Category THE RACE

This growing and broadly based criticism of the lunar landing program con­cerned President Kennedy. At an April 19 meeting with newspaper editors, he noted with some irritation that “the space program. . . is now under some attack. It seems to me that this indicates a certain restlessness. This program passed unanimously last year. Now suddenly we shouldn’t carry out the space program, and then maybe 6 months from now, when there is some extraordinary action in space which threatens our position, everybody will say, ‘Why didn’t we do more?’ ”6

The White House behind the scenes was developing its response to the criticisms of Apollo. On April 5, the day of Reston’s column in the Times., Kennedy’s national security adviser McGeorge Bundy, who had assumed a lead policy role on the space program within Kennedy’s inner circle of advis­ers, told NASA administrator Webb that “the President would like to have an appraisal of the basic changes and modifications that we have made in the space program since this Administration came in, so that he will be fully equipped to defend our current position against what looks like an emerg­ing attack.” Bundy added that “what the President would like particularly to have is an account of the deficiencies of the space program as it was, and was projected, under the outgoing Administration. What would we have failed to do, and what are we now going to be able to do that could not have been done on the Eisenhower basis.” Bundy asked for a “careful and complete answer” to the president’s questions, but also gave Webb only two weeks to develop that answer.7

Kennedy soon also decided to use the Space Council to coordinate the process of developing the defense of his space program. In an April 9 memo­randum to Vice President Johnson, Kennedy noted that “in view of recent discussions, I feel the need to obtain a clearer understanding of a number of factual and policy issues relating to the National Space Program.” The president asked Johnson to lead a Space Council effort to develop responses to five questions:

1. What are the salient differences. . . between the NASA program projected on January 1, 1961 for the years 1962 through 1970, and the NASA program as redefined by the present Administration?

2. What specifically are the principal benefits to the national economy we can expect to accrue from the present, greatly augmented program in the following areas: scientific knowledge; industrial productivity; education, at various levels beginning with high school; and military technology?

3. What are some of the major problems likely to result from continuation of the national space program as now projected in the fields of industry, government, and education?

4. To what extent could the program be reduced, beginning with FY1964, in areas not directly affecting the Apollo program (and therefore not compromising the timetable for the first manned lunar landing)?

5. Are we taking sufficient measures to insure the maximum degree of coordination and cooperation between NASA and the Defense Department?8

The Space Council’s Edward Welsh led the process of getting inputs from the council’s member agencies. He received brief papers from staff officials at the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and the Department of State, a one – page letter with supporting material from Jerome Wiesner, and a seven-page response from Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. NASA’s James Webb first sent a four-page cover letter with a sixty-three page attachment; this was later reduced to a seventeen-page memo signed by Webb; it still had ten pages of attachments. Webb was as verbose in his written communications as when he spoke.

The AEC response discussed only the organization’s efforts to develop nuclear power sources for space uses. The State Department’s somewhat skeptical response noted that “from the viewpoint of U. S. foreign policy objectives generally, it seems quite likely that several adverse effects may develop because of the increasingly large percentage of our space effort to be devoted to the GEMINI and APOLLO programs.” This was because “our program will increasingly accentuate, rather than mitigate, the gap between ourselves and other countries in space and space related activities.” Another concern was “the inevitable merging of national security requirements and scientific requirements in the conduct of our program,” which would make the United States “increasingly the object of skepticism on the part of the neutralist or non-allied countries with respect to the ‘peaceful’ or ‘beneficial’ objectives and character of our program.” The State Department cautioned against reductions in the nonhuman space flight parts of NASA’s activities, saying that such a reduction “would be particularly harmful, if it were to result in a retrenchment in our extant commitments or stated objectives with respect to cooperation in space activities with other countries.”9

Wiesner commented that “it is my feeling that the NASA-DOD rela­tionship should be substantially improved.” In his submission, Secretary of Defense McNamara identified “$600-675 million of the NASA effort which appears to have direct or indirect value for military technology.” Of that amount, “about $275-$350 million stems from the augmentation of NASA programs since January 1961.” Agreeing with Jerome Weisner, McNamara told the vice president that “I am not satisfied, and I am sure that Mr. Webb is not satisfied, that we have gone far enough to eliminate all problems of duplication and waste in administration.” McNamara suggested that the coordination problem was of “sufficient importance” that it required atten­tion at the White House level. In a suggestion sure not to be welcomed by the vice president and his Space Council staff, he suggested that responsibil­ity for monitoring coordination between NASA and DOD “be assigned to the Bureau of the Budget and to the Director of the Office of Science and Technology.”10

NASA on May 3 not only provided to the vice president copious material responding to the president’s five questions; it also submitted a draft reply to those questions. In a May 10 memorandum that “refines and reduces, in volume,” the information provided on May 3, Webb suggested that “there is little evidence to indicate that significant national problems are likely to be made critical or require radical solutions as a result of the continuation of the space program.” In particular, Webb argued, NASA demand for sci­entific and engineering personnel to carry out its program would rise only from 3 to 6 percent of total national requirements, and this increase would not unduly divert needed technical personnel from other national programs. Webb suggested that “cooperation between NASA and the DOD is good,” but noted “areas for further improvement,” including “greater participation by the DOD in NASA projects.”11

A “principals only” meeting of the Space Council was held on the after­noon of May 7 to review and approve the vice president’s report to the presi­dent. Welsh read the president’s questions and Lyndon Johnson, reading from a seven-page draft prepared by the Space Council staff, indicated the intended replies. The draft was kept purposely relatively short compared to the inputs from the Space Council member agencies; Welsh had been reminded by the vice president that “the president does not like a lot of ‘verbiage’ ” and that the responses to Kennedy’s questions should be kept “as short and simple as possible.” A few revisions and additions to the draft reply were made “after careful consideration and discussion,” and the report was approved; Council members initialed the vice president’s original typed copy of the reply “based on the premise that agreed upon changes would be made.”12

Johnson delivered the Space Council’s report to President Kennedy on May 13; it painted the overall situation in very positive terms. The report esti­mated that the augmented space program would require approximately $30 billion more in the FY1961 to FY1970 period than had been planned as the Eisenhower administration left office ($48.086 billion rather than $17.917 billion). It noted that the “basic difference between the two programs is that the plan of the previous Administration represented an effort for a second place runner and the program of the present Administration is designed to make this country the assured leader before the end of the decade.” With respect to the impacts of the additional space spending, the report suggested that “the ‘multiplier’ of space research and development will augment our economic strength, our peaceful posture, and our standard of living.” It noted that “the introduction of a vital new element into an economy always creates new problems but, otherwise, the nation’s space program creates no major complications” and that “despite claims to the contrary, there is no solid evidence that research and development in industry is suffering significantly from a diversion of technical manpower to the space program.” Reducing the portion of the NASA program not related to the lunar landing would “lessen the quantity and quality of benefits to the economy” and “give additional ammunition to those who criticize the major funding weight given to the lunar program on the grounds that it diverts money from other programs.” With respect to NASA-DOD coordination, the report suggested that “it is inevitable that controversies will continue to arise in any field as new, as wide – ranging, and as technically complicated as space.”

