Soviet Successes—and Failures

In mid-August 1962, the United States was also reminded that the space race with the Soviet Union was still on. A year had passed since the second Soviet orbital flight of cosmonaut Gherman Titov on August 6, 1961. That flight had had its share of troubles; in particular, Titov, unlike Yuri Gagarin, had experienced significant motion sickness during his seventeen-orbit, day-long flight; in contrast, Gagarin had completed his one orbit with no ill effects. On August 11, 1962, the Soviet Union launched its third human space flight and then, on the next day, much to the surprise of Western observers, launched a fourth human mission. In the United Kingdom, astronomer Bernard Lovell, who was a year later to become involved in a controversy over whether the Soviet Union intended to send people to the Moon, called the two launches “the most remarkable development that man has ever seen.” The two Soviet spacecraft passed close to one another early in their joint mission; the two cosmonauts communicated using their on-board radios, and, according to at least some reports, saw each other’s spacecraft, but they did not have the maneuvering capabilities required for a rendezvous attempt. Until the lack of that capability became evident to U. S. observers, there was concern that the Soviet Union had beaten the United States to another important milestone, the ability to carry out a space rendezvous.35

After rejecting the suggestion that he make a formal statement on the space competition with the Soviet Union at the start of his August 22 press conference, President Kennedy chose instead to respond to an inevitable question about the Soviet feat. His response suggested both his continuing commitment to catching up with the Soviet Union and his recognition of how expensive the space effort was becoming.

Q: Mr. President, the Soviet Union’s latest exploit, the launching of two men within 24 hours, seems to have caused a good deal of pessimism in the United States. You hear people say that we’re now a poor second to Russia. How do you size up the situation, Mr. President, for the present and the future?

Kennedy: We are second to the Soviet Union in long-range boosters. I have said from the beginning—we started late, we’ve been behind. It’s a tre­mendous job to build a booster of the size that the Soviet Union is talking about, and also have it much larger size, which we are presently engaged in the Saturn program. So we are behind and we’re going to be behind for a while. But I believe that before the end of this decade is out, the United States will be ahead. But it’s costing us a tremendous amount of money. . . And it’s going to take us quite a while to catch up with a very advanced program which the Soviets are directing and there’s no indication the Soviets are going to quit.

We’re well behind, but we’re making a tremendous effort. We increased after I took office, after 4 months, we increased the budget for space by 50 percent over that of my predecessor. The fact of the matter is that this year we submitted a space budget which was greater than the combined eight space budgets of the previous eight years. So this country is making a vast effort which is going to be much bigger next year and the years to come and represents a very heavy burden upon us all. But we might as well recognize that we’re behind now and we’re going to be for a while. But what we’ve got to do is concentrate our efforts.36

While publicly President Kennedy was acknowledging the continued Soviet lead in space, behind the scenes the White House was debating whether to counter the public awareness of Soviet space successes with what the U. S. government knew about Soviet failures. The Soviet Union had attempted on August 25 to send a spacecraft to Venus, but the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) informed Carl Kaysen, McGeorge Bundy’s dep­uty, that “the evidence points to a failure of the probe to eject from earth orbit.” By contrast, the U. S. launch of its Mariner II spacecraft to Venus on August 27 went well; for the first time, the United States was on its way to another planet, and the White House was anxious to contrast the U. S. success with the Soviet failure. On August 31, Kaysen sent a memoran­dum to White House press secretary Pierre Salinger discussing how best to announce this and prior Soviet failures without revealing the classified means through which the information had been acquired. On September 5, Lieutenant General Marshall Carter, acting director of the CIA, provided to President Kennedy a “fact sheet” on six Soviet failures of probes to Venus or Mars. He noted that “the information from which the fact sheet was developed has been obtained from many intelligence sources, some of them our most sensitive,” but that “there is enough collateral information avail­able to warrant unclassified publication of this fact sheet without blowing the cover of our sensitive sources.” Carter was worried about such a release, however; he told the president, “I am concerned over the opening up of this entire matter of our knowledge of Soviet activities to the general scrutiny of the public, and particularly the probing press,” who might be able to discover “our entire box of tricks.”

The White House decided to accept this risk, and on September 5 James Webb sent a letter to the chairmen of the Senate and House Space Committees detailing the Soviet failures; the letter was intended to be leaked to the media, and the press soon picked up the story. The New York Times on September 9 reported the release of information on Soviet failures and com­mented that “this week the Administration finally decided that the infor­mation was too good—from the standpoint of embarrassing and deflating the Russians—to keep secret any more,” and that the release was a “neat propaganda ploy.”37