The Gemini astronauts would in effect open the doorway to a moon landing—an event not measured then in decades but a mere handful of years.
—FRANCIS FRENCH AND COLIN BURGESS, IN THE SHADOW OF THE MOON (2007)
The week President Kennedy was touring America’s space facilities and giving his soaring speech at Rice University, thirty-two Project Gemini finalists were at their homes scattered around the country, nervously waiting to see who would make the final cut. Those thirty-two candidates had been selected after rigorous examination that past July, from a larger pool of more than two hundred fifty applicants, all of them white men. NASA’s evaluation of the semifinalists was grueling, with the prospects required to show extraordinary psychological and physical fortitude as well as quick problem-solving skills. Nine slots were available for NASA’s second astronaut group—two more than for Mercury because Gemini’s launch schedule would be much more compressed: twelve missions within 603 days (one every 60 days), versus Mercury’s six missions over 451 days (one every 112 days). Colin Burgess, a space historian who befriended the men who were selected to the “New Nine,” as well as others who came close, concluded that “NASA was not looking for another bunch of accomplished stick-and-rudder test pilots with limited academic credentials. They wanted intellectual giants to help to solve the complex problems of space exploration. All nine of those new astronauts had excelled academically at whatever institution they attended.”
James Webb was indeed adamant about the need for academic excellence, with his ideal candidates having both high-performance jet experience and first-rate records from great university engineering programs like Purdue, Caltech, Princeton, UCLA, Georgia Tech, and Michigan. Kennedy, known for staffing his entire administration with so-called whiz kids, heartily approved of Webb’s recruitment priorities. The final list of would-be Gemini astronauts included six civilians, a nod to the president’s emphasis on the peaceful nature of America’s space program. On average, the Gemini “New Nine” astronaut was thirty-two and a half years old, about two years younger than the average Mercury astronaut was when selected. At five feet nine inches, the composite selectee was an inch shorter and also four pounds lighter than his Mercury predecessors.
On September 14, 1962, while Kennedy was at the America’s Cup race in Newport, the nine men chosen to be Gemini astronauts received phone calls from NASA—not from Webb, but from Deke Slayton, one of the current Mercury Seven astronauts. Neil Armstrong, who already worked for NASA evaluating high-altitude aircraft at Edwards Air Force Base, got a call from Slayton. With little preamble, he asked Armstrong if he still wanted to be an astronaut.
Armstrong, the man who had once described his engineer personality as “born under the second law of thermodynamics, steeped in the steam tables, in love with free-body diagrams, transformed by Laplace, and propelled by compressible flow,” was ready for the moment—or for rejection. Ever since Glenn’s unforgettable Friendship 7 mission, Armstrong had grown excited about traveling to space. Not long before the call from Slayton, Armstrong had analyzed his chances and concluded that he could be passed over for any number of reasons, all of them beyond his control. Now, though pleased by his selection, he reacted with little apparent emotion. “Yes, sir,” he said matter-of-factly. With that, Slayton instructed Armstrong to report to Houston, where he was to check into the Rice Hotel under the code name “Max Peck,” rendezvous with the other eight selectees, and get ready for the big announcement three days later.
On September 16, the Gemini Nine, having successfully evaded reporters, met in secret at Ellington Air Force Base, southeast of Houston. Having seen the two-person Gemini prototype in St. Louis, Kennedy had lit a fire to fast-track Project Gemini and announce the chosen astronauts. Bob Gilruth, director of the Marshall Space Flight Center, told the astronauts that there would be eleven or twelve manned Gemini flights, and that one of the nine of them would inevitably be the first man on the moon. “There’ll be plenty of missions,” Gilruth promised, “for all of you.”
With great fanfare, the Gemini Nine astronauts were presented to the public on September 17 at the University of Houston’s eighteen-hundred-seat Cullen Auditorium. It was the Mercury Seven rollout of 1958 all over again. Cheers erupted when the roster was read: civilian pilots Neil Armstrong and Elliot M. See Jr.; air force officers Frank Borman, James McDivitt, Thomas Stafford, and Edward White; and naval aviators Charles Conrad, James A. Lovell, and John W. Young. Some in the press dubbed the New Nine the “Kennedy moon corps.” Armstrong biographer James Hansen later wrote, “In the opinion of individuals responsible for the early manned space program, it was unquestionably the best all-around group of astronauts ever assembled.”