The Space Council report concluded:

There is one further point to be borne in mind. The space program is not

solely a question of prestige, of advancing scientific knowledge, of economic

benefit or of military development. . . A much more fundamental issue is at stake—whether a dimension that well can dominate history for the next few centuries will be devoted to the social system of freedom or controlled by the social system of communism.

We cannot close our eyes to what would happen if we permitted totalitarian systems to dominate the environment of earth itself. For this reason our space program has an overriding urgency that cannot be calculated solely in terms of industrial, scientific, or military development. The future of society is at stake.13

The Space Council report was received with some degree of skepticism by the White House staff. Wiesner discussed it with President Kennedy on May 16, telling him that “the impact of the NASA program on the nation’s supply of scientists and engineers is much greater” than that indicated in the report. While NASA might require the services of only 7 percent of the total supply of U. S. scientists and engineers, it would utilize up to 30 percent of those involved in research and development, he suggested. Wiesner also noted that the report unduly minimized “current management and other differences between NASA and Defense and does not reflect the concerns and views expressed by the Secretary of Defense in his letter to the Vice President.” He also pointed out that the report ignored Secretary McNamara’s sugges­tion that “the responsibility for monitoring NASA-Defense problems in the space area be assigned to the Bureau of the Budget and to the Director of the Office of Science and Technology.”14

The Bureau of the Budget (BOB) noted that “the statement of the ‘ben­efits’ to the national economy from the space program has the unintended effect of showing, probably accurately, how slight and intangible such benefits have been and are likely to be in the future.” Also, “the question of whether the space program is having detrimental effects on the supply or activities of scientific and technical manpower is still not clearly answered either way.” The BOB suggested that while “the report does gloss over current problems and differences between the Department of Defense and NASA,” because “the issues involved are either petty or very complex. . . we would see no use­ful purpose in presenting any of them to the President at this time.” Finally, BOB suggested that “while the point might be overstated” in the conclud­ing paragraphs of the report, “we are inclined to agree with the conclusion that the fundamental justification at this time for a large-scale space pro­gram lies. . . in the fundamental unacceptability of a situation in which the Russians continue space activities on a large scale and we do not.”15

The individual on McGeorge Bundy’s staff with primary responsibility for tracking space issues was Charles E. Johnson. When Bundy received a copy of the Space Council report, he asked Johnson “do you think well of this?” Johnson replied to Bundy that while the “purple prose” in the report’s conclusion left him “quite unimpressed,” his primary concern was that the report might be released as a public statement of the administra­tion’s position on the space program. He saw “no need or urgency for such a statement,” believing that public debate could go on “without getting the

President more firmly signed on to a hard position with respect to the space program.” He suggested that “the ‘Cold War’ aspects should not be magni­fied,” since “there is already too much religion in the space program.” The NSC staffer suggested that “the Administration’s ability to maneuver should be retained so we can adjust to developments.” He added, in what turned out to be a perceptive comment, that “it is possible that the Soviets may not be engaging in a race (the intelligence is not conclusive) or may wish to join in a cooperative space program as an alternative to an expensive national program that strains their economy.”16

Although President Kennedy requested that an unclassified version of the Space Council report be prepared, it was not publicly released or referred to in the continuing debate over space priorities. While Kennedy himself remained publicly committed to proceeding with the accelerated space pro­gram he had endorsed in May 1961, the questioning of the program’s values and implementation by his senior staff suggested not only that was there a public debate over the proper goals and pace of the space program, but also that a similar debate was beginning to take place inside the top levels of the Kennedy administration.

Indeed, it may be the symbolic character of America’s voyages to the Moon that is the most important heritage of the Apollo program. Certainly the image of the Earth rising over the barren lunar surface taken by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders on Christmas Eve 1968 and of Apollo 11’s Buzz Aldrin standing next to the American flag at “Tranquility Base” have become iconic, communicating to subsequent generations that the United States did years ago achieve something unique in human experience, the first steps off the home planet.

Achieving JFK’s Purposes

John Kennedy chose to go to the Moon as a means of restoring the U. S. prestige that he judged had been lost during the Eisenhower administration.

In the shorter term, he also wanted to counteract the prestige loss caused by the conjunction of the Soviet success with the flight of Yuri Gagarin and the U. S. failure at the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy in 1961 conceptualized prestige in a way well described by British diplomatic historian F. S. Oliver thirty years earlier:

What prestige is, it would be hard to describe precisely, It may be nothing more substantial than an effect produced upon the international imagina­tion—in other words, an illusion. It is, however, far from being a mere bubble of vanity; for the nation that possesses great prestige is thereby enabled to have its way, and to bring things to pass which it could never hope to achieve by its own forces. Prestige draws material benefits in its train. Political wisdom will never despise it.21

In terms of both shorter-term and more lasting impacts on U. S. interna­tional prestige and the associated national pride, Apollo was a substantial success. Within months of JFK’s clarion call, NASA and U. S. industry were mobilized in a high-profile pursuit of the lunar landing goal. By declaring that the United States intended to take a leading position in space, and by then taking the steps to turn that declaration into practice, Kennedy effectively undercut the unilateral Soviet space advantage in dramatic space achievements well before any comparable U. S. success. The succes­sive achievements of Projects Mercury and Gemini, and most notably the February 1962 first U. S. orbital flight of John Glenn, became initial steps in JFK’s lunar quest and thus made the U. S. space program of the 1960s a source of international prestige and national pride. The psychological and political advantages of early Soviet space successes were quickly and effec­tively countered.

The success of Apollo 11 in July 1969 and five subsequent missions to the lunar surface (Apollo 13, of course, had a major failure on the way to the Moon and did not complete its landing mission) cemented the international perception of the United States as a country committed to peaceful space achievements “for all mankind.” Americans who were abroad at the time of the first Moon landings, U. S. diplomats, and Apollo astronauts return­ing from post-mission international tours all attested to an immense flow of admiration for the country that could accomplish such a feat. Senior State Department officer U. Alexis Johnson reported that “There is no question that the success of Apollo 11 mission did more to bolster prestige abroad than any single event since the termination of the Pacific War in 1945.” Johnson added a qualification, noting that “no one could hope or expect that the euphoric burst of enthusiasm felt by most of the world toward our country. . . could be long maintained—nor has it been.” According to Johnson, “we are left, however, with a very substantial residue of admiration and prestige. While benefits are impossible to measure in quantitative terms, these gains should be of very real value with respect to our posture in the world and our relations abroad for many years to come.”22 John Kennedy could not have hoped for a better report on the success of his 1961 lunar landing decision.

One analyst of the Kennedy presidency has suggested that JFK’s “aggres­sive, militaristic, confrontational attitude” toward the Soviet Union made the world a riskier place during Kennedy’s brief time in office, as he “waged Cold War.”23 Extending this judgment to the race to the Moon seems unjus­tified. By choosing a Cold War competitive arena that did not involve mili­tary or direct political confrontation, Kennedy channeled one dimension of the U. S.-Soviet rivalry into what some have described as “the moral equiva­lent of war,” rather than armed confrontation.

