American Moonshot

by Douglas Brinkley

  In preparation for reentry, Carpenter made several mistakes, including one that wasted fuel. Finally, when he fired his retrorockets on reentry three seconds late, his capsule overshot the planned splashdown point by 250 miles. Carpenter had to escape the Aurora 7 before it sank, scrambling into an inflatable raft on a rough sea northeast of Puerto Rico. He was out of radio contact for thirty-nine minutes, with the ocean heaving mightily. Nobody knew whether he’d survived. After three hours lost at sea, he was saved by two frogmen who jumped from an SC-54 transport plane, finding him “smiling, happy, and not at all tired.” He was retrieved by an H5S-2 helicopter and whisked to the deck of the USS Intrepid.

  The breakdown of procedure on reentry embarrassed NASA brass. Fingers were pointed in various directions, and Carpenter took the brunt for being too fascinated with the beauty of space and negligent of technical procedures—which was somewhat unfair, since mechanical issues also played a part. As the second U.S. astronaut to orbit Earth, Carpenter had performed well, racking up NASA’s fourth successful Mercury mission and moving the agency one more stride closer to the moon. Nevertheless, Chris Kraft, in his memoir, claims he drummed Carpenter out of the astronaut corps because of his poor performance on the Mercury mission.

  An ebullient and grateful Kennedy made his now-traditional call, reaching Carpenter aboard the USS Intrepid. With heartfelt congratulations, he invited the astronaut to visit the White House down the line. However, no special ceremony was planned for Carpenter, indicating that the president and NASA were putting the brakes on the celebratory machine that had greeted the three previous Mercury astronauts. On June 5, Carpenter, his wife, Rene, and their four children spent about twenty minutes with Kennedy in the Oval Office. During the middle of a serious space-related conversation, one of Carpenter’s young daughters belted out, “Where is Macaroni?” referring to the Kennedy family pony. Then her sister shouted accusingly, “And Caroline?” While the adults laughed, the two Carpenter kids truly wanted answers. “President Kennedy bent down to their faces,” Carpenter recalled in his memoir For Spacious Skies. “Macaroni, America’s most famous Pony, needed pasture and lived in the country, [the president] explained. The girls stood their ground unsmiling.”

  Even after the Carpenters’ embrace by Kennedy, rumors continued to circulate that the astronaut had panicked during his mission. A decade later, Tom Wolfe came to Carpenter’s defense in The Right Stuff. “One might argue that Carpenter had mishandled reentry,” Wolfe wrote, “but to accuse him of panic made no sense in the light of the telemetered data concerning his heart rate and respiratory rate.” A year and a half after his Mercury flight, Carpenter took a leave of absence from NASA to participate in a navy project called Sealab. He later returned to the space program, then retired early.

  What Carpenter didn’t know during his White House meeting was that Kennedy was grappling with a frightening nuclear issue. Twenty-four hours before he arrived, the United States had sent up an army Thor rocket equipped with a nuclear bomb set to explode at an altitude of thirty miles. It was part of the series of high-altitude tests grouped together as Operation Fishbowl, which would culminate with nuclear weapons detonated in outer space. The operation was in direct response to the August 30, 1961, announcement by the Soviets that they were ending their three-year moratorium on testing. During the first attempted launch, on June 2, radar lost track of the missile, and concerns over the safety of ships and aircraft on its trajectory led to the mission’s being aborted, the rocket falling into the North Pacific near Johnston Atoll. Though the test itself hadn’t occurred, the incident pointedly told the Soviet intelligence officers in the KGB that the United States was on the verge of matching and exceeding their own high-altitude nuclear testing from the previous year. Predictably, Moscow’s diplomats at the Geneva disarmament talks were incensed, feeling double-crossed by the Kennedy administration. With bombastic overreaction, Khrushchev accused Kennedy of planning imminent attacks on Soviet cities from space.

