Scott Carpenter, Telstar, and Presidential Space Touring
Space represents the modern frontier for extending humanity’s research into the unknown. Our commitment to manned programs must remain strong even in the face of adversity and tragedy. This is our history and the legacy of all who fly.
—JOHN GLENN
Had John F. Kennedy lived to a fitting old age, he might have looked back on the late winter and spring of 1962 as the sweet spot of his presidency. In early April, his approval rating stood at 79 percent, as reported by pollster George Gallup. The number of Americans who reported disapproving of him was just 12 percent, with 9 percent expressing no opinion. Even more startling than the overall high rating was the fact that most respondents couldn’t point to anything that Kennedy had done wrong. “He has yet to provoke any solid bloc of opposition to his programs or actions,” Gallup noted on April 2. Only seven months out from the midterm elections, the Republicans still hadn’t found a major issue to damage Kennedy and his party. The only public gripe, according to the poll, was that he was absent from the White House too often, notably at his family’s oceanfront homes on Cape Cod and Palm Beach.
If America’s aerospace industry shareholders had been polled, Kennedy would probably have scored 100 percent favorable. Instead of dispensing the entire plum of Project Apollo development to a single contractor, the administration spread the financial allocations among hundreds of happy companies. It was the New Frontier’s infrastructure stimulus approach applied to a lunar voyage, space exploration, computer science, and aeronautical activities in general, making it possible for NASA “to acquire billions’ worth of exotic new hardware and specialized features without overrunning the initial cost estimates and without even the slightest hint of any procurement scandal in that vast empire.”
As noted, due to the Saturn V rocket’s massive size and complexity its three stages would be produced by three separate companies. Boeing won the contract to build the first stage (SI-IC, with five F-1 engines) at Michoud Operations in New Orleans, Louisiana, a 1.8-million-square-foot manufacturing facility that had built Patton and Sherman tanks for the Korean War. Located beside Bayou Sauvage and offering ship access to the Gulf of Mexico, Michoud adopted the slogan “from muskrats to moon ships.” Just weeks after choosing Michoud, NASA determined that the Saturn V test site would be on the Pearl River, in Hancock County, in southwestern Mississippi, only a half-hour drive from Michoud.
Saturn V’s second stage would be manufactured by North American Aviation in Seal Beach, California, and its third stage would be built by Douglas Aircraft at Huntington Beach, California. Rocketdyne, a subsidiary of North America located near Los Angeles, supplied engines for the Saturn V: five of the F-1 type for the first stage; five of the J-2 design, using a different fuel mixture, for the second stage; and one J-2 for the third stage, which sent the future Apollo astronauts to the moon. Two hundred times heavier when assembled than von Braun’s V-2, the three-stage Saturn V rocket would stand 363 feet taller than the Statue of Liberty. Numerous other auxiliary companies—including Collins Radio, and Minneapolis-Honeywell—also received lucrative NASA contracts for the Saturn V.
Besides John Glenn’s successful Mercury mission, there had been another event in early 1962 that contributed mightily to JFK’s record level of popularity. On February 14, all three networks broadcast A Tour of the White House with Mrs. John F. Kennedy, an hour-long special in which Jacqueline Kennedy unveiled the just-renovated Executive Mansion. Solidifying the unique rapport the Kennedy family had with the American public, the First Lady made the $2 million restoration seem like a grand triumph, representing the nation’s history and esteemed place in the world. Her eyes bright and vivid, and displaying style, grace, and poise as she thoughtfully and politely guided viewers from room to room, the First Lady won over slews of new admirers from around the world. On the night of the broadcast, three out of four TVs in America were tuned in.
Underneath all the New Frontier post-Glenn optimism and the First Lady’s refreshing elegance, the protracted crisis in Berlin still simmered. Although the possibility of a U.S.-Soviet war over the city had grown more remote, it remained Europe’s scariest Cold War hotspot. Every day of his presidency, Kennedy worried about the fate of West Berliners, and he was determined to keep NATO fortified. The U.S. State Department grappled on a daily basis with East Berliners engaged in escape attempts. On the broadest scale, fear of nuclear war was widespread. Convinced the Soviets would only respect American toughness, JFK endorsed a Pentagon recommendation to deploy von Braun–designed Jupiter nuclear-armed missiles in Turkey and Italy. All the while, the White House maintained a tactical back channel of diplomatic communication with the Kremlin. Out of the public glare, the Cold War rivals were at least covertly talking about cooperation in outer space and nuclear test bans, even as both pressed ahead with ICBM development and advanced reconnaissance systems that could be construed as “weaponizing space.”
