First Steps on the Way to the Moon

In anticipation of President Kennedy’s decision to approve a lunar landing project as a top priority national undertaking, NASA on May 2, 1961, had begun in earnest to examine just what would be required to carry out the president’s mandate. That examination revealed the immense dimensions of the task. New facilities would be needed, new approaches to space flight would be required, and new hardware would have to be developed. In his book Digital Apollo, David Mindell observes: “For the first couple of years the Apollo project was largely undefined, the money flowed freely, and the nerve-racking deadlines seemed far in the future.”1 This was certainly not the perception of those directly involved with the mobilization of human and financial resources required to carry out the lunar landing project. The second half of 1961 and most of 1962 were marked by a rapid series of decisions. To many of those in the White House and NASA concerned with attempting to meet the late 1967 target date that NASA had set for the first attempt at a lunar landing, there was a sense of urgency in getting a fast start on the needed buildup of people, facilities, and hardware; to them, “nerve-racking deadlines” were a daily reality.

Between the final Eisenhower budget request that went to the Congress in January 1961 and the Fiscal Year 1964 request that President Kennedy sent to Congress in January 1963, the NASA budget grew from $1.1 billion to $5.7 billion, an increase of over 400 percent in just two years. NASA in 1961 and 1962 chose the locations for the facilities that would be required for the lunar landing mission, selected and contracted for the launch vehicles and spacecraft to carry out the mission, and decided on the technical approach to landing on the Moon, this last decision resulting in an intense conflict with the White House science advisers. NASA reorganized itself for the task of managing Project Apollo while carrying out Project Mercury and get­ting started on an intermediate human space flight effort, Project Gemini. The NASA workforce increased from the 10,200 civil servants as John F. Kennedy came into the White House to 23,700 at the end of 1962; the total

would ultimately increase to 34,500 by the end of 1965. The associated contractor workforce grew at an even more rapid rate. At the end of 1960, it totaled 36,500; two years later, it was 115,000, and by the end of 1965, it was 376,700.2 This was truly an unprecedented warlike, albeit peaceful, mobilization of national resources.

President Kennedy and his White House associates viewed this rapid buildup with mixed emotions. On one hand, Kennedy made it very clear that getting to the Moon before the Soviet Union was one of his top policy priorities, and by the end of 1962 appeared willing to provide even more resources to NASA if doing so would increase the chances of achieving that objective. While Kennedy focused his interest on the lunar landing program, NASA argued that across-the-board preeminence—a clearly leading position in all areas of space activity—was the fundamental goal, and the lunar land­ing only the most visible element of achieving it.

On the other hand, the budget projections that had accompanied Kennedy’s May 1961 decision to go to the Moon and to accelerate the other elements of the NASA program were admittedly highly uncertain, and the Bureau of the Budget (BOB) had warned Kennedy that the decisions he was making would lead to a very expensive space effort in the coming years. In his desire to get the country on the path to space leadership, Kennedy seem­ingly did not pay very much attention to that warning. Theodore Sorensen comments that although JFK was a “fiscal tightwad,” at the time of the lunar landing decision “ I’m sure he had no idea what the whole effort was going to cost.”3 Kennedy soon became concerned about the space program’s rapidly growing costs, and this concern intensified during 1962 as the full scope of the lunar landing effort became clearer. Kennedy pressed his staff to make sure that the related costs were fully justified. Even so, at the end of 1962 Kennedy’s determination to win the race to the Moon remained firm; his desire to be first in space justified in his mind the high costs of achieving that position.