Lunar Politics
Fifty years ago today, a 38-year-old American from Wapakoneta, Ohio named Neil Armstrong pressed humanity’s first footsteps on another world. A few minutes later, he was joined on the surface of the moon by Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin from Glen Ridge, New Jersey. Even from the perspective of 2019, it still seems like a nearly impossible feat, all the more so given the short timeline from project concept to the flight of Apollo 11. But it wasn't impossible. All it took was the right combination of politics, money, courage and talent.
The journey officially began just eight years earlier on May 25, 1961, at a joint session of the US Congress. President John F. Kennedy stood at the rostrum of the US House of Representatives and delivered a “Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs.” The young president was barely four months into his term. He had already delivered his first State of the Union message at the end of January. Kennedy noted that presidential addresses to Congress were traditionally an annual affair. But he said, “These are extraordinary times.”
Just twenty days earlier, at 9:35 a.m. on May 5, US Navy Captain and Mercury Seven Astronaut Alan Shepard rode his Mercury-Redstone rocket from Launch Complex 5 at Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, Florida to an altitude of just over 116 miles. Fifteen minutes later, his Freedom 7 spacecraft splashed down in the Atlantic. The flight made Shepard the first American in space, but not the first human. The exploits of Soviet Air Force Major Yuri Gagarin and his Vostok spacecraft on April 12 had seen to that.
At the address to Congress, the president first talked about Latin America, civil defense, disarmament and Vietnam. But the speech would not be remembered for any of this. It would instead go down in history as Kennedy’s “moon speech.”
Acknowledging the emphasis his administration had already put on space, Kennedy said America needed to do more. “Now it is time to take longer strides--time for a great new American enterprise--time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on Earth.”
He openly admitted that the Soviets had “many months lead-time” in space. But this was not because America didn’t have the capacity to lead. It simply had lacked the will. “The facts of the matter are that we have never made the national decisions or marshaled the national resources required for such leadership.” He asked Congress for the money to develop nuclear rockets and accelerate the development of communications and weather satellites. But first, there was a more important, more breathtaking goal to set.
“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth,” the president famously said. “No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.”
The president was right in his assessment of the effects of a human moon landing. It was, for example, extraordinarily difficult and expensive, and it did, eight years later, unite humankind for a brief and unique moment. But in 1961, the proposal was bold to the point of preposterous, coming as it did at a time when the United States could boast a mere fifteen minutes of manned spaceflight, all of it belonging to Shepard.
In a warning that is as relevant in the 21st Century as it was in 1961, the president cautioned the Congress against timidity and incrementalism in such an expensive and wide-ranging endeavor. “If we are to go only half way, or reduce our sights in the face of difficulty, in my judgment it would be better not to go at all... because it (the moon program) is a heavy burden, and there is no sense in agreeing or desiring that the United States take an affirmative position in outer space, unless we are prepared to do the work and bear the burdens to make it successful.”
But daring as Kennedy’s call to action was, it was a product of Soviet leadership and the fear it generated in the West, not American leadership. Project Apollo triumphed, but it was eventually canceled after the Soviets made it clear that Cosmonauts would not be following in America’s lunar footsteps.
Sitting in the Oval Office two months before his message to Congress, the contrast in Kennedy’s attitude was striking. His predecessor, Dwight Eisenhower, had mothballed the design studies needed to launch NASA’s long-range plans, drafted in 1959, which included the development of monstrous new rockets, the Saturn and Nova family of boosters, along with a new spacecraft and a permanent near-Earth space station to serve as a jumping off point for lunar exploration sometime after 1970. The latter two elements, the spacecraft and space station, were already being called Project Apollo inside NASA. In March 1961, James Webb, the NASA Administrator and George Low, Chief of the Manned Space Flight Office met with the new president to secure his approval for the development of the Apollo spacecraft and rockets. Webb didn’t mince words. He told Kennedy that unless the president approved NASA’s plans, “the Russians will, for the next five to ten years, beat us to every spectacular exploratory flight.”
It was hardly an idle threat. The Soviet Union had orbited Sputnik, the world’s first artificial satellite, on October 4, 1957. A month later, it launched a larger version, with a dog-Cosmonaut on board. The concern this generated in the United States was profound and widespread. It led to, among other things, the transformation of the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics into the more technically and bureaucratically muscular National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Even so, while Kennedy listened carefully, he was unmoved. The next day, he decided to shelve NASA’s long-term vision and the Apollo spacecraft, just as Eisenhower had, but he did green-light the development of new rockets. Events, however, would force his hand.