THROUGHOUT 1962, NASA continued to be the focus of federal space-related initiatives and congressional appropriations. The army was the most cooperative branch of the armed services in ceding the space initiative to NASA, acquiescing to NASA’s takeover of former army jewels such as Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Huntsville’s Marshall Space Flight Center. The navy likewise agreed to leave the lion’s share of space research activities to NASA, though it stubbornly retained control over the development of an array of satellites, especially those designed for mapping and positioning.
That left the air force, which was still unmollified about a civilian-run NASA. Its sticking point, as ever, was that space was air, and if the air force dominated the air, as its name affirmed, then it should dominate space as well. While the navy and army could move aside for NASA without losing much stature, the youngest military branch might easily have renamed itself the “space force” in order to drive its point home. Instead, it renamed the field in question, promoting the word aerospace to help justify expanding its aeronautical mission beyond the atmosphere. Determined not to be bigfooted by NASA, the air force hotly pursued Defense Department grants for major space probe and launch initiatives, especially for the continued development of the Dyna-Soar reusable rocket masterminded by ex-Peenemünder Walter Dornberger. According to the Kennedy administration’s guiding edict, space programs in any of the military branches had to be nonaggressive in nature. Peaceful space exploration had to be the modus operandi of space research—even if the potential for a more offensive military use was close at hand.
Hoping for diplomatic negotiations that would prevent the militarization of space, Kennedy grasped at the trial balloon Khrushchev had sent up after Glenn’s Friendship 7 flight. On March 7, 1962, he wrote a three-page letter to the Soviet premier suggesting that the two superpowers “could render no greater service to mankind through our space programs than by the joint establishment of an early operational weather satellite system.” His feelers to Khrushchev mentioned future collaborations, such as the exchange of space-related equipment, scientific data, and aerospace personnel. Toward the end of his letter, Kennedy once again offered to share the glory, and the expense, of manned space exploration. “Some possibilities are not yet precisely identifiable,” Kennedy wrote, “but should become clear as the space programs of our two countries proceed. In the case of others[,] it may be possible to start planning together now. For example, we might cooperate in unmanned exploration of the lunar surface, or we might commence now the mutual definition of steps to be taken in sequence for an exhaustive scientific investigation of the planets Mars or Venus, including consideration of the possible utility of manned flight in such programs.”
Kennedy didn’t specifically mention the demilitarization of space in this letter, but it was inherently on the negotiating table. Behind the scenes, the White House had made it well known to the USSR and Great Britain that the president was hungry for a nuclear test ban treaty. Furthermore, the State Department dangled before Khrushchev the possibility of joint U.S.-Soviet weather satellite systems, cooperation on mapping Earth’s magnetic fields from high altitudes, and shared data on space medicine being innovated at the U.S. Air Force School of Aerospace Medicine, in Texas. Even the possibility of a futuristic joint U.S.-Soviet manned flight to Mars or Venus was open to negotiation. On the peace offense, the surprisingly openhanded Kennedy boasted of NASA’s steady technological advancements, knowing full well that the Kremlin loathed and feared transparency. America continued broadcasting its Cape Canaveral satellite and manned space launches on live TV, while the Soviets maintained ironclad secrecy. The U.S. government’s message was crystal-clear: JFK’s New Frontier stood for freedom and openness. By contrast, the Kremlin was all about hidden totalitarian agendas. After John Glenn’s mission, a fair-minded judge could assert that the United States was beating the USSR in the race for global prestige.
On the same day that Kennedy sent his friendly proposal to Khrushchev, he was asked at a news conference about the possibility of joint U.S.-Soviet exploration of outer space. The president referred to his March 7 letter and promised to release its contents. What Kennedy wanted the world to appreciate was that the United States thought of space as a peace initiative—but in reality, this was only half true.
Khrushchev, fearful of being duped by the American leader, was less attached to the humanistic goal of reserving space for scientific exploration. Nevertheless, the Soviet desire for peace exemplified by the nuclear slogan “Let the atom be a worker, not a soldier” also applied to their space rockets, where excitement centered on the hope that they would blaze a trail of scientific research, not be destroyers of cities. But behind the scenes, the Soviets were willing to weaponize space, having begun high-altitude testing of nuclear bombs during the last half of 1961, extending a program of surface and air-dropped atmospheric tests that had resulted in 2,014 detonations between 1949 and 1962.
