Chasing the Moon: The Story of the Space Race - from Arthur C. Clarke to the Apollo landings

VON BRAUN’S TRIUMPH with Explorer did little to rectify the ongoing competition among the different branches of the armed forces. Former defense secretary Wilson’s decision two years earlier to give the Air Force responsibility for long-range ballistic missiles implied it would become the branch designated to oversee any future military activities in earth orbit. However, von Braun and General Medaris at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency continued to work on their own ambitious ideas, including plans for a large heavy-lifting rocket that could place human-piloted vehicles in orbit.

The ongoing competition extended into the services’ public marketing campaigns, with the Army, Air Force, and Navy each promoting their leadership in the dawning space age. The Navy regarded space as a new ocean to conquer and command, in keeping with von Braun’s allusion to the great maritime powers of the past. The Air Force argued that space was an extension of the conquest of the air, just at a higher altitude, and coined its own marketing term, “aerospace.” And the Army, while regarding rocketry as a high-powered extension of the artillery, also used the launch of Explorer to promote itself as the team that got things done.

Shortly after Sputnik and the panic on Capitol Hill, the Air Force inaugurated its own piloted spacecraft program, called Man in Space Soonest. Its Special Weapons Center even commissioned a top-secret fast-track study, code named Project A119, to evaluate the scientific paybacks of Fred Singer’s proposal to explode thermonuclear weapons on the Moon, an idea some in the Air Force believed would demonstrate to the world America’s military prowess and instill patriotic pride at home.

© Recruiting posters (Public Domain, private collections)

By the late 1950s, the Army, Navy, and Air Force were each employing space age–themed marketing campaigns to encourage new recruits. The Army’s poster celebrates the launch of Explorer I, the Navy’s includes a picture of Vanguard, and the Air Force promotes its plans for a human military presence in outer space.

President Eisenhower realized he needed to resolve the ongoing service rivalry that was becoming counterproductive and costly to the country. He was also increasingly wary of the power of some personalities in the American military to influence public opinion and gain congressional backing for their ambitious and expensive projects. Accordingly, Eisenhower decided to reduce the military’s role in future human spaceflight by signing into law the National Aeronautics and Space Act. His announcement in late July 1958 followed a Presidential Science Advisory Committee that recommended developing space technology in response to the “compelling urge of man to explore and to discover, the thrust of curiosity that leads men to try to go where no one has gone before.” It was a declaration that—when slightly reworked with the adverb “boldly” in the prelude to the television series Star Trek eight years later—would become one of the most familiar catchphrases of the latter half of the twentieth century. Presciently sensing the emotions those words would invoke, Eisenhower noted in an accompanying letter, “This is not science fiction … every person has the opportunity to share through understanding in the adventures which lie ahead.”

The National Aeronautics and Space Act created a new civilian space agency, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), built in part from the half-century-old National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), which was already dedicating half its resources to space-related projects, including Vanguard and the X-15 suborbital space plane. Chosen as NASA’s first administrator was the president of Case Institute of Technology, T. Keith Glennan, a former member of the Atomic Energy Commission.

Within the first week of NASA’s creation, the Air Force terminated its nascent Man in Space Soonest initiative. NASA would now oversee a new civilian-run program, named Project Mercury, dedicated to putting the first Americans into space. Instead, the Air Force would concentrate on its own piloted winged space glider, known as Dyna-Soar, which, after being launched on top of a ballistic missile, would allow military crews to service satellites, conduct aerial reconnaissance, and possibly intercept enemy satellites.

Despite the idealistic rhetoric about exploration and adventure, it was impossible to conceal the reality that the civilian agency planned to send Americans into space atop repurposed military missiles developed to deliver warheads and transport reconnaissance spy satellites. The United States therefore chose to emphasize the open, peaceful, and cooperative nature of its civilian space program, which stood in contrast with the secretive and militarily aligned Soviet effort.

Remarkably, the Soviet Union had never placed a high priority on launching the world’s first artificial satellite. Rather, its military rocket program had been developed to inform the world that Russia had the capability to strike other nations with nuclear weapons. Sputnik was an unexpected dividend after von Braun’s Soviet counterpart, Sergei Korolev, developed a heavy-lifting rocket—the R-7—capable of delivering a six-ton nuclear warhead. But the Soviet warhead turned out to be far lighter than the original estimate; Korolev had designed a rocket much more powerful than needed.

