Category THE RACE

The most vocal demands for an immediate response to the Soviet flight came from the House of Representatives, and particularly its Committee on Science and Astronautics. Committee hearings took place in a highly charged atmosphere.13 On April 12, the committee held a previously scheduled hear­ing on the proposal to revise the 1958 Space Act to make the vice president the chairman of the Space Council. Edward Welsh was the only witness. But the minds of the representatives were on the Gagarin flight, not the Space Council. Committee chair Overton Brooks stated that “we ought to make a determination that we. . . are going to be first in the future.” Republican James Fulton proclaimed that “we in the United States should publicly say that we are in a competitive space race with Russia and accept the challenge.” On April 13, James Webb and Hugh Dryden appeared before the commit­tee to defend the NASA budget increases that the president had approved on March 23. The focus of the hearings was not on those additions to the NASA budget to speed up the booster programs; rather, it was on the funds for human space flight on which the president had deferred approval. Fulton told Webb and Dryden that “I believe we are in a race, and I have said many times, Mr. Webb, ‘Tell me how much money you need and this committee will authorize all you need.’ ” Congressman Vincent Anfuso suggested that he was “ready to call for a full-scale congressional investigation. I want to see our country mobilized for war because we are at war. I want to see our schedules cut in half.”14

After helping prepare the Webb-McNamara report over the May 6-7 week­end, Willis Shapley found himself in charge of carrying out a review of that report from the BOB perspective. The draft of the internal BOB review was completed on May 18, and BOB director Bell sent it to Secretary of Defense McNamara, NASA administrator Webb, and Atomic Energy Commission chairman Glenn Seaborg with a request for immediate comments. Welsh of the Space Council also received a copy in the absence of Vice President Johnson, who was still touring in Asia. The final version of the review was dated May 20.

The review was the kind of thorough “due diligence” assessment that was the BOB’s responsibility, pointing out the implications of the decisions being proposed and examining potential obstacles to their successful implementa­tion. With respect to the magnitude of resources that would be needed, the review pointed out that what was being proposed was an increase of over $2 billion per year—perhaps even $3 billion per year—over previously planned budgets. It recognized that the budget estimates being used were subject to upward revision, suggesting that “the funds required by the manned lunar landing objective may have been underestimated by as much as $200 million in 1962 and perhaps $1 billion per year in future years.” What would be needed was “a commitment to a long term-effort and to pro­vide the resources it requires. Starts and stops, changes in goals, or failure to provide the required level of budgetary support would impair the success of the program.” It noted that “the commitment actually extends beyond the achievement of the manned lunar landing . . . By 1967 we will have geared

the nation up to an annual space effort of almost $7 billion per year; it is unrealistic to assume that an effort of approximately this level would not continue for many years.”

The draft BOB report pointed out the need to consider “the implica­tions of likely and possible outcomes other than complete success” of the lunar landing program; interestingly, this discussion was missing from the final version. The draft noted that “the magnitude of the effort required for the manned lunar landing program is so great and the proposed schedule so tight that it will place a major strain on our capabilities in the space and related fields.” It also noted that “increases in the space programs of the magnitude proposed cannot help having the effect of diverting scientific and technical manpower from other areas of national need” and might cause “a major and continuing distortion in the utilization of our scientific and technical resources which will have detrimental effects in other areas of seri­ous national concern.” The commitment to space would “also reduce our flexibility as a nation to undertake large scale, all-out efforts in other areas not now foreseen which may suddenly appear to be of comparable national importance.”

The review recognized that using 1967 as the internal planning date for the first lunar landing would “necessitate a rapid build-up,” but recommended that this planning date be maintained. With respect to making the target date publicly known, the BOB recommendation was to “make a major effort to avoid any public commitment to [a] specific target date.”16

Whether President Kennedy or his closest advisers read the BOB analysis cannot be known with certainty. If they did read it, they would have had the benefit of a comprehensive and thoughtful analysis of the implications of the decisions that Kennedy was about to announce.