Back in 1958, when Kennedy was running for reelection to the U.S. Senate, the Eisenhower administration had also detonated a series of nuclear warheads in space. At that time, the Soviets had taken the high road and chosen to impose a moratorium on themselves—which Khrushchev broke in late August 1961, under pressure from hard-line militarists. The Soviets’ first launch during Kennedy’s presidency exploded a nuclear warhead within Earth’s atmosphere. A pair of tests that followed in October broke through and detonated in outer space. After that, the Soviet tests abruptly stopped. In the aftermath, Kennedy was determined not to allow the Soviets a technological advantage, yet he remained intent on brokering a ban on atmospheric nuclear testing, fearing another tit-for-tat dynamic that could lead to disaster. Careful never to describe the cosmos as a Cold War battlefield, Kennedy told Time’s Hugh Sidey, “Ever since the longbow, when man has developed new weapons and stockpiled them, somebody has come along and used them. I don’t know how we escape it with nuclear weapons.”
When in December 1961 Khrushchev described how easily the Soviets could substitute nuclear explosives for cosmonauts in orbiting Vostok rockets, Kennedy grew alarmed. Space started approximately sixty-two miles above Earth—declared such by the founding director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Theodore von Kármán—and Kennedy wanted it maintained as a world peace demarcation line. Defense Secretary McNamara immediately authorized a leading Southern California think tank, the Aerospace Corporation, to work on a U.S. antiballistic missile defense system. By no coincidence, this company, founded only two years before in the midst of the Dyna-Soar’s development, was closely aligned with the air force. Within a few weeks, however, the president rethought the idea, rescinded the brief to Aerospace Corporation, and refocused on deescalating the Cold War in space—a wiser long-term policy objective, he believed, than diverting money to build a multibillion-dollar cocoon over American airspace. Nearly a quarter century later, President Ronald Reagan would propose a similar program, the Strategic Defense Initiative (popularly known as “Star Wars”), which would cost taxpayers at least $30 billion before being scrapped due to technical failures, budgetary constraints, and concerns that it could complicate arms-limitation talks. Under President Bill Clinton, however, SDI was reformed into the Ballistic Defense Organization. (The extent of U.S. defensive coverage today is classified. But, according to what is in the public domain, programs already in place provide detection and tracking capabilities, and ground- and sea-based interceptors can launch kinetic vehicles to collide with incoming ICBMs.)
Kennedy devoted extensive time throughout early 1962 to conferring on the proper response to the Soviets’ atmospheric nuclear testing of the year before. Glenn Seaborg, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, became the president’s key advisor on the subject of renewed American testing in the upper atmosphere and beyond. Considered one of the most esteemed chemists in American history, Seaborg was a Nobel Prize winner for his early-1950s work on ten transuranium elements. JFK trusted Seaborg because he was passionate about the peaceful uses of atomic energy. “[The president] made it clear,” Seaborg recalled, “at every meeting during January, February, and March, that he had not yet made the definitive decision to resume tests.”
According to Seaborg, Kennedy truly wanted to give Khrushchev every chance to agree to a nuclear test ban in 1962. There was no bluffing going on. Finally, in early April, the Kremlin announced its plan to renew testing at a later date. The president cringed with disapproval. Having failed to move U.S.-Soviet negotiations closer to a ban, and feeling backed into a corner, he reluctantly authorized a series of American atmospheric nuclear tests, the last of which would explode well into space. “On April 23, just two days before the opening of the test series, Secretary [of State Dean] Rusk called me to say that he had talked to the President who was at that time at Palm Beach,” recalled Seaborg, “and the President . . . should get in touch with Chairman Khrushchev to suggest that after the completion of the U.S. atmospheric test series and the presumed second Russian test series that we all expected would be undertaken, the two countries should sign a treaty banning atmospheric tests. This was one of the earliest indications of his thinking in that regard.” Disappointing peace activists, who had been counting on Kennedy to ban these high-radiation explosions, the administration was straddling the tricky line between the peaceful use of space and the air force’s desire to make it into a Cold War battlefield.
When Kennedy learned that around two hundred executives from the defense industry, government, and local communities were meeting in Wilton, Connecticut, to discuss aerospace technology, he asked his advisor Roswell Gilpatric to deliver a major policy speech there. Gilpatric, who had served as undersecretary of the air force in the Truman administration, worked as a corporate lawyer in New York during the Eisenhower years. Now, as number two at the Pentagon, he had become indispensable to McNamara while earning the full confidence of the president. In fact, fearing that McNamara was inexperienced in foreign policy, JFK had handpicked Gilpatric to be his own private eyes and ears in the Pentagon.
The first fifteen minutes of Gilpatric’s Wilton speech before these aerospace aficionados was boilerplate. But then, quite unexpectedly, he shifted gears and emphasized that the “long-standing proposal for cooperation with Russia was to ensure that space was used purely for peaceful purposes.” This was still, Gilpatric said, “the national goal.” Nevertheless, the United States would be “very ill-advised, if we did not hedge our bets. . . . We ought to be ready . . . [and] anticipate the ability of the Soviets at some time to use space offensively.” Gilpatric added that while the Pentagon hadn’t completed its strategic defense planning, he could foresee the development of “space systems which could be used to protect the peaceful or other defensive satellites now in operation.”
