American Moonshot Read online

  Frontispiece

  A new era in human history began on July 20, 1969, when Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin walked on the moon. No longer were global citizens shackled to Earth. It was John F. Kennedy’s vision for an American moonshot that jump-started this epic NASA feat. Photos of moon prints became popular in newspapers around the world.

  Buyenlarge/Archive Photos/Getty Images

  Dedication

  TO MY COLLEAGUES AT RICE UNIVERSITY AND

  TO MY BELOVED WIFE, ANNE

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Frontispiece

  Dedication

  Preface: Kennedy’s New Ocean

  Part I: Rockets

  1. Dr. Robert Goddard Meets Buck Rogers

  2. Kennedy, von Braun, and the Crucible of World War II

  3. Surviving a Savage War

  4. Who’s Afraid of the V-2?

  Part II: Generation Sputnik

  5. Spooked into the Space Race

  6. Sputnik Revolution

  7. Missile Gaps and the Creation of NASA

  8. Mercury Seven to the Rescue

  9. Kennedy for President

  Part III: Moonbound

  10. Skyward with James Webb

  11. Yuri Gagarin and Alan Shepard

  12. “Going to the Moon”: Washington, DC, May 25, 1961

  13. Searching for Moonlight in Tulsa and Vienna

  14. Moon Momentum with Television and Gus Grissom

  15. Godspeed, John Glenn

  16. Scott Carpenter, Telstar, and Presidential Space Touring

  Part IV: Projects Gemini and Apollo

  17. “We Choose to Go to the Moon”: Rice University, September 12, 1962

  18. Gemini Nine and Wally Schirra

  19. State of Space Exploration

  20. “The Space Effort Must Go On”

  21. Cape Kennedy

  Epilogue: The Triumph of Apollo 11

  Acknowledgments

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  Photo Section

  About the Author

  Also by Douglas Brinkley

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Preface: Kennedy’s New Ocean

  The most difficult thing is the decision to act. The rest is merely tenacity.

  −AMELIA EARHART

  It will not be one man going to the moon . . . it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.

  —PRESIDENT JOHN F. KENNEDY, MAY 25, 1961

  Even the White House ushers were abuzz on the morning of October 10, 1963, because President John F. Kennedy was honoring the Mercury Seven—astronauts Lieutenant Scott Carpenter (USN), Captain Leroy “Gordo” Cooper (USAF), Lieutenant Colonel John Glenn (USMC), Captain Virgil “Gus” Grissom (USAF), Lieutenant Commander Walter “Wally” Schirra (USN), Lieutenant Alan Shepard (USN), and Captain Donald “Deke” Slayton (USAF)—with the coveted Collier Trophy that afternoon in a Rose Garden affair. (Robert J. Collier had been an editor of Collier’s Weekly in the early twentieth century; he promoted the careers of Orville and Wilbur Wright, believing deeply that flight was going to revolutionize transportation.) The trophy had been established in 1911 to be presented annually for “the greatest achievement in aeronautics in America,” with a bent toward military aviation. At the Mercury ceremony were representatives from such Project Mercury aerospace contractors as McDonnell Aircraft Corporation (designers of the capsule) and Chrysler Corporation (which fabricated the Redstone rockets for the U.S. Army’s missile team in Huntsville, Alabama). Kennedy wanted to personally congratulate the “Magnificent Seven” astronauts, all household names, for their intrepid service to the country. And his remarks marked the end of the Mercury projects after six successful space missions.

  At the formal ceremony, Kennedy, in a fun-loving, jaunty mood, full of gregariousness and humor, presented the flyboy legends with the prize. It was the first occasion for all seven spacemen and their wives to be together at the White House since the maiden astronaut, Alan Shepard, accepted a Distinguished Service Award for his Mercury suborbital flight of fifteen minutes to an altitude of 116.5 miles on May 5, 1961. Surrounding Kennedy as he spoke were such aviation history dignitaries as Jimmy Doolittle, Jackie Cochran, and Hugh Dryden. Instead of recounting the Mercury Seven’s space exploits in rote fashion, Kennedy used the opportunity to drive home his brazen pledge of 1961, that the United States would place an astronaut on the moon by the decade’s end. Scoffing at critics of Project Apollo (NASA’s moonshot program) as being as thickheaded as those fools who laughed at the Wright brothers in 1903 before the Kitty Hawk flights, he turned visionary. “Some of us may dimly perceive where we are going and may not feel this is of the greatest prestige to us,” Kennedy said. “I am confident that its significance, its uses and benefits will become as obvious as the Sputnik satellite is to us, as the airplane is to us. I hope this award, which in effect closes out the particular phase of the program, will be a stimulus to them and to the other astronauts who will carry our flag to the moon and perhaps someday, beyond.”

