American Moonshot

by Douglas Brinkley

  Enthralled by the space jewels he saw on his tour of the facility, Kennedy stayed twice as long as scheduled. At one point, he climbed into the cockpit of an Apollo Command Module mock-up, which had been designed to test the crew seats and instrument panels. Staring at a seventeen-foot-high lunar lander prototype, he seemed almost paralyzed with wonder. Shepard described to Kennedy the work of the “lunar excursion vehicle” (LEV; also called the “Lunar Bus”), praising the extraordinary effort of the Manned Spacecraft Center team. Surrounded by engineers, technicians, and computer specialists, Kennedy reiterated his pledge that the Apollo moon landing would happen within the decade. “To talk of placing a tremendous rocket outside the orbit of the earth, to send it to the moon to rendezvous, to go to the moon’s surface, to put men on the moon, to take them off, to rendezvous again, and bring them back to earth safely, and to talk about doing that in the next 5 or 6 years indicates how far and how fast we have come and how far and how fast we must go,” he said. “And back of all the extraordinary scientific and technical accomplishments which must be made to make this possible, of course, are the men who are involved, and particularly those who are at the point of the spear, those who must fly this mission into the most unknown sea.”

  President John F. Kennedy emerging from inside a model of the futuristic NASA spacecraft during his tour of the new Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Texas.

  Bob Gomel/The LIFE Images Collection/Getty Images

  At some level, both Kennedy’s Rice speech and the spontaneous remarks he delivered in front of the Mercury astronauts were responses to his Republican critics. At Rice, his lofty rhetoric, elevating the moonshot into the pantheon of human exploration and scientific advancement, was a slap at Barry Goldwater’s contention that NASA was a distraction from the more important military uses of space. On Telephone Road, his remarks were a counterweight to Dwight Eisenhower, who’d mocked Project Apollo’s breakneck pace. With the midterm elections looming, the former president was, that same day, out politicking for the first time since leaving the White House, stumping for Republican senatorial candidates.

  Eisenhower and Kennedy were at a unique juncture in their strained relationship. A few weeks before, in The Saturday Evening Post, Ike had levied what amounted to his own personal platform for the nation’s future. Eisenhower didn’t neglect space in his state-of-the-nation manifesto, but while proclaiming his pride in John Glenn, Scott Carpenter, and the other Mercury astronauts, he came down hard on Kennedy’s multibillion-dollar budgetary expansion of NASA. In a repeat of his commentary at the Naval War College the previous year, Eisenhower lamented the amount of money that was, in his view, being wasted on Project Apollo. “By all means, we must carry on our explorations in space, but I frankly do not see the need for continuing this effort as such a fantastically expensive crash program,” he wrote. “From here in, I think we should proceed in an orderly, scientific way, building one accomplishment on another, rather than engaging in a mad effort to win a stunt race.”

  Being criticized by the still popular Eisenhower put Kennedy in a political bind: realistically, he was unable to ignore his predecessor’s putdown, yet it would be foolhardy to confront it head-on. The Cold War had obviously put Americans in various camps, reflecting their attitudes toward Communist and especially Soviet influence in America. But even though that struggle overlapped with the space race in crucial ways, NASA’s space effort had yet to become a liberal or conservative issue as of 1962. In his speeches and press conferences, Kennedy strove to keep the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs above that political fray, and when he described the effort to put a man on the moon, it was invariably presented as a uniting, bipartisan endeavor. Now Eisenhower’s critical commentary, purposely given with the midterm elections in mind, gave millions of Republican-leaning Americans a fiscally pragmatic rallying cry: “Why the great hurry to get to the moon and planets?”

  Eisenhower was undeniably right that removing the hurry from Project Apollo would lower NASA’s budgetary expenditures, and that was a fiscal argument with enough conservative voter appeal to divide popular support for space exploration. As newspapers began quoting Ike’s Saturday Evening Post opinions in editorials, Kennedy held his response for a moment when it would have the desired impact but also land softly enough that it wouldn’t alienate his White House predecessor. With tensions rising over the increasing Soviet military presence in Cuba, Kennedy needed Eisenhower’s (and by extension, the GOP’s) support when it came to defending the Monroe Doctrine and countering the threats arising in Castro’s Cuba.