Kennedy had adroitly used Gilpatric as a stalking horse to deliver a message to Khrushchev: the U.S. military-technology-industrial order was ready to meet any and all Soviet boasts and threats—even, if necessary, in outer space. In fact, the secretary of defense had already given the army top-secret authorization to proceed with the development of an antisatellite system under the name Mudflap. (This Defense Department directive was so secret that space historians question whether even the White House or air force was fully aware of it.) Gilpatric’s comments, however, were widely read. “The furor that greeted these reports was immense,” historian Paul Stares wrote in Space Weapons and US Strategy. “Not only did it appear to signal a reversal of the administration’s position on the peaceful exploitation of space, but it also seemed to members of Congress that the Defense Department was competing with NASA.”
On May 13, three days after Gilpatric’s speech, Kennedy was at the first conference of the United Nations’ new eighteen-nation Disarmament Commission, in Geneva, Switzerland, preparing to propose a four-point plan to ensure peace in space. The initial business of the conference was a discussion of Soviet and U.S. draft treaties to ban all nuclear testing, but the president’s negotiations were soon bringing space into the discussion, and the domestic dustup over Gilpatric’s Wilton speech may have been timed to enhance the American negotiators’ proposals on space in general. For the time being, though, the USSR was unwilling to budge on nearly anything. “The reports from [our] representatives in Geneva during the spring of 1962,” said Seaborg, “reflected a strong sense of frustration and discouragement.”
While the Soviets blocked progress on Kennedy’s efforts regarding the peaceful use of space, they accepted his open-handed proposal to cooperate in the management of weather satellites. In another friendly development, the Soviet cosmonaut Gherman Titov visited America with his wife, Tamara, in early May, and was greeted by a festive atmosphere of genuine admiration. The couple was hosted by John and Annie Glenn, who took them to see the memorials and museums on the capital’s National Mall. The Titovs were mobbed by adoring fans and space enthusiasts everywhere they went around the Tidal Basin. On May 3, the two astronauts had a private meeting at the White House with the president, who welcomed them in a statesmanlike way, heavier on diplomatic protocol than raw enthusiasm. But as positive as the satellite cooperation and Titov’s goodwill visit might have been, they proved only a temporary reprieve from the two superpowers’ head-on competition for space dominance.
BY THE END of May, NASA was preparing for its next launch, which appeared at first glance to be a repeat of the Glenn mission: three orbits, with much the same equipment. However, the Mercury astronaut chosen, Scott Carpenter, would be expected to perform additional tasks while in space. No “man in a can” or a glorified chimpanzee, Carpenter would conduct a greater number of scientific experiments than had been attempted on any previous Mercury mission.
A native of Boulder, Colorado, Carpenter had won the coveted fourth astronaut slot after Deke Slayton was benched over medical concerns. A longtime navy test pilot known as the free spirit of the Mercury Seven, he was a natural flier, blessed with the ability to stay tranquil in high-tension situations. He had learned to fly planes over the Front Range of the Rockies, where weather patterns can shift dramatically. His Colorado upbringing may also have contributed to his ability to acclimate quickly to high-altitude situations without feeling lightheaded or oxygen hungry.
During the Korean War, Carpenter had flown numerous reconnaissance and antisubmarine missions along both the Siberian and Chinese coasts. After three deployments, he returned stateside to serve at the Naval Test Pilot School in Patuxent River and, later, at the Navy Line School in Monterey, California. If Shepard, Grissom, and Glenn were renowned as fighter pilots, all steady hands with good judgment, Carpenter stood out for his phenomenal visual capabilities. As legend had it, from a cramped plane cockpit, he could see the minutest details at the most extreme ranges, a real asset in the high-altitude surveillance business.
At 7:45 a.m. on May 24, President Kennedy watched from his White House bedroom as Carpenter’s Aurora 7 lifted off from Cape Canaveral; for the rest of the morning, the president darted out of meetings to catch further televised coverage. Television was indeed the magic machine of the era, bringing live events into the public’s living rooms. Carpenter’s three-orbit mission lasted almost five hours, his Mercury-Atlas 7 achieving a maximum altitude of 164 miles and an orbital velocity of 17,532 miles per hour. The number of flight “firsts” Carpenter accomplished included eating solid food in space and conducting successful experiments regarding liquid behavior in a weightless state. He took nineteen beautiful photographs of the flattened sun at orbit sunset. With his keen eyes, he identified particles of frozen liquid from outside the Aurora 7 and reported back to Mercury Control about the phenomenon. Chris Kraft, the Cape Canaveral flight director, thought that Carpenter conversed with himself too much, peering out the porthole, soaking up the sublime majesty of space. “He was completely ignoring our request to check his instruments,” Kraft later wrote. “I swore an oath that Scott Carpenter would never fly again. He didn’t.”