Gemini was a workhorse project tasked with solving in space the challenges of actualizing Kennedy’s moonshot. The Gemini Nine were the lucky test pilots given the first opportunity to experiment with the cutting-edge aerospace hardware, to perfect the complicated techniques of rendezvous and conducting docking maneuvers in Earth’s orbit. They would learn how to spacewalk, to master guided reentry, and to maneuver spacecraft into higher and lower orbits.
Congress began debating an increase in the NASA budget just a few days after the Gemini Nine’s introduction. With the 1962 midterm elections just weeks away, Democrats wanted to show progress on Kennedy’s moon pledge, but costs were rising, as was congressional concern. By September, Gemini’s projected price tag had risen from $530 million to $745 million, due to the need to design and develop new systems rather than reuse those from Project Mercury. The New Nine rollout was one administration gambit to avoid a cost-analysis debate in Congress. Another was also on deck: in just three weeks, Mercury astronaut Wally Schirra would be lofted into space for the fifth manned Mercury mission, scheduled to make six orbits of Earth. If he was successful, steadfast manned space Democrats expected to reap rewards on Election Day.
FOR A YEAR and a half, President Kennedy had been inspiring Americans to slip the bonds of Earth and literally reach for the moon, pushing past limits that had constrained mankind through its entire history. For some, however, there was still a glass ceiling beyond which they weren’t permitted to go.
Inspired by Kennedy’s vision, women were lobbying hard to join America’s astronaut corps, applying to NASA, working behind the scenes, and inundating the White House with enlistment pleas. For example, Kennedy received a letter from Susan Marie Scott of Kentucky asking to audition for Gemini. His secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, forwarded the letter to O. B. Lloyd Jr., director of NASA’s Office of Public Services and Information. In his response to Scott, Lloyd wrote, “Many women are employed in the program—some of them are in extremely important scientific posts. But we have no present plans to employ women in spaceflights. There are no women pilots to our knowledge, who have the degrees of scientific and flight training required for the success of those missions. Since there is no shortage of qualified male candidates, there is no need to train women for space flight at this stage in the program.”
As Scott found out, it was impossible for women to be genuinely considered for Project Gemini. An applicant needed a superior recommendation from a military or scientific employer and a laudable record as a test pilot. Service in the Korean War was also looked upon favorably. All the criteria were tilted toward male applicants only. “NASA did not state gender in its selection requirements, but more than two decades of discrimination by the military didn’t give the agency any qualified choice other than men,” Francis French and Colin Burgess wrote in Into the Silent Sea. “Not only did the military still bar women from flying high-performance aircraft except in extremely rare circumstances, but civilian companies rarely hired women pilots either, let alone trained them as test pilots.”
While African Americans’ struggle for civil rights was beginning to shake the pillars of Jim Crow, female pilots were struggling for equality in their fight against NASA’s patriarchy. They did, however, have one offbeat ally in Dr. William “Randy” Lovelace II. An aeromedicine pioneer, Lovelace was chairman of the Special Advisory Committee on Life Science and from his office in New Mexico had conducted the intensive medical examinations that had helped winnow down the first class of likely astronauts to the final Mercury Seven. Although holding what were then traditional views on women’s roles in American society, Lovelace believed that women were better equipped physiologically for NASA space travel because they were, on average, shorter and smaller than men, needed less food and oxygen, and had better blood circulation and fewer cardiac problems.
After meeting American aviator Geraldyn “Jerrie” Cobb in 1959, Lovelace invited her to take the same tests as the Mercury astronauts—and was amazed at her aptitude. Beginning in 1960, Lovelace had begun testing this hypothesis at his privately financed Lovelace Foundation for Medical Education and Research, in Albuquerque. Intrigued as to whether Cobb was an anomaly, Lovelace accepted a financial gift from the fabled pilot Jackie Cochran, the leader of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) program in World War II, to examine eighteen other seasoned female pilots at his New Mexico clinic for secret testing. These women, all dexterous airplane pilots with commercial ratings, were put through a series of rigorous tests on centrifuges to simulate the pressure of launch and reentry. They graduated with flying colors. When word of the tests leaked to the media, the top twelve, along with Jerrie Cobb, were christened the “Mercury 13.” These women pilots ranged in age from twenty-three to forty-one, and ran the gamut from flight instructors to homemakers and from scientists to bush pilots.
