Kennedy (94 page)

But the Soviets had brusquely rejected the suggestion. They had little incentive to cooperate with an American space program which lagged far behind their own—not in the number and variety of scientific studies but in the all-important capacity to lift large payloads into orbit. With their more powerful rocket boosters—developed originally to launch more massive nuclear warheads before they learned the technique of the small hydrogen bomb—the Soviets in 1957 were the first to launch a space satellite, then the first to put living animals into orbit. The Eisenhower administration, despite prodding from Majority Leader Johnson, started its own program slowly and tardily, with much scoffing and skepticism from Republican officials about the meaning of the Russian effort. President Truman had also cut back the infant American space program started after the war with the help of German scientists.

John Kennedy had borne down hard on this space gap in the 1960 campaign. To him it symbolized the nation’s lack of initiative, ingenuity and vitality under Republican rule. He was convinced that Americans did not yet fully grasp the world-wide political and psychological impact of the space race. With East and West competing to convince the new and undecided nations which way to turn, which wave was the future, the dramatic Soviet achievements, he feared, were helping to build a dangerous impression of unchallenged world leadership generally and scientific pre-eminence particularly. American scientists could repeat over and over that the more solid contributions of our own space research were a truer measure of national strength, but neither America nor the world paid much attention.

After the election, a top-notch transition task force under Jerome Wiesner had warned Kennedy that the United States could not win the race to put a man in space. Others expressed concern that a Soviet space monopoly would bring new military dangers and disadvantages to the West. Our own rocket thrust was adequate for all known military purposes, but no one could be certain of its future uses. Other nations, moreover, assumed that a Soviet space lead meant a missile lead as well; and whether this assumption was true or false, it affected their attitudes in the cold war.

Before his first hundred days in the White House were out, Kennedy’s concern was dramatically proven correct. Moscow announced on April 12 that Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had completed an orbital flight around the earth in less than two hours. As the Soviet Union capitalized on its historic feat in all corners of the globe, Kennedy congratulated Khrushchev and Gagarin—and set to work.

He had already sharply increased the budget request for development of the large Saturn rocket booster; and he had already revitalized the National Space Council, with the Vice President as Chairman, to expedite progress with less military-civilian quibbling. But that was not enough. Nor was he reassured on the day after the Gagarin announcement when National Aeronautics and Space Administrator James Webb brought in a desk model of the U.S.-designed capsule soon to carry an American astronaut into space. Eying the Rube Goldberg-like contraption on his desk, Kennedy speculated that Webb might have bought it in a toy store on his way to work that morning.

To gain some immediate answers, he asked me to review with Wiesner that same day—in preparation for an interview he had granted for that evening—the outlook in NASA and the Budget Bureau on next steps in the space race. NASA reported that the dramatic big-booster steps still to come might include, in possible order of development, longer one-man orbits, two men in a spacecraft, an orbiting space laboratory, a fixed space way station, a manned rocket around the moon and back, a manned landing on the moon and return, manned exploration of the planets and a fully controllable plane for space travel. For any of the early items on this list, said the scientists, America’s prospects for surpassing the Soviets were poor because of their initial rocket superiority. Our first best bet to beat them was the landing of a man on the moon.

The President was more convinced than any of his advisers that a second-rate, second-place space effort was inconsistent with this country’s security, with its role as world leader and with the New Frontier spirit of discovery. Consequently he asked the Vice President as Chairman of the Space Council to seek answers to all the fundamental questions concerning the steps we could or must take to achieve pre-eminence in space—in terms of manpower, scientific talent, overtime facilities, alternative fuels, agency cooperation and money. Intensive hearings were held by the Council. The details of a new space budget were hammered out by Webb and McNamara. On the basis of these reports, the President made what he later termed one of the most important decisions he would make as President: “to shift our efforts in space from low to high gear.” In his special second State of the Union Message of May, 1961, he included a determined and dramatic pledge: to land a man on the moon and return him safely to earth “before this decade is out.”

He was unwilling to promise a specific year, and referred to “this decade” as a deadline he could later interpret as either 1969 or 1970. James Webb, in fact, gave him visions of a late 1968 moon trip as a triumphant climax to his second term, (tinder the level of support previously provided, the flight would not have been accomplished before the middle 1970’ s, if at all.) Whatever the date, the purpose of the
pledge was to provide a badly needed focus and sense of urgency for the entire space program. The lunar landing was not the sole space effort to be undertaken; but it was clearly one of the great human adventures of modern history.

“No single space project in this period,” the President told the Congress, “will be more impressive to mankind or more important…[or] so difficult or expensive to accomplish.” It would require, he said, the highest kind of national priority, the diversion of scientific manpower and funds from other important activities, a greater degree of dedication and discipline, and an end to all the petty stoppages, rivalries and personnel changes long troubling the space program.

The routine applause with which the Congress greeted this pledge struck him, he told me in the car going back to the White House, as something less than enthusiastic. Twenty billion dollars was a lot of money. The legislators knew a lot of better ways to spend it. Seated to the side of the rostrum, I thought the President looked strained in his effort to win them over. Suddenly he departed extensively from his prepared text—the only time he ever did that in addressing the Congress—to express his awareness of the responsibility they faced in making so expensive and long-range a commitment. “Unless we are prepared to do the work and bear the burdens to make it successful,” he said, there is no sense in going ahead. His voice sounded urgent but a little uncertain.