In preparation for reentry, Carpenter made several mistakes, including one that wasted fuel. Finally, when he fired his retrorockets on reentry three seconds late, his capsule overshot the planned splashdown point by 250 miles. Carpenter had to escape the Aurora 7 before it sank, scrambling into an inflatable raft on a rough sea northeast of Puerto Rico. He was out of radio contact for thirty-nine minutes, with the ocean heaving mightily. Nobody knew whether he’d survived. After three hours lost at sea, he was saved by two frogmen who jumped from an SC-54 transport plane, finding him “smiling, happy, and not at all tired.” He was retrieved by an H5S-2 helicopter and whisked to the deck of the USS Intrepid.
The breakdown of procedure on reentry embarrassed NASA brass. Fingers were pointed in various directions, and Carpenter took the brunt for being too fascinated with the beauty of space and negligent of technical procedures—which was somewhat unfair, since mechanical issues also played a part. As the second U.S. astronaut to orbit Earth, Carpenter had performed well, racking up NASA’s fourth successful Mercury mission and moving the agency one more stride closer to the moon. Nevertheless, Chris Kraft, in his memoir, claims he drummed Carpenter out of the astronaut corps because of his poor performance on the Mercury mission.
An ebullient and grateful Kennedy made his now-traditional call, reaching Carpenter aboard the USS Intrepid. With heartfelt congratulations, he invited the astronaut to visit the White House down the line. However, no special ceremony was planned for Carpenter, indicating that the president and NASA were putting the brakes on the celebratory machine that had greeted the three previous Mercury astronauts. On June 5, Carpenter, his wife, Rene, and their four children spent about twenty minutes with Kennedy in the Oval Office. During the middle of a serious space-related conversation, one of Carpenter’s young daughters belted out, “Where is Macaroni?” referring to the Kennedy family pony. Then her sister shouted accusingly, “And Caroline?” While the adults laughed, the two Carpenter kids truly wanted answers. “President Kennedy bent down to their faces,” Carpenter recalled in his memoir For Spacious Skies. “Macaroni, America’s most famous Pony, needed pasture and lived in the country, [the president] explained. The girls stood their ground unsmiling.”
Even after the Carpenters’ embrace by Kennedy, rumors continued to circulate that the astronaut had panicked during his mission. A decade later, Tom Wolfe came to Carpenter’s defense in The Right Stuff. “One might argue that Carpenter had mishandled reentry,” Wolfe wrote, “but to accuse him of panic made no sense in the light of the telemetered data concerning his heart rate and respiratory rate.” A year and a half after his Mercury flight, Carpenter took a leave of absence from NASA to participate in a navy project called Sealab. He later returned to the space program, then retired early.
What Carpenter didn’t know during his White House meeting was that Kennedy was grappling with a frightening nuclear issue. Twenty-four hours before he arrived, the United States had sent up an army Thor rocket equipped with a nuclear bomb set to explode at an altitude of thirty miles. It was part of the series of high-altitude tests grouped together as Operation Fishbowl, which would culminate with nuclear weapons detonated in outer space. The operation was in direct response to the August 30, 1961, announcement by the Soviets that they were ending their three-year moratorium on testing. During the first attempted launch, on June 2, radar lost track of the missile, and concerns over the safety of ships and aircraft on its trajectory led to the mission’s being aborted, the rocket falling into the North Pacific near Johnston Atoll. Though the test itself hadn’t occurred, the incident pointedly told the Soviet intelligence officers in the KGB that the United States was on the verge of matching and exceeding their own high-altitude nuclear testing from the previous year. Predictably, Moscow’s diplomats at the Geneva disarmament talks were incensed, feeling double-crossed by the Kennedy administration. With bombastic overreaction, Khrushchev accused Kennedy of planning imminent attacks on Soviet cities from space.
For the time being, Kennedy’s plan to coax the Soviets into a test ban agreement was shipwrecked. The American tests continued, and the next rocket, code-named Starfish Prime and manufactured by Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, was launched on July 9, 1962. Its W49 warhead detonated at a record altitude of nearly 250 miles, well into outer space, but its power was such that the enormous fireball could be seen flashing like heat lightning, even through heavy cloud cover, as far away as Honolulu. It was by far the largest nuclear weapon detonated to date, one hundred times more powerful than the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.
Mercury astronaut Scott Carpenter of Colorado dressed for spaceflight. He was a U.S. Navy officer and aviator. On May 24, 1962, Carpenter flew into space atop the Mercury-Atlas 7 rocket, becoming the second American (after John Glenn) to orbit the Earth.