Just before these women finalists were to gather at the Naval School of Aviation Medicine, in Pensacola, Florida, for advanced aeromedical examinations, they received telegrams informing them that their program was being effectively shut down. NASA hadn’t certified gender in Lovelace’s work. In fact, when NASA leadership learned of the experiment, they made it abundantly clear that the agency wasn’t going to employ women astronauts. The impetus for NASA’s decision was Kennedy’s May 25, 1961, moonshot announcement, and Webb’s belief that all the agency’s astronaut-training energy had to be targeted toward that lunar objective. In other words, it wasn’t the time for a shift on gender. That didn’t stop the American press from lionizing these women’s test results. Some of the choice headlines read: “Astrogals Can’t Wait for Space,” “Spunky Mom Eyes Heavens,” and “Why Not ‘Astronauttes’ Also?”
Fueled by the media attention and desire to shatter the glass ceiling, Janey Briggs Hart refused to give up her space dream easily. The wife of Michigan senator Phil Hart and the mother of eight children, Hart orchestrated a letter-writing campaign to the White House, arguing that women deserved to be included in the NASA space program. The pressure became so intense that Kennedy booted the issue to Congress, where a special subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics convened. On the first day of testimony, Hart and the other women pilots spoke righteously on behalf of women’s equality, and they were gaining momentum. Then, a most unlikely spoiler appeared before the subcommittee: John Glenn, who echoed Webb’s contention that funding women in space drained money needed for the moonshot, and was generally a waste of tax dollars. “I think this gets back to the way our social order is organized,” Glenn testified. “It is just fact. The men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them. The fact that women are not in the field is a fact of our social order.”
The Mercury 13 pilots were devastated that Glenn, whom they all admired, was opposed to female astronauts, putting the U.S. space program on the wrong side of history. The following year, the Soviets did what the Americans wouldn’t, making Valentina Tereshkova the first woman in space. At heart, this was a stunt to one-up the Americans. Lifting off aboard Vostok 6 on June 16, 1963, Tereshkova became a global hero after making forty-eight Earth orbits over the course of seventy hours, at one point coming within three kilometers of Cosmonaut Valery Bykovsky, who’d launched aboard Vostok 5 just two days earlier. Frustrated that NASA had flummoxed his Mercury 13 project, Lovelace kept fighting a rearguard action from his home in New Mexico, hoping for the inclusion of a woman astronaut on the Gemini roster. But in December 1965, he and his wife were killed in a plane crash, depriving the Mercury 13 of their most devoted advocate. It would be nearly twenty years before Sally Ride became the first American woman in space, lifting off aboard the Space Shuttle flight STS-7—the Challenger—on June 18, 1983.
From a wide-lens historical perspective, the Mercury 13 were fighting an uphill battle for job equality that was central to the women’s movement. During the Kennedy years, women earned only 60 percent of the average wage for men. For the exact same job, a working man earned $5,147, to $3,283 for women; it was imperative that this gap be closed. While Kennedy was progressive on such women’s issues as day care centers, fair employment, and college admissions, he behaved as if the U.S. military workforce, with space exploration folded in, were a male prerogative. Nevertheless, Kennedy’s Equal Pay Act of 1963 (which prohibited arbitrary discrimination against women in the workforce) was a step in the right direction. Frances Perkins, America’s first woman cabinet secretary (under FDR), believed the law, along with the 1963 publication of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, was the opening salvo of the modern women’s movement.
The idea of an African American, Hispanic, Native American, or Jewish American astronaut quite simply wasn’t in NASA’s organizational plan for the early 1960s. WASP supremacy still held sway. Many of NASA’s facilities were in the Deep South and Southwest, where racial segregation roadblocks were only starting to be dismantled. For example, when the black mathematician Julius Montgomery was hired at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, he faced harassment from NASA employees who were members of the Ku Klux Klan. White employees wouldn’t say hello or even look at Montgomery. But in the end he prevailed by performing flawlessly. After the Civil Rights Act of 1964, NASA finally made long-overdue strides toward having a diversified, multicultural workforce.
COMPARED TO THE other Gemini recruits and the stymied women of Mercury 13, Wally Schirra seemed, at age thirty-nine, a grand old man of space exploration. But after a series of delays, he was finally poised to become America’s newest space hero, scheduled to launch on October 3, 1962, aboard a Mercury-Atlas 8 (MA-8).
Schirra was born into an aviation family in New Jersey in 1923. His father, Walter M. Schirra Sr., flew bombing sorties over Germany during World War I for the Royal Canadian Air Force. After the war, the elder Schirra made a living barnstorming at county fairs in New Jersey and Pennsylvania. Florence Schirra, the astronaut’s mother, joined her husband doing wing-walking stunts to awestruck crowds. By the time Wally was fifteen, he was already flying airplanes by himself.