  After his Houston trip triumph, Kennedy made the last stop on his space inspection tour, visiting the McDonnell Aircraft factory in St. Louis, where the Gemini two-man space capsule was being built with Gus Grissom’s supervisory help. The visit was planned so carefully that it felt scripted. Air Force One landed at the aircraft plant, touching down just in time for a shift change, meaning that nearly ten thousand McDonnell workers were on hand to represent the blue-collar face of the aerospace industry. Escorted by MIT-trained physicist and company founder James Smith “Mac” McDonnell, with Webb and von Braun also in the entourage, the president inspected a Gemini capsule mock-up, watched production in a dust-free “white room,” and met with top company executives. The only impromptu segment of the two-and-a-half-hour visit was, oddly enough, the part that would normally have been written down in advance: Kennedy’s two-minute speech at the factory. Reiterating the most salient points from his Rice speech, Kennedy brought the enormous budget for Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo down to kitchen-table level, reminding his audience that each American was contributing forty cents per week—still possibly a strain for middle- or lower-income families, but that was the price of a truly national project. Through their contributions, he reminded them, “Every citizen of this country has a stake and is participating in this effort.”

  In part, Kennedy’s space tour was designed to highlight how NASA was supporting the New Frontier economy, spurring growth not only in the public sector but also in private companies across America. Visiting McDonnell Aircraft was a great way to get that message across. Although less than two dozen years old, McDonnell was already America’s largest manufacturer of fighter jets—the two-seat F-4 Phantom II (a twin-engine, supersonic, long-range, all-weather fighter-bomber) was its newest wonder. The company, which had snared prime NASA contracts to develop and provide space capsules for both the Mercury and Gemini programs, was the biggest employer in greater St. Louis, and all McDonnell shareholders, even if they were Republican, could clearly see the benefits of Kennedy’s moonshot gambit staring at them from the bottom line. Furthermore, Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had contracted McDonnell (which would merge with the Douglas Aircraft Company to form McDonnell Douglas in 1967) to produce various classes of missiles.

  Another smart reason for Kennedy to have toured McDonnell Aircraft was that his administration was about to choose Grumman (the largest employer in Long Island, New York, whose specialty was jet aircraft such as the A-6 Intruder and the E-2 Hawkeye) to be the chief contractor on the Apollo lunar module that would bring the Apollo 11 astronauts to the moon. Kennedy and NASA would wait until November 7, after the midterm elections, to announce that Grumman had won the lucrative bid.

  United Press International correspondent Alvin Spivak interpreted the president’s words during his stops in Houston and St. Louis in purely political terms: “By forceful implication, he endeavored to meet the challenge of former President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s question ‘why the great hurry’ in NASA’s ‘fantastically expensive space program aimed at the moon.’” Kennedy was aware that Congress was showing signs of balking at the ever-ballooning NASA budget, but his whirlwind tour through Alabama, Florida, Texas, and Missouri that September had given him (and a rapt TV, radio, and newspaper audience) firsthand knowledge of the way American taxpayers’ “40 cents per week” was being spent. To most of the voting public, funding Kennedy’s moonshot was a down pa
yment on the future greatness of the United States.

  McDonnell Aircraft contributed mightily to NASA’s manned space efforts. On September 12, 1962, after his Rice University speech, President Kennedy flew to St. Louis, Missouri, to speak with company employees.

  Cecil Stoughton. White House Photographs. The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston

  JUST TWO DAYS after the Houston and St. Louis events, Kennedy attended the America’s Cup race in Newport, Rhode Island. Fresh from calling space the “new ocean” at Rice, he was happy to return to the real thing, the Atlantic. “I really don’t know why it is that all of us are so committed to the sea, except I think it is because . . . we all came from the sea,” he said at a dinner for the America’s Cup crews. “And it is an interesting biological fact that all of us have, in our veins[,] the exact same percentage of salt in our blood that exists in the ocean, and, therefore, we have salt in our blood, in our sweat, in our tears. We are tied to the ocean. And when we go back to the sea, whether it is to sail or to watch it[,] we are going back from whence we came.”

