production added human and technical risks, fears of a Soviet hammer-and-sickle flag planted on the moon loomed large, leaving the Kennedy administration few other choices. In Huntsville, the challenge sparked a new wave of determination to quickly develop Saturn rockets. Much federal funding was at stake. “The next flight by an astronaut would be on the Atlas,” Deke Slayton wrote later. “We hoped by the end of the year.”
The U.S. Air Force’s Atlas rocket, which provided five times the thrust of the army’s Redstone, was considered a “man-ready” vehicle, able to take a person into space, but it had been prone to disintegration during unmanned testing. With construction not yet begun on von Braun’s new three-stage Saturn design, and deployment still years away, acceleration of the Mercury program rested on whether a reliably safe Atlas was ready. In September, an unmanned Mercury capsule was fired off on top of an Atlas as a dress rehearsal for a manned voyage. After taking off without a hitch, the capsule parachuted to a perfect landing in the Atlantic near Bermuda and was retrieved by the U.S. destroyer Decatur.
WITH HOUSTON CHOSEN as NASA’s manned-space hub, Webb now needed to choose the right technical manager for Apollo. The two most obvious candidates, von Braun and Silverstein, director of NASA’s Office of Manned Space Flight Programs, distrusted each other. (Silverstein, of Jewish heritage, couldn’t stomach even being physically near von Braun, with his Nazi past.) For a number of reasons, Webb didn’t consider either of the brilliant engineers quite right for the management job. He tried recruiting Captain Levering Smith, deputy head of the U.S. Navy’s Polaris program, but Smith chose to stay with the nuclear navy at the new rank of vice admiral. Eventually, Webb chose an executive in the private sector, D. Brainerd Holmes of RCA, for the job. At the time, Holmes had been busy overseeing the design and implementation of the Ballistic Missile Early Warning System, setting up enormous high-tech installations in Arctic Alaska, Greenland, and Scotland. Taking a large salary cut, Brainerd left RCA and joined NASA on November 1, as director of the Office of Manned Space Flight. Just five weeks later, Holmes established a third NASA project, Gemini, as a training program. Featuring two-man crews, Project Gemini would bridge the gap between the one-man Project Mercury missions and the three-man Apollo launches.
In late November, NASA blasted an Atlas rocket from Cape Canaveral. It reached full Earth orbit for the first time, giving its crewman, a chimpanzee named Enos, the distinction of becoming only the third hominid to reach so deeply into space, after Gagarin and Titov. At a famous press conference, Kennedy deadpanned: “The chimpanzee who is flying in space took off at 10:08. He reports that everything is perfect and working well.” Although scheduled for three orbits, the mission was ended after two revolutions due to technical malfunctions, and Enos returned safely to Earth—a triumph, but the wrong kind of triumph. In the wake of Titov’s mind-boggling flight and East Germany’s construction of the Berlin Wall, Kennedy worried that the national fascination with the moonshot was eroding as NASA continued its methodical program of unmanned missions. A chimpanzee, cute as he might be, was no substitute for another Shepard or Grissom.
Sensing that JFK’s moonshot was, for the time being, more aspirational than newsworthy, the White House press corps largely avoided the subject, but sometimes the wrong kind of news would creep in. As a case in point, Dr. Al Hibbs, chief of space sciences at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, a NASA affiliate, told the press on November 21 that the United States had “less than a 50-50 chance” of beating the Soviets to the moon. Coming from one of the country’s leading aerospace technology institutions, Hibbs’s gloomy assessment was quoted in newspapers all over Ame
rica.
Hibbs wasn’t alone. Other space experts were also skeptical, including Dr. Walter Dornberger, von Braun’s former boss at Peenemünde, who was then chief scientist for partner Bell Aerospace. On November 30, he told a space symposium in Louisiana that the Soviets were far ahead in developing ICBMs and artificial satellites. Blaming this deficit on U.S. indifference from 1945 until the Sputnik launch in 1957 toward manufacturing ballistic missiles, Dornberger cast doubt on America’s ability to catch up. “The Russians will be able to intercept and shoot down our satellites within a few years,” Dornberger predicted. “We will not be able to shoot down their satellites.” Whether or not his analysis was entirely accurate, he frighteningly spoke as though war in space were inevitable, another roiling theme in light of Vostok 2’s show of continued Soviet innovation.
IF LATE 1961 was a challenge for NASA and America’s space morale, the bright spot was the marine who was waiting to take the national stage. Forty-year-old Ohioan John Glenn was the oldest of the Mercury Seven astronauts, yet he often looked the youngest. With his boyish face, bright smile, penetrating blue eyes, and general air of collegial optimism, he was impossible not to like. Slated to take the third suborbital Mercury mission, he was bumped up to a full orbital flight when the program jumped ahead in August, and he spent the last months of the year training with his backup, Scott Carpenter of Colorado.
While Glenn waited for his big moment, Kennedy was focused on other aspects of space exploration: opening orbital space to communications satellites and closing it to nuclear arms. Just four years after Sputnik, U.S. companies were vying to exploit the potential commercial viability of satellites. Two American physicists at Johns Hopkins University’s Applied Physics Laboratory had also made dramatic strides in monitoring satellite radio transmissions, thereby establishing the conceptual foundation for global positioning systems (the beginning of today’s GPS). Underdeveloped regions of Latin America, Asia, and Africa could be brought into modernity, it was thought, via cutting-edge satellite technology. “Never before has a major scientific venture involved such mutual dependence” between industry and government, wrote George J. Feldman of Massachusetts, chief counsel for the Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration. JFK was emerging as the poster president of the same military-industrial complex Dwight Eisenhower had warned about in his farewell address. A new era of space-related inventions and entrepreneurial innovations was poised to begin. But this communications revolution required America to secure new “open skies” treaties with other countries, notably the USSR, a nation that equated satellite communications with spying.
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