After excelling in high school, Schirra attended the U.S. Naval Academy in Annapolis from 1942 to 1945 and served during the final months of the war aboard a navy cruiser. After the war, he married Josephine “Jo” Cook of Seattle (stepdaughter of Admiral James L. Holloway) and trained as an aviator at the Naval Air Station in Pensacola, earning his wings and joining Fighter Squadron 71 in 1948. Other pilots were in awe of Schirra’s natural ability and technical skills. Determined to shatter aviation records, he became only the second navy pilot to log one thousand hours in jet aircraft. When the Korean War erupted, Schirra was seconded by the navy to the air force, where he became operations officer with the 154th Fighter-Bomber Squadron. Between 1951 and 1952, Schirra flew ninety combat missions, usually in an F-84 Thunderjet, downing one MiG-15 and inflicting serious damage on two others. After receiving the Distinguished Flying Cross and the Air Medal with oak leaf cluster for distinguished wartime service, he moved on to a career as a test pilot and aeronautical engineer.
In the late 1950s, Schirra bounced around navy test schools, participating in the unveiling of the Sidewinder missile and the F7U-3 Cutlass jet fighter. At one test, Schirra fired a Sidewinder missile, and the projectile doubled back and started trailing his jet, forcing him into evasive maneuvers. Nobody ever doubted that Wally had the right stuff. Once chosen as a Mercury Seven astronaut, he earned the reputation of being the comedian of the bunch, loving to muck it up with reporters. “Levity is the lubricant of a crisis,” he explained of his prankish nature. In truth, his carefree personality belied an extremely careful and diligent work ethic. “My rambunctious approach to the off-duty aspect of life may have fooled some people, but this was not a game, I often said to myself. This is for real. I was not interested in the glamour of being a space hero. Instead, I was interested in getting up and getting back.”
Set to become the fifth American in space and to make the country’s third orbital spaceflight, Schirra named his spacecraft Sigma 7—“7” for the Mercury Seven and “Sigma” after the Greek symbol for the sum of the elements of an equation, a mark long adopted for engineering excellence. “Not a fancy name like Freedom or Faith,” he recalled. “Not that I didn’t appreciate those names, but I wanted to prove that it was a team of people working together to make this vehicle go. . . . I thought that it was a very well-made machine, and very, very carefully designed.”
During his nine-hour-plus mission on October 3, Schirra reported back to Mercury Control everything he did or encountered, his voice relayed via the Telstar satellite to TV and radio audiences around the world. As Schirra checked off his list, it became clear to Flight Director Chris Kraft at NASA that MA-8 was going to be the smoothest mission yet. After orbiting six times, Sigma 7 splashed down northeast of Midway Island in the Pacific, where Schirra was retrieved by Navy SEALs from the recovery ship USS Kearsarge. “In mission control, I winked at Deke Slayton and lit up my now traditional cigar,” Kraft wrote in Flight. “Schirra was the perfect astronaut and he’d just carried out a perfect mission.”
At the White House, a busy Kennedy couldn’t watch the whole nine-hour MA-8 mission, but he received a constant flow of updates. “The President was always extremely interested in these flights,” Evelyn Lincoln recalled, “and there was a great deal of excitement around the White House. Commander Walter Schirra was in the space ship early in the morning, waiting. I had my television set tuned in for the event. What a relief when he got into orbit.” A delighted and breathless Lincoln kept her boss apprised of the flight every half hour.
Rather than scientific experimentation, the mission of Sigma 7 focused mostly on engineering: the performance and operation of the spacecraft, the capabilities of global spacecraft tracking and communication systems, and the effects of prolonged microgravity on Schirra himself. However, Schirra had also carried a special two-and-a-half-pound handheld camera while aboard, recording the marvelous imagery of the star-filled adventure. With preparation considered meticulous even for a well-trained NASA astronaut, Schirra piloted his mission so free of flaws that reporters considered the feat almost mundane. “I ate and I wasn’t hungry,” he said. “The tubes of peaches, meat, and vegetables were tasty.” He even refined a method of cruising that saved enough fuel to repeat the six orbits, had he been allowed and had there been enough oxygen on board. Slayton and Shepard later wrote that Schirra’s efficiency “would have turned a robot green with envy.”