The Congress by nearly unanimous vote embraced what the President called this “great new American enterprise,” aided by the successful shot of Commander Alan Shepard into space (although not into orbit) a few weeks earlier. The space budget was increased by 50 percent in that year. The following year it exceeded all the pre-1961 space budgets combined. Major new facilities sprang up in Houston, Texas, Cape Canaveral (now Cape Kennedy), Florida and elsewhere. Research produced for or from U.S. space launchings introduced advancements in dozens of other fields, ranging from medicine to metal fabrication. With the orbital flight of Colonel John Glenn in February, 1962, an instrumented flight past Venus later that year, and the use of a Telstar satellite to relay TV programs (including a Presidential news conference), the acceleration and expansion of America’s space program began to gain ground.

The United States was still not first, said the President. He was not lulled by a variety of seemingly indifferent statements from Chairman Khrushchev, including the suggestion at Vienna that the U.S. could better afford to go to the moon first and then the Soviet Union would follow. Nor was he deterred by a swelling chorus of dissenters at home. After each striking Soviet success, he noted, there were demands that we do more on a crash “Manhattan Project” basis. After each American astronaut’s flight, there were demands that the world recognize our pre-eminence. But during the long intervals between flights, there were demands—sometimes from the same political and editorial sources—that our space budget be cut back and our timetable slowed down. Taxpayers complained about the cost. Scientists complained that more important activities were being slighted. Republicans began dipping into such phrases as “boondoggle” and “science fiction stunt.”

But the President, once started, was not backing out. To those who said the money could better be spent relieving ignorance or poverty on this planet, he pointed out that this nation had the resources to do both but that those members of Congress making this point seemed unwilling to vote for more welfare funds, regardless of the size of the space program. To those who criticized concentration on the moon shot, he pointed out that this was a focal point for a broad-based scientific effort, and that some sixty other unrelated projects comprised nearly one-quarter of the space budget. To those who argued that instruments alone could do the job, he replied that man was “the most extraordinary computer of them all…[whose] judgment, nerve and…[ability to] learn from experience still make him unique” among the instruments. To those who feared that the publicity given our launchings would cost us heavily in the event of failure, he replied that this risk not only demonstrated our devotion to freedom but enhanced the prestige of successes which might otherwise be written off as second-best.

He was concerned, to be sure, about risks to the astronauts’ lives; and he made clear at the outset that, “Even if we should come in second…I will be satisfied if, when we finally put a man in space, his chances of survival are as high as I think they must be.” He was also concerned about the program’s effect on our nation’s supply of scientists and engineers, and voiced new urgency for his higher education and other personnel development programs. He was concerned, finally, about waste and duplication in the space effort, and kept his Budget Director, Science Adviser and Space Council riding herd on the rapidly growing NASA complex (although not, he admitted, very successfully).

But he never relinquished that goal, “not simply to be first on the moon,” as he put it, “any more than Charles Lindbergh’s real aim was to be the first to Paris,” but to strengthen our national leadership in a
new and adventuresome age. In September of 1962, at Rice University in Houston, his most notable address on the subject summed up all the reasons why this nation must “set sail on this new sea.” The exploration of space will go ahead whether we join it or not, he said; and just as the United States was founded by energy and vision, and achieved world leadership by riding the first waves of each new age—the industrial revolution, modern invention and nuclear power—so this generation of Americans intends to be “the world’s leading space-faring nation.” His remarks revealed much of his general outlook on life as well as on space:

Kennedy’s accelerated space program also served as a useful aid to American foreign policy. Other nations cooperated in tracking our space vehicles and benefited from our weather, navigation and communications satellites. Many instituted space research programs in conjunction with our own. But it was not until after the orbital flight of John Glenn in 1962 that the Soviet Union for the first time showed any interest in space cooperation.

The Glenn flight was a turning point in many ways. Ten times it had been postponed. Frequently during the five-hour, three-orbit trip unforeseen dangers threatened to burn Glenn alive. The President, who enjoyed talking with each astronaut immediately upon the latter’s safe return, personally liked Glenn immensely. Indeed, he found all the astronauts to be a remarkably competent and personable group. He did not approve of the rights granted them by his predecessor to make large profits through the exploitation of their names and stories while still in military service; nor did he want the period or frequency of their parades and speech-making to reach a level interfering with their work. But he recognized that their courage and achievement merited special honors. “The impact of Colonel Glenn’s magnificent achievement,”
he said, after Glenn was safely down, having watched his flight most of the day on TV, “goes far beyond our own time and our own country. We have a long way to go. We started late. But this is the new ocean, and I believe the United States must sail on it.”

At Vienna Khrushchev—dismissing the importance of scientific coordination on launchings which he asserted were undertaken primarily for prestige—had said cooperation was impossible anyway because he did not want his rockets observed. In a later interview he had compared space progress with the evolution of insects, with his nation in the flying stage and the Americans merely jumping. But among the many cables from heads of state pouring in after the Glenn flight was a Khrushchev message extending not only congratulations but new interest in cooperation. There had been no such response, noted Kennedy, to similar proposals in his Inaugural, State of the Union and United Nations addresses. “But we…now have more chips on the table…so perhaps the prospects are improving.”