Category THE RACE

From the start of Project Mercury in 1958, the project’s plan called for several brief suborbital flights with an astronaut aboard before committing a human to an orbital mission. The first such flight could have come in March 1961 if it had not been for the combination of some relatively minor problems on the January 31 Mercury-Redstone-2 flight carrying the chimpanzee Ham and the biomedical concerns raised by PSAC about an astronaut’s ability to withstand the stresses of spaceflight. An additional test flight without an astronaut (or chimpanzee) aboard was inserted in the Mercury schedule, and the first crewed flight, Mercury/Redstone-3 (MR-3), was slipped until the end of April or early May; to some, that flight seemed rather anticlimactic when Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth on April 12.

Beginning with the Wiesner task group report in January and extending almost to the day of the flight, there were White House fears that the risks of the MR-3 mission outweighed its benefits. These fears were only ampli­fied by the failure at the Bay of Pigs in mid-April; the possibility that a U. S. astronaut might perish in the full light of the television and other media cov­erage of the mission so soon after the United States had looked so weak in its unwillingness to support the invasion force it had trained was very troubling to President Kennedy and his top advisers. Sorensen remembers that while “gloating Russians, undecided Third World neutrals, and concerned allies” awaited the outcome of the flight, “untold numbers of the American press insisted for weeks that all their reporters must receive passes to be present.” At the same time, there was insistence that “their editorial writers and col­umnists must be free to deplore the media circus atmosphere resulting from so many reporters being present.” The White House concern was “that such a big buildup would worsen our national humiliation [the Bay of Pigs] if the flight were a failure.”34

Jerome Wiesner had raised similar concerns as far back as March 9. In a memorandum to McGeorge Bundy, Wiesner expressed his worry about the pressure for live TV and press coverage of the MR-3 launch, fearing that there was a danger of the event tuning into a “Hollywood production” that “could jeopardize the success of the entire mission.” He suggested that the government should meet such pressures “with firmness.” Wiesner on the other hand was concerned about how best to exploit the public relations value of a successful mission to serve administration interests, since “in the imagination of many” the mission would “be viewed in the same category as Columbus’ discovery of the new world.”35 Wiesner’s hope for a historic first was definitively dashed by the Soviet orbital flight in April.

At the March 22 meeting on the NASA budget, President Kennedy had asked about the risks associated with the first Mercury flight. Hugh Dryden assured him that “no unwarranted risks would be involved” and that “the decision to ‘go’ was being made by project managers best qualified to assess the operational hazards.” The PSAC panel on Mercury agreed with this assessment, saying the flight would be “a high risk undertaking but not higher than we are accustomed to taking in other ventures.”36

Still, doubts about the wisdom of going ahead with the mission, at least so soon after the Soviet orbital flight and the Bay of Pigs fiasco, persisted. The person who had led the PSAC review of Mercury, Donald Hornig, on April 18 sent a memorandum to Sorensen raising two questions: (1) “Is MR-3 still justified, in view of the risks, after the Russian flight?” and (2) “If so, should the present schedule be maintained or should it be carried out at a later time?” Hornig noted that after the Gagarin flight “the fact that one human can withstand these conditions [of spaceflight] is now established.” Hornig’s conclusion was that “it seems likely that we should proceed on schedule, particularly since the world already knows that schedule,” but that “our estimate of the risk is still that it cannot presently be demonstrated that the likelihood of disaster is less than one in ten or one in twenty.”37

On April 26, Wiesner told the Space Council’s Welsh that his office had been receiving messages from “some of the scientists whom he knows rais­ing a question about the advisability of our going forward with the Mercury man-in-space shots.” Their concern, said Wiesner, was that “if these shots were successful, they would still look relatively small compared with what the Russians have done, and, if the shots failed, the damage to our prestige would be serious.” In reporting this message to Vice President Johnson, Welsh said that he believed “we should go ahead. . . Having announced that we were going to make the efforts, I believe that we would suffer seriously if we did not go ahead.”38 Concerns about the wisdom of proceeding were not limited to the White House. Senators John Williams (R-DE) and William Fulbright (D-AK) suggested “that the flight should be postponed and then conducted in secret lest it become a well-publicized failure.”39