NASA officials congratulated themselves that it had been the right mission at exactly the right time. There were plenty of reasons for American pride in Sigma 7. Nevertheless, its nine-hour flight still paled in comparison to the latest Soviet space accomplishments. Two months before Schirra’s flight, the USSR had smashed the record for human endurance in space when cosmonaut Andriyan Nikolayev piloted Vostok 3 through sixty-four Earth orbits over the course of a three-day, twenty-two-hour, and twenty-eight-minute flight. Nikolayev also made a creditable attempt at staging a space rendezvous with Vostok 4, which had been launched one day after his own flight. In the United States, space enthusiasts were acutely aware that America’s deficit in the space race was not closing.
Eleven days passed before arrangements were made for Schirra to visit the White House. In the interim, he was honored fifty different ways in Houston. At a press conference at Rice University, Schirra boasted that the flight had been free of problems, that he’d experienced no difficulties with weightlessness, and that Mercury was now ready for a full one-day mission. Finally, on October 16, Schirra, Jo, and their two young children arrived at the White House at meet the president.
At 9:25 a.m., the Schirras were led into the Oval Office. Five-year-old Suzanne Schirra lit up the room as she gazed wide-eyed and bashful at the handsome president and said quietly, “I know who you are!” Kennedy responded with the delight he naturally found in children, taking special care to entertain the girl and her twelve-year-old brother, Walter III. Sitting in his favorite seat, a rocking chair, he chatted with each member of the family. JFK’s composed ability to contain his darkest concerns that morning was so effective that Schirra detected nothing out of the ordinary. At ten o’clock, the astronaut and his family were politely escorted out. The Associated Press reporter covering the half-hour visit described the president’s demeanor as “homey” and “relaxed.” But this time, his elusive charm masked a darker reality.
TWENTY-FIVE MINUTES BEFORE the Schirras had arrived, McGeorge Bundy had asked to see the president in the White House family quarters. The national security advisor disclosed that the CIA had analyzed surveillance photos of Cuba taken on October 14, confirming the construction of launch bases for Soviet nuclear missiles just a hundred miles from American soil. It was the news that Kennedy had dreaded.
Starting at 11:30 a.m., Kennedy spent hours in the Cabinet Room with the senior advisors who comprised the Executive Committee of the National Security Council (ExComm). Deputy CIA director General Marshall Carter showed Kennedy the top-secret U-2 photos taken over Cuba, pinpointing fourteen canvas-covered missile trailers. As various possibilities for a U.S. response were proposed and discussed (including air strikes, invasion, and naval blockade), it became clear that any military response could easily result in all-out war. The president calmly wondered aloud about Khrushchev’s ballsy gamble. “Why would the Soviets permit nuclear war to begin under that sort of half-assed way?” he mused.
As ExComm members and their staffs worked to game out America’s options, Kennedy attempted to carry on with his other presidential duties, including a campaign swing through the Midwest on behalf of Democratic candidates. Seemingly undistracted, he pulled off speeches in Cincinnati, Ohio, and Muskegon, Michigan, with aplomb. At a hundred-dollar-a-seat fund-raiser in Chicago, however, speaking before five thousand people and a large broadcast audience, a distracted JFK skipped over large sections of his prepared text, ending well short of his allotted time. With dead air looming on televisions across metropolitan Chicago, Mayor Richard Daley rushed to the podium and hastily called for a benediction. Claiming a head cold, Kennedy canceled the rest of his Midwest tour and returned to Washington.
On October 18, the National Photograph Interpretation Center advised the administration that two medium-range ballistic missile sites in Cuba could be operational within weeks. Two days of ExComm meetings in the White House ensued, and on October 22, an unruffled Kennedy made the missile crisis public in a televised address. Stating firmly that the United States would never tolerate Soviet offensive weapons in the Caribbean, the president announced the implementation of a naval quarantine designed to prevent any Soviet ships carrying offensive weapons from reaching Cuba.
Like the rest of the country, officials and staff at NASA wrestled with anxiety as the long-burning fuse of the Cold War seemed close to reaching its charge. “For almost two weeks,” recalled Assistant Flight Director Gene Krantz, “the space program was understandably preoccupied with the blockade and possible invasion of Cuba, which could presage an all-out nuclear conflict with Russia.” Krantz, an air force veteran like many of his NASA colleagues, had already been notified that his reserve unit was on standby, and he could be called up at any time.