Korolev realized the R-7 could put a satellite in orbit, if that was of interest to the Kremlin. Following Eisenhower’s International Geophysical Year announcement, Korolev sent a memo noting that should Russia want to set a world record by launching a satellite, they could do so at practically no additional cost. When Khrushchev gave his consent, he never anticipated the alarmist reaction in the United States. While the Soviet space program’s principal purpose was—and remained—military, Sputnik’s overnight success suddenly elevated the role of space research in the eyes of the Kremlin, making it an engineering, scientific, and propaganda priority.

NASA’s charter specifically restricted it from any responsibility for military defensive weapons or reconnaissance satellites. That separation between NASA and the Pentagon allowed it to act as Washington’s public face for promoting scientific research, furthering exploration, and bolstering national prestige, while deflecting attention from ongoing military space initiatives. In fact, during NASA’s first year of operation, the Pentagon’s space budget was nearly 25 percent larger.

NASA’s formation left the fate of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville uncertain, with both General Medaris and von Braun taking a predictably negative view of the new civilian agency. In addition to the existing NACA facilities, NASA brought the Army’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and the Navy’s Vanguard group under its umbrella. Glennan, NASA’s new administrator, proposed bringing half of von Braun’s group at the Army Ballistic Missile Agency within NASA, an idea that von Braun immediately killed by using his celebrity status to sway political and public opinion. Both General Medaris and von Braun feared that under NASA, the Huntsville group would lose its unique position and become a small part of a larger, and probably dysfunctional, government agency.

As 1958 came to a close, President Eisenhower surprised the world with his own space-propaganda stunt, intended to deliver multiple messages. One was a message of peace; a second was a bit of blatant saber rattling directed at the Soviets; a third was a ploy to silence Eisenhower’s critics; and a fourth was a sly dismissal of America’s premier space-age celebrity. Under tight secrecy, an Air Force Atlas missile weighing more than four tons was launched into orbit. Transmitted from a tiny box inside the huge Atlas, a recording of Eisenhower’s voice proclaimed, “America’s wish for peace on Earth and goodwill toward men everywhere.” By orbiting the entire Atlas missile—an achievement of little distinction in itself—the United States could technically claim to have placed the heaviest satellite into space.

Still, it wasn’t lost on the Soviets that the sentiments voiced on the tape had in fact been delivered by a new ICBM, specifically designed to transport a thermonuclear warhead. Nor was it lost on von Braun and many in the media that Eisenhower had excluded the Army’s team in Huntsville from a starring role in a space-age first, intended to boost American prestige. The head of the new Advanced Research Projects Agency, which oversaw Project SCORE as it was called, described it as essentially “a propaganda ploy designed to put a really big, heavy object into space as a means of silencing press and congressional complaints about small payloads and rocket failures.”

The media gave the stunt plenty of coverage during the holiday season, but it ultimately achieved little of importance, not even as the first device to transmit a message from space to people on Earth. It was quickly forgotten. Von Braun had concluded that despite their potential to revolutionarily change society, communications satellites would never engage the public or motivate politicians to fund a massive space effort like the piloted program he envisioned. He knew that the fear of annihilation, the loss of military superiority, or the erosion of national prestige were greater motivators among those in power, just as they had been in his dealings with the Third Reich. He was intrinsically aware that the public’s imagination would be fully engaged only when an intelligent being was on board a spacecraft, providing a vicarious adventure of a singular and historic nature.

And, indeed, nothing NASA undertook during its first year captured the public’s attention more than the selection of the nation’s first astronauts. It was this step that brought the dream that had consumed the minds of Clarke, Ley, von Braun, and many others for nearly three decades to the verge of reality.

Sensing that this was not only a good story but also a turning point in human history, journalists searched for a way to portray the men who would experience the unique, dangerous, and otherworldly. Even though there was little to distinguish the first seven astronauts from any other group of military pilots when NASA introduced them at a Washington, D.C., press conference in April 1959, the media rapidly promoted them as exemplars of American masculinity, courage, resourcefulness, and intelligence.

Though they spoke of wanting to travel into space in the near future, both Clarke and von Braun were already a few years older than John Glenn, who at age thirty-seven was the oldest of the seven Mercury astronauts. He had been chosen from an initial group of five hundred applicants, with the finalists representing the Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps. Five had experienced air combat in World War II or Korea, and the same number had been military test pilots. All were reported to have IQs greater than 130, and, coincidently—or not—all were firstborn or only children. Coming from a fraternity of combat fliers and jet jockeys, the Mercury Seven, as they came to be called, had no intention of being treated like confined lab rats in a glorified orbiting science experiment. They saw themselves first and foremost as active pilots.