The MR-3 flight was scheduled to lift off on the morning of May 2. In the preceding days, Ted Sorensen and the president’s brother Robert Kennedy discussed whether it was worse to postpone the flight after the press buildup had reached such a peak or to go ahead with the flight and run the risks of failure.40 President Kennedy made the final decision on whether to go ahead with the flight in an Oval Office meeting on April 29. Present at the meet­ing were Wiesner, Sorensen, Bundy, and Welsh, among others. One of those present raised the point of “maybe we should postpone the Shepard flight, maybe we shouldn’t take this risk, something might go bad, there might be a casualty, and we’ve had a number of things go rather poorly here and maybe we shouldn’t do this right now.” The majority of the group favored post­poning the flight, but Welsh argued that it was no riskier than flying from Washington to Los Angeles in bad weather, and asked the president, “why postpone a success?” According to Welsh, “that ended the discussion.”41 On May 1, the day before the flight was scheduled, James Webb and White House press secretary Pierre Salinger met with Kennedy for a final review of the press arrangements for covering the launch. Webb assured the president that all precautions had been taken and the flight should go for­ward as scheduled. Kennedy asked his secretary to place a call to NASA’s public information officer in Florida, Paul Haney, to discuss plans for televi­sion coverage and to discuss the reliability of the Mercury capsule’s escape system. Salinger talked to Haney from the Oval Office and, after Haney reviewed the history of the launch escape system, told Kennedy that he felt that JFK’s questions had been adequately answered.42

Because of poor weather, the MR-3 flight was postponed on May 2 and again on May 4. Finally, on May 5, astronaut Alan Shepard was launched on what he described as a “pleasant ride.” A wave of national relief and pride over an American success swept the country, from the White House down to the person in the street. At the White House, Kennedy’s secretary Evelyn Lincoln interrupted a National Security Council meeting to tell the president that Shepard was about to be launched. Kennedy, joined by Lyndon Johnson, Robert Kennedy, Robert McNamara, Dean Rusk, Ted Sorensen, McGeorge Bundy, Arthur Schlesinger, and others crowded around a small black and white television set in Lincoln’s office to watch the takeoff. As Jacqueline Kennedy walked by, the president said: “Come in and watch this.” Sorensen suggests that the group watching the flight in Lincoln’s office “heaved a sigh of relief, and cheered” as Shepard and his spacecraft were pulled from the Atlantic Ocean.43 After Shepard was safely aboard the recovery ship, Kennedy called him, saying, “I want to congratulate you very much. We watched you on tele­vision, of course, and we are awfully pleased and proud of what you did.”44 The decision to carry out the Shepard flight in full view of the world seems to have paid off. A May 1961 report of the U. S. Information Agency comparing international reactions to the Gagarin and Shepard flights noted that in terms of public reaction “the U. S. reaped a significant psychologi­cal advantage over the Soviet Union.” This was due in large part to the “openness” surrounding the Shepard flight, plus the flight’s “technologi­cal refinements and the poise and humility of the U. S. astronaut.” People around the world contrasted this “critically to Soviet secrecy and blatant pro­paganda exploitation, as well as the obviously politically controlled behavior of Gagarin.” The report went on to say that “without question the greatest impact on expressed opinion in the Free World was made by the openness of the U. S. both as to the flight itself and to the release of scientific infor­mation.” In contrast, “Soviet secrecy was deplored and even continued to

arouse some skepticism.” Some of the commentary “showed a significant tendency to identify itself with the U. S. success.”45

If the Shepard flight had been a catastrophic failure, it is very unlikely that President Kennedy would have, or politically could have, soon after­ward set as a national goal the flight of Americans to the Moon. However, the unqualified success of the flight in both technical and political terms likely swept away any of Kennedy’s lingering reservations with respect to the benefits of an accelerated space effort with human space flights as its centerpiece. In a formal statement issued after the flight, Kennedy said: “All America rejoices in this successful flight of Astronaut Shepard. This is an historic milestone in our own exploration into space. But America still needs to work with the utmost speed and vigor in the further development of our space program. Today’s flight should provide incentive to everyone in our nation concerned with this program to redouble their efforts in this vital field. Important scientific material has been obtained during this flight and this will be made available to the world’s scientific community.” At a press conference later in the day, Kennedy announced that he planned to under­take “a substantially larger effort in space.”46

While the locations for new Apollo facilities were settled expeditiously, NASA was slower in selecting what approach to use in getting to the Moon and thus what spacecraft and launch vehicle would be needed for the lunar land­ing. On November 20, 1961, almost six months after President Kennedy’s May 25 speech, Jerome Wiesner provided to Theodore Sorensen an “outline of major problems” with respect to NASA’s progress in implementing the lunar landing program.21

Wiesner noted that “six months have elapsed since the decision was announced to put man on the moon, yet none of these crucial hardware programs have progressed beyond the study phase. Lead times on these development and construction programs are of critical importance.” He also noted that “it is hoped that there will be no further field stations beyond these already announced. However, there are major problems related to the activation of these centers.”