Art Rickerby/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
By design, Starfish Prime augmented the radiation found in the Van Allen belts, collections of charged particles circling Earth and held in place by the planet’s gravity, which had been discovered in 1958 by James Van Allen of the University of Iowa. The U.S. military believed that the megabomb could be used to make the Van Allen belts destructive to dangerous Soviet satellites. Only after the massive Starfish Prime explosion did NASA study whether the fortified Van Allen belts could also prevent a successful lunar mission. Kennedy, asked beforehand whether the test could adversely affect the belts, replied jauntily that “I know there has been disturbance about the Van Allen belt, but Van Allen says it is not going to affect the belt.” In truth, years passed before Earth and its atmosphere, and its belts, recovered from the seismic effects of Starfish Prime. There are numerous astrophysicists who believe they will never again be the same.
With the successful Glenn and Carpenter orbits balanced against the spectacularly ill-conceived experiment of Starfish Prime, the topic of space was a complicated one for the president. The flagging effort to bring nuclear disarmament to outer space weighed on JFK’s mind, and his first priority was to make sure space remained safe enough for an astronaut to fly through, and for a world population to live beneath. On the other hand, Kennedy did have some notable successes to boast of. Since his May 1961 moonshot challenge, the United States had launched at least fifteen orbital satellites. And on August 27, NASA’s Mariner 2 probe took off from Cape Canaveral, bound for Venus on a three-and-a-half-month scientific mission to measure planetary temperatures and the interplanetary magnetic field, and to take other readings en route. On December 14, 1962, Mariner 2 became the first spacecraft to fly past another planet, its perfect trajectory confirming Kennedy’s earlier description of it as “the most intricate instrument in the history of space science.”
What Kennedy kept in mind at all times was how NASA could help fuel technological innovation in the private sector. He was locked into Section 203(a)(3) of the Space Act of 1958, which charged NASA with the mandate to “provide for the widest and most practical appropriate dissemination of information concerning its activities and results thereof.” To Kennedy this meant shortening the time gap between NASA’s discovering new knowledge and its effective adaptation in the consumer marketplace. In June 1962 Kennedy approved the NASA Technology Utilization Program (originally called the Industrial Application Program) to quickly transfer new knowledge derived from places such as the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and Marshall Space Flight Center into the American manufacturing-innovation order. On July 10, in the spirit of the Technology Utilization Program, the United States made the first direct TV connection between continents after the launch of Telstar 1, an American Telephone and Telegraph Company (AT&T) active repeater satellite orbited by a NASA vehicle. Although the relays didn’t function properly at first, the coming months saw two successful test transmissions between receiving ground stations at Andover, Maine, and Goonhilly Downs, England. Then, on July 23, Telstar began transmitting regular civilian TV broadcasts between the United States and Europe. “Telstar was the first true communications satellite,” historian Michael J. Neufeld has explained, “one that could receive a signal from the ground, amplify it, and then immediately retransmit it,” enabling live overseas broadcasts of events such as the Olympic Games and European elections.
What differentiated Telstar from other Kennedy-era satellites was that its funding emanated principally from the private sector; AT&T boasted that the innovation was a tribute to the American free-enterprise system. And while NASA wasn’t directly responsible for the global commercial satellite system, it partnered with other groups, private and public, to make it a reality.
In an effort to prove that he was both pro–air force and pro-NASA Kennedy presented four X-15 pilots the Robert J. Collier Trophy in a Rose Garden ceremony. All the leaders in the aerospace industry attended, as did top Pentagon officials. Kennedy purposely had Webb and air force secretary Eugene Zuckert pose together in a photo op. The four honored pilots were Major Robert M. White, Joseph A. Walker, A. Scott Crossfield, and Commander Forrest Petersen.
AROUND THE TIME of the Collier Trophy ceremony and Telstar, NASA publicly announced the specific framework for the future Apollo lunar mission, formally adopting John Houbolt’s vision of a lunar orbit rendezvous, with one manned spacecraft circling the moon while a smaller craft detached for descent to the surface. With that framework in place, planning for future missions could be organized on a more detailed time line, bringing Apollo-Saturn into better focus. Feeling great about how his administration was shaping up, Kennedy installed a secret taping system in the White House, ostensibly to assist his future memoir. Space history would greatly benefit from the taped conversations Kennedy had in 1962 and 1963, particularly with James Webb.