On October 28, after thirteen nerve-racking days and a complex series of both public and back-channel communications, Kennedy and Khrushchev agreed on measures to bring a peaceful resolution to what became known as the Cuban Missile Crisis. The Soviet premier agreed to remove the missile bases from Cuba and allow on-site verification by UN inspectors. Kennedy promised that America wouldn’t invade Cuba, and secretly committed to removing U.S. Jupiter missiles from Turkey within a year. Essesntially, a trade of the two sets of weapons—U.S. Jupiters and Soviet IRBMs—ultimately ended the crisis.
A gaggle of customers in a California appliance store gather in the electronics department on October 22, 1962, to watch President John F. Kennedy deliver a televised address to the nation on the subject of the Cuban Missile Crisis.
Ralph Crane/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images
The searing experience of contemplating nuclear war in real time had tempered both Khrushchev and Kennedy, who’d been stunned by how ready his army and air force officers were to go to war. “You will never know,” Kennedy confided to Ambassador John Kenneth Galbraith, “how much bad advice I had.” The Cold War still held both leaders in its iron grip, but the experience of living with the specter of annihilation for thirteen terrifying days motivated the two men to open up a telephone hotline between Moscow and Washington, as well as to begin a thoughtful correspondence aimed at lessening global tensions. Chastened, they embarked on negotiations for what became the Limited Nuclear Test Ban Treaty, signed the following August to restrict atmospheric and underwater nuclear tests.
FROM THE BEGINNING of his administration, Kennedy’s attitude toward space exploration had evolved, although not in a straight line. Never blinded by the lure of the stars, he instead balanced his idealism with pragmatism, seeking a mission that would renew America. World War II and the Cold War, he knew, had aged the country. With instincts reinforced by his own life experiences, he realized that the United States needed youth and new frontiers. It needed energy, originality, optimism, and a sense of both individual achievement and teamwork. The Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs gave all that in spades. JFK always knew that his greatest potential legacy could accrue from ending the Cold War with the Soviets, but the moon mission was his backup plan, giving the possibility of a huge geopolitical win—an appealing prospect to a man who’d been raised to believe that second place was for losers.
But in the aftermath of the Cuban Missile Crisis, the president began questioning both his own moon mandate and the reasoning underlying the whole U.S.-Soviet space race. Growing tension existed in American space circles between those with scientific goals and those who simply wanted to beat the Soviets to the moon. Both sides had points to make, but with an annual government allocation that had grown from $500 million to $3.7 billion in just two years, they were encountering resistance in Congress. On November 5, the New York Times put the problem succinctly into a headline: “Space Goals Put Strain on Budget; NASA, for First Time, Must Tailor Projects to Funds.” The post-Gagarin days of blank checks were coming to an end, and NASA faced the prospect of its manned space program starving its work on communications satellites, meteorite studies, Mars probes, and other unmanned space science missions—the one area where the United States was verifiably ahead of the USSR.
The space agency was suddenly scrutinized for expenditures. Worsening the situation were rumors that Brainerd Holmes, NASA’s director of the Office of Manned Space Flight, was campaigning for a steep hike in the budget in order to put a man on the moon by 1966, four years ahead of the Kennedy-imposed deadline. If the expanded funding wasn’t forthcoming, then Holmes advocated concentrating all NASA’s assets only on the moonshot.
Some members of Congress felt they were being blackmailed by the forty-year-old Holmes, a formidable figure who had proved himself as something of a marvel in the complex field of missile development at RCA in the 1950s. Because his launches, however complex, always worked the first time, he was known as “One-Shot” Holmes. The year before, he’d quit the corporate world for the high-pressure job in Washington, DC, responsible for America’s efforts to put a man on the moon. On his desk, Holmes kept a rocket-shaped toy bank given to him by a friend, which he claimed would “keep me thinking of the taxpayers’ money.”
Now, in late 1962, Holmes suggested accelerating the Apollo program despite the added cost. He had heard President Kennedy, during his Rice University speech, call the challenge of reaching the moon “one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win.” To One-Shot Holmes, that meant giving Projects Gemini and Apollo everything NASA had, and then some.
Interestingly, Holmes’s immediate superior, James Webb, heard the Rice speech differently. After listing some of the scientific and unmanned space shots on which NASA was working, Kennedy had actually said that the manned moon mission was “one which we intend to win, along with the others.” Refusing to forfeit the “others” even for the sake of Apollo, Webb was irritated by Holmes’s confusing press comments. Because of Holmes’s record of success, however, and the respect Webb accorded him, his stance had to be taken seriously. Webb wrote to the president describing the cost of moving up the date of the moonshot. Kennedy, wanting all the facts before weighing in on the increasingly contentious issue, asked David Bell at the Bureau of the Budget to give a candid assessment of the situation at NASA.