As it turned out, however, during the Kennedy administration the United States was racing only itself to the Moon. We now know that while by 1963 the Soviet Union had begun to develop a large space rocket capable of send­ing a cosmonaut to the Moon, it had not yet decided to use it for lunar missions. It was not until spring 1964 that Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analysts identified activity at the Soviet launch site in central Asia as a launch complex for a very large rocket. Until then, the CIA in its intelligence estimates had basically assumed without supporting hard evidence that the Soviet Union was pursuing a lunar landing program, both because that was a logical extension of past Soviet space activities and because the United States had identified a lunar landing as the appropriate goal for human space flight and intelligence analysts reasoned that the Soviet would follow the same course.24

Kennedy was aware in 1961 that his decision to go to the Moon was being made without knowledge of Soviet space intentions; he decided that the prestige benefits of the lunar landing program required that the United States be first to the Moon, whether or not the Soviet Union was in the race. But he continually referred to U. S.-Soviet competition in going to the Moon in his public statements defending his decision. This was certainly the politically expedient thing to do; it would have been far more difficult to maintain political support for Apollo if the threat of Soviet competition had been absent. Several of President Kennedy’s advisers in 1962 and 1963 alerted Kennedy to the lack of evidence in support of Soviet lunar intentions, and Kennedy was quite aware of the mid-1963 claims by Bernard Lovell that the Soviets did not have a lunar landing program. By then, he seems to have accepted James Webb’s argument that the U. S. lunar program was an extremely valuable focal point for developing overall U. S. space capability, and that it should proceed, cooperatively if possible but unilaterally if not, even if the Soviet Union did not have a similar program.

Both during the Kennedy administration and during the rest of the 1960s (and even until today), critics have argued that the Apollo program was an unfortunate reflection of misplaced U. S. priorities. President Kennedy was aware of these criticisms, and in 1963 worked to prepare answers to the program’s doubters. Apollo came to culmination at a time when the United States was experiencing urban riots, civil rights conflicts, political assassina­tions, and a seemingly pointless war in Southeast Asia. Kennedy cannot be faulted for not anticipating the domestic and international upheavals of the 1960s that changed the social context in which the lunar landings actually took place. In starting Apollo, Kennedy gave more weight to the situation in 1961 than to the longer-term situation in which the landings would actually take place. From his perspective in spring 1961, Apollo looked like the right thing to do.

All in all, then, an evaluation of Project Apollo in terms of the objectives that led John Kennedy to initiate and sustain it must be positive. Although it is impossible clearly to separate the positive impacts of Apollo from the many negatives of the decade of the 1960s, if not for the achievements of the U. S. space program at the end of the decade there would be little positive for Americans to remember from that time.

Even though the significance of the Soviet launches of spacecraft begin­ning with Sputnik 1 in October 1957 and the dog-carrying Sputnik 2 the following month and the appropriate U. S. response to Soviet space achievements were major issues before the Congress between 1958 and 1960, Senator Kennedy said little about space issues during those years. Kennedy also showed little personal interest in U. S. and Soviet space efforts. He was a member of the Visiting Committee of the Harvard College Observatory, but any curiosity he may have had regarding astron­omy apparently did not carry over into the space realm. The head of the Instrumentation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Charles Stark Draper, recalled a discussion with John Kennedy and his brother Robert at a Boston restaurant during the post-Sputnik period. Draper tried to get the Kennedy brothers excited about the promise of space flight. According to one account of the evening, the brothers treated Draper and his ideas “with good-natured scorn”; Draper noted that they “could not be convinced that all rockets were not a waste of money, and space navigation even worse.”2 Kennedy did vote in February 1958 to create a Senate Special Committee on Space and Aeronautics and voted in favor of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) funding bills in 1959 and 1960; other actions related to NASA during those years were approved by voice votes, without the positions of indi­vidual senators being recorded.3

Kennedy’s primary focus in his years in the Senate was defense and foreign policy, with particular attention after 1957 to what he and many others called an emerging U. S.-Soviet “missile gap.” The growing disparity between U. S. and Soviet missile capability, Kennedy argued, would soon put the United States at a significant strategic disadvantage vis-a-vis the Soviet Union. In a speech on the Senate floor on August 14, 1958, Kennedy expressed worry that the Soviet Union’s superiority in nuclear-tipped missiles would allow it to use “sputnik diplomacy” and other nonmilitary means to shift the bal­ance of global power against the United States.4 Kennedy, when he did speak about space issues in the post-Sputnik period, most often linked them to the missile gap issue, frequently using the term “missile-space problem.”

Kennedy did gain a seat on the prestigious Committee on Foreign Relations in the mid-1950s. He was one of the first senators to recognize the significance for U. S. interests of the decolonization movement of the late 1950s; he thought it essential that the United States be an appealing ally to Asians and Africans as they chose which social system to pursue as independent nations. Kennedy attracted international attention by denounc­ing French suppression of Algeria’s move toward independence.5 He was an ardent anticommunist at this point in his life, and the possibility of newly independent nations “going communist” was troubling to him. His interest in presenting a positive image of the United States to the countries of the third world was a factor in his later judgment that the United States could not by default cede space leadership to the Soviet Union.

An intriguing insight into what may have been JFK’s views on space in the prepresidential period emerges from his February 16, 1960, response to a handwritten letter from a Princeton University freshman “with a strong Republican background” who told Senator Kennedy that he should “put more money in the space program.” In his response, Kennedy noted that the letter had reached him because of the author’s “undeviating Republicanism, Princetonian self-assurance and uncomplicated handwriting.” Kennedy sug­gested that “whatever the scale and pace of the American space effort, it should be a scientific program. . . In this interval when we lack adequate pro­pulsion units, we should not attempt to cover this weakness with stunts.” He added, “When this weakness is overcome, our ventures should remain seriously scientific in their purpose.” Kennedy felt that “with respect to the competitive and psychological aspects of the space program, it is evident that we have suffered damage to American prestige and will continue to suffer for some time.” However, he pointed out that “our recent loss of international prestige results from an accumulation of real or believed deficiencies in the American performance on the world scene: military, diplomatic, and eco­nomic. It is not simply a consequence of our lag in the exploration of space vis-a-vis the Soviet Union.”