  For the time being, Kennedy’s plan to coax the Soviets into a test ban agreement was shipwrecked. The American tests continued, and the next rocket, code-named Starfish Prime and manufactured by Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, was launched on July 9, 1962. Its W49 warhead detonated at a record altitude of nearly 250 miles, well into outer space, but its power was such that the enormous fireball could be seen flashing like heat lightning, even through heavy cloud cover, as far away as Honolulu. It was by far the largest nuclear weapon detonated to date, one hundred times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

  Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter of Colorado dressed for spaceflight. He was a U.S. Navy officer and aviator. On May 24, 1962, Carpenter flew into space atop the Mercury-Atlas 7 rocket, becoming the second American (after John Glenn) to orbit the Earth.

  Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

  By design, Starfish Prime augmented the radiation found in the Van Allen belts, collections of charged particles circling Earth and held in place by the planet’s gravity, which had been discovered in 1958 by James Van Allen of the University of Iowa. The U.S. military believed that the megabomb could be used to make the Van Allen belts destructive to dangerous Soviet satellites. Only after the massive Starfish Prime explosion did NASA study whether the fortified Van Allen belts could also prevent a successful lunar mission. Kennedy, asked beforehand whether the test could adversely affect the belts, replied jauntily that “I know there has been disturbance about the Van Allen belt, but Van Allen says it is not going to affect the belt.” In truth, years passed before Earth and its atmosphere, and its belts, recovered from the seismic effects of Starfish Prime. There are numerous astrophysicists who believe they will never again be the same.

  With the successful Glenn and Carpenter orbits balanced against the spectacularly ill-conceived experiment of Starfish Prime, the topic of space was a complicated one for the president. The flagging effort to bring nuclear disarmament to outer space weighed on JFK’s mind, and his first priority was to make sure space remained safe enough for an astronaut to fly through, and for a world population to live beneath. On the other hand, Kennedy did have some notable successes to boast of. Since his May 1961 moonshot challenge, the United States had launched at least fifteen orbital satellites. And on August 27, NASA’s Mariner 2 probe took off from Cape Canaveral, bound for Venus on a three-and-a-half-month scientific mission to measure planetary temperatures and the interplanetary magnetic field, and to take other readings en route. On December 14, 1962, Mariner 2 became the first spacecraft to fly past another planet, its perfect trajectory confirming Kennedy’s earlier description of it as “the most intricate instrument in the history of space science.”

  What Kennedy kept in mind at all times was how NASA could help fuel technological innovation in the private sector. He was locked into Section 203(a)(3) of the Space Act of 1958, which charged NASA with the mandate to “provide for the widest and most practical appropriate dissemination of information concerning its activities and results thereof.” To Kennedy this meant shortening the time gap between NASA’s discovering new knowledge and its effective adaptation in the consumer marketplace. In June 1962 Kennedy approved the NASA Technology Utilization Program (originally called the Industrial Application Program) to quickly transfer new knowledge derived from places such as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Marshall Space Flight Center into the American manufacturing-innovation order. On July 10, in the spirit of the Technology Utilization Program, the United States made the first direct TV connection between continents after the launch of Telstar 1, an American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) active repeater satellite orbited by a NASA vehicle. Although the relays didn’t function properly at first, the coming months saw two successful test transmissions between receiving ground stations at Andover, Maine, and Goonhilly Downs, England. Then, on July 23, Telstar began transmitting regular civilian TV broadcasts between the United States and Europe. “Telstar was the first true communicat
ions satellite,” historian Michael J. Neufeld has explained, “one that could receive a signal from the ground, amplify it, and then immediately retransmit it,” enabling live overseas broadcasts of events such as the Olympic Games and European elections.

  What differentiated Telstar from other Kennedy-era satellites was that its funding emanated principally from the private sector; AT&T boasted that the innovation was a tribute to the American free-enterprise system. And while NASA wasn’t directly responsible for the global commercial satellite system, it partnered with other groups, private and public, to make it a reality.

  In an effort to prove that he was both pro–air force and pro-NASA Kennedy presented four X-15 pilots the Robert J. Collier Trophy in a Rose Garden ceremony. All the leaders in the aerospace industry attended, as did top Pentagon officials. Kennedy purposely had Webb and air force secretary Eugene Zuckert pose together in a photo op. The four honored pilots were Major Robert M. White, Joseph A. Walker, A. Scott Crossfield, and Commander Forrest Petersen.

