Missile Gaps and the Creation of NASA
Events since last October show all too clearly the public appeal and the Cold War importance of satellites. The importance to the Nation of a successful space program cannot be overestimated.
—W. H. PICKERING (DIRECTOR OF CALTECH’S JET PROPULSION LABORATORY) TO W. V. HOUSTON (PRESIDENT OF THE RICE INSTITUTE), APRIL 19, 1958
At the beginning of 1958, the U.S. Navy’s Vanguard program was still mired in the short-term effort to put a satellite into space. By then, Senator Kennedy had taken to calling the International Geophysical Year the “Geo Fizzle Year,” and his disillusionment with Eisenhower’s systematic approach to the space race was now a regular talking point. At a Harvard Club dinner in March, he even subtly mocked Vanguard’s first disastrous launch effort. “When the elevator at the Washington Monument caught fire in December and smoke poured out of the building,” he deadpanned, “one drunk staggered by and declared, ‘They will never get it off the ground.’”
That winter, both U.S. military rocket programs, the army’s Redstone project and the navy’s Vanguard, were so hungry for a satellite success that there was a race to launch first at Cape Canaveral. One launchpad was quickly repaired after sustaining damage in the December 6 Vanguard TV-3 explosion. The Vanguard team had a launch of their TV-3BU backup scheduled for February 3. The indefatigable von Braun, raring for the Army Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) in Huntsville to be first, had fulfilled his promise to Secretary of Defense Neil McElroy to deliver a modified Redstone rocket (the Jupiter-C) within ninety days. The pressure was on.
On January 31, 1958, von Braun was in the Communications Room at the Pentagon while his primary boss, Major General John Medaris, oversaw the launch from Cape Canaveral. He had gotten permission to launch the Jupiter-C as a counterstatement to Sputnik 2. According to Medaris’s journal, he “cautioned Dr. von Braun that there must be no public claims or discussion by employees of this agency which would falsely give the impression that we are in the satellite business.” This was the only day the army team had to test the white, cone-shaped Jupiter-C; after that, they’d have to cede the Cape Canaveral range to the navy’s Vanguard, which might then beat them into space. Von Braun knew that the Jupiter-C launch vehicle, a descendant of the Redstone, was ready, but the weather still had to cooperate.
Fickle weather was the bane of rocketeers the world over. Sudden wind or a lazy drizzle could scrub a launch. Fortunately for the army’s Redstone team, after two rainy days, the skies cleared that January evening. Cape Canaveral’s chief meteorologist, to von Braun’s relief, gave the launch a late-evening thumbs-up. At 10:48 p.m., the Jupiter-C rose exactly as planned, disappearing into the upper atmosphere and then beyond. The stages fell away on cue, leaving America’s first orbiting satellite, Explorer 1, circling the Earth. Von Braun was euphoric when he heard confirmation of Explorer’s radio signal, after it first circled Earth. At 1:00 a.m. on February 1, two hours after the launch, he emerged in a state of jubilation to announce his ABMA team’s success to the sleepy press corps, who had been given no advance warning of the launch. It was the triumph of the Huntsville team. Pleased with the breaking news, Secretary of the Army Wilber Brucker and Army Chief of Staff Maxwell Taylor congratulated von Braun and touted the launch as a great American achievement. Speaking on behalf of all the Operation Paperclip rocketeers, von Braun said, “It makes us feel that we paid back part of the debt of gratitude we owe this country.”
The next morning, newspapers and broadcasts on radio and TV ballyhooed the success of Explorer 1, which had brought relief and considerable delight to millions of Americans. Most major U.S. newspapers suggested that the Explorer was the first step toward American space supremacy. The San Francisco Chronicle headline read, “First U.S. Moon Circling Globe” while the Orlando Sentinel boasted, “Moon Over the Cape.” President Eisenhower was ecstatic upon hearing the news at his cottage at Georgia’s Augusta National Golf Club. Repeating the word wonderful three times when told of the success, he admitted, “I sure feel a lot better now,” though he also gave orders to “not make too big a hullabaloo over this.”
Three days after the Explorer launch, the navy’s Vanguard TV-3BU fared only a little better than its predecessor, breaking up in midair long before reaching space. But in the wake of Explorer’s success, the U.S. government wasn’t overly concerned. Major General Medaris boasted that the trifecta of the U.S. Army, academic science wizards, and the aerospace industry was indeed the winner of the interservice rivalry with the navy. “This is the beginning,” von Braun said, “in a long-range program to conquer outer space.”