NASA was aware of these White House concerns. Webb told Dryden and Seamans that he had “scouted around” and had discovered that President Kennedy “has some concern as to whether we are proceeding rapidly enough and with enough procurement and program commitment activity to accom­plish the goals he has set for the nation.” NASA had issued a contract on August 10 to the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory for the Apollo guid­ance system, and on November 20 was one week away from contracting for the Apollo command and service module, one element of the spacecraft needed for the lunar landing. However, delays in selecting the design of launch vehicle for the lunar mission had meant that its procurement had had to wait. While NASA had chosen the locations for its Apollo-related facili­ties, Webb also reported that “there is some evidence that the President has had some doubts raised as to whether our decisions with respect to the Cape Canaveral, Michoud, and Houston installations were based on the needs of the program or had political overtones.”22

Space was one of four areas of scientific cooperation initially identified for possible discussion at the June 3-4 Vienna summit; the others were nuclear science, earth science, and life science. In a May 29 memorandum to the president on summit preparations, national security adviser Bundy attached “a new and much improved memorandum from Wiesner’s office.” This memorandum listed only four potential cooperative projects, two in space and two in nuclear science. The two space projects suggested were “use of ground facilities for cooperative experiments” and “planetary probes.” Cooperation in a lunar landing program was only briefly mentioned as one of the “other possible areas for cooperative projects.”27 In transmitting the memorandum, Bundy cautioned the president that “your own proposals [on scientific cooperation] to Khrushchev should probably go no further than to express your own interest and to suggest that the matter be discussed at experts’ meeting arranged by Ambassador [Llewellyn] Thompson.” This approach was prudent, suggested Bundy, because “the practical process of scientific cooperation can be very difficult even with friends, and you will not want to get your own prestige hooked to specific negotiations that could be made sticky at any time by the Soviets.”28

The Vienna summit was, in President Kennedy’s words, “a very sobering two days.” During their meetings, both alone with just interpreters present and with their staff, “Khrushchev had not given way before Kennedy’s rea­sonableness, nor Kennedy before Khrushchev’s intransigence.”29 The Soviet leader insisted that he would sign a peace treaty with the German Democratic Republic by the end of the year, and that the new East German govern­ment would then have the right to cut off U. S. access to Berlin. Kennedy responded that this was unacceptable, and that if necessary the United States would use force to assure its access. Khrushchev replied “force will be met with force.” The president concluded his conversation with Khrushchev with the observation that “it would be a cold winter.”30

In this grim atmosphere, there was little chance to bring up secondary top­ics such as space cooperation. The only opportunities for more relaxed conver­sation came at two luncheons for the U. S. and Soviet delegations. At the June 3 lunch hosted by President Kennedy, the talk turned to the flight of Yuri Gagarin and then to the possibility of launching a man to the Moon. None of the other proposals for scientific cooperation prepared for Kennedy’s use were discussed. With respect to a lunar mission, Khrushchev said that “he was cautious because of the military aspects of such flights.” Then, “in response to the President’s inquiry whether the US and the USSR should go to the Moon together, Mr. Khrushchev first said no, but then said ‘all right, why not?’ ” Reportedly, the second response was made “half-jokingly.” The next

day it was Khrushchev’s turn to host a lunch, and once again Kennedy turned the conversation to a mission to the Moon. Khrushchev commented that “he was placing certain restraints on projects for a flight to the moon.” The Soviet premier noted that “such an operation” would be “very expensive” and might “weaken Soviet defenses.” He added: “Of course, Soviet scientists want to go to the moon,” but “the U. S. should go first because it is rich and then the Soviet Union would follow.” President Kennedy once again suggested a coop­erative lunar landing effort; Khrushchev retracted his casual agreement of the preceding day, noting that “cooperation in outer space would be impossible as long as there was no disarmament.” This was the case because “rockets are used for both military and scientific purposes.” To Kennedy’s suggestion that perhaps Soviet and U. S. lunar missions could be coordinated in their timing in order to save money, Khrushchev replied “that this might be possible but noted that so far there had been few practical uses of outer space launchings. The race was costly and was primarily for prestige purposes.”31

The reason for this overnight change of mind, even if he had been serious in his response on the preceding day, was apparently Khrushchev’s consul­tations with his advisers. The Soviet chairman’s son, Sergey Khrushchev, has suggested that in May 1961 “my father was faced with the decision of whether to accept the challenge [of a race to the Moon] and be prepared to spend billions for the sake of keeping the palms of victory, or whether he should step aside and allow his undoubtedly richer competitor to get ahead of him. . . My father was not prepared to answer this question.” In addition, “the military men came out against this proposal—they wanted to protect their secrets. Korolev [Sergei Korolev, the “chief designer” of the Soviet space program] was also against it, since he did not like the idea of sharing the palms of leadership with anyone.”32 In his memoirs, Nikita Khrushchev explains his unwillingness to cooperate in space as being due to the Soviet weakness in intercontinental ballistic missiles. He noted that “we had only one good missile at the time; it was the Semyorka [the R-7 ICBM] . . . Had we decided to cooperate with the Americans in space research, we would have had to reveal to them the design of the booster for the Semyorka.” He added: “We knew if we let them have a look at our rocket, they’d easily be able to copy it.” Thus, “they would have learned its limitations, and from a military standpoint, it did have serious limitations. In short, by showing the Americans our Semyorka, we would have been giving away both our strength and revealing our weakness.”33