  AROUND THE TIME of the Collier Trophy ceremony and Telstar, NASA publicly announced the specific framework for the future Apollo lunar mission, formally adopting John Houbolt’s vision of a lunar orbit rendezvous, with one manned spacecraft circling the moon while a smaller craft detached for descent to the surface. With that framework in place, planning for future missions could be organized on a more detailed time line, bringing Apollo-Saturn into better focus. Feeling great about how his administration was shaping up, Kennedy installed a secret taping system in the White House, ostensibly to assist his future memoir. Space history would greatly benefit from the taped conversations Kennedy had in 1962 and 1963, particularly with James Webb.

  NASA’s long, drawn-out Apollo plan didn’t thrill everyone. That summer of 1962, Senator Barry Goldwater gave a major speech on space policy, his first since Kennedy’s moonshot oration before Congress. His preference was to build up the air force, not NASA moon ships. Goldwater, who had inherited a thriving Phoenix, Arizona, department store in 1930, had developed from an anti-New Dealer into a conservative Republican by the time of World War II. Joining the U.S. Army Air Corps, he flew cargo into war zones worldwide, making frequent runs between the United States and India. This assignment expanded to Goldwater’s piloting over “the Hump” of the Himalayas to deliver much-needed supplies to Chiang Kai-shek’s army in China. There were also flights to Nigeria, the Azores, Tunisia, and South America. Goldwater remained in the Arizona Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve after V-J Day, where he became a major general. All told, he flew more than 165 different planes, including the B-52 Stratofortress. Nobody could accuse him of not understanding military aviation.

  Goldwater won a Senate seat in 1952, upsetting the incumbent Democrat, Ernest McFarland, then the Senate majority leader. Goldwater’s political influence was essential to the creation of the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs (the visitor center of which is named after him), and by mid-1962 he was being mentioned as a possible 1964 presidential candidate, in part because he was a quintessential hawk. Given his bedrock devotion to the air force, Goldwater thought that civilian space should indeed be militarized. It bothered him that NASA was always trying to placate the United Nations instead of militarily winning the Cold War.

  New York liberal governor Nelson Rockefeller was also considered a serious GOP presidential contender for 1964, standing at the opposite end of the Republican continuum from Goldwater. Richard Nixon, the center-right pragmatist, was now running for governor of California, and few thought he would be game for another presidential run after his 1960 loss. At the time of the Starfish Prime detonation, Rockefeller was leading Goldwater by a wide margin in opinion polls. As the Gallup poll showed and as Goldwater understood, Kennedy at that point remained unburdened by any meaningful negative issues—and so, on July 17, the Arizona senator set out to give the president one. “The clock has already run too long a course without our pursuing more vigorously a military space program,” Goldwater told the National Rocket Club. “How can we guarantee that space will be used for peaceful purposes without having the means to defend such a doctrine? It is our view that international law or agreement cannot exist without the physical means to enforce it.”

  Hoping to score midterm election points, the articulate Goldwater also accused the Kennedy administration of “gambling with national survival” by making military objectives in space secondary to peaceful scientific accomplishments. The Arizona conservative-libertarian had an alternative: “The armed forces should already be planning the development as soon as possible of a completely integrated space warfare system. Perhaps I should say, a super-system, since it will be far more comprehensive than other so-called systems.”

  Goldwater’s criticism of Kennedy appeared in newspapers across the country. His “gambling with national survival” theme gathered a measure of traction, and in August he and fellow Republicans in the Senate opened a debate on the subject of space militarization. It wasn’t exactly a prime spot on the calendar, tucked between summer recess and Labor Day, but they nevertheless made their prepared remarks in the full chamber. The administration was fully aware that Goldwater was looking for an equivalent to JFK’s own charge of a “missile gap,” which had so sorely dogged Eisenhower and Nixon. When the Republicans criticized the president for having actually “deterred” the armed services from preparing for space warfare, the White House offered figures from the new budget, showing that spending on military space programs had doubled in just one year, coming in at $1.5 billion, an enormous sum for 1962.