Measuring just 6.4 inches in diameter, Explorer wasn’t very sophisticated or large—Nikita Khrushchev famously derided it as the “grapefruit satellite”—but it proved a trouper, orbiting Earth until 1970, while both Sputniks disintegrated upon reentry just months after launch. Not to be outdone in the competitive one-upmanship mode, the Soviets decided to launch a complex geophysical laboratory for their next satellite, and the TASS News Agency in Moscow claimed that the Kremlin’s advanced space initiative was the most ambitious yet, designing rockets that would go near the moon as soon as 1959. The U.S.-Soviet space race was accelerating.
Encouraged by Explorer but still wary of pouring funds into space, Congress began looking into upgrading the peaceful aspects of American space exploration. Likewise, President Eisenhower, in an effort to harness government activities in the technology field, ordered Defense Secretary McElroy to streamline space activities across the army, air force, and navy. As a result, the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) was created in February 1958 with a budget of $520 million. According to McElroy, ARPA’s mandate was to coordinate cutting-edge research in artificial satellites, planet probes, and other space-related endeavors. It would act as a technology hub, overseeing existing research laboratories within each branch of the military while also sponsoring scientific work in private business and academia—all with the goal of beating the Soviets in overall space innovation.
The first director of ARPA, a civilian named Roy Johnson, ran the agency on a lean budget. A former General Electric executive, he had a dubious grasp of science but surrounded himself with aerospace experts and astrophysicists who appreciated that the new agency could help them achieve space feats. Hunting for a big-league success, Johnson lobbied around U.S. government power corridors on behalf of his bagful of space imperatives.
One proposal, dubbed Project Orion, suggested using a series of atomic explosions to propel a spacecraft at high velocity, with great fuel efficiency. At first “it looked screwball,” Johnson told a congressional committee in 1959. “It doesn’t look so screwball today. . . . You use little bombs, and you use a lot of them. The trick is the creation of a spring mechanism on the platform.” The platform would provide a barrier between the nuclear bombs and the spaceship, somehow protecting astronauts onboard from the bombs’ concussions. While thermal nuclear propulsion in rocketry was the kind of research undertaken through ARPA contracts, the agency ultimately decided against bomb-powered spaceflight.
Having excoriated the Eisenhower administration the previous autumn over mismanagement of national security, Kennedy was not actively involved with ARPA’s plans to reorganize American space exploration. When, on March 17, Project Vanguard finally sent a navy satellite into orbit, Kennedy retired his space jokes. Running for reelection to the Senate, he instead switched gears, homing in on a recent National Intelligence Estimate that forecast the Kremlin would have a “first operational capability with up to ten prototype ICBMs” somewhere between mid-1958 and mid-1959. Such a nuclear arsenal in the hands of a leader like Khrushchev, who regularly threatened to “bury capitalism,” was represented to Kennedy as the most dangerous threat the United States had ever had to face—the possibility of total annihilation.
JFK also began taking control of some of the less decorous aspects of his personal narrative. Speaking that March at the Gridiron Club, during a glittering evening of status-conscious Washingtonian satire for which he prepared as though it were a Harvard final exam, Kennedy pulled from his jacket pocket what he said was a telegram, claiming it had just arrived from his “generous daddy.” Poking fun at himself, he then pretended to read his father’s faux message aloud: “Dear Jack, don’t buy a single vote more than is necessary. I’ll be damned if I’m going to pay for a landslide.” From that point on, he drew roars from the audience, often at his own expense. It was a hilarious night overall, and a watershed for Kennedy. After living ten years in Georgetown, he was at last part of the Washington establishment on his own terms: an independent Democrat, beholden to nobody.
In fact, Kennedy’s Gridiron jest belied the actual plan for his Senate campaign. Knowing full well that Joe Sr. would pour nearly unlimited funds into the coming presidential campaign, Jack was adamant that his Senate reelection campaign be bare bones. Not wanting the image that “Daddy buys my votes” to have a glimmer of truth in 1958, he made sure his campaign team was disciplined and effective in its own right. Hard as it might have been on his health, he returned to Massachusetts regularly and circulated around the nation tirelessly, delivering speech after speech.