In his November 20, 1961, status report on NASA’s Apollo buildup, Jerome Wiesner had noted that “it is hoped that there will be no further field sta­tions beyond these already announced.” This turned out to be a false hope. As the NASA leadership assessed the various capabilities it would need to manage Apollo effectively, it concluded that NASA was sorely lacking in high-quality electronics competence. This presented a problem with respect to NASA’s ability to manage its contracts with industry and academia, since NASA calculated that 40 percent of the cost of launch vehicles was related to their electronic components; for spacecraft, the cost was 50 to 70 percent. In addition, experience with early robotic spacecraft suggested that there were significant differences in the reliability requirements for electronic compo­nents in space as compared to on Earth. Most NASA employees at the time were more interested in the structural and propulsion aspects of spacecraft and launch vehicle design and development than their electronic aspects.38

In January 1962 associate administrator Robert Seamans asked the NASA staff to investigate what could be done to address this situation. Albert Kelly, director of electronics and control in NASA’s Office of Advanced Research and Technology, spent the next ten months preparing a detailed report on the issue; the November 1962 report concluded that the best approach to gaining the needed competence was to create a new NASA laboratory, or “field center,” dedicated to managing NASA’s electronics research. The NASA leadership had in fact several months earlier reached the same conclu­sion; the issue then became where to locate the new center. Webb, Dryden, and Seamans gave greatest weight to two criteria in making this decision: (1) a location near one or more universities involved in advanced electronics research, and (2) a location where the industrial community was also work­ing on electronics and was research-oriented.

Another consideration, according to James Webb, was President Kennedy’s questioning “why some of the best brains in the East were not working more actively in our program.” Webb told Kennedy that “a new Electronics Research Center in the eastern part of the country” would not only satisfy a specific NASA need, but would also “kill several birds with the same stone by making this Center a focal point of contact between some of our ablest people and some of the ablest ones working in advanced fields in universi­ties.” Kennedy told Webb that “while he felt that this was certainly an impor­tant objective, he was going to leave the decision to me but would like to be kept informed.” By October 1962, Webb told Kennedy that he, Dryden, and Seamans had decided to locate the Center in Boston, “making it clear that the geographic proximity to Harvard, MIT and the brilliant researchers and scholars in the electronics and associated fields in the city was one of the major bases for our judgment.” In fact, said Webb, NASA wanted “to put it [the new Center] within walking distance of both Harvard and MIT.”39

There were two political problems with that decision. President Kennedy was of course from Massachusetts, and thus such a decision could appear as if it had been influenced by his desire to bring some of the benefits of the space buildup to his home state. Even more problematic was the fact that the President’s youngest brother, Edward “Ted” Kennedy, was in 1962 running to fill the remaining two years of President Kennedy’s Senate term, and his campaign argued that he “could do more for Massachusetts.” If NASA had announced, without any prior notice or competition, a decision to locate a major new facility in Massachusetts, the political reaction likely would have involved NASA in a tightly contested election, a situation both President Kennedy and James Webb wanted to avoid.

When Webb on October 16, 1962, told Kennedy of NASA’s plans for locating the new center in the Boston area, he also said that it was extremely important from NASA’s “image of careful professional work and decisions made on a technical basis that this should not become a matter under dis­cussion in the then ongoing campaign in Massachusetts where his brother was running for the Senate.” Kennedy’s response was that “he approved the concept of the Electronics Research Center.” Kennedy also “stated that he was prepared to accept it in his budget” and “agreed that it should not be introduced into public discussion until the budget was to go to Congress” in early 1963, after the Senate election. To avoid the appearance of Kennedy’s political influence on the decision, Webb buried the initial funding for the new center in the NASA budget request submitted to the BOB in September 1962; this was not difficult to do, since the initial request of $5 million was very small compared to the overall $6.2 billion NASA budget request. Even the BOB was not informed of NASA’s intentions. As a former director of the BOB, Webb was well versed in ways to manipulate the normal process of BOB review. In Fall 1962, according to Webb, “the only persons who knew we were planning this Center outside of NASA” were President Kennedy and his top political operative, Kenneth O’Donnell.”40

Once the election was over and Ted Kennedy had won the Senate seat, NASA was ready to let the BOB in on its plans. Before meeting with budget director Bell on December 13 to finalize the NASA FY1964 budget request, Webb asked Kenneth O’Donnell to check with the president to make sure that Kennedy still agreed with NASA’s decision to develop the new center. Assured that this was indeed the case, NASA and the BOB inserted into the president’s budget message notice of the decision to create a new Electronics Research Center and to locate it “in the Greater Boston area.” Kennedy directed that “this matter should be handled with the most complete discre­tion.” There was no leak to the press of this decision until the budget became public with its submission to the Congress in mid-January 1963.