Meanwhile, it was still election season. On November 6, the Democrats lost seats in the House of Representatives, but maintained a comfortable majority (258 to 176), while in the Senate, their majority grew. Kennedy had avoided the midterm election jinx that has historically plagued presidents. In this election, the ranks of Kennedy Democrats in the Senate had grown. This was stupendously good news for the administration and for NASA. Most gratifying of all to the president was that his youngest brother, Edward “Ted” Kennedy, won a special election in Massachusetts to represent the state as its junior senator. It was the seat JFK had held prior to his election as president.
On November 13, David Bell presented the results of his assessment on NASA spending to the president, reporting that the agency was managed quite well by Webb and Dryden, with Projects Gemini and Apollo generally on track and waste being kept to a minimum. But one conclusion stood out: according to Bell, there was no moon race with the Soviets. For all their Sputniks and Vostoks, Bell saw zero evidence that the Soviets were constructing facilities for boosters and capsules capable of taking cosmonauts to the moon. Khrushchev’s space efforts were geared more toward an eventual USSR space station, not a moon walk.
While Bell’s report was largely supportive of the planned Apollo spending, its contention that the United States was the sole competitor in the moon race effectively bolstered Webb’s position. Poking a hole in Holmes’s moon-only argument, the report stressed the equal importance of “programs for scientific investigations in space, in which the United States from the start has been recognized as the world leader.”
“NASA takes the view,” Bell noted, that if reductions were to be made to the agency’s budget, they should be applied “at least in part to the manned lunar landing program.”
ON NOVEMBER 21, 1962, Kennedy summoned his space advisors to the White House for a frank discussion of the merits of space exploration and the moonshot. The transcript of the resulting arguments that day is invaluable to historians. While the president mostly listened, his comments mirrored his record over the course of his administration, seeing the adventure of space exploration from several strategic viewpoints. All the while, JFK looked for ways to tie NASA’s massive effort more closely with the economic health of America. In the end, he made his convictions and priorities clear.
The participants in the Cabinet Room included Webb, Wiesner, Bell, Dryden, Seamans, and Holmes. After a general discussion of a proposed $440 million supplement to the NASA budget, Webb allowed that in terms of accelerating the moon program, “we’re prepared to move if you really want to put it on a crash basis.” Kennedy asked Webb pointedly whether he thought of the moon mission as the “top-priority program of the Agency.” Sensing that Kennedy was in no mood for vague indirection or double-talk, Webb responded bluntly:
JAMES WEBB: No, sir, I do not. I think it is one of the top-priority programs, but . . . [s]everal scientific disciplines that are very powerful begin to converge on this area.
PRESIDENT KENNEDY: Jim, I think it is the top priority. I think we ought to have that very clear. Some of these other programs can slip six months, or nine months, and nothing strategic is going to happen. . . . But this is important for political reasons, international political reasons. This is, whether we like it or not, in a sense a race. If we get second to the Moon, it’s nice, but it’s like being second any time. So that if we’re second by six months, because we didn’t give it the kind of priority, then of course that would be very serious. So I think we have to take the view that this is the top priority with us.
Although Bell had presented the president with CIA U-2 reconnaissance discounting the possibility of a Soviet moonshot, that hadn’t been enough to shake JFK’s focus and commitment. Having never lost an election himself, and having just retained his party’s congressional majority and elected his brother to the Senate, Kennedy had no intention of being second. And he never forgot that the Apollo moonshot wouldn’t happen without continuing public support demonstrated by robust budgets and tireless insistence on beating the Soviets. Webb continued to argue for prioritizing other, unmanned scientific ventures by appealing to Kennedy’s old-style, Ivy League faith in the academic elite:
WEBB: The people that are going to furnish the brainwork, the real brainwork, on which the future space power of this nation for twenty-five or a hundred years are going be to made, have got some doubts about it and . . .
KENNEDY: Doubts about what, with this program?
WEBB: As to whether the actual landing on the moon is what you call the highest priority.
KENNEDY: What do they think is the highest priority?
WEBB: They think the highest priority is to understand the environment and . . . the areas of the laws of nature that operate out there as they apply backwards into space. You can say it this way. I think Jerry [Wiesner] ought to talk on this rather than me, but the scientists in the nuclear field have penetrated right into the most minute areas of the nucleus and the sub-particles of the nucleus. Now here, out in the universe, you’ve got the same general kind of a structure, but you can do it on a massive universal scale.