On February 6, 1958, as noted, the Senate voted to establish a Special Committee on Space and Astronautics to map a more aggressive U.S. space policy. Lyndon Johnson had steamrolled the resolution through the Senate and succeeded with a 78–1 vote. The lone dissenter was Allen Ellender of Louisiana, a Democrat who rejected all new committees as a matter of principle. The new Senate committee was chaired by Johnson. Soon thereafter the House created its own Select Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration. Seizing on the post-Sputnik moment, both these legislative bodies were geared to advocate civilian space relevancy over those in the military. In the deliberations, Kennedy was merely a yes vote, while Johnson seized on space with assiduity. “LBJ was eager to get out front in space because it was the new national toy,” White House speechwriter Bryce Harlow believed. “He was trying to get to become President of the United States . . . so LBJ wanted to get in front of the space race so that everybody would say, ‘oh, that’s our leader.”
In the Senate, both Kennedy and Johnson vigorously championed a bill that was gathering steam: the National Defense Education Act (NDEA). Promising funding to encourage studies in the sciences and related subjects, the proposal was controversial in that it initiated direct federal aid for public schools, as well as universities and individual students. Some saw this as the beginning of the end for local control of public schools. The book Why Johnny Can’t Read and What You Can Do About It, published by Harper and Row, had hit the best-seller list, and Kennedy rode the wave. Nathan Pusey, the president of Harvard, joined JFK in insisting that a larger percentage of the GNP be directed toward education. Kennedy believed that science education was the critical component of American success in the space race. Today’s high-schoolers would be tomorrow’s physicists and astronomers. He supported the bill and also proved his ability to balance fairness with his ardent anticommunism by arguing against a provision requiring loan applicants to sign a loyalty oath. Once the NDEA was enacted, it indeed laid the groundwork for advancements in space by putting hundreds of thousands of students on track to what might be called science/space technology literacy.
At ARPA, Roy Johnson received a proposal in March 1958 that caught his fancy. Sporting the catchy name “Man-in-Space-Soonest” (MISS), the idea originated at the air force’s Air Research and Development Command, one of the many groups that had sprouted up throughout the military over which ARPA was supposed to ride herd. Within days, Johnson expressed his support for the $133 million program, telling the press, “The Air Force has a long-term development responsibility for manned spaceflight capability with the primary objective of accomplishing satellite flight as soon as technology permits.” The plan called for an eleven-step protocol, with each step constituting the launch of a more refined and sophisticated space vehicle, leading to the ultimate goal of a “Manned Space Flight to the Moon and Return.” The total projected cost of landing an American on the moon by 1965 was $1.5 billion (off by $24 billion and four years, as it turned out).
Even before the initial ARPA disbursement came through, the air force began work on MISS. Rudimentary plans were debated, scientists were contracted, and astronauts were recruited. Accordingly, the USAF asked Dr. Edward Teller, the so-called father of the hydrogen bomb, and several other members of the scientific technology elite to study the issue of human spaceflight and make recommendations for the future. Teller’s group concluded that the air force could place a human in orbit within two years, and urged that the department pursue this effort. Teller understood, however, that there was essentially no military reason for undertaking this mission and chose not to tie his recommendation to any specific rationale, falling back on a basic belief that the first nation to do so would accrue national prestige in a general manner. In early 1958, Lieutenant General Donald Putt, the USAF deputy chief of staff for development, informed NACA director Hugh Dryden of the air force’s intention of aggressively pursuing “a research vehicle program having as its objective the earliest possible manned orbital flight which will contribute substantially and essentially to follow-on scientific and military space systems.” Putt asked Dryden to collaborate in this effort, but with the NACA as a decidedly junior partner. Dryden agreed, but insisted on a nonmilitary lead in the effort. In the fall of 1958, the newly established NASA gained authority of MISS. It laid the groundwork for Project Mercury.
While space historians have often ignored or dismissed MISS as an underfunded effort, it accomplished three important things over the summer of 1958. First, it identified an easily quantified objective: a manned flight into space. Second, the eleven-step guideline provided a framework for realistic discussions about Americans in space. Third and most important for manned space in the coming decades, MISS proactively named the men who would venture into space.