Kennedy listed these deficiencies in the order in which he thought they should be addressed: “the missile gap,” “inadequate or misdirected policies in the underdeveloped areas,” “the disarray of NATO,” “the weakening of the international position of the dollar,” and, finally, “our inferior position in space exploration.” He thought that the United States “should accept the costs now of achieving the powerful propulsion unit a few years earlier than now may be the case” and looked forward to “the internationalization of space exploration, first on a Free World basis, then with the USSR.” This response suggests that Senator Kennedy had indeed given some thought to space issues before February 1960, and that in his judgment they had a lower priority in comparison to other threats to U. S. leadership; this may well be an accurate reflection of his views as opposed to the strident attitude toward space leadership that characterized much of his campaign rhetoric later in the year. Notable is JFK’s interest at this early date in both increasing the lifting power of U. S. rockets and in internationalizing space activity. The letter also suggests, as in the use of the expression “propulsion unit” rather than launch vehicle, that Kennedy or whoever composed the response was not very famil­iar with the specifics of the U. S. space effort.6

According to his closest policy adviser, Theodore C. Sorensen, by mid – 1960 Kennedy thought of space “primarily in symbolic terms. . . Our lagging space effort was symbolic, he thought, of everything of which he complained in the Eisenhower Administration: the lack of effort, the lack of initiative, the lack of imagination, vitality, and vision; and the more the Russians gained in space during the last few years in the fifties, the more he thought it showed up the Eisenhower Administration’s lag in this area and damaged the pres­tige of the United States abroad.”7

On a frigid and snow-covered January 20, 1961, John F. Kennedy was sworn in as the thirty-fifth President of the United States. In his stirring inaugu­ral address, Kennedy had a particular message “to those nations who would make themselves our adversary.” He asked that “both sides begin anew the quest for peace,” but that toward potential adversaries, “we dare not tempt them with weakness.” So, “let us begin anew, remembering on both sides that civility is not a sign of weakness. . . Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate. Let both sides explore what problems unite us. . . Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its ter­rors. Together let us explore the stars.” Kennedy stressed the sacrifices he was asking of Americans in order to lead the global fight for freedom, saying “now the trumpet summons us again—not as a call to bear arms, though arms we need—not as a call to battle, though embattled we are—but a call to bear the burden of a long twilight struggle, year in and year out”; he called his countrymen to action with his much-quoted admonition, “Ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country.”1

Theodore Sorensen, who collaborated with Kennedy in drafting the address, notes that one line in the speech was “a more important statement of his administration’s intent” than any other in the speech: “Only when our arms are sufficient beyond doubt can we be certain beyond doubt that they will never be employed.” This, says Sorensen, “was the Kennedy approach to war and peace,” combining unmistakable strength with a willingness to seek areas of cooperation rather than to focus on areas of conflict.2 It was an approach that Kennedy was to use with respect to space in all his days in office—preferring to cooperate but being willing to compete if that was the better path to advancing U. S. interests.

The inaugural address, in addition to its soaring rhetoric, reflected Kennedy’s world view as he entered office. Thomas Reeves notes that Kennedy brought with him to the White House “the values and many of the ideas his father had instilled in all the Kennedy children.” These included

“the president’s selection of pragmatic advisers, his overall lack of interest in domestic reform, his conservative economic views, his hard-nosed posture in foreign affairs. . . and his intense interest in public relations and his image.”3

In his September 1960 memorandum on “Organizing the Transition,” Richard Neustadt had observed that “one hears talk all over town about ‘another Hundred Days’ [referring to the beginning ofFranklin D. Roosevelt’s first term in office], once Kennedy is in the White House.” Neustadt felt that “if this means an impression to be made on congressmen, bureaucrats, press, public, foreign governments, the analogy is apt.” He suggested that “noth­ing would help the new administration more than such a first impression of energy, direction, action, and accomplishment. Creating that impression and sustaining it becomes a prime objective for the months after Inauguration Day.” Arthur Schlesinger adds that it was Kennedy’s intention in his initial days in office “to create a picture of drive, purpose and hope.”4

This intention was not realized. Instead, the first one hundred days of the Kennedy administration were marked by slow movement of Kennedy’s domestic program through the Congress and immediate challenges from abroad. After an initial victory in the House of Representatives, adding two more liberal members to the southern conservative-dominated House Rules Committee and thus making it more likely that the committee would not block Kennedy’s legislative proposals from reaching the House floor, the president found that moving his domestic policy proposals through the Congress was much slower going than he had hoped for.

In the foreign policy and national security fields, even more intractable issues confronted the new president. Kennedy and his close associates were troubled by a January 6 speech by Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, in which the Soviet leader projected “bellicose confidence” that international events were trending in the favor of the Communists; Khrushchev had said that “there is no longer any force in the world capable of barring the road to socialism.” Kennedy’s tough language in his inaugural address was an initial reaction to the Soviet challenge. On February 23, Kennedy sent off a letter to Khrushchev, suggesting an early meeting between the two; it was Kennedy’s hope that he could convince the Soviet leader that the United States could not be bullied.5

The first crisis of the new administration in foreign policy emerged in mid-March; Kennedy was faced with the decision of whether or not to inter­vene with U. S. troops in Laos, a small landlocked country in Southeast Asia, where the pro-American government seemed to be on the verge of mili­tary defeat by the Communist Pathet Lao forces. The White House inter­preted this conflict as one of the “wars of national liberation” that Nikita Khrushchev had said in his January speech would be an important means for spreading Communist values around the world. On March 20 and again on March 21, Kennedy met with his National Security Council to discuss whether immediate intervention was necessary or whether a diplomatic solution was still possible. The joint chiefs of staff, fearing another Korea – like engagement half a world away, urged decisive actions involving 60,000 troops, air support, and possibly the use of tactical nuclear weapons in order to ensure quick success. After these meetings, Kennedy decided not to inter­vene as yet, but to demonstrate his willingness to do so if the United States and the Soviet Union could not find grounds for compromise on the future of Laos. Kennedy scheduled a press conference for March 23 in order to issue a public warning to the Soviets that the United States would intervene unless an immediate ceasefire could be arranged.6

It was in this troubled domestic and international context that the Kennedy administration took its first steps in determining the future of the U. S. civilian space program. Compared to the other issues on his agenda, space remained a relatively low priority item, and Kennedy himself was only occasionally directly involved. However, early attention to a number of issues could not be avoided.

Budget director David Bell in February issued a government-wide call for a rapid agency review of the proposed Fiscal Year (FY) 1962 budget that had been submitted by the outgoing Eisenhower administration. James Webb’s initial examination of the NASA budget convinced him that the Eisenhower proposal was not adequate to support the kind of space program he believed was appropriate for the Kennedy administration; he judged that there was a need to accelerate the pace of the milestones that had been set out in NASA’s then-current ten-year plan. For example, he wanted to move the date of a potential lunar landing mission forward from 1973 to 1970; George Low’s report had indicated that it would be possible by that year, and perhaps even sooner. On March 17, NASA submitted a request for an additional $308.2 million, a 30 percent increase over the $1,109.6 million budget in the Eisenhower request. In his budget submission, Webb argued that “the civilian space program clearly can achieve a much more substantial contri­bution in aeronautical research and space exploration and technology if the pace of the program for 1962 is substantially accelerated.”18

Budget director Bell did not think that either he or the president was ready to decide on such an acceleration of NASA’s efforts. He later recalled that “most of us, when we came into office didn’t have any notion of what the space program was all about, what the issues were. A lot of people needed to be educated.”19 In response to the NASA request, BOB indicated that it would approve only a $50 million increase in the NASA budget, with any additional increases deferred until fall 1961, after a comprehensive review of the NASA program had been completed. James Webb refused to accept BOB’s decision and, as was his right as the head of a government agency, asked for a meeting with the president to appeal his case for a larger increase. The meeting was set for the late afternoon of March 22.