The Congress, and particularly NASA’s House of Representatives oversight committee, the Committee on Science and Astronautics, was not pleased to learn that NASA had made this decision without prior consultation with the committee. Over the next several years, the committee and NASA remained at loggerheads over whether NASA could proceed with its plans. There was also opposition from some Senate members who believed that the areas they represented should have been able to compete for the new NASA center. At one point, President Kennedy got personally involved, meeting on June 11, 1963, with Webb and Representative Joseph Karth (D-MN), who thought that the center was not really needed, but if NASA went ahead with its plans to create it, the new center could very well be located in his state. Kennedy was “very gracious,” but he was unable to change Karth’s mind regarding the issue.41

By the time Congress finished work on the NASA FY1964 budget in December 1963, there was tentative agreement to allow NASA to proceed with its plans, subject to Congressional review of several required studies. Even after those studies were completed, there was continued questioning of NASA’s plans for the center; “the fight for and against the Center raged on through 1965.” It was not until 1966 that the Congressional opposition died down, even though the Electronics Research Center had become opera­tional in 1965. This was too late for the center to have much of an impact on the Apollo program. The Electronics Research Center was to have a short lifetime; NASA announced in December 1969 that as part of its post-Apollo retrenchment, it had decided to close the facility.42

Conclusion

While Jerome Wiesner at the end of 1961 might have been concerned by what appeared to be too slow a pace in NASA’s implementation of the lunar landing decision, to those at NASA involved in the effort the rate of activ­ity during 1961 and 1962 seemed extremely rapid. In the weeks following Wiesner’s November 20, 1961, memorandum, NASA chose the contractors for the Apollo spacecraft and the first and third stages of the Saturn V vehi­cle. By the start of 1962, construction had begun at all the new facilities that would be required for Apollo. A major NASA reorganization to prepare the space agency for managing Apollo was announced on November 1, 1961; among the changes made was the creation of a separate Office of Manned Space Flight as one of the major program units at NASA headquarters. Chosen as its head, with the title associate administrator for manned space flight, was a dynamic young executive from RCA named Brainerd Holmes. Webb and Seamans had thought briefly about asking Wernher von Braun to become the human space flight manager, but that possibility disappeared when Hugh Dryden said that he would retire if it became reality. (Dryden was apparently one of those at NASA who resented von Braun’s involvement with the Nazi regime in Germany before and during World War II.) On April 11, 1962, President Kennedy assigned to Project Apollo the highest national priority, designated DX; this gave the undertaking first call (together with some defense and a few other space efforts) on whatever human and physical resources were needed for its accomplishment.43

It was thus clear by mid-1962 that the mobilization of the resources needed to accomplish a lunar landing was well underway. President Kennedy had warned the Congress and the American public on May 25, 1961, that achieving the lunar goal “would take many years and carry very heavy costs.” In the fifteen months following his May 25 speech, the realism of that warn­ing became increasingly evident; by September 1962, President Kennedy concluded that it was time for him to take a first-hand look at the unfolding effort.

Mid-1963 developments—improved U. S.-Soviet relations, growing criti­cisms of the U. S. Moon program, White House concerns about its costs, and possible signals of Soviet openness to collaboration—formed the back­ground against which President Kennedy decided in September 1963 to include a suggestion of U. S.-Soviet cooperation in going to the Moon in his September 20 address before the United Nations General Assembly.

JFK Still Interested

Whether or not Kennedy had ever given up on the idea of such cooperation during the difficult days of 1961 and 1962, the changed situation in 1963 made him again interested in actively pursuing the idea. As noted above, in his July 17 press conference, Kennedy for the first time had publicly stated his preference for a cooperative approach to lunar exploration.

The United States and the Soviet Union agreed to a Limited Test Ban Treaty on July 25, six weeks after JFK’s American University speech, and the relationship between the two nuclear powers was less tense then at any time since Kennedy had come to the White House. As part of

Secretary of State Dean Rusk’s agenda when he was in Moscow in early August to sign the treaty, Kennedy asked Rusk to raise the space coopera­tion possibility with Nikita Khrushchev. When Rusk did so, Khrushchev responded only with a quip: “Sure, I’ll send a man to the moon. You bring him back.”24 Kennedy himself discussed the possibility in an August 26 meeting with Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin. At the end of a wide ranging conversation, the president “raised the question of activities in outer space.” He talked about possible cooperative projects, “including going to the moon.” Dobrynin found this “an interesting thought” and told Kennedy he would raise it with Khrushchev, saying that he was aware that Khrushchev was interested in “more cooperation in outer space.” Kennedy told the Soviet ambassador that “if each knew the other’s ambi­tions and plans, it might be easier to avoid all-out competition” and that “if Mr. Khrushchev thought that a cooperative effort was possible, he would be interested.”25