  For Kennedy, much depended on the United States going to the moon, beating the Soviet Union, being first, winning the Cold War in the name of democracy and freedom, and planting the American flag on the lunar surface. Just five weeks later, Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas. Writing the president’s obituary in Aviation Week & Space Technology on December 2, 1963, editor Robert Hotz, who had been at the Collier Trophy ceremony that October, predicted that when a NASA astronaut walked on the moon in less than six years’ time, Kennedy, America’s thirty-fifth president, would be honored as a spacefaring seer whose eternal marching command to his fellow countrymen was “Forward!”

  Even though Kennedy wasn’t alive for the fulfillment of his May 25, 1961, pledge to a joint session of Congress to land a “man on the moon” and return him safely to Earth, the marvel of television made it possible for more than a half-billion people to watch the historic Apollo 11 mission in real time, and I was one of them. On July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong gingerly descended from the spider-like lunar module the Eagle with his hefty backpack and bulky space suit, becoming the first human on the moon, I cheered like a banshee. I was only eight years old that summer, and watching all things Apollo 11—from the nearly two-hundred-hour galactic journey out of the Space Coast of Florida to splashdown in the Pacific Ocean—became my obsession. I didn’t miss a moment of the long, nerve-racking chain of events that led to the Eagle establishing the moon base Sea of Tranquility (named in advance by Armstrong). I vividly remember our astronauts planting the American flag on the lunarscape, bouncing on the desolate moon’s surface, handling instruments, and procuring moon rocks.

  My family lived in Perrysburg, Ohio, and we considered Armstrong, from the nearby community of Wapakoneta, essentially a hometown boy. It was stunning that this local kid, who grew up on an Auglaize County farm with no electricity, was leading America into the new world of lunar exploration. When Armstrong said, “That’s one small step for [a] man, one giant leap for mankind,” every member of my family was awed at the instantaneous greatness of it all. We were hardly alone in realizing that Apollo 11 had changed all who watched it unfold or lived in its wake. I was proud of my country.

  For years I longed to hear Neil Armstrong describe what it was like to contemplate Earth from 238,900 miles away, to explain, in his own words, the thermodynamics affecting motion through the atmosphere both in launching and reentry. Former Johnson Space Center director George Abbey of Houston (now a colleague of mine at Rice University) once told me that many NASA astronauts felt that looking at Earth was akin to a religious experi
ence. Did Armstrong agree? What did it feel like, emotionally, spiritually, to stand on the surface of the moon? Armstrong’s reticence was legendary. He was known to be media shy. But I hoped to persuade him to talk with me about his storied career. Perhaps I could get him to reflect in fresh ways on his lunar experience. In 1993, I wrote him requesting an interview (enclosing signed copies of my books Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years and Driven Patriot: The Life and Times of James Forrestal). I got a polite postcard rejection of the “Not now, but I’ll keep you in mind” variety.

  John F. Kennedy was handsome, debonair, and press savvy. Often, when he visited Cape Canaveral, Florida, or Huntsville, Alabama, or Houston, Texas, to inspect NASA sites, he wore dark sunglasses, which gave the visits a touch of Hollywood glamour. Because he was six feet one in height, sitting in a cramped Mercury, Gemini, or Apollo capsule for a photo op was not an option. So he mastered the art of looking upward at rockets.