Before meeting with the president, Webb, Dryden, and Seamans briefed Vice President Johnson on their budget request. Budget director Bell, his deputy Elmer Staats, and the top career BOB staff person for the NASA
budget, Willis Shapley, explained to the vice president why they had not approved most of the request. In preparation for this meeting, Edward Welsh had prepared a briefing memorandum for Johnson that noted that the “major policy issue” involved in the budget was “does this country want to make an effort to catch up to the Soviet Union in space capability,” and particularly in weight-lifting capability. “To a considerable extent, domination of space will belong to those who can put up large manned and unmanned vehicles,” suggested Welsh.20

After this initial discussion, President Kennedy, Jerome Wiesner, the president’s national security adviser, McGeorge Bundy, and chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission Glenn Seaborg joined the meeting in the White House cabinet room. Bundy had not been named to his post until January, making him one of the last people to join Kennedy’s White House inner

President Kennedy with two of his top advisors on space issues, special counsel Theodore Sorensen (left image) and special assistant for national security affairs McGeorge Bundy (right image). (JFK Library photos)
circle. He was a Yale-educated member of the Republican Eastern establish­ment who had become a Harvard professor of government with a widely acknowledged intellect, and then in 1953, at age 34, the youngest ever dean of the Harvard faculty. Bundy during the Kennedy administration was to play an important role in the national security dimensions of the U. S. space effort, including the race to the Moon.

The BOB had prepared an agenda for the meeting that indicated that “the future direction and level of the civilian space program primarily depends on decisions to be made by this administration concerning the rate [at which] it wishes to undertake the following: (1) Increasing the rate of closure on the USSR’s lead in weight lifting capability; (2) Advancing manned exploration of space beyond Project Mercury.” Each of these issues, said the BOB paper, “merits assessment in relation to its (1) technological significance, (2) impact on the international prestige of the United States, and (3) effect on present and future budget requirements.” With respect to agenda item 2, the ques­tion was “should we now launch an aggressive program of manned space exploration to follow Mercury, aimed at the progressive goals of (a) multi­manned orbital laboratory and later (b) manned circumlunar flight and (c) manned lunar landing?”21

James Webb had stayed up late the day before the meeting preparing a six-page talking paper. He argued that “U. S. procrastination for a number of years had been based in part on a very real skepticism by President Eisenhower personally as to the necessity for the large expenditures required, and the validity of the goals sought through the space effort.” Webb noted that “in the preparation of the 1962 budget, President Eisenhower reduced the $1.35 billion requested by the Space Agency to the extent of $240 million and specifically eliminated funds to proceed with manned space flight projects beyond Mercury. This decision emasculated the ten year plan before it was even one year old, and unless reversed guarantees that the Russians will, for the next five to ten years, beat us to every spectacular exploratory flight.” Webb told Kennedy that “the first priority of this country’s space effort should be to improve as rapidly as possible our capability for boosting large spacecraft into orbit.” He added that “the Soviets have demonstrated how effective space exploration can be as a symbol of scientific progress and as an adjunct of foreign policy. Without necessarily following the Soviet lead in this kind of exploitation, we should not fail to recognize its potential.” Webb closed his paper by suggesting that leadership in space, “pioneering on a new frontier,” would help to create “more viable political, social and economic systems for nations willing to work with us in the years ahead.”22 These were themes that Webb realized would resonate with John Kennedy.

Robert Seamans followed Webb’s remarks with a concise summary of NASA’s budget request. Kennedy told Seamans: “That was very good; I would like your views in writing tomorrow.”23 With that, the hour-and-a – half meeting concluded. During those 90 minutes, John Kennedy, perhaps for the first time, had had the chance to get a clear picture of the space policy and budget issues requiring his decision.

Webb then briefly went into the Oval Office with President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson. He assured them, as the newcomer to the NASA leadership, that he believed “that we were moving right ahead with the things that needed to be done”; Kennedy in return told Webb that Dryden and Seamans had made a positive impression on him at this, their first meeting. Meanwhile, Seamans went home and prepared the memorandum that Kennedy had requested, which Webb quickly forwarded to the White House.24

On Saturday morning, May 6, the group charged with preparing the rec­ommendations met at the Pentagon office of Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara. Those present at some point in the day included McNamara, deputy secretary of defense Roswell Gilpatric, Harold Brown, the new direc­tor of defense research and engineering, and his deputy John Rubel, from the Department of Defense; James Webb, Hugh Dryden, Robert Seamans, and Abraham Hyatt, director of program planning and evaluation, from NASA; Chairman Glenn Seaborg from the Atomic Energy Commission; and Willis Shapley from the Military Division of Bureau of the Budget (BOB). Neither Jerome Wiesner nor Edward Welsh participated in the weekend sessions, and neither was briefed on their results before LBJ’s recommendations were sub­mitted to President Kennedy on May 8.1

Seamans reports that “there was unanimous agreement that at this that time we needed to do more in space; that we had a reasonable scientific

program; that the military program in space was satisfactory; that we should probably do more in the commercial area, or the civilian area, and specifi­cally, Secretary [McNamara] was very insistent that NASA add to its budget $50 million for communications satellites.” John Rubel added that large space projects “reflect the capacity and the will of the nation to harness its technological, economic, and managerial resources for a common goal”; for these reasons, “a successful space program validates your claim to other capacities.”

During Vice President Johnson’s review over the preceding two weeks, NASA and DOD had never seen each other’s responses to President Kennedy’s April 20 memorandum, so most of the day was spent with NASA and DOD presenting those responses to the other agency. NASA went first and outlined its proposed initiatives, including setting a manned lunar landing goal with a planning date of 1967 for the first landing attempt. There had been enough analysis, dating back to the work of George Low’s task force, to satisfy the NASA leaders that a lunar landing was a technically achievable objective, given a strong commitment of resources and people. That such a program would be recommended to the president was certain enough that NASA had established an internal task force four days earlier to provide a more detailed sense of what would be involved in such an undertaking, but that group’s findings were not due until early June. Thus the specifics of the lunar landing plans discussed on May 6 were in a very preliminary state.

In choosing the lunar landing program as the central feature of its recom­mended program, the group had no firm intelligence regarding whether or not the Soviet Union was already embarked on a similar program. An April 25, 1961, National Intelligence Estimate on “Soviet Technical Capabilities in Guided Missiles and Space Vehicles” had estimated that the Soviet Union could orbit payloads weighing 50 to 100 tons in the “latter part of the decade”; this capability would allow Russia to launch a human mission to circumnavigate the Moon by 1966, to go into orbit around the Moon by 1967, and, “contingent upon success with manned earth satellites and the development of large booster vehicles,” to carry out “lunar landings and return to earth by about 1970.” The estimate noted: “The Soviet leaders clearly believe that achievements in space enable them to persuade the world that in the realms of science, technology, and military strength, the USSR stands in the very front rank of world powers. In seizing an early lead and following it with a series of dramatic successes, they have sought to bolster their claims of superiority of the Soviet system. . . Since 1955, the announced goal of the Soviet space program has been manned interplanetary travel.” There was, however, no hard evidence that the Soviet Union had initiated a lunar landing program.2

Although there is no direct evidence that those preparing the space recommendations had read this intelligence estimate prior to the May 6-7 weekend, they were likely aware of its conclusions. The final recommenda­tions that went to Vice President Johnson the following Monday, May 8, were accompanied by a separate, highly classified, annex on Soviet space capabilities.3

The only question about the wisdom of selecting the lunar landing goal as the key step toward space leadership came from Robert McNamara, who wondered, given the lack of specific knowledge about the Soviet space pro­gram and its record of achievements to date, whether such an effort was ambitious enough. Might the Soviets already be so far along on a lunar land­ing program that they could do it in a year or two, he wondered. Might it be better to focus on sending people to Mars, instead, he asked the group. Seamans told McNamara that going directly to a human mission to Mars was technically not feasible, but, he says, “McNamara kept pressing the issue of whether we shouldn’t embark on a planetary program.”