  Dean Acheson once quipped that if you hurled a brick down a blind alley at night and heard a loud squawk, you knew you’d hit a cat. In this spirit, Goldwater’s brick had clearly made an impact on Kennedy. On September 5, the White House announced that the president would visit space facilities in Alabama, Florida, Texas, and Missouri. In addition, Kennedy authorized Roswell Gilpatric to rewrite his upcoming speech in South Bend, Indiana, the new remarks directly rebuking Goldwater’s hawkish appraisal. “The United States believes that it is highly desirable for its own security and for the security of the world,” Gilpatric said in a kind of Kennedy Doctrine, “that the arms race should not be extended into outer space, and we are seeking in every feasible way to achieve that purpose.” After that, it was left for the media-savvy Kennedy himself to bring the force of his optimistic personality to bear on the NASA–versus–air force view of space, which he could do as no other. And, perhaps more importantly, to prepare for budget discussions.

  ON SEPTEMBER 11, President Kennedy began his space tour in Huntsville, Alabama. It was the day after Supreme Court justice Hugo Black ordered that the University of Mississippi allow James Meredith, a twenty-nine-year-old African American and air force veteran, to attend fall classes at its segregated Oxford campus. That decision would roil the school and the nation at large, as Mississippi governor Ross Barnett ordered state troopers to bar Meredith from enrolling. The White House was working hard to change the Old South, partly by using NASA to bring high-tech jobs and a futuristic thinking to backward regions slow to abandon violent and self-defeating prejudice. Determined to win the Oxford showdown, the Kennedy administration hoped that the recent selection of Hancock County, Mississippi, on the banks of the Pearl River near Louisiana, as the site of an Apollo engine-testing facility—these days, it’s known as the John C. Stennis Space Center—might ameliorate the state’s anti-federal stance.

  Despite the nettlesome civil rights crisis in Mississippi, Kennedy didn’t allow himself to be distracted from his central purpose in Huntsville: inspecting the development of the Saturn rocket, the moonshot vehicle. Rocket City, U.S.A., pulled out all the stops for Kennedy’s visit, honoring him with Dixieland jazz and a twenty-one-gun salute. Visiting both the Marshall Space Flight Center and the Ballistic Missile Agency base, Kennedy was hosted by von Braun, the city’s most famous citizen. When posing for photographs together, they looked like twin glamour doppelgängers
cut from the same cloth. Pointing to a drawing of a Saturn rocket, the proud rocketeer enthused to his boss, “This is the vehicle designed to fulfill your promises to put a man on the moon in this decade.” Then, looking at the Saturn model first and then flashing his eyes at Kennedy, he added, “And, by God, we’ll do it!”

  Von Braun gave the president a guided tour of a well-protected bunker from which they witnessed the static firing of a Saturn C-1 booster. Karl Heimburg, the Test Lab director, told JFK that this booster produced 1.3 million pounds of thrust, dwarfing anything the Soviets could muster. When the rocket’s engines fired up, on time to the millisecond, Kennedy’s jaw dropped. “Just as the last echoes reverberated among the huge test stands and blockhouses of the Marshall Center Test Lab, Kennedy grasped von Braun’s hand impulsively and congratulated him warmly,” von Braun’s friend and biographer Erik Bergaust recalled. “In a rare gesture of credit-sharing, von Braun waved his hand toward the team members nearby, in a display of appreciation.”

  Even though NASA had already determined that lunar orbit rendezvous (LOR) was the approach it would use for landing on the moon, there remained dissension in the ranks. As von Braun explained the LOR concept, Kennedy slyly retorted, “I understand that Dr. Wiesner doesn’t agree with this,” then called his science advisor over for an impromptu debate, with Webb and Seamans joining in. White House aides, Vice President Johnson, and the press looked on in consternation. After five minutes, the debate between Wiesner and Webb got heated and Kennedy stepped in to play referee. “Well,” he said, “maybe we’ll have one more hearing and then we’ll close the books on this issue.”