On September 10, U. S. ambassador Foy Kohler visited Soviet foreign min­ister Gromyko in Moscow. Kohler referred to President Kennedy’s August 26 conversation with Dobrynin, and asked whether the Soviet government “had given consideration to the President’s broad, imaginative proposal for joint cooperation in outer space projects and if he would be prepared to discuss this subject” during his forthcoming visit to the United States to attend the United Nations General Assembly’s opening sessions. Gromyko indicated that the Soviet Union “agreed in principle with the idea and he would of course be prepared to examine any specific proposals [that the] US might have in mind.”26

Kohler reported this conversation to the president at a September 17 White House meeting. Kennedy first asked Kohler for his views on the concept of a joint lunar mission. Kohler told Kennedy that Gromyko had found the sug­gestion “interesting”; however, Kohler thought that the “Soviets were both intrigued and puzzled by what the president might have in mind.” Thus Gromyko, while giving a “cautious welcome” to the president’s idea, had asked that “we come up with some concrete suggestions.” Kennedy replied that “while this was not an idea that he had considered in detail, he contin­ued to be interested in developing it and thought it would in fact be useful, for example, and save a great deal of expense if we could come to some kind of agreement with the USSR on the problem of sending a man to the moon.” Kohler repeated that he thought that “there might be some real interest in developing cooperation in this field since Khrushchev had a problem of allo­cation of extremely limited resources” and that made carrying out Kennedy’s proposal “relatively simple.”27

Speechwriter Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., may not have been aware of these presidential initiatives and conversations when he inserted language pro­posing a joint U. S.-Soviet moon mission in his draft of the UN address, although it is hard to conclude that he independently came up with the same idea. But there is no doubt that the concept had been widely discussed by President Kennedy and others between July and September 1963.

Responding both to President Kennedy’s concern over the increasing costs of the U. S. space effort and criticisms such as those in the August Reader’s Digest that there was too much emphasis on the lunar landing program at the expense of space efforts more directly relevant to national security, the White House in late September 1963 initiated a sweeping review of the U. S. civilian and military space programs and the balance between them. Representative Olin Teague a few days after Kennedy’s September 20 United Nations speech had written to President Kennedy, saying that he was “very anxious to know whether this national goal [being first to the Moon] was being abandoned or changed” and that he was “disappointed” at the sug­gestion of cooperation in the undertaking with the Soviet Union.1 National security adviser McGeorge Bundy replied on October 4 that he and White House congressional liaison Larry O’Brien had discussed Teague’s letter with the president. Bundy told Teague that Kennedy asked Bundy to contact Teague with “an interim answer to the important question which you raise” regarding the national security implications of the cooperative proposal. Bundy told the congressman that “the relation between national security and the space program is very clear and important in the President’s judg­ment, and he is currently engaged in a major review of the relative roles of different agencies. . . We can assure you that there will be new expressions of the Administration’s point of view.”2

What precisely was meant by the tantalizing term “new expressions” was not specified. But apparently there were some people advising President Kennedy that it was not necessary to continue the fast-paced effort to reach the Moon by the end of the decade; for example, secretary of state Dean Rusk in an October 3 meeting with the president suggested taking 15-20 years to reach the lunar surface. Others argued that more emphasis should be placed on human flights in Earth orbit carried out under Department of Defense auspices. NASA’s Webb saw Kennedy’s United Nations speech as “a slight withdrawal of support” for Apollo, a “slight testing of the sentiment

as to whether the program could stand without his strong support.” Webb saw the speech as reflecting a “feeling that this was just the beginning of a group around him [Kennedy] who wanted to withdraw support.” Who the members of this “group” were was not clear to Webb; he suggested in a 1969 interview that “I don’t know whether it meant Schlesinger and Sorensen or whether it meant the disarmament [and] arms control [advocates] or whether it meant Mr. McNamara. I would simply say those around him.”3

On November 8, 1960, John F. Kennedy was elected by a very narrow margin as the thirty-fifth President of the United States; his victory was confirmed only shortly after noon on the next day. In the following ten weeks before he took the oath of office, president-elect Kennedy moved forward briskly on many of the issues that he had highlighted in the campaign. However, he paid very limited attention to space topics during his transition activities. While the perceived lack of urgency in the Eisenhower administration’s space efforts may have been a useful issue to stress in the campaign, the reality was that the president-elect and his advisers did not give high priority to addressing either immediate or longer-term space questions during the post­election transition period. There was no contact made with the new National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which had begun opera­tions two years earlier, on October 1, 1958. Kennedy prior to his inaugura­tion nominated no one to replace Eisenhower appointee T. Keith Glennan as NASA administrator. As John F. Kennedy took the oath of office on January 20, 1961, there was thus significant uncertainty about the future of the U. S. space effort.

