Apollo’s Impacts

Indeed, it may be the symbolic character of America’s voyages to the Moon that is the most important heritage of the Apollo program. Certainly the image of the Earth rising over the barren lunar surface taken by Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders on Christmas Eve 1968 and of Apollo 11’s Buzz Aldrin standing next to the American flag at “Tranquility Base” have become iconic, communicating to subsequent generations that the United States did years ago achieve something unique in human experience, the first steps off the home planet.

Achieving JFK’s Purposes

John Kennedy chose to go to the Moon as a means of restoring the U. S. prestige that he judged had been lost during the Eisenhower administration.

In the shorter term, he also wanted to counteract the prestige loss caused by the conjunction of the Soviet success with the flight of Yuri Gagarin and the U. S. failure at the Bay of Pigs. Kennedy in 1961 conceptualized prestige in a way well described by British diplomatic historian F. S. Oliver thirty years earlier:

What prestige is, it would be hard to describe precisely, It may be nothing more substantial than an effect produced upon the international imagina­tion—in other words, an illusion. It is, however, far from being a mere bubble of vanity; for the nation that possesses great prestige is thereby enabled to have its way, and to bring things to pass which it could never hope to achieve by its own forces. Prestige draws material benefits in its train. Political wisdom will never despise it.21

In terms of both shorter-term and more lasting impacts on U. S. interna­tional prestige and the associated national pride, Apollo was a substantial success. Within months of JFK’s clarion call, NASA and U. S. industry were mobilized in a high-profile pursuit of the lunar landing goal. By declaring that the United States intended to take a leading position in space, and by then taking the steps to turn that declaration into practice, Kennedy effectively undercut the unilateral Soviet space advantage in dramatic space achievements well before any comparable U. S. success. The succes­sive achievements of Projects Mercury and Gemini, and most notably the February 1962 first U. S. orbital flight of John Glenn, became initial steps in JFK’s lunar quest and thus made the U. S. space program of the 1960s a source of international prestige and national pride. The psychological and political advantages of early Soviet space successes were quickly and effec­tively countered.

The success of Apollo 11 in July 1969 and five subsequent missions to the lunar surface (Apollo 13, of course, had a major failure on the way to the Moon and did not complete its landing mission) cemented the international perception of the United States as a country committed to peaceful space achievements “for all mankind.” Americans who were abroad at the time of the first Moon landings, U. S. diplomats, and Apollo astronauts return­ing from post-mission international tours all attested to an immense flow of admiration for the country that could accomplish such a feat. Senior State Department officer U. Alexis Johnson reported that “There is no question that the success of Apollo 11 mission did more to bolster prestige abroad than any single event since the termination of the Pacific War in 1945.” Johnson added a qualification, noting that “no one could hope or expect that the euphoric burst of enthusiasm felt by most of the world toward our country. . . could be long maintained—nor has it been.” According to Johnson, “we are left, however, with a very substantial residue of admiration and prestige. While benefits are impossible to measure in quantitative terms, these gains should be of very real value with respect to our posture in the world and our relations abroad for many years to come.”22 John Kennedy could not have hoped for a better report on the success of his 1961 lunar landing decision.

One analyst of the Kennedy presidency has suggested that JFK’s “aggres­sive, militaristic, confrontational attitude” toward the Soviet Union made the world a riskier place during Kennedy’s brief time in office, as he “waged Cold War.”23 Extending this judgment to the race to the Moon seems unjus­tified. By choosing a Cold War competitive arena that did not involve mili­tary or direct political confrontation, Kennedy channeled one dimension of the U. S.-Soviet rivalry into what some have described as “the moral equiva­lent of war,” rather than armed confrontation.

As it turned out, however, during the Kennedy administration the United States was racing only itself to the Moon. We now know that while by 1963 the Soviet Union had begun to develop a large space rocket capable of send­ing a cosmonaut to the Moon, it had not yet decided to use it for lunar missions. It was not until spring 1964 that Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) analysts identified activity at the Soviet launch site in central Asia as a launch complex for a very large rocket. Until then, the CIA in its intelligence estimates had basically assumed without supporting hard evidence that the Soviet Union was pursuing a lunar landing program, both because that was a logical extension of past Soviet space activities and because the United States had identified a lunar landing as the appropriate goal for human space flight and intelligence analysts reasoned that the Soviet would follow the same course.24

Kennedy was aware in 1961 that his decision to go to the Moon was being made without knowledge of Soviet space intentions; he decided that the prestige benefits of the lunar landing program required that the United States be first to the Moon, whether or not the Soviet Union was in the race. But he continually referred to U. S.-Soviet competition in going to the Moon in his public statements defending his decision. This was certainly the politically expedient thing to do; it would have been far more difficult to maintain political support for Apollo if the threat of Soviet competition had been absent. Several of President Kennedy’s advisers in 1962 and 1963 alerted Kennedy to the lack of evidence in support of Soviet lunar intentions, and Kennedy was quite aware of the mid-1963 claims by Bernard Lovell that the Soviets did not have a lunar landing program. By then, he seems to have accepted James Webb’s argument that the U. S. lunar program was an extremely valuable focal point for developing overall U. S. space capability, and that it should proceed, cooperatively if possible but unilaterally if not, even if the Soviet Union did not have a similar program.

Both during the Kennedy administration and during the rest of the 1960s (and even until today), critics have argued that the Apollo program was an unfortunate reflection of misplaced U. S. priorities. President Kennedy was aware of these criticisms, and in 1963 worked to prepare answers to the program’s doubters. Apollo came to culmination at a time when the United States was experiencing urban riots, civil rights conflicts, political assassina­tions, and a seemingly pointless war in Southeast Asia. Kennedy cannot be faulted for not anticipating the domestic and international upheavals of the 1960s that changed the social context in which the lunar landings actually took place. In starting Apollo, Kennedy gave more weight to the situation in 1961 than to the longer-term situation in which the landings would actually take place. From his perspective in spring 1961, Apollo looked like the right thing to do.

All in all, then, an evaluation of Project Apollo in terms of the objectives that led John Kennedy to initiate and sustain it must be positive. Although it is impossible clearly to separate the positive impacts of Apollo from the many negatives of the decade of the 1960s, if not for the achievements of the U. S. space program at the end of the decade there would be little positive for Americans to remember from that time.