Prologue

On 25 September 1961, President John F. Kennedy gave an impassioned address to the United Nations General Assembly in New York City, during which he presented proposals for a new disarmament program as well as warning of “the smoldering coals of war in Southeast Asia.” He also called for peaceful cooperation in the new frontier of outer space.

“The cold reaches of the universe,” Kennedy implored, “must not become the new arena of an even colder war.” Earlier that year, in both his Inaugural and first State of the Union addresses, he had called for East-West cooperation “to invoke the wonders of sci­ence instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the stars.”

With a smug arrogance, the hierarchy of the Soviet Union dismissed Kennedy’s sug­gestion of cooperation in space exploration. They had very little incentive to join forces or feed information to an American space program that was then deemed to be lagging well behind theirs. Back then, they possessed an array of powerful boosters – designed to deliver massive nuclear weapons – which could insert huge payloads into orbit. Four years earlier, in October 1957, they had launched the first artificial satellite, followed weeks later by the first living creature to be sent into orbit – a dog named Laika. These would not be the only major “firsts” the Soviet Union achieved in what became universally known as the “Space Race” – a mammoth and incredibly expensive undertaking of resources and technological advances in order to gain the ascendancy in space exploration.

The previous Eisenhower administration, in spite of the best efforts of Majority Leader Lyndon B. Johnson to incite some measure of positive response, and despite the establish­ment of NASA as the nation’s civilian space agency, had been accused of excessive tardi­ness in getting a viable American space program up and running. Additionally, that administration was accused of treating Soviet space efforts with skepticism and almost disdain. Even Republican officials had admonished Dwight Eisenhower over the Soviet Union’s seemingly superior space program and what it might mean.

During the 1960 presidential campaign, Senator John Kennedy had come down hard on what he perceived to be the mounting “gap” in space technology. To him, Eisenhower’s inaction symbolized the nation’s lack of initiative, ingenuity, and vitality under Republican rule. Furthermore, he was convinced that Americans did not yet grasp the world-wide political and psychological impact of the Space Race, and that the dramatic Soviet efforts were helping to build a dangerous impression of unchallenged global leadership generally, and scientific pre-eminence particularly.

Kennedy narrowly won the election, and during the transition he appointed a task force under Science Advisor Jerome B. Wiesner to advise him on the national space program and recommend policies for the future. On 10 January 1961 the Wiesner Committee submitted its preliminary report, advising that without immediate action the United States could not possibly win a race to place the first human into space, even though the nation’s first astro­nauts had already been selected and were deep into training for the first missions.

Wiesner was himself a strong advocate for utilizing unmanned probes rather than risk­ing human lives in exploring space, but he also realized the imperative for setting immedi­ate goals in space and achieving those goals. The committee’s report stated that the United States was seriously lagging behind the Soviet Union in missile and space technology, attributing this to duplication of effort and a lack of coordination among NASA, the Department of Defense and the three military services, with each of those services com­peting to create its own independent space programs.

Before his first hundred days in the White House were over, President Kennedy’s con­cern was dramatically proven correct. On 12 April 1961, a 27-year-old Soviet Air Force lieutenant named Yuri Gagarin was launched into a single orbit of the planet, becoming history’s first human space explorer. This largely unexpected feat had a profound impact on a nation which had been looking forward with confidence to the imminent first flight of an American astronaut, albeit only a 15-minute ballistic or suborbital mission.

America’s man-in-space program, which came to be called Project Mercury, had its origins during the middle years of the 1950s as a basic research initiative of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA). By the late summer of 1958 the momen­tum within NACA for a manned space program had increased to the point where it became a strong and viable discussion topic before various committees in Congress while the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 was under serious consideration.

Prior to the passing of the Space Act on 29 July 1958, it had become evident that NACA would undergo a radical evolutionary change by becoming the nucleus of a proposed civil­ian space agency to be known as the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) which would be assigned responsibility for carrying out the nation’s manned space flight program.

When NASA officially came into existence on 1 October 1958, the agency’s first administrator Dr. T. Keith Glennan approved the setting up of Project Mercury and autho­rized the establishment of the Space Task Group (STG) to implement and oversee the project. Created on 5 November 1958, the STG was based at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. As its director, Dr. Robert R. Gilruth, would later state:

“The methods by which Project Mercury was planned to be implemented were to use the simplest and most reliable approaches known and to depend, to the greatest extent practicable, on existing technology. To this end, existing ballistic missiles (the Atlas and

Redstone) were selected as the primary propulsion systems; it was planned to use a drag reentry vehicle with the entry initiated by retrorockets, with the final descent to be made with parachutes, and to plan on a water landing. As the Atlas and Redstone weren’t designed originally for manned flight operation, it was necessary to provide automatic escape systems which would sense impending launch-vehicle malfunctions and separate the spacecraft from the launch vehicle in the event of such malfunction.

“Man had never before flown in space and thus it was felt desirable to include animal flights in the program to provide early biomedical data and to prove out, realistically, the operation of the life-support systems. It was considered wise to monitor the performance of the spacecraft, its systems, and its occupant, whether animal or man, almost continu­ously. To this end, a world-wide network of tracking, telemetry, and communications sta­tions has been established.

“Since a new era of flight was being approached, it was planned to use a build-up type of flight-test program, in which each component or system would be flown to successively more severe conditions in order first to prove the concept, then to qualify the actual design, and finally to prove, through repeated use, the reliability of the system.”

In the wake of the shock announcement that Yuri Gagarin had completed a single orbit barely weeks before an American astronaut was due to fly a suborbital mission, the real­ization that the Cold War enemy had beaten them onto the “high ground” of space came as a disturbing development to the American people. This was a country that had endured in the previous three-and-a-half weeks not only the Soviet space triumph, but also the fiasco of the Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba. Deeply troubled, many Americans believed that the Soviet Union had demonstrated a so-far unrivaled ascendancy in breaching and exploring the new domain of space.

On 5 May 1961, at the start of a decade that began the practice of making people famous for fifteen minutes, a renewed sense of confidence arose and national pride was restored across America when a 37-year-old U. S. Navy commander was hurled into space atop a Redstone rocket. To many, this achievement fell somewhat short of a solid response to Gagarin’s circuit of the globe, but that flight, in a tiny spacecraft named Freedom 7, ushered in America’s participation in the gathering thrust of the Space Race.

As a scientific and historical fact, the first venture of an American astronaut into space deservedly stands on its own – it requires no embellishment. In the context of disastrous events troubling the United States, however, it had a special importance for everyday citi­zens with an urgent need of success. The embarrassing misadventure in Cuba, the apparent loss of Laos, and the shattering announcement by the Soviet Union of its own space achieve­ment were wounds that hurt. The flight of Freedom 7 gave America that “can do” sense of success once again, and reinvigorated a much-needed groundswell of national pride.

History will record that while the Soviet Union continued for a time to outdo the United States’ efforts in human space exploration, NASA’s achievements in human space flight and technology would soon outstrip those of the Soviet space chiefs as America pursued a new national goal set by President Kennedy, of landing a man on the Moon by the end of the decade and returning him safely to the Earth.

One of those NASA astronauts who proudly walked on the Moon during Project Apollo was also the man who set America on its audacious path towards that goal. He was U. S. Navy Commander Alan Bartlett Shepard, Jr.