The first result of this “peace-making” effort was a February 23 agreement signed by Webb and Gilpatric, confirming the desirability of a single national launch vehicle program and indicating that neither NASA nor DOD would begin the development of a new space launcher without the written acknowl­edgment of such a step from the other agency. On February 24, Webb and Dryden met with McNamara, Gilpatric, and director of defense research and engineering Herbert York, an Eisenhower holdover. The group agreed that Webb and Gilpatric would meet “from time to time for lunch and would bring others as needed” as a way to coordinate NASA and DOD space activi­ties at the top level. They agreed on the need for a review in “about four weeks” from the date of the meeting to determine the need for accelerat­ing the existing space program; there was “a general feeling that we should accelerate the booster program.” There was discussion of a possible omnibus bill to cover all space activities in both NASA and DOD (an idea which was never implemented). Writing to budget director David Bell a few days later, Webb described the February 24 meeting as “splendid.”26

Webb’s biographer W. Henry Lambright suggests that NASA-DOD agreement was possible because Robert McNamara was already “trying to constrain the expansionist tendencies of the services” and wanted to use NASA “as a check on the air force.” In addition, both McNamara and Webb recognized that “if they failed to settle differences at the NASA-DOD level, Lyndon Johnson would have the opportunity to stake out a stronger claim for coordinating them through the National Aeronautics and Space Council.” Webb saw this period as part of a process in which NASA and the DOD were “like two strange animals. . . sparring around, smelling each other, seeing what could be done, testing each other out.”27

Shortly after taking office, McNamara had requested a review examining whether the Wiesner Task Force criticism of a “fractionated military space program” was valid. Based on this review and conversations within DOD, McNamara decided to centralize management of Department of Defense space efforts in the Air Force, and on March 6 issued a directive to that effect.28 This was not, however, exactly the outcome that the Air Force had hoped for, given the preceding NASA-DOD agreements; from McNamara’s perspective, centralizing space activity in one organization made it easier for him to exercise tighter control over that activity.

The next morning, April 14, Robert Seamans and George Low appeared before the committee, and were subject to even more intense pressure. Seamans in particular put himself in a vulnerable position with respect to administration policy, saying that although there were no plans at that time to ask Congress for funding for Project Apollo, the post-Mercury human space flight effort, it might indeed be possible with an accelerated effort to land on the Moon by 1967. Seamans noted that doing so would require “a very major undertaking. To compress the program by 3 years [the date of the first lunar landing in the recently revised NASA planning was 1970] means that greatly increased funding would be required. . . I certainly cannot state that this is an impossible objective. It comes down to a matter of national policy.” Seamans added that he would be “the first to review it wholeheart­edly to see what it would take to do the job. My estimate at the moment is that the goal may very well be achievable.” Seamans was, of course, well aware of the February report of George Low’s committee that had said that a lunar landing within the decade was technologically feasible; he was also aware of Kennedy’s decision in March not to approve additional funding for human space flight beyond Project Mercury, even as he provided addi­tional funding for larger space boosters. Seamans’s comments, coming just as the committee and the media were calling for an accelerated space effort, appeared to be adding NASA pressure on the president to the pressure com­ing from the House committee and the media; this was an uncomfortable position for Seamans to be in. He recalls that “it was unwise for an underling to get out ahead of the President.”15

Indeed, President Kennedy was not at all happy to read in the next day’s newspapers that a NASA official had made public statements that seemed to preempt what would necessarily be a presidential decision. The Washington Post headline read “Reaching the Moon First Would Cost Billions” and its story began, “A multi-billion dollar crash space program might put an American on the Moon by 1967—a top Government official said yesterday.” The New York Times headlined its report on Seamans’ testimony “costly drive might bring landing by ‘67.” Administrator Webb got both a message from budget director David Bell and a “strongly worded” letter from Kenneth O’Donnell asking about the testimony; O’Donnell was one of the presi­dent’s top assistants and his policy “enforcer.” For a few days, Seamans’ job was in real jeopardy, but Webb was able to calm the White House concern. In a letter to O’Donnell, Webb noted that the committee was in a “runaway mood” and that “the members of the Committee, almost without exception, were in a mood to try to find someone responsible for losing the race to the Russians” and were seeking information “that would focus public attention on the Committee, and the role it had chosen for itself as the goad to force a large increase in the program.” He defended Robert Seamans, saying that he had done “an exceptionally fine job” of resisting the committee’s inquiries with respect to NASA’s relations with the Bureau of the Budget (BOB)and the president.16