  I. C. Rapoport/Archive Photos/Getty Images

  It wasn’t until eight years later that NASA afforded me the privilege of interviewing Neil Armstrong for its official Oral History Project. I was surprised at and honored by the chance to speak in depth with the “First Man”—and thrilled when the date was set for September 19, 2001, in Clear Lake City, Texas. Then, eight days in advance of the big meeting, I saw the horrifying collapse of the World Trade Center towers on TV and listened to accounts of the two other disastrous airplane hijackings. A pervasive sense of gloom and urgency enveloped America. Like everyone else, I felt shock and repugnance at the ghastly scenes of our nation under attack, feelings that still burn to this day. I was sure my Armstrong interview would be canceled. But it didn’t play out that way. To my utter astonishment, a NASA director telephoned me to say that Armstrong, no matter what, never missed a scheduled appointment. His effort to keep his word was legendary. The post-9/11 skies were largely shut to commercial aircraft, but Armstrong, whose own boyhood hero was flier Charles Lindbergh, refused to cancel his appointment at the Johnson Space Center, piloting his own plane from his adopted hometown of Cincinnati. It was a matter of honor, part of Armstrong’s “onward code.”

  The six-hour interview went well. When I asked Armstrong why the American people seemed to be less NASA crazed in the twenty-first century than back during John F. Kennedy’s White House years, he had a thoughtful response. “Oh, I think it’s predominantly the responsibility of the human character,” he said. “We don’t have a very long attention span, and needs and pressures vary from day to day, and we have a difficult time remembering a few months ago, or we have a difficult time looking very far into the future. We’re very ‘now’ oriented. I’m not surprised by that. I think we’ll always be in space, but it will take us longer to do the new things than the advocates would like, and in some cases, it will take external factors or forces which we can’t control.”

  Moments later, I again tried to get Armstrong to loosen up and be more expressive about his lunar accomplishment, to defuse his engineer’s penchant for personal detachment. I had long pictured him in the sultry evenings at Cape Canaveral leading up to the Apollo 11 launch, looking up at the luminous moon and knowing that he and Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin would soon be the first humans to visit a place beyond Earth. “As the clock was ticking for takeoff, would you every night or most nights, just go out and quietly look at the moon? I mean, did it become something like ‘My goodness?!’” I asked.

  “No,” he replied. “I never did that.”

  That was the extent of his romantic notions about the lifeless moon. Neil Armstrong was first and foremost a Navy aviator and aerospace engineer, following military orders with his personal best. What became clear to me after interviewing him (and other Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo astronauts of 1960s fame) was that the story of the American lunar landing wasn’t wrapped up in any idealized aspiration to walk on the moon surface; instead, it was all about the old-fashioned patriotic determination to fulfill the pledge made by President Kennedy on the afternoon of May 25, 1961. “I believe,” our thirty-fifth president had said before Congress, “that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.”

  Only one top-tier Cold War politician had the audacity to risk America’s budget and international prestige on such a wild-eyed feat within such a short time frame: in John F. Kennedy, the man and the hour had met. Even Kennedy’s own national security advisor, McGeorge Bundy, thought the whole moonshot gambit scientifically reckless, politically risky, and a “grandstanding play” of the most outlandish kind; and he had the temerity to voice his opinion in no uncertain terms to the president. “You don’t run for President in your forties,” Kennedy snapped back, “unless you have a certain moxie.”

  Without Kennedy’s daunting vow to send astronauts to the moon and bring them back alive in the 1960s, Apollo 11 would never have happened in my childhood. The grand idea undoubtedly grew out of a series of what Armstrong called “external factors or forces”—including World War II, Sputnik, the Bay of Pigs, Yuri Gagarin, atomic bombs, intercontinental ballistic missiles, the inventions of the silicon transistor and microchip, and a steady stream of Soviet advances in space. Myriad new technological capabilities unfurled and coalesced with Kennedy’s indomitable “Go, go, go!” leadership style. It’s my contention that if JFK had been wired differently—if he hadn’t had such a hard-driving father who raised him with the need to achieve great things or a brother who died in World War II trying to destroy a German missile facility—then the moonshot might not have happened.

  Reading copy of President John F. Kennedy’s special message to Congress, “Urgent National Needs,” delivered May 25, 1961. In the address, Kennedy argues for increased support of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the United States’ landing a man on the moon by the end of the decade.