NASA also listed other areas of space activities that were candidates for acceleration; Shapley suggests that between the items that NASA suggested and those coming from Seaborg regarding nuclear propulsion for space and from DOD with respect to solid-fueled boosters, the result was “a whole smorgasbord.” Part of that “smorgasbord” was setting as a goal of creating as soon as possible an operational meteorological satellite system. Such an initiative had been under study within the government and by a President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) panel in the previous weeks. The panel was headed by Princeton professor John Tukey; it had concluded that “the usefulness of a meteorological system operating on a continuing basis is unquestionable.” Such a system, Wiesner a few days later noted, would “assure to the U. S. the advantages of U. S. leadership in this important peace­ful use of outer space and provide opportunities for a significant interna­tional cooperative program.”4 Another initiative approved by the group was the creation of an operational communications satellite system, which was listed in a May 5 background paper, apparently prepared by Willis Shapley, as a “first” with “continuing prestige impact.” Such a system could be avail­able in about twenty months, suggested the paper, “provided the program is directly pushed by the Government, takes full benefit of private commercial developments, and gives priority to time rather than economic factors.”5

An important reason for Robert McNamara’s desire to have a large civil­ian space program was that it would help him resist Air Force demands for an increase in its space activities. McNamara, aware of the bullish recom­mendations contained in the Gardner Committee report, believed that the Air Force was “out of control,” and that, if NASA was carrying out a large program with heavy involvement of the aerospace industry, it would be more difficult for the Air Force to get political support from the same firms and from the Congress for its space ambitions.6

The group then reviewed the Department of Defense space effort. The only new area suggested for the DOD was the development of large solid – fueled rocket motors. The military wanted this capability, Seamans sug­gested, “for quick reaction, for strategic purposes.” The DOD thought that “the solid motor was going to be the wave of the future, easier to store, easier to operate, no need to top off the oxygen as with an Atlas missile.” The

Department of Defense wanted to develop a 260-inch diameter solid motor, and NASA had limited interest in such an undertaking. There was agreement that both liquid-fueled boosters, NASA’s preference, and solid propulsion boosters would be pursued in parallel, with the choice of which would be used for the lunar landing mission deferred to a future time. The group also agreed that work on a nuclear upper stage for a large rocket should be pur­sued, but that such a stage was unlikely to be available in time for the initial lunar landing attempts. The major role for nuclear propulsion would be later missions to the Moon and then future human missions to the planets.

On late Saturday afternoon, the meeting then turned to how to proceed in preparing a report containing the recommendations that had been agreed to. The Department of Defense had prepared a draft report, written primar­ily by John Rubel. NASA had no similar draft, just a listing of the projects it was proposing for acceleration. Robert McNamara suggested using the DOD draft as the starting point and then folding in the NASA recommen­dations; James Webb agreed to this approach. The meeting then adjourned, with Seamans, Rubel, and Shapley designated as a drafting group to prepare by Monday morning a report for McNamara’s and Webb’s signatures.

Webb, in fact, had agreed to use the DOD draft without first reading it. When Seamans later on Saturday did read the report, which made the same general points as had the April 22 McNamara presentation to the vice presi­dent, but in more detail, he was “very troubled.” What bothered Seamans was the approach the draft report took to competing with the Soviet Union in space. The draft claimed that “the government had allowed industry to proliferate to too great an extent,” with the result being a diffuse and inef­fective effort. It suggested “winnowing” the existing aerospace firms so that only “two or three or four stalwarts” would be allowed to compete for DOD and NASA contracts. The argument was that “free enterprise had gone too far and the government had to take a stronger role.” In addition, “there was a lot of philosophical stuff. . . about the excellent being the enemy of the good.” Seamans, a Republican, was “appalled” by the suggestion that the government should “control the industrial complex in a manner that certainly would have represented a very major change in policy.” He called Webb on Sunday morning, saying, “we’ve got a terrible problem with this [DOD] report. I think it would be much better to start all over again.” Webb told Seamans that this was not possible, since Webb had already agreed with McNamara to use the DOD report as the starting point; he said “it’s up to you to work with John Rubel and revise it until you consider it to be satis­factory.” Webb was on Sunday immersed in making arrangements for what would turn out to be a triumphant visit to Washington the next day by astro­naut Alan Shepard and his Mercury astronaut colleagues.

Seamans, Shapley, and Rubel and some of their staff worked into Saturday evening and all day Sunday on the report, adding the NASA material to the DOD draft, with Shapley providing budget figures. Seamans told Webb on Sunday afternoon that he still was not satisfied with the report’s lan­guage, and Webb agreed that he would come to the Pentagon after having dinner with Alan Shepard’s family. Webb appeared sometime after 9:30 in the evening; between then and 1:00 or 2:00 on Monday morning, in what Seamans describes as “one of the great experiences of my life,” Webb went through the report with Rubel page by page, negotiating changes in language or deletions “clearly to the benefit of the report.” Finally, Webb, Seamans, and Rubel agreed that the report was ready for signature and for­warding to the vice president. Then Webb waited until the secretaries who had been typing the revisions finished their work; he insisted on driving the one secretary who did not have a car to her home during a pouring rainstorm, even waiting at the woman’s house for a few minutes until the rain let up. Seamans describes Webb’s actions as “a remarkable display of a Southerner. . . being gallant.”

Seamans was back at the Pentagon by 7:30 a. m. to make sure the report was in shape for Webb and McNamara’s approval. The two men signed a cover letter, and the report was delivered to Vice President Johnson that morning. The cover letter said: “Attached to this letter is a report entitled ‘Recommendations for Our National Space Program: Changes, Policies, Goals,’ dated May 8, 1961. This document represents our joint thinking. We recommend that, if you concur with its contents and recommendations, it be transmitted to the President for his information and as a basis for early adop­tion [and] implementation of the revised and expanded objectives which it contains.”7

Wiesner noted in his November 20 memorandum that the NASA budget being discussed for Fiscal Year 1963 was 50 percent greater than had been projected just six months earlier. Indeed, the budget projections accompany­ing the accelerated space effort that President Kennedy had approved in May had projected a NASA budget of $3.029 billion for FY1963. However, when NASA submitted its FY1963 request to the BOB several months later, that total had grown to $4.238 billion, which was a 40 percent increase over the May estimate. By the time NASA and the BOB in December 1961 completed their negotiations over what the president would request for NASA in Fiscal Year 1963, the budget level had been reduced from $4.238 billion to $3.787 billion; this was still more than a 125 percent increase over the final FY1962 level. In a memorandum to President Kennedy summarizing the state of the NASA program, budget director David Bell provided a comprehensive overview of the evolution of the program since May and recommended to the president “that it would be desirable for you and the Vice President to have in the near future a short briefing and discussion of the status and plans for the civilian space programs, especially the manned lunar landing program.” Bell noted that NASA administrator Webb had concurred in this recommendation and on the budget figures outlined in his memorandum.28 The proposed briefing did not take place until Kennedy and Johnson visited NASA’s Apollo facilities in September 1962.