The BOB review did not attempt to assign a cost to the overall Apollo proj­ect through the planned first landing. In preparing NASA administrator Webb for possible questions at the press briefing planned to follow President Kennedy’s May 25 speech, NASA’s public affairs chief Bill Lloyd suggested that the answer to the questions “What is your best estimate? How many billions of dollars would the lunar landing program cost?” should be “our best guess is in the neighborhood of $20 billion.”17 The origins of this $20 billion figure apparently lie with James Webb. Robert Seamans reports that the NASA staff estimate for the additional cost of the lunar landing program above what had been previously planned was in the range of $10 to $12 billion; Hugh Dryden had used an $11.4 billion increment in his April 22 presentation to Vice President Johnson. According to Seamans, “Jim Webb put an ‘administrator’s discount’ on our ability to predict costs precisely.” Lambright suggests that Webb’s administrative discount applied both to announcing a date for the first landing attempt and for a precise cost of the project. With respect to the landing date, Webb wanted “a margin of flex­ibility weighted against what the technical experts thought was possible, just in case something went wrong. He did not want the prestige of the nation (much less his own reputation) resting on an overly optimistic deadline.” With respect to the projected costs, the $10 to $12 billion estimate “looked much too low to Webb. Because no one could anticipate all the contingen­cies, he enlarged the figure NASA sent Kennedy to $20 billion for the first lunar journey.” There are stories, apparently apocryphal, that Webb doubled the Apollo cost estimate during a ten-minute car ride from NASA headquar­ters to Capitol Hill; Seamans’s account suggest that there was substantially more thought given to the cost estimate than such stories would suggest.18

One critical decision with respect to the lunar landing project still remained unsettled as President Kennedy prepared in September 1962 to make an inspection tour of the facilities being developed for the accelerated space effort. That decision was the best approach to getting astronauts to the lunar surface. NASA in July 1962 had selected as its preferred approach rendez­vous in lunar orbit, a way to the Moon that had emerged in its consideration only at the very end of 1961. Kennedy’s science adviser Wiesner and his staff did not agree with this choice, and were actively pressuring NASA to reverse it in favor of an Earth orbit rendezvous approach. The president’s September 11-12 visit to NASA and industry installations was intended to give him an overview of the human space flight effort in preparation for the hard budget decisions that all knew were upcoming later in the year; it also exposed him to the ongoing argument about the choice of how best to fly to the Moon. It was also on this trip that John F. Kennedy at Rice University in Houston gave his most memorable address on the reasons why he had chosen to accel­erate the U. S. space effort.

As he toured the NASA facilities, Kennedy, as was his style, asked many questions, and learned that some within NASA believed that the first landing on the Moon could come as much as a year sooner than the late 1967 date that was at that point NASA’s target. To advance the landing date by that many months would require requesting from Congress an extra short-term supplement to the NASA budget, and there was considerable debate during October and November 1962 about the wisdom of that action. Adding more money to the human space flight budget was strongly advocated by associate administrator for manned space flight Brainerd Holmes, but equally strongly resisted by NASA administrator James Webb. Their disagreement escalated into tensions that culminated in Holmes leaving NASA in mid-1963.

The debate over extra money for NASA led to a November 21 White House meeting in which President Kennedy and Webb disagreed about the prior­ity of the lunar landing program compared to other NASA activities. In the

aftermath of this meeting, President Kennedy reluctantly decided not to try to accelerate the Apollo schedule, and to continue on the path of requesting funds for NASA adequate to maintain the late 1967 target date for the first lunar landing attempt. Even pursuing that path required a NASA Fiscal Year 1964 budget request of $5.712 billion, an increase of 55 percent over the NASA FY1963 budget of $3.674 billion but almost a half billion dollars less than what NASA had requested in September 1962. The continuing exponen­tial increase in NASA funding came at a time when Kennedy and his White House advisers were striving to limit overall budget growth, even as the finan­cial demands of Apollo approached 4 percent of the total federal budget.