NASA’s long, drawn-out Apollo plan didn’t thrill everyone. That summer of 1962, Senator Barry Goldwater gave a major speech on space policy, his first since Kennedy’s moonshot oration before Congress. His preference was to build up the air force, not NASA moon ships. Goldwater, who had inherited a thriving Phoenix, Arizona, department store in 1930, had developed from an anti-New Dealer into a conservative Republican by the time of World War II. Joining the U.S. Army Air Corps, he flew cargo into war zones worldwide, making frequent runs between the United States and India. This assignment expanded to Goldwater’s piloting over “the Hump” of the Himalayas to deliver much-needed supplies to Chiang Kai-shek’s army in China. There were also flights to Nigeria, the Azores, Tunisia, and South America. Goldwater remained in the Arizona Air National Guard and Air Force Reserve after V-J Day, where he became a major general. All told, he flew more than 165 different planes, including the B-52 Stratofortress. Nobody could accuse him of not understanding military aviation.
Goldwater won a Senate seat in 1952, upsetting the incumbent Democrat, Ernest McFarland, then the Senate majority leader. Goldwater’s political influence was essential to the creation of the U.S. Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs (the visitor center of which is named after him), and by mid-1962 he was being mentioned as a possible 1964 presidential candidate, in part because he was a quintessential hawk. Given his bedrock devotion to the air force, Goldwater thought that civilian space should indeed be militarized. It bothered him that NASA was always trying to placate the United Nations instead of militarily winning the Cold War.
New York liberal governor Nelson Rockefeller was also considered a serious GOP presidential contender for 1964, standing at the opposite end of the Republican continuum from Goldwater. Richard Nixon, the center-right pragmatist, was now running for governor of California, and few thought he would be game for another presidential run after his 1960 loss. At the time of the Starfish Prime detonation, Rockefeller was leading Goldwater by a wide margin in opinion polls. As the Gallup poll showed and as Goldwater understood, Kennedy at that point remained unburdened by any meaningful negative issues—and so, on July 17, the Arizona senator set out to give the president one. “The clock has already run too long a course without our pursuing more vigorously a military space program,” Goldwater told the National Rocket Club. “How can we guarantee that space will be used for peaceful purposes without having the means to defend such a doctrine? It is our view that international law or agreement cannot exist without the physical means to enforce it.”
Hoping to score midterm election points, the articulate Goldwater also accused the Kennedy administration of “gambling with national survival” by making military objectives in space secondary to peaceful scientific accomplishments. The Arizona conservative-libertarian had an alternative: “The armed forces should already be planning the development as soon as possible of a completely integrated space warfare system. Perhaps I should say, a super-system, since it will be far more comprehensive than other so-called systems.”
Goldwater’s criticism of Kennedy appeared in newspapers across the country. His “gambling with national survival” theme gathered a measure of traction, and in August he and fellow Republicans in the Senate opened a debate on the subject of space militarization. It wasn’t exactly a prime spot on the calendar, tucked between summer recess and Labor Day, but they nevertheless made their prepared remarks in the full chamber. The administration was fully aware that Goldwater was looking for an equivalent to JFK’s own charge of a “missile gap,” which had so sorely dogged Eisenhower and Nixon. When the Republicans criticized the president for having actually “deterred” the armed services from preparing for space warfare, the White House offered figures from the new budget, showing that spending on military space programs had doubled in just one year, coming in at $1.5 billion, an enormous sum for 1962.
Dean Acheson once quipped that if you hurled a brick down a blind alley at night and heard a loud squawk, you knew you’d hit a cat. In this spirit, Goldwater’s brick had clearly made an impact on Kennedy. On September 5, the White House announced that the president would visit space facilities in Alabama, Florida, Texas, and Missouri. In addition, Kennedy authorized Roswell Gilpatric to rewrite his upcoming speech in South Bend, Indiana, the new remarks directly rebuking Goldwater’s hawkish appraisal. “The United States believes that it is highly desirable for its own security and for the security of the world,” Gilpatric said in a kind of Kennedy Doctrine, “that the arms race should not be extended into outer space, and we are seeking in every feasible way to achieve that purpose.” After that, it was left for the media-savvy Kennedy himself to bring the force of his optimistic personality to bear on the NASA–versus–air force view of space, which he could do as no other. And, perhaps more importantly, to prepare for budget discussions.
ON SEPTEMBER 11, President Kennedy began his space tour in Huntsville, Alabama. It was the day after Supreme Court justice Hugo Black ordered that the University of Mississippi allow James Meredith, a twenty-nine-year-old African American and air force veteran, to attend fall classes at its segregated Oxford campus. That decision would roil the school and the nation at large, as Mississippi governor Ross Barnett ordered state troopers to bar Meredith from enrolling. The White House was working hard to change the Old South, partly by using NASA to bring high-tech jobs and a futuristic thinking to backward regions slow to abandon violent and self-defeating prejudice. Determined to win the Oxford showdown, the Kennedy administration hoped that the recent selection of Hancock County, Mississippi, on the banks of the Pearl River near Louisiana, as the site of an Apollo engine-testing facility—these days, it’s known as the John C. Stennis Space Center—might ameliorate the state’s anti-federal stance.