In his review of the situation for the president, Bell said that even in May the BOB had thought that NASA’s projections for future budgets “appeared to us to be understated,” and that BOB had anticipated a $3.5 billion budget request for FY1963, although it had not used that number in any official documents. Bell told the president that “the cost estimates for the manned lunar landing program appear to have been underestimated to an even greater degree than anticipated.” This was because “earlier estimates were of neces­sity made in advance of detailed technical plans and cost studies,” but such studies were now “showing clearly that the costs of the principal elements of the program will be greater than anticipated.” Bell estimated that the NASA budget would continue to increase, reaching $4.9 billion in FY1964, $5.3 billion in FY 1965, and $5.6 billion in FY1966. This meant that at the end of 1961 the accelerated space effort was projected to cost at least $2.8 bil­lion more than had been estimated just six months earlier. That such cost growth was worrying to the White House was clear; Webb told Dryden and Seamans on November 21 that “there is some evidence that the President is concerned about the cost of our program.”29 Webb was correct; the president was indeed concerned.

X resident Kennedy’s suggestion to Nikita Khrushchev at the June 1961 Vienna summit that the United States and the Soviet Union cooperate in flights to the Moon was made privately, and was not subsequently widely reported. The 1962 discussions on space cooperation were carried out on a low-key basis, with their results being made public only after agreement had been reached. In contrast, President Kennedy’s next cooperative initia­tive came in a most public fashion. Addressing the General Assembly of the United Nations on September 20, 1963, Kennedy said “in a field where the United States and the Soviet Union have a special capacity—in the field of space—there is room for new cooperation. . . I include among these possibili­ties a joint expedition to the moon.” “Why,” Kennedy asked, “should man’s first flight to the moon be a matter of national competition? . . . Surely we should explore whether the scientists and astronauts of our two countries— indeed of all the world—cannot work together in the conquest of space, sending some day in this decade to the moon not the representatives of a single nation, but representatives of all our countries.”[3]

Kennedy’s proposal came as a major surprise to all but a few people who had been involved in preparing his United Nations speech or had been advised by the president of his intent. The decision to include the proposal in the president’s speech was made just a day or two before September 20, although Kennedy had been mulling the idea for some time. The offer was the personal initiative of the president and a few of his closest advisers.

Responsible for drafting the UN address were presidential assistant Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. and State Department official Richard Gardner. Schlesinger suggests that as the two “canvassed the scientific and technical agencies of the government, we discovered that specific proposals of American-Soviet cooperation seemed trivial compared to the enormities of the space age.” As they searched for more dramatic initiatives, “there swam into our minds the thought of merging the Russian and American expeditions to the moon.”2

Without clearing the idea with anyone else, Schlesinger included language proposing such a cooperative lunar mission in the speech draft “to see how it sounded.”3 Schlesinger says that he “had forgotten that the President had himself suggested this to Khrushchev in Vienna in 1961,” and thus was not “prepared for his quick approval.”4

Between the September 20 speech and his assassination two months later, President Kennedy continued to hope for a positive response to his proposal and, when it seemed to come in early November, to push NASA to come up with ways of turning the proposal into reality. Given all the practical diffi­culties of doing so, in addition to continuing skepticism within NASA and among many in Congress about the wisdom of the proposal in the first place, he may well indeed have been in “pursuit of an illusion”—the thought that the space arena might “be used as a means to swing the US and the USSR from competition to cooperation.”5 But certainly Kennedy was not prac­ticing what Walter McDougall has characterized as “benign hypocrisy”—a willingness to cooperate only in areas “where the United States was safely dominant.” McDougall suggests that Kennedy’s words about U. S.-USSR space cooperation “were just exercises at image-building.”6 The record sug­gests a different interpretation—that in 1963 Kennedy was quite serious in his hope that there were practical ways of making U. S. space projects, including the challenging undertaking of sending people to the Moon, an area for reducing U. S.-Soviet tensions and for developing habits of working together.

The criticism of Project Apollo took on a more partisan tone as the Senate Republican Policy Committee on May 10 released a report suggesting that there were other important national problems that “should, perhaps, be examined side by side with the moon shot program.” The report sug­gested that “the question is not, then, whether man will ultimately reach the moon and beyond. The question is, rather, how shall it be done, and whether other aspects of human needs should be bypassed or overlooked in one spasmodic effort to achieve a lunar landing at once.” It suggested that “a cold, careful examination is past due.” The report was distributed to all Republican senators; it concluded that “for momentary transcendence over the Soviet Union we have pledged our wealth, national talent, and our honor” and suggested that “a decision must be made as to whether Project Apollo (the moon program) is vital to our national security or merely an excursion, however interesting, into space research. . . If our vital security is not at stake, a less ambitious program may be logical and desirable.” A month later, at a breakfast meeting with Republican congressmen, former President Eisenhower made a widely reported comment that spending $40 billion to beat the Soviet Union to the Moon was “nuts.”17

The Kennedy administration in May began an intensified effort to respond to the critics of its space program. NASA administrator Webb added to a previously scheduled speech the declaration: “At the earliest appropriate stage in the program scientists will be included on Apollo missions.” Vice President Johnson in a May 11 speech responded to criticism that the costs of Apollo would undermine the strength of the dollar as an international currency, saying that “we are not told what would happen to the dollar—or to America—if space were defaulted to the Communists.” He added: “The question is what kind of philosophy, democratic or Communist, will domi­nate outer space? . . . I, for one, don’t want to go to bed by the light of a Communist moon.”

On May 26, in an effort coordinated by NASA, “eight scientists, three of them Nobel laureates and most of them in academic positions, spoke out . . . in support of the United States program of landing men on the moon.” Life magazine in a May 17 editorial added its support to the Moon program, suggesting that the United States could “abdicate its national greatness by not doing enough. . . The U. S. commitment to space seems a natural undertaking for the American people, who are a venturesome lot.” A June 3 editorial in Aviation Week and Space Technology suggested that “gradually, the point that the manned lunar landing Apollo program is simply the best possible focal point [for] development of a broad capability in space technology” is “emerging from the verbal pyrotechnics of the cur­rent debate.”18

Arguments for and against proceeding with Project Apollo were aired at June 10-11 hearings of the Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences; ten scientists testified and other interested parties submitted written statements. There was general agreement in the hearings that the deadline set for the first lunar landing was probably conducive to waste, and that many national problems deserved equal attention; there was no agreement that the American science enterprise was being distorted by so much attention to space. The strongest protest against the program was a written statement submitted to the committee by Warren Weaver, vice president of the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation; it listed many other desirable uses for $30 billion of federal spending, which Weaver projected as Apollo’s ultimate cost. Thirty billion dollars, Weaver said, would give every teacher in the U. S. a 10 percent annual raise for 10 years; give $10 million each to 200 small colleges; provide 7-year scholarships at $4,000 per year to produce 50,000 new Ph. D. scien­tists and engineers; give $200 million each to 10 new medical schools; build and endow complete universities for 53 underdeveloped nations; create 3 more Rockefeller Foundations; and leave $100 million over “for a program of informing the public about science.”19

By contrast, the impact of Apollo on the evolution of the U. S. space program has on balance been negative. Apollo turned out to be a dead end undertak­ing in terms of human travel beyond the immediate vicinity of this planet; no human has left Earth orbit since the last Apollo mission in December 1972. Writing in 1970, I suggested that the capabilities developed for Apollo would have “broad and significant impacts on human existence in the decades to come.” Like many others close to the space program, I was caught up in the excitement of the initial lunar landings, and could not conceive of the pos­sibility that having served its political purposes, Apollo and whatever human exploration efforts might follow it would so rapidly be brought to a close.