There the discussion on space cooperation ended. During the remainder of 1961, Cold War tensions were high and the Berlin Wall was erected; the outlook for any significant space cooperation between the United States and the Soviet Union was correspondingly bleak. President Kennedy’s proposal to the Congress and the nation that the United States embark on an extremely ambitious space effort, with Project Apollo as its centerpiece, received wide­spread political support. The idea that the lunar landing program might be a joint U. S.-Soviet undertaking appeared stillborn, and other areas of poten­tial space cooperation remained unexplored.

President Kennedy on January 17, 1963, sent to Congress a Fiscal Year 1964 budget request for NASA of $5.712 billion. The New York Times editori­alized that “whether the $20 billion (or $40 billion) race to the moon is justified on scientific, political, or military grounds, we do not think the matter has been sufficiently explained or sufficiently debated. We hope it will be in the present Congress.” In his March 21 press conference, President Kennedy was questioned about the pace of the U. S. space program as com­pared to that of the Soviet Union. He responded: “The United States is mak­ing, as you know, a major effort in space and will continue to do so. We are expending an enormous sum of money to make sure that the Soviet Union does not dominate space. We will continue to do it.”2

On March 29, Congressman Charles Halleck (R-IN) released a letter from former President Dwight Eisenhower in which Eisenhower suggested that “the space program, in my opinion, is downright spongy. This is an area where we particularly need to demonstrate some common sense. Specifically, I have never believed that a spectacular dash to the moon, vastly deepen­ing our debt, is worth the added tax burden it will eventually impose on our citizens.” President Kennedy was asked about Eisenhower’s comments at an April 3 press conference; he responded: “We are second in space today because we started late. It requires a large sum of money. I don’t think we should look with equanimity upon the prospect that we will be second all through the sixties and possibly the seventies. We have the potential not to be. I think having made the decision last year, that we should make a major effort to be first in space. I think we should continue to do so.” He added: “Now President Eisenhower—this is not a new position for him. He has disagreed with this, I know, at least a year or year and a half ago when the Congress took a different position. It is the position I think he took from the time of Sputnik on. But it is a matter on which we disagree.” Kennedy added: “It may be that there is waste in the space budget. If there is waste, then I think it ought to be cut out by the Congress, and I am sure it will be. But if we are getting to the question of whether we should reconcile ourselves to a slow pace in space, I don’t think so.”3

Respected New York Times columnist James Reston soon suggested that “the debate on the nation’s space program is getting out of hand. Some Republicans are attacking the program as if it were a vast boondoggle, and President Kennedy is defending it as if it were the Bill of Rights.” Reston added that “the space program deserves a more serious response. For a large and influential sector of the scientific community of the nation. . . believes that the scientific objectives of the program can be achieved at a fraction of the cost by putting instruments, rather than man, on the moon.” Thus scientists see the issue as “whether the immense additional cost of the man­landing should take a higher priority than using a part of the savings for other essential tasks that would invigorate the economy and create jobs.” Three weeks later, Reston reported that “the debate over the Government’s space budget is getting rough and threatening to create a crisis of confidence in the Administration’s whole space program.” Reston cited the contradic­tions between Vice President Johnson’s claims that the space program was having a positive economic impact with statements by others in the Kennedy administration that in fact the program was taking scientists and engineers away from economically more valuable pursuits. The result, he suggested, was “a confusion of testimony that is bewildering the Congress and drag­ging the space program into the arena of politics.”4

The scientific community’s critique of Apollo was very visibly articulated in an April 19 editorial in the leading journal Science signed by its editor, Philip Abelson. Abelson suggested that “the lasting propaganda value of placing a man on the moon has been vastly overestimated. The first lunar landing will be a great occasion; subsequent boredom is inevitable.” He added that “most of the interesting questions regarding the moon can be studied by electronic devices” and suggested “a re-examination of priorities is in order.” Abelson’s editorial received attention well beyond the scientific community; his criticism was noted in front-page articles in prominent news­papers and in an April 20 appearance on the Today television program.5

Project Apollo became the twentieth-century archetype of a successful, large-scale, government-led program. As peacetime engineering endeavors sponsored by the government, only the construction of the Panama Canal between 1904 and 1914 and the construction of the Interstate Highway System over several decades beginning in the 1950s rivaled Apollo in terms of the scope and difficulty of the task and the scale of human and financial resources required. The success of Apollo has also led to the cliche, “if we can put a man on the Moon, why can’t we. . . ?” In their 2009 book titled with that cliche, Eggers and O’Leary suggest that “democratic governments can achieve great things only if they meet two requirements: wisely choosing which policies to pursue and then executing those policies.”18

