"I Am Not That Interested in Space&quot

One critical decision with respect to the lunar landing project still remained unsettled as President Kennedy prepared in September 1962 to make an inspection tour of the facilities being developed for the accelerated space effort. That decision was the best approach to getting astronauts to the lunar surface. NASA in July 1962 had selected as its preferred approach rendez­vous in lunar orbit, a way to the Moon that had emerged in its consideration only at the very end of 1961. Kennedy’s science adviser Wiesner and his staff did not agree with this choice, and were actively pressuring NASA to reverse it in favor of an Earth orbit rendezvous approach. The president’s September 11-12 visit to NASA and industry installations was intended to give him an overview of the human space flight effort in preparation for the hard budget decisions that all knew were upcoming later in the year; it also exposed him to the ongoing argument about the choice of how best to fly to the Moon. It was also on this trip that John F. Kennedy at Rice University in Houston gave his most memorable address on the reasons why he had chosen to accel­erate the U. S. space effort.

As he toured the NASA facilities, Kennedy, as was his style, asked many questions, and learned that some within NASA believed that the first landing on the Moon could come as much as a year sooner than the late 1967 date that was at that point NASA’s target. To advance the landing date by that many months would require requesting from Congress an extra short-term supplement to the NASA budget, and there was considerable debate during October and November 1962 about the wisdom of that action. Adding more money to the human space flight budget was strongly advocated by associate administrator for manned space flight Brainerd Holmes, but equally strongly resisted by NASA administrator James Webb. Their disagreement escalated into tensions that culminated in Holmes leaving NASA in mid-1963.

The debate over extra money for NASA led to a November 21 White House meeting in which President Kennedy and Webb disagreed about the prior­ity of the lunar landing program compared to other NASA activities. In the

aftermath of this meeting, President Kennedy reluctantly decided not to try to accelerate the Apollo schedule, and to continue on the path of requesting funds for NASA adequate to maintain the late 1967 target date for the first lunar landing attempt. Even pursuing that path required a NASA Fiscal Year 1964 budget request of $5.712 billion, an increase of 55 percent over the NASA FY1963 budget of $3.674 billion but almost a half billion dollars less than what NASA had requested in September 1962. The continuing exponen­tial increase in NASA funding came at a time when Kennedy and his White House advisers were striving to limit overall budget growth, even as the finan­cial demands of Apollo approached 4 percent of the total federal budget.