KENNEDY: I agree that we’re interested in this, but we can wait six months on all of it.
The six-month time frame was Kennedy’s way of expressing priority: which NASA projects could wait six months and which might fail due to that much delay. Webb next tried to convince the president that the drawn-out time frame of the moonshot would eventually cost it public support, while a schedule of exciting if unmanned experiments would generate broader enthusiasm in Congress and beyond. Also, if evidence emerged that the Soviets weren’t actually racing America to the moon, the funding for Project Apollo would be put in a stranglehold. An animated disagreement ensued, ending only when JFK pulled rank. It remains unclear, however, whether Webb was speaking from the heart or playing devil’s advocate to draw Kennedy out.
KENNEDY: I would certainly not favor spending six or seven billion dollars to find out about space no matter how on the schedule we’re doing. I would spread it out over a five- or ten-year period. But we can spend it on . . . Why aren’t we spending seven million dollars on getting fresh water from saltwater, when we’re spending seven billion dollars to find out about space? Obviously, you wouldn’t put it on that priority except for the defense implications. And the second point is the fact that the Soviet Union has made this a test of the system. So that’s why we’re doing it. So I think we’ve got to take the view that this is the key program. The rest of this . . . we can find out all about it, but there’s a lot of things we can find out about; we need to find out about cancer and everything else.
WEBB: But you see, when you talk about this, it’s very hard to draw a line between what . . .
KENNEDY: Everything that we do ought to really be tied into getting onto the Moon ahead of the Russians.
WEBB: Why can’t it be tied to preeminence in space, which are your own . . .
KENNEDY: Because, by God, we keep, we’ve been telling everybody we’re preeminent in space for five years and nobody believes it because they have the booster and the satellite. We know all about the number of satellites we put up, two or three times the number of the Soviet Union . . . we’re ahead scientifically. It’s like that instrument you got up at Stanford which is costing us a hundred and twenty-five million dollars and everybody tells me that we’re the number one in the world. And what is it? I can’t think what it is. [Interruption from multiple speakers: “The linear accelerator.”] I’m sorry, that’s wonderful, but nobody knows anything about it!
Webb pointed out that only a full range of progress could usher in major advancements in space, but Kennedy bluntly wrested the argument back to his way of thinking:
KENNEDY: We ought to get it, you know, really clear that the policy ought to be that this is the top-priority program of the Agency, and one of the two things, except for defense, the top priority of the United States government. I think that that is the position we ought to take. Now, this may not change anything about that schedule, but at least we ought to be clear, otherwise we shouldn’t be spending this kind of money because I’m not that interested in space. I think it’s good; I think we ought to know about it; we’re ready to spend reasonable amounts of money. But we’re talking about these fantastic expenditures which wreck our budget and all these other domestic programs and the only justification for it, in my opinion, to do it in this time or fashion, is because we hope to beat them and demonstrate that starting behind, as we did by a couple years, by God, we passed them.
In their final exchange of the day on space, Webb unwittingly made Kennedy’s point for him.
WEBB: In Berlin you spent six billion a year adding to your military budget because the Russians acted the way they did. And I have some feeling that you might not have been as successful on Cuba if we hadn’t flown John Glenn and demonstrated we had a real overall technical capability here.
KENNEDY: We agree. That’s why we want to put this program . . . That’s the dramatic evidence that we’re preeminent in space.
When listening to this White House conversation, it is important to remember that Webb spoke nonstop and was difficult to turn off. When Kennedy cut Webb off by saying, “I’m not that interested in space,” he was cutting to the chase. Unlike with his public speeches, Kennedy wasn’t in a “New Ocean” feel-good science state of mind. He wanted to drill home to Webb that the moonshot should be sold as a serious Cold War national security priority.
In other words, Kennedy wasn’t merely arguing for the Apollo moon program. With a sweeping sense of history, he was arguing for a new era in which technological superiority was power. For the same reason that emperors of old paraded their armies in the streets, the president’s moon program was a showcase for America’s technological might, and its contracts with corporations such as McDonnell Aircraft, North American Aviation, Boeing, Chrysler, and others were a collaborative government–private sector project for the new technologies that would guarantee the American century. To voters, he presented NASA’s moonshot as a proof of national greatness. But at the same time, in internal discussions, he described it as a negotiating weapon in the Cold War struggle with Khrushchev: Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo as Olympian deterrents to contain Soviet expansionism.