I believe that this study demonstrates that Project Apollo met both of these requirements for success. Eggers and O’Leary attribute much of the successful execution of the lunar landing program to the leadership of NASA administrator James Webb. I suggest that many others, both within and out­side of NASA, should share credit for that implementation success, including particularly John Kennedy.19 President Kennedy gave Webb a great deal of freedom to manage NASA as Webb saw fit. A number of times between 1961 and 1963 Kennedy heard from others, often science adviser Jerome Wiesner or budget director David Bell, who questioned or disagreed with the path chosen by Webb. In particular, Wiesner waged a vigorous campaign to over­turn NASA’s choice of the lunar orbit rendezvous approach for carrying out the landing mission. Brainerd Holmes let it be known to Kennedy that Webb opposed his suggestion that the schedule for the first lunar landing be accelerated; Kennedy shared Holmes’s desire for the earliest possible landing. Even the Mercury astronauts took their plea for an additional flight in the Mercury program directly to President Kennedy. In every instance, Kennedy deferred to Webb as the individual responsible for carrying out the space pro­gram and thus the person who should make these decisions. Kennedy’s style as chief executive was to seek as much information as possible in formulating his policy choices, but once a decision was made, Kennedy seldom intervened in its execution.

In my 1970 book, I suggested that “the experience of the lunar landing decision can be generalized to tell us how to proceed toward other ‘great new American enterprises.’ ” I set out in that book four conditions that seemed to me to be requirements for making a wise decision regarding an ambitious future objective:

1. The objective sought must be known to be feasible, with a high degree of probability, at the time the decision to seek it is made.

2. The objective must have been the subject of sufficient political debate so that the groups interested in it and opposed to it can be identified, their positions and relative strengths evaluated, and potential sources of sup­port have time to develop.

3. Some dramatic “occasion for decision,” such as a crisis resulting from an external or domestic challenge, must occur to create an environment in which the objective and the policies to achieve it become politically fea­sible.

4. There must be in leadership positions in the political system individuals whose personalities and political philosophies support the initiation of new large-scale government activities aimed at long-term payoffs and who have the political skill to choose the situations in which such activities can be initiated successfully.

Even writing in 1970, I recognized that the first of these conditions was very limiting, and would not work when the end desired required both tech­nological breakthroughs and significant changes in deep-seated behavior patterns. However, I thought that “finding objectives with high social utility which could be achieved by a specific time using technologies, either physi­cal or social, which are based on existing knowledge is not difficult.”20 Forty years later, I find these comments either remarkably optimistic or remark­ably naive, probably both. What was unique about going to the Moon is that it required no major technological innovations and no changes in human behavior, just mastery over nature using the scientific and technological knowledge available in 1961. There are very few, if any, other potential objec­tives for government action that have these characteristics.

The reality is that attempts to implement other large-scale nondefense programs over the past forty years have never been successful, in the space sector or in the broader national arena. Both President George H. W. Bush in 1989 and President George W. Bush in 2004 set out ambitious visions for the future of space exploration, but neither of those visions became real­ity; the political and budgetary support needed for success were notably missing. More recent attempts to re-create a space race mentality by posit­ing that China was intending to send humans to the Moon before a U. S. return have fallen flat. In 2010, President Barack Obama proposed a dra­matic move away from the Apollo approach to space exploration, stressing the development of new enabling technologies and widespread international collaboration; he also declared that the Moon would not be the first desti­nation as humans traveled beyond Earth orbit. This proposal was met with skepticism and political controversy; as I write these words, its fate is still unclear. In the nonspace sector, there have been few opportunities for large – scale government programs that do not require for their success a combina­tion of technological innovation and significant changes in human behavior. The attempts to declare a “War on Cancer,” for example, required not only research breakthroughs but also changing the smoking habits of millions of Americans. Attempts to move toward U. S. “energy independence” run afoul both limited research and development spending and the complex ties between non-U. S. energy suppliers and the U. S. financial and government sectors. Providing adequate health care for all Americans turns out to be primarily a political, not merely a technical, challenge. Managing global environmental change has both high technical uncertainties and challenging social inertia to overcome. And so on.

Given this situation, I am now inclined to accept an alternative explana­tion that I rejected forty years ago: that the lunar landing decision and the efforts that turned it in into reality were unique occurrences, a once-in-a – generation, or much longer, phenomenon in which a heterogeneous mixture of factors almost coincidentally converged to create a national commitment and enough momentum to support that commitment through to its fulfill­ment. If this is indeed the case, then there is little to learn from the decision to go to the Moon relevant to twenty-first century choices. This would make the lament “if we can put a man on the moon, why can’t we. . . ?” almost devoid of useful meaning except to suggest the possibility that governments can succeed in major undertakings, given the right set of circumstances. Other approaches to carrying out large-scale government programs will have to be developed; the Apollo experience has little to teach us beyond its status as a lasting symbol of a great American achievement.