That summer, nine names made the air force MISS list, all of them high-altitude test pilots who also fit the profile of being smaller, lighter men. Four fearless X-15 test pilots were on the roster: Iven Kincheloe, Joe Walker, Jack McKay, and Neil Armstrong. Also listed was Scott Crossfield, an aviation engineer from California who from 1946 to 1950 had worked in the University of Washington’s Kirsten Wind Tunnel, and who was slated to fly the X-15 even while helping to engineer it. Bob White, a New York City native, was equally at home in the cockpit and at the drawing board, having worked as a systems engineer at the Rome Air Development Center in upstate New York before seeking a billet at Edwards Air Force Base as a test pilot. Bob Rushworth was a stalwart of air force combat and experimental aviation. Alvin White (no relation to Bob White) was a World War II hero with a degree from the University of California, Berkeley. Bill Bridgeman, at forty-two the oldest of the MISS candidates, had risen from obscurity, flying relatively slow airplanes in the war and immediately afterward, and then becoming a flashy, record-breaking test pilot by 1951.
Among the X-15 pilots themselves, Joe Walker of Pennsylvania was already a legend of sorts. During World War II he earned the Distinguished Flying Cross by flying weather reconnaissance flights for the army air corps. Once the war ended, Walker left the air corps and joined the NACA’s Aircraft Engine Research Laboratory, in Cleveland. There he met his hero Jimmy Doolittle. Something of a daredevil, Walker would fly test planes to unprecedented altitudes. While Chuck Yeager became famous in 1947 for being the first person to break the sound barrier, it was Walker who logged more hours and went higher and faster on the X-15 than any other American pilot. On his inaugural X-15 flight, he was surprised by the sheer brute thrust of its rocket engines. “Oh my God!” he screamed into the radio as his body vibrated madly. The flight controller comically responded, “Yes? You called?” By 1951, Walker was relocated to the High-Speed Flight Research Station, in Edwards, California. With experience in practically every new type of chase plane or fighter jet, Walker was an obvious choice for the air force’s MISS group in 1958.
Denying that he wanted to break the speed records, Neil Armstrong was skeptical about the MISS program. The decorated Korean War pilot was not especially interested in sleek rockets or spaceships, insisting that he preferred planes with wings, which the X-15 had. Armstrong volunteered, and with the other candidate astronauts was put through several days of medical testing at Edwards Air Force Base. The patriotic Armstrong, in his non-flashy Ohio way, spoke for the rest of the corps when he said that if the country needed a Man-in-Space-Soonest, he was “in the line-up.”
With this lineup, MISS put faces on those American test pilots who, it was thought at the time, would someday conquer space. But this MISS program wasn’t publicized. President Eisenhower refused to seek headlines in mid-1958. That however, would change, with personal publicity soon becoming a hallmark of American space exploration. The air force promoted only a few articles about the MISS roster. But once Time, Life, Collier’s, and Newsweek turned von Braun into the Space Maestro of the 1950s, astronauts—as the aviators turned space travelers were now called—were also poised on the brink of fame.
If Eisenhower hadn’t been convinced previously of the need for an American presence in outer space, the six months since Sputnik had brought him a long way around from his naturally conservative fiscal beliefs—his modus operandi, he often claimed, was saving taxpayers “every possible dime.” In sending the legislation for a new space agency to Congress in April 1958, the president admitted that public relations had become the master. “The highest priority should go of course to space research with a military application,” he explained, “but for national morale, and to some extent national prestige, this should likewise be pushed through a separate agency.” Infuriating army, navy, and air force brass, the new space agency was to be run by civilians. Trying to calm the military’s disgruntlement, the president promised generals and admirals that every branch of the armed services would still play a major role in all space-related White House decisions.
ON APRIL 2, 1958, President Eisenhower spoke before a joint session of Congress to champion the creation of a civilian National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), which would incorporate the existing National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA), headquartered in Washington, DC, with laboratories in Hampton, Cleveland, and the San Francisco Bay area. Lyndon Johnson of Texas wasted no time in embracing Eisenhower’s call. Working with Senator Styles Bridges (R-New Hampshire), Johnson cosponsored the Senate version of the NASA bill and resisted arm-twisting efforts to militarize the adolescent American space program as the two senators worked on the legislation in bipartisan tandem with the Eisenhower administration.
The bill’s controversial proposal for civilian control of NASA led to months of negotiations on Capitol Hill, as the small contingent of space advocates in Congress was overwhelmed by the horde of legislators who demanded a say in military matters. Ultimately, the exact nature of NASA’