Everything changed 19 days later on April 12, when Gagarin became the first human in space and the first to orbit the Earth. It was a stunning display of Soviet scientific and engineering prowess, and a feat that the United States would be unable to match for nearly a year. Kennedy was on the spot. He called Webb back for another meeting, this time with a substantially more urgent tone. “Is there any place we can catch them? What can we do? Tell me how to catch up,” the president demanded. As a follow up to this, on April 20 Kennedy wrote a memorandum to Vice President Lyndon Johnson, asking Johnson to investigate several questions and report back quickly: “Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the moon, or by a rocket to land on the moon, or by a rocket to go to the moon and back with a man? Is there any other space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win?”
NASA was skeptical that either of their previously defined goals for Project Apollo, to orbit a manned space station, and to send astronauts to orbit the moon without landing on it, could be accomplished before the Russians. NASA rocket scientist, and former Nazi rocket scientist, Wernher von Braun responded to the president’s questions in a memorandum to Johnson on April 29. He wrote that the Soviets had already demonstrated the ability to lift many times more payload into orbit than the United States was currently capable of, certainly enough lifting capacity to orbit something which could be called a “laboratory in space” if the Soviets chose to do so. Von Braun thought the US had a “sporting chance” of orbiting a 3-man crew around the moon before the Soviets. But, he said, “we have an excellent chance of beating the Soviets to the first landing of a crew on the moon (including return capability, of course).” What made the manned moon landing a better option, von Braun said, was that while the United States lacked the mammoth rocket required for such a mission, the Soviets very likely lacked it, too. In an even race, and with an “all-out crash program,” von Braun thought the US could beat the Russians to this “obvious next” prize.
So NASA looked down the road as a way of redefining a race they thought America could win. It was hugely ambitious. Even within NASA, there were doubts. Webb was a veteran of federal budgeting (he had been budget director under President Truman) and he worried that the sustained effort such a program would require was untenable. Others shared his concerns. When the president made the plan public, future NASA flight director Glynn Lunney remembered that “I was floored, stunned, staggered by the scale of the challenge.” Future astronaut Jim Lovell (of Apollo 13 fame) was more direct: “This president must be crazy. How can we possibly do that in nine years?” But regardless of any doubts or concerns, Apollo had been recast. The space station was off the table, as was the plan to orbit the moon after 1970. Instead, the program would now aim for a manned lunar landing in a shorter time frame.
With Yuri Gagarin splashing headlines around the globe, Kennedy’s appetite for risk had clearly changed. Although the United States had yet to even send a human being into space at all, to say nothing of orbiting the Earth as Gagarin had done, Kennedy was prepared to announce that Americans would visit the moon and return safely by the end of the decade. Less than a month after Gagarin’s flight, Alan Shepard completed his 15-minute sub-orbital flight, a substantial achievement to be sure but a far cry from Gagarin’s orbital triumph. On May 25, Kennedy told the Congress that “while we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first, we can guarantee that failure to make this effort will find us last.” The following year, in another meeting with Webb where the NASA administrator tried to discuss the scientific aspects of the moon program, Kennedy dismissed outright the notion that the space program was about anything other than Cold War geo-political advantage. "This (the space program) is important for political reasons, international political reasons, and this is, whether we like it or not, an intensive race."
So the first decade of America’s civil space program was driven by a single, burning presidential question: “Is there any other space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win?” During this period, and for the only time to date, America’s aspirations in space were in sync with its budget. The policymaking that led to and then sustained Project Apollo was an anomaly. NASA’s political muscle and budget fell quickly back to Earth once Armstrong and Aldrin satisfied Kennedy’s drive for a dramatic geo-political victory, so it’s hard to imagine that Apollo would have survived successive federal budget wars intact but for two things. First, after Kennedy’s assassination, Apollo became part of Camelot—the inspired legacy of a fallen leader. Second, even though Apollo was a reaction to America’s lagging fortunes in space, it had the effect of framing the space race in very concrete terms that were more favorable to the United States. Before May 1961, “winning” the space race could have meant several things. After that, and for the balance of the 1960s, it meant only one thing: “achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.”
Having publicly defined the race in very specific terms and placed it so firmly in the context of the West’s global struggle with communism, it would have been politically difficult for America to back off the game. So while the monstrous Saturn V rocket that shot Apollo 11 to the moon was fueled by kerosene, liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen, Project Apollo was powered by politics, market positioning and public opinion.