X ublic life was not the first choice among possible futures for John F. Kennedy as he returned from World War II. Kennedy in principle could have chosen among many career paths. Kennedy’s own inclination seems to have leaned in the direction of becoming a journalist, a writer of nonfic­tion books, or even an academic. Kennedy’s father, Joseph, however, was determined that his sons not enter the business world; he had amassed suf­ficient wealth to allow his sons to choose a future that did not have to lead to significant additional income. The reality was that if Kennedy had chosen a career other than politics, it would have meant going against the wishes of his strong-willed father. John Kennedy, from the time his older brother, Joseph Jr., was killed in action during World War II, became his father’s designated aspirant to high political office; JFK’s father, after the end of the war, planned to build “the greatest political dynasty of the age. . . one remaining son at a time.” Kennedy was easily elected to the U. S. House of Representatives in 1948 and to the Senate in 1952 and again in 1958. But his time in Congress was not fulfilling for either his or his father’s ambi­tions. During his fourteen years in Congress, Kennedy “failed to penetrate the inner circle.” The conservative Southern senators who controlled the Senate, in particular, “viewed him as too detached, independent, overrated, and overly ambitious.” Beginning in 1956, when he was almost selected as Adlai Stevenson’s vice presidential running mate, Kennedy set his eyes on being elected president of the United States in November 1960. As he pur­sued that objective, the candidate was described by one acute observer as a “charming, handsome, rich, young aristocrat.”1

In his years as a senator, Kennedy said little about space issues except in the context of the linkage between space launch vehicles and strategic mis­sile capabilities. That changed once he became the Democratic nominee for president in July 1960. The growing disparity in global prestige between the United States and the Soviet Union under the Eisenhower administration became a central theme of JFK’s campaign, and the fact that the United

States was trailing the Soviet Union in space achievement was frequently cited by Kennedy as very visible evidence of this disparity. Kennedy offered no specific views on future space activities during the campaign, however, and once he was declared the president-elect, he spent little time on space issues prior to his inauguration. This meant that Kennedy’s personal views and interests with respect to space, as differentiated from his campaign rhet­oric, remained largely unknown as he entered the White House.

In his final weeks in office, NASA administrator Keith Glennan grew increasingly distressed by the lack of any contact from the incoming Kennedy administration. Shortly after the election, Glennan spoke briefly with Jerome Wiesner. He tried to probe Wiesner regarding the schedule for naming the new NASA administrator, but Wiesner only asked whether Glennan was willing to stay on in the job, to which Glennan replied in the negative. By January 3, Glennan noted in his diary that “never in my life have I seemed so frustrated in attempting to bring an important job to a conclusion.” He bemoaned that NASA had “been in a state of suspended animation since the election” and that “not one single word or hint of action has been forthcom­ing from the Kennedy administration.”63

On January 9, the impatient Glennan called vice president-elect Lyndon Johnson. Glennan told Johnson that he “felt a heavy responsibility in the matter of turning over my job to my successor” and that he “was ready to help in any way desired.” He added that he had heard that finding a new NASA administrator was proving difficult, and offered “to help in the pro­cess.” Glennan noted that this was “his first contact with the new adminis­tration, and that he had to initiate it.” He reported that Johnson replied to his call by thanking him lavishly for his helpful attitude and then saying “as soon as I have something to tell or discuss with you, I will call you!”64 Such a call never came.

On January 17, with still no word from the incoming administration, Glennan called the White House to alert the staff there that no senior person at NASA had been asked to stay on, and that Hugh Dryden had expressed his willingness to serve as acting administrator during the change in admin­istrations. An hour later, he was told that Clark Clifford, who was handling personnel appointments for president-elect Kennedy, had indicated to the White House that the new administration did indeed want Dryden to stay on.65 There still was no direct contact between NASA and the Kennedy team.

Glennan’s last day at NASA was January 19, 1961. After sherry with a few of his staff, Glennan left NASA for the final time, intending to begin the drive back to his home in Cleveland that evening. However, Washington was paralyzed by a blizzard, and it was not until 6:30 a. m. on January 20, the day of the Kennedy’s inauguration, that he was able to leave. As he drove west and listened to the inauguration ceremonies on his car radio, Keith Glennan reflected on “some 29 months of interesting, exciting, baffling, and, at times, frustrating work in Washington.” His somewhat melancholy last entry into the diary of his time in Washington was: “And still—no word from the Kennedy administration!”66

Neither Keith Glennan nor anyone else connected with the nation’s civil­ian space program could have anticipated the dramatic changes in the nation’s space policy that would emerge over the next few months.