However, neither they nor NASA were prepared for how their fairly routine press conference would become a pivotal moment in the marketing of the American space program and the transformation of modern celebrity. Preceded by stories of past air heroes like Charles Lindbergh and a decade of Hollywood science-fiction films, the seven pilots were thrust into starring roles in the television age’s first heroic real-life narrative. They and their families were abruptly placed under the modern media’s spotlight. Ghostwritten and sanitized versions of their lives appeared in heavily promoted issues of Life magazine, the result of a controversial NASA-approved contract that gave the magazine exclusive rights to the personal stories of the astronauts and their wives, even though the men were government employees. Since information related to their work had been understood to be freely available to all, journalists from rival publications naturally felt as though they were being shut out and they criticized the arrangement, to no avail. As part of the agreement, the astronauts were given a life-insurance policy and additional income to supplement their modest military salaries. Almost as important to them, the exclusive nature of the contract gave them justification to decline countless other media requests, and as a result it indirectly protected the privacy of the astronauts and their families when they were not the focus of a Life feature.

Not surprising given the tenor of the time, NASA gave no consideration to women as astronaut candidates. Despite the example of Jacqueline Cochran, who had set a series of historical firsts during a career as a military and air-race pilot, no woman in the United States had been granted an opportunity to gain experience as either a combat or test pilot. But provocative speculation never hurt sales, so the question of whether a woman might fly in space, and when, often arose in popular magazines. In reality, it was a non-issue, and NASA avoided public statements that would only exacerbate controversy.

When Real, a publication that advertised itself as “the Exciting Magazine for Men,” had considered the question in 1958, it concluded that women would indeed have a place on lengthy future space missions—as crew members willing to ease the strong sexual urge of men in the prime of life. The author, Martin Caidin, who became a fixture among the Cape Canaveral press corps during the next decade, attempted to make his argument by considering the alternative: “If you ignore the problem, you’re letting yourself in for emotional dynamite and homosexuality—and that is not acceptable.” In a similar vein, whenever von Braun was asked a question about the possibility of women serving as astronauts, he usually responded with a wry smile and a prepared answer: “We have talked about adding provisions in the space capsule for one hundred twenty pounds of recreational equipment.”

The seven smiling men pictured wearing sports shirts and crew cuts in the pages of Life magazine quickly eclipsed the celebrity of America’s most famous rocket man. When, shortly after their press conference, the astronauts visited Huntsville to see the rockets under development, von Braun said publicly that he found them wonderful people, “serious, sober, dedicated, and balanced.” But behind the scenes during the visit, von Braun and General Medaris were still trying to determine the fate of the Army Ballistic Missile Agency.

Von Braun’s newest project was the Saturn, a cleverly improvised design for a large, heavy-lifting booster. Built from existing component parts, the huge rocket’s first stage was composed of a cluster of eight individual cylindrical Redstone rocket-size fuel tanks—each eighty feet high and five feet in diameter—surrounding a single, slightly larger Jupiter rocket tank. Five of the tanks, including the Jupiter tank in the center, carried liquid oxygen; the remaining four carried kerosene. Together, the Saturn’s six engines would produce 1.5 million pounds of thrust, enough to place a payload of ten thousand to forty thousand pounds into low earth orbit. While the Department of Defense and the Advanced Research Projects Agency had been planning large reconnaissance satellites, von Braun was thinking of other possible uses. He knew that if he could obtain funding to produce a small yet very powerful heavy-lifting booster and demonstrate its ability, the decision makers in Washington were more likely to approve the design of the next, slightly larger model. By progressing in steps to bigger and more powerful vehicles, he would eventually produce one capable of taking men to the Moon, an option von Braun was always working toward, even though no one in Washington was talking seriously about such an undertaking.

NASA’s civilian man-in-space program was planning to use the military’s Redstone, Atlas, and Titan missiles for the early missions, but any ambitious later projects involving a space station or leaving earth orbit would require a bigger heavy-lifting rocket. Von Braun’s Saturn now seemed the likely workhorse for NASA’s longer-term future. With Eisenhower’s consent, the Army’s entire rocket development-operations division in Huntsville was brought under NASA’s umbrella as its rocket-development facility. Renamed the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, it became the agency’s largest facility when the transfer took place on July 1, 1960. For the first time in more than a quarter of a century, von Braun would no longer be working for a branch of the military. And his lifelong ambition to design the rockets that would take humans into the heavens was now a reality.