  Kennedy didn’t have the luxury of meditating on either the old ocean or the new ocean for long, because two of the most consequential long-term crises of his White House tenure had deteriorated during his robust space tour. In Mississippi, state officials were still defying the Supreme Court’s order to desegregate the University of Mississippi, while in Georgia, arsonists had burned two African American churches that had been active in the voter registration movement. Civil rights leaders such as Martin Luther King Jr. and Ralph Abernathy were expressing their outrage. With great force, Kennedy condemned Jim Crow laws. In late September, Attorney General Robert Kennedy ordered U.S. Marshals to help facilitate James Meredith’s registration at Ole Miss. When segregationists triggered a riot on the campus, JFK ordered in federal troops to restore law and order.

  Even as opposition to the civil rights movement was threatening to blow open American society from within, another crisis was doing the same from without. In the aftermath of the Bay of Pigs invasion the previous year, the United States had adopted various measures to destabilize Castro’s regime, including assassination plots, sabotage of the Cuban economy, and contingency plans to blockade the island. Convinced that a full-scale invasion from America was inevitable, Castro agreed to a Soviet offer to deploy intermediate-range nuclear missiles in Cuba. During the late summer of 1962, the USSR increased the delivery of military systems to the Caribbean island. In response, Kennedy asked Congress for standby authority to order 150,000 reservists to active duty for a year. Three days later, in the midst of JFK’s space tour, the Soviet Union lambasted the request as “an act of aggression,” warning that it would thwart any incursion into Cuba with war—even, it was implied, nuclear war.

  Ensconced in the White House, Kennedy remained firmly committed to preventing acts of aggression against the United States by or through Cuba. At a press conference on September 13, he addressed the situation directly. “Let me make this clear,” he said. “If at any time the Communist build-up in Cuba were to endanger or interfere with our security in any way, including our base at Guantanamo, our passage to the Panama Canal, our missile and space activities at Cape Canaveral, or the lives of American citizens in this country . . . then this country will do whatever must be done.”

  Group portrait of the second group of men selected to be astronauts in NASA’s Project Gemini space program, 1963. Bottom row, left to right: James Lovell (1928– ), Jim McDivitt (1929– ), and Pete Conrad (1930–99); second row: Elliot See (1927–66) and Thomas Stafford (1930– ); third row: Edward White (1930–67) and John Young (1930–2018); fourth row: Neil Armstrong (1930–2012) and Frank Borman (1928– ).

  Ralph Morse/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images

  18

  Gemini Nine and Wally Schirra

  The Gemini astronauts would in effect open the doorway to a moon landing—an event not measured then in decades but a mere handful of years.

  —FRANCIS FRENCH AND COLIN BURGESS, IN THE SHADOW OF THE MOON (2007)

  The week President Kennedy was touring America’s space facilities and giving his soaring speech at Rice University, thirty-two Project Gemini finalists were at their homes scattered around the country, nervously waiting to see who would make the final cut. Those thirty-two candidates had been selected after rigorous examination that past July, from a larger pool of more than two hundred fifty applicants, all of them white men. NASA’s evaluation of the semifinalists was grueling, with the prospects required to show extraordinary psychological and physical fortitude as well as quick problem-solving skills. Nine slots were available for NASA’s second astronaut group—two more than for Mercury because Gemini’s launch schedule would be much more compressed: twelve missions within 603 days (one every 60 days), versus Mercury’s six missions over 451 days (one every 112 days). Colin Burgess, a space historian who befriended the men who were selected to the “New Nine,” as well as others who came close, concluded that “NASA was not looking for another bunch of accomplished stick-and-rudder test pilots with limited academic credentials. They wanted intellectual giants to help to solve the complex problems of space exploration. All nine of those new astronauts had excelled academically at whatever institution they attended.”