In the weeks after his inauguration, President Kennedy spent very little time in formal consideration of space issues. On February 13, he sent Soviet pre­mier Nikita Khrushchev a congratulatory note on the launch of a Russian mission to Venus on the preceding day. (After returning data during its interplanetary cruise, the Venera 1 mission ultimately was a failure in achiev­ing its primary objective of returning data from Venus.) Later that same day, Kennedy met with Overton Brooks, chairman of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics, who told Kennedy that “NASA and the civilian space program badly need a shot in the arm.” Brooks said that Congress, or at least his committee, “cannot impress upon the Executive too strongly the need for urgency” in the space program, for “if we do not recognize it, we may falter badly in both our domestic and international relationships.”15 Science adviser Wiesner at some point after the Russian Venus launch discussed with the president the implications of the launch and “our relative positions in the general fields of space exploration and science.” The launch had raised security concerns because specialists at the Central Intelligence Agency had suggested that it could be “a step towards creating a capability for achieving a parking orbit with an ICBM warhead”; the spacecraft had in fact gone into orbit around the Earth before ejecting a large probe on a Venus-bound trajectory. The sample questions and answers used in preparing Kennedy for a February 15 press conference suggested that, if asked about the military significance of the launch, he reply that “there is no indication that the Soviet Union plans to use their ability to orbit large payloads to develop any kind of bombardment systems.” Such a system would be “inef­ficient” and would likely “be objected to by all the nations of the world.”16 In a follow-up memorandum to his discussion with the president, Wiesner noted that “the most significant factor, as we have said many times, is that the Soviets have developed a rocket as part of their ballistic missile program with considerably more thrust or lifting power than anything we have avail­able.” He noted that “one of the things we must realize is that in dramatizing the space race we are playing into the Soviet’s strongest suit. They are using this accomplishment at home and around the world to prove the superiority of Soviet science and technology.” Wiesner told the president that the United States “was superior in most fields to Soviet science” and that “in almost any other area in which we would elect to compete, food, housing, recreation, medical research, basic technological competence, general consumer good production, etc., they would look very bad.” He suggested that “we should attempt to point this out rather than assist them by an official. . . reaction that supports their propaganda.”17 Subsequent actions by President Kennedy demonstrated that he did not accept this advice.

With the success of Alan Shepard’s flight on May 5, the momentum toward a dramatic acceleration of the American space effort, with its focal point being a “space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win,” was becoming unstoppable. Vice President Johnson’s consultations over the prior two weeks had revealed almost unanimous support for such an initiative. But before President Kennedy could announce his intent to enter and win the space race, the generalized support had to be turned into specific program recommendations with an accompanying political rationale and budget esti­mates. Kennedy on April 20 had asked for the conclusions of the vice presi­dent’s review “at the earliest possible moment.” With the vice president leaving Washington on May 8 for almost two weeks, that meant a busy weekend for those charged with putting the results of LBJ’s consultations into a form for Johnson to submit with his recommendation for presidential approval.

Wiesner in his memorandum to Sorensen noted that “the major decisions have not been announced as to what extent rendezvous will be employed, what Advanced Saturn vehicle will be built (probably C-4), and what will be the characteristics of the so-called Nova that could put man on the Moon by direct ascent. The relative emphasis of rendezvous versus direct ascent is a key to the entire program.”

There were two reasons for the delay in selecting the launch vehicle for the lunar mission. One was that the “national space plan” called for in the May 8 Webb-McNamara memorandum had anticipated a collaborative NASA-DOD effort to define a family of launch vehicles that could meet both agencies’ requirements and advance the development of both liquid fuel and solid fuel propulsion systems. The focus of this planning effort was a “NASA-DOD Large Launch Vehicle Planning Group.” The group was directed by Nicholas Golovin, then with NASA; its deputy director was Lawrence Kavanaugh of DOD. The group started work in July 1961, and by the fall had become bogged down in very detailed studies and deadlocked over the relative roles of liquid-fueled and solid-fueled boosters in the lunar landing program. Rather than come up with an integrated plan, the group had suggested a new Air Force-developed launch vehicle, called Titan III, with lift capabilities closely resembling the Saturn 1 vehicle that NASA was developing. The group’s final recommendations attempted to satisfy both NASA and DOD, and ended up pleasing neither agency.23

The second reason for the delay in selecting a launch vehicle for the lunar mission was NASA’s difficulties during the May-November period in decid­ing its preferred approach to sending men to the Moon.24 Indeed, this uncer­tainty would continue well into 1962 and become a focus of NASA-White House controversy.