  Papers of John F. Kennedy, Presidential Papers, President’s Office Files, Courtesy of the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum, Boston

  For Kennedy, who himself became a World War II naval hero for his bravery in the PT-109 incident of 1943 in the Pacific Theater, the Project Mercury astronauts were ultimately fearless public servants like him. The NASA astronauts Kennedy had fêted in the Collier Trophy ceremony weeks before his assassination volunteered for space travel duty at a pivotal moment in the Cold War. Like Kennedy, these astronauts were courageous, pragmatic, and cool; they were husbands and fathers who, as journalist James Reston noted, “talked of the heavens the way old explorers talked of the unknown sea.” Kennedy’s New Frontier ethos was based on adventure, curiosity, big technology, cutting-edge science, global prestige, American exceptionalism, and historian Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous “frontier thesis.” All six of NASA’s Mercury missions occurred during Kennedy’s presidency. With Madison Avenue instinct, Kennedy routinely claimed that space was the “New Ocean” or “New Sea.” If so, then he was the navigator in chief ordering NASA spacecraft with noble names such as Freedom, Liberty Bell, Friendship, Aurora, Sigma, and Faith into the great star-filled unknown. His talent for converting Cold War frustration over Soviet rocketry success into a no-holds-barred competition for the moon was politically masterful. And the American public loved him for leading the effort.

  There were other U.S. politicians who promoted NASA’s manned space program with zeal in the late 1950s and ’60s, Lyndon Johnson chief among them. But only the magnetic Kennedy knew how to sell the $25 billion moonshot (around $180 billion in today’s dollars) to the general public. Due to Kennedy’s leadership over 4 percent of the federal budget went to NASA in the mid-1960s. In sports terms, he built a team like a great coach, and then played to win. The faith he placed in ex-Nazi rocketeer Wernher von Braun and NASA technocrat James Webb showed that the president was a leader who instinctively knew how to tap the right talent at the right time. Although he worried about space budgets, in the end he never shrank from asking Congress fo
r the fiscal increases that NASA’s moonshot required. What makes Kennedy’s leadership even more impressive was the way he wrapped both domestic and foreign policies around his New Frontier moon program in a judicious, cost-effective, and effective way. Building on Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal and Harry Truman’s Fair Deal, Kennedy’s New Frontier was activist federal government writ large. What the Interstate Highway System, the Saint Lawrence Seaway, and ICBM development were to Dwight Eisenhower, NASA’s manned space programs were to Kennedy: America, the richest nation, doing big projects well.

  It’s fair to argue that NASA’s Projects Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo were just a shiny distraction, that the taxpayers’ revenue should’ve been spent fighting poverty and improving public education. But it’s disingenuous to argue that Kennedy’s moonshot was a waste of money. The technology that America reaped from the federal investment in space hardware (satellite reconnaissance, biomedical equipment, lightweight materials, water-purification systems, improved computing systems, and a global search-and-rescue system) has earned its worth multiple times over. Ever since, whenever we have worried about an America in decline, Kennedy’s moonshot challenge has stood as the green light reminding us that together as a society we can accomplish virtually any feat.

  Full of blithe optimism, Kennedy’s pledge set an audacious goal, capping a three-and-a-half-year period in which the Soviet Union twice shocked the world, first by launching the first orbital satellite, on October 4, 1957, and then by sending cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin on the first manned space mission on April 12, 1961, just six weeks before Kennedy’s rally cry to Congress. For a world locked in a Cold War rivalry between the Americans and the Soviets, space quickly became the new arena of battle. “Both the Soviet Union and the United States believed that technological leadership was the key to demonstrating ideological superiority,” Neil Armstrong explained later. “Each invested enormous resources in evermore spectacular space achievements. Each would enjoy memorable successes. Each would suffer tragic failures. It was a competition unmatched outside the state of war.” Kennedy, with depth and commitment, articulated a visionary strategy to leapfrog America’s Communist rival and win that high-stakes contest in the name of the capitalistic free-market system as represented by the United States. It was just a matter of figuring out how to do it, using engineering exactitude, military know-how, taxpayer dollars, and political pragmatism.