  James Webb was indeed adamant about the need for academic excellence, with his ideal candidates having both high-performance jet experience and first-rate records from great university engineering programs like Purdue, Caltech, Princeton, UCLA, Georgia Tech, and Michigan. Kennedy, known for staffing his entire administration with so-called whiz kids, heartily approved of Webb’s recruitment priorities. The final list of would-be Gemini astronauts included six civilians, a nod to the president’s emphasis on the peaceful nature of America’s space program. On average, the Gemini “New Nine” astronaut was thirty-two and a half years old, about two years younger than the average Mercury astronaut was when selected. At five feet nine inches, the composite selectee was an inch shorter and also four pounds lighter than his Mercury predecessors.

  On September 14, 1962, while Kennedy was at the America’s Cup race in Newport, the nine men chosen to be Gemini astronauts received phone calls from NASA—not from Webb, but from Deke Slayton, one of the current Mercury Seven astronauts. Neil Armstrong, who already worked for NASA evaluating high-altitude aircraft at Edwards Air Force Base, got a call from Slayton. With little preamble, he asked Armstrong if he still wanted to be an astronaut.

  Armstrong, the man who had once described his engineer personality as “born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in the steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace, and propelled by compressible flow,” was ready for the moment—or for rejection. Ever since Glenn’s unforgettable Friendship 7 mission, Armstrong had grown excited about traveling to space. Not long before the call from Slayton, Armstrong had analyzed his chances and concluded that he could be passed over for any number of reasons, all of them beyond his control. Now, though pleased by his selection, he reacted with little apparent emotion. “Yes, sir,” he said matter-of-factly. With that, Slayton instructed Armstrong to report to Houston, where he was to check into the Rice Hotel under the code name “Max Peck,” rendezvous with the other eight selectees, and get ready for the big announcement three days later.

  On September 16, the Gemini Nine, having successfully evaded reporters, met in secret at Ellington Air Force Base, southeast of Houston. Having seen the two-person Gemini prototype in St. Louis, Kennedy had lit a fire to fast-track Project Gemini and announce the chosen astronauts. Bob Gilruth, director of the Marshall Space Flight Center, told the astronauts that there would be eleven or twelve manned Gemini flights, and that one of the nine of them would inevitably be the first man on the moon. “There’ll be plenty of missions,” Gilruth promised, “for all of you.”

  With great fanfare, the Gemini Nine astronauts were presented to the public on September 17 at the University of Houston�
�s eighteen-hundred-seat Cullen Auditorium. It was the Mercury Seven rollout of 1958 all over again. Cheers erupted when the roster was read: civilian pilots Neil Armstrong and Elliot M. See Jr.; air force officers Frank Borman, James McDivitt, Thomas Stafford, and Edward White; and naval aviators Charles Conrad, James A. Lovell, and John W. Young. Some in the press dubbed the New Nine the “Kennedy moon corps.” Armstrong biographer James Hansen later wrote, “In the opinion of individuals responsible for the early manned space program, it was unquestionably the best all-around group of astronauts ever assembled.”

  Gemini was a workhorse project tasked with solving in space the challenges of actualizing Kennedy’s moonshot. The Gemini Nine were the lucky test pilots given the first opportunity to experiment with the cutting-edge aerospace hardware, to perfect the complicated techniques of rendezvous and conducting docking maneuvers in Earth’s orbit. They would learn how to spacewalk, to master guided reentry, and to maneuver spacecraft into higher and lower orbits.

  Congress began debating an increase in the NASA budget just a few days after the Gemini Nine’s introduction. With the 1962 midterm elections just weeks away, Democrats wanted to show progress on Kennedy’s moon pledge, but costs were rising, as was congressional concern. By September, Gemini’s projected price tag had risen from $530 million to $745 million, due to the need to design and develop new systems rather than reuse those from Project Mercury. The New Nine rollout was one administration gambit to avoid a cost-analysis debate in Congress. Another was also on deck: in just three weeks, Mercury astronaut Wally Schirra would be lofted into space for the fifth manned Mercury mission, scheduled to make six orbits of Earth. If he was successful, steadfast manned space Democrats expected to reap rewards on Election Day.