Beginning on May 2, even before a final decision on whether to approve a lunar landing effort had been made, there were a series of NASA stud­ies examining alternatives for accomplishing the lunar mission. The first of these studies took as its starting point a “direct ascent” approach, in which the spacecraft for the lunar mission would be launched by a giant booster with eight F-1 engines in its first stage. The spacecraft would fly directly to the Moon and land intact on the lunar surface. A portion of the spacecraft would then take off from the Moon after the astronauts had completed their exploration, and return directly to Earth. This approach meant designing a seventy-five-ton spacecraft, almost forty times the weight of the Mercury cap­sule, that would “back down” to a lunar landing, using rocket firings to slow the craft to landing speed; during the landing, the astronauts would be on their backs at the other end of the craft, more than eighty feet above the sur­face and with no or very limited direct visibility of the landing site. The direct ascent approach also required that the fuel for the return journey and the heat shield needed for reentry into the Earth’s atmosphere, both of which were heavy, would have to be carried to and then launched from the lunar surface. All of this would require a large and heavy spacecraft, and thus a very power­ful booster NASA called Nova to send it to the Moon in a single launch. The more NASA, and especially von Braun and his team at Huntsville, thought about the technological leap required to develop the gigantic Nova vehicle, the more it looked for alternatives to making such a jump.

NASA during the summer of 1961 began to look harder at an approach called Earth-orbit rendezvous (EOR). This approach would allow the lunar spacecraft and the rocket stage needed to send it toward the Moon to be divided into two or more pieces, each piece launched separately. One or more rendezvous in Earth orbit would then be needed to assemble the pieces into a single spacecraft. An alternative EOR approach was to send the complete spacecraft and its Earth departure stage fueled with light liquid hydrogen into Earth orbit with one launch. Then a second launch would carry into orbit the comparatively heavy liquid oxygen used as the oxidizer for burn­ing the hydrogen fuel; the oxygen would then be transferred to the lunar – bound rocket stage. Using an EOR approach meant that a launch vehicle significantly smaller than the Nova could be developed for the lunar mission. However, it did not solve the problem of how to land a single large spacecraft on the lunar surface.

Several versions of a smaller launch vehicle were proposed during the 1961 studies. The Saturn C-2 that had been part of NASA’s plans in the spring was soon abandoned, and an “Advanced Saturn” with several powerful F-1 engines in its first stage became the focus of attention; the issue was how many of the large engines to use. The two-engine version became known as the Saturn C-3 and the four-engine version the C-4. This was the vehicle Wiesner mentioned in his November 20 memorandum to Sorensen.25

When he wrote that memorandum, Wiesner was apparently not aware of the latest NASA study of the launch vehicle issue. On November 6, Milton Rosen of NASA headquarters, reflecting the deadlock in the Golovin – Kavanau group, had organized a separate two-week study to recommend to the NASA leadership “a large launch vehicle program” which would “meet the requirements of manned space flight” and “have broad and continuing national utility.” Rosen reported that “to exploit the possibility of accom­plishing the first lunar landing by rendezvous,” NASA should develop an “intermediate vehicle” that had five F-1 engines in the first stage, four or five J-2 engines in its second stage, and one J-2 in its third stage. (The J-2 was an engine powered by high-energy liquid hydrogen fuel that would have the capability to be stopped and restarted.) The four-engine Saturn C-4 had a “hole” in the center of its four first-stage F-1 engines; adding a fifth F-1 would thus be relatively straightforward. Rosen argued that NASA should build the most powerful rocket possible short of a Nova, and von Braun agreed that “the hole in the center was crying out for another engine.” Adding a fifth engine would increase first stage thrust at liftoff to 7.5 million pounds. Since a direct flight to the Moon was at this point still NASA’s officially stated preference for the lunar landing mission, Rosen also recommended that “a NOVA vehicle consisting of an eight F-1 first stage” should be developed on a “top priority basis.” He added that “large solid rockets should not be considered as a requirement for manned lunar landing.” The recommendation for a five-engine first stage for the launch vehicle, soon called the Advanced Saturn C-5 and ultimately the Saturn V, was quickly accepted by the NASA leadership. Within a few weeks, some form of rendezvous using the Saturn V replaced direct ascent as NASA’s preferred approach to getting to the Moon, although design work on the Nova vehicle continued for some months.26

Wiesner likely also was not aware of a November 6 meeting between the NASA and Department of Defense space leadership at which there was agreement to “cancel the development of very large (240” class) solid rocket as a backup for NOVA,” since “the work of the past six months shows that the reliability and potential of NOVA will be sufficient to make unnecessary the parallel development of the large solids on identical time scales,” as had been called for in the May 8 Webb-McNamara memorandum.27 Overall, the situation with respect to a launch vehicle for Apollo was not in as bad a shape as the Wiesner memorandum suggested; however, Wiesner was correct in his assessment that “the relative emphasis of rendezvous versus direct ascent is a key to the entire program.”