What happened, however, was that most of the Apollo hardware and asso­ciated capabilities, particularly the magnificent but very expensive Saturn V launcher, quickly became museum exhibits to remind us, soon after the fact, of what once was had been done. Commenting on this reality in 1989, Walter McDougall lamented the fate of Apollo: “a brilliant creation, carrying tremendous emotional baggage for the nation, achieved so quickly through such skilled and dedicated teamwork, only to be discarded, dismembered, or disinherited.” Columnist Charles Krauthammer at the time of the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission in 2009 deplored the fact that humans have not returned to the Moon since the last Apollo mission: “On it are exactly 12 sets of human footprints—untouched, unchanged, abandoned. For the first time in history, the Moon is not just a mystery and a muse, but a nightly rebuke. A vigorous young president once summoned us to this new frontier, calling the voyage ‘the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.’ And so we did it. We came. We saw. Then we retreated.”25

This rapid retreat should not have come as a surprise to careful observers. By being first to the Moon, the United States achieved the goal that had provided the sustainable momentum that powered Apollo; after Apollo 11, that momentum very rapidly dissipated, and there was no other compelling rationale to continue. In 1969 and 1970, even as the initial lunar landing

missions were taking place, the White House canceled the final three planned trips to the Moon. President Richard Nixon had no stomach for what NASA proposed—a major post-Apollo program aimed at building a large space sta­tion in preparation for eventual (in the 1980s!) human missions to Mars. Instead, Nixon decreed, “we must think of them [space activities] as part of a continuing process. . . and not as a series of separate leaps, each requiring a massive concentration of energy. Space expenditures must take their proper place within a rigorous system of national priorities. . . What we do in space from here on in must become a normal and regular part of our national life and must therefore be planned in conjunction with all of the other undertak­ings which are important to us.”26 Nixon’s policy view quickly reduced the post-Apollo space budget to less than $3.5 billion per year, a budget alloca­tion one-quarter of what it had been at the peak of Apollo. There were in the 1960s proposals, called the Apollo Applications Program, to use Apollo hardware for a variety of Earth orbit and deep space missions. Only one of those missions, the Skylab space station, ever came to fruition; its May 1973 launch was the last use of the Saturn V. The booster’s production line had been shut down in 1970. The 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test Program mission was the last use of an Apollo spacecraft and the Saturn 1B launch vehicle. With the 1972 decision to begin the shuttle program, followed in 1984 with the related decision to develop a space station, the United States basically started over in human space flight, limiting itself to orbital activities in the near vicinity of Earth.

The policy and technical decisions not to build on the hardware devel­oped for Apollo for follow-on space activities were inextricably linked to the character of President John Kennedy’s deadline for getting to the Moon— “before this decade is out.” By setting a firm deadline for the first lunar landing, Kennedy put NASA in the position of finding a technical approach to Apollo that gave the best chance of meeting that deadline. This in turn led to the development of the Saturn V launcher, the choice of the lunar orbit rendezvous approach for getting to the Moon, and the design of the Apollo spacecraft optimized for landing on the Moon. Perceptive observer Richard Lewis in 1968 spoke of the “Kennedy effect,” noting that

the political decision to send men to the moon also led to unexpected results in the development of space technology. . . It has determined the priorities, the engineering designs, and the scientific objectives of the space program in this decade, and it is quite likely to control future space work for the remainder of this century. This unforeseen result might be called the Kennedy effect. While its intent at the beginning was to enlarge American competence in space, its implementation has built a Procrustean bed and the American space program has been severely mutilated to fit it.27

The consequences of selecting the lunar orbit approach to the Moon landing were of concern to Kennedy’s science adviser Jerome Wiesner as he opposed the LOR choice in 1962. President Kennedy in his determination to be first to the Moon overruled Wiesner, a decision, as Lewis noted, with profound consequences for the space program. NASA during the second half of the 1960s became what James Webb had feared, a one-program agency; given the budget constraints of the period, there was no money available for major new starts on alternative programs.

The “Kennedy effect” went well beyond rockets and spacecraft. The Apollo program created in NASA an organization oriented in the public and political eye toward human space flight and toward developing large-scale systems to achieving challenging goals. It created from Texas to Florida the institutional and facility base for such undertakings. With the White House rejection of ambitious post-Apollo space goals, NASA entered a four-decade identity crisis from which it has yet to emerge. Repetitive operation of the space shuttle and the extended process of developing an Earth-orbiting space station have not been satisfying substitutes for another Apollo-like under­taking. NASA has never totally adjusted to a lower priority in the overall scheme of national affairs; rather, as the Columbia Accident Investigation Board observed in its 2003 report, NASA became “an organization strain­ing to do too much with too little.”28 All of this is an unfortunate heritage of John Kennedy’s race to the Moon.

Yale University organizational sociologist Gary Brewer in 1989 observed that NASA during the Apollo program came close to being “a perfect place”—the best organization that human beings could create to accom­plish a particular goal. But, suggests Brewer, “perfect places do not last for long.” NASA “perfected itself in the reality of Apollo, but that success is past and the lessons from it are now obsolete.” The NASA of 1989, according to Brewer, was “no longer a perfect place” and was “deeply troubled.” He added:

The innocent clarity of purpose, the relatively easy and economically painless public consent, and the technical confidence [of Apollo] . . . are gone and will probably never occur again. Trying to recreate those by-gone moments by sloganeering, frightening, or appealing to mankind’s mystical needs for explo­ration and conquest seems somehow futile considering all that has happened since Jack Kennedy set the nation on course to the Moon.

Brewer’s comments of more than two decades ago might usefully be applied to the twenty-first century NASA and its supportive space commu­nity, which still struggle to maintain the approach to human space flight developed during the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. It is well beyond the scope of this study to discuss the future of the U. S. space explo­ration program; the point to make here is that the conditions that made Apollo possible and the NASA of the 1960s a “perfect place” were unique and will not reoccur. I agree with Brewer’s conclusion that NASA needs “new ways of thinking, new people, and new means to come to terms and cope with social, economic, and political environments as challenging and harsh as deep space itself.”29