Despite the nettlesome civil rights crisis in Mississippi, Kennedy didn’t allow himself to be distracted from his central purpose in Huntsville: inspecting the development of the Saturn rocket, the moonshot vehicle. Rocket City, U.S.A., pulled out all the stops for Kennedy’s visit, honoring him with Dixieland jazz and a twenty-one-gun salute. Visiting both the Marshall Space Flight Center and the Ballistic Missile Agency base, Kennedy was hosted by von Braun, the city’s most famous citizen. When posing for photographs together, they looked like twin glamour doppelgängers cut from the same cloth. Pointing to a drawing of a Saturn rocket, the proud rocketeer enthused to his boss, “This is the vehicle designed to fulfill your promises to put a man on the moon in this decade.” Then, looking at the Saturn model first and then flashing his eyes at Kennedy, he added, “And, by God, we’ll do it!”
Von Braun gave the president a guided tour of a well-protected bunker from which they witnessed the static firing of a Saturn C-1 booster. Karl Heimburg, the Test Lab director, told JFK that this booster produced 1.3 million pounds of thrust, dwarfing anything the Soviets could muster. When the rocket’s engines fired up, on time to the millisecond, Kennedy’s jaw dropped. “Just as the last echoes reverberated among the huge test stands and blockhouses of the Marshall Center Test Lab, Kennedy grasped von Braun’s hand impulsively and congratulated him warmly,” von Braun’s friend and biographer Erik Bergaust recalled. “In a rare gesture of credit-sharing, von Braun waved his hand toward the team members nearby, in a display of appreciation.”
Even though NASA had already determined that lunar orbit rendezvous (LOR) was the approach it would use for landing on the moon, there remained dissension in the ranks. As von Braun explained the LOR concept, Kennedy slyly retorted, “I understand that Dr. Wiesner doesn’t agree with this,” then called his science advisor over for an impromptu debate, with Webb and Seamans joining in. White House aides, Vice President Johnson, and the press looked on in consternation. After five minutes, the debate between Wiesner and Webb got heated and Kennedy stepped in to play referee. “Well,” he said, “maybe we’ll have one more hearing and then we’ll close the books on this issue.”
At Marshall, Kennedy also visited the principal hangar where a Saturn 1 booster was housed. As von Braun used rocket models to give Kennedy a short, impromptu lecture, the camera-courting president positioned himself at the best angle to allow photographers to capture both him and the giant rocket behind him. Von Braun, however, kept moving closer to the president, inadvertently botching the photo op. One journalist blurted out, “Look at von Braun trying to upstage the President!” The assembled officials broke out in laughter. Miscues aside, it was evident at Huntsville that Kennedy had grown personally fond of von Braun. In the way he exuded controlled optimism while maintaining a subtly detached air, von Braun was perhaps closer to Kennedy in persona than any Democratic senator or congressman of the era.
The next leg of Kennedy’s space tour was to the NASA Launch Operations Center on Cape Canaveral. Quite spontaneously, Kennedy asked von Braun to travel there with him on Air Force One, so they could talk shop. He boarded without even a travel kit. On the plane, a reporter asked Kennedy who was going to win the LOR debate. “Jerry’s going to lose it, it’s obvious,” JFK joked, referring to Jerome Wiesner. “Webb’s got all the money, and Jerry’s only got me.” Kennedy was being funny; weeks earlier, LOR had been chosen, and there was no turning back.
At Cape Canaveral, the president inspected perhaps the most sophisticated high-technology government facility in the world in a two-and-a-half-hour walk-around. To his pleasure, the massive NASA funding he’d pushed for was being put to full use, with lunar expedition planning clearly in high gear. Watching the president move quickly around the facility, inspecting the assembly shop and educating himself about predetermined launch loads, spacecraft component separation, heat shield verification, and other minutiae of space preparation, one missile technician cried out, “Who said John Glenn is the fastest American alive? Jack Kennedy has him beat a mile!”
Even in Florida’s stultifying coastal humidity and mosquito hordes, Kennedy didn’t wilt. Beaming confidence and joviality, he gave a brief pep talk, proclaiming, “We shall be first!” On a helicopter tour with Gordon Cooper and Gus Grissom as seatmates, as ABC News space correspondent Jay Barbree recalled, the two Mercury astronauts pointed out the key infrastructure highlights of the growing moonport. “They showed him where one day a monster called Saturn V would stand on its launch pad,” Barbree wrote. “Here the name Apollo was gaining substance with every passing day.”