While von Braun’s future with the Army was still under discussion, his past was being recreated on a Munich movie-studio soundstage. Columbia Pictures was producing I Aim at the Stars, a dramatic biopic intended to tell von Braun’s odyssey from a rocket visionary in Nazi Germany to an American hero. Playing von Braun was German actor Curd Jürgens, a familiar face from other recent Hollywood productions. British filmmaker J. Lee Thompson had intended the movie to address questions about the social responsibility of a modern scientist and what constitutes a war criminal, but these moral issues were lost in a screenplay that focused on telling an inaccurate and sanitized version of von Braun’s life. When the film opened in London, Munich, and New York, protesters handed out “Ban the Bomb” leaflets and displayed placards denouncing von Braun as a Nazi. However, the most bruising attack came from movie critics, and the film disappeared from movie theaters just as the final days of the 1960 presidential election were playing out on home screens. By the decade’s end, 88 percent of American homes had televisions. In addition to the novelty of the nation’s first televised presidential debates, the 1960 election marked a turning point in American politics, as the power of the image proved as crucial as the candidates’ spoken words.

This was the first presidential election in which both candidates had been born during the twentieth century. Both had also served with distinction during World War II—one returning as a war hero who had saved lives. For those who had fought in the North Atlantic, in Europe, in the Pacific, and in Korea, the election of 1960 marked a dramatic generational shift.

Watching the campaign from Huntsville, one World War II veteran saw something of himself in John Kennedy. Like the Massachusetts senator, von Braun had been born to privilege and wealth and, with a combination of charisma, intelligence, and persuasive rhetoric, had risen to national prominence. Hungry for a change after the cautious policies of the Eisenhower White House, von Braun thought Kennedy might be the right person to usher in the dawning age of human space travel. Kennedy was not afraid of making bold decisions, such as his choice to ignore the advice of campaign strategists and help secure the release of Martin Luther King, Jr., from an Atlanta jail cell during the final week of the campaign.

Von Braun and his wife went to their local Huntsville polling place on Election Day and cast their ballots for the Democratic presidential candidate.

As his second term was nearing its end, President Eisenhower was determined to deliver a final message to the American people. He had been contemplating the content of his farewell address for nearly two years and had labored over more than twenty drafts before appearing in front of live television cameras three days before the inauguration of the thirty-fifth occupant of the executive office. Considered by many the most important speech of his presidency, Eisenhower’s televised farewell famously voiced a warning about the increasing influence of the American military-industrial complex. In it he expressed respect for scientific discovery and the ways in which technology could improve lives, but he called equal attention to the “danger that public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.”

Eisenhower subsequently declined to elaborate in public about what specifically led him to make this speech. But some months later in a private conversation, a noted nuclear physicist asked the former president whether he had anyone in mind when he mentioned the scientific-technological elite.

Eisenhower answered without any hesitation. He had two people in mind: physicist Edward Teller, the “father of the hydrogen bomb,” and Wernher von Braun.

CHAPTER THREE (#ulink_c2dc1738-8518-51a4-aa51-2f961a5d7a9f)

THE NEW FRONTIER (#ulink_c2dc1738-8518-51a4-aa51-2f961a5d7a9f)

(1961–1963) (#ulink_c2dc1738-8518-51a4-aa51-2f961a5d7a9f)

JOHN KENNEDY CONVEYED a sense of confidence and ease as he strode to the podium. The youngest man ever elected president, Kennedy had not yet been in office for three months. Seated before him in the large State Department auditorium were more than four hundred journalists. Present in the room as well were three very large TV cameras. Today’s presidential news conference would be broadcast on live network television, as had become the custom in this new administration. Never attempted in the Eisenhower years, these afternoon exchanges between the president and the press were a new attraction, occurring nearly every other week, preempting afternoon soap operas and game shows.

Kennedy’s apparent comfort before the cameras that afternoon gave little indication that the days ahead would define his presidency and greatly affect the course of the twentieth century. But April 12, 1961, had begun with extraordinary news. That morning the Soviet Union had announced the successful launch and return of the Vostok 1 spacecraft, carrying cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin, the first human to enter outer space and orbit the Earth.

The news was electrifying yet not entirely unexpected. For the past few days American intelligence sources had been predicting that the Russians might attempt such a feat. A few hours before the news conference began, viewers in Europe had seen the first live television images ever broadcast from inside the Soviet Union. A somewhat blurry transmission from Moscow presented a carefully orchestrated display in which Gagarin stepped from an airplane and strode across a red carpet toward a jubilant and beaming Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. The two men were then seen proceeding in a motorcade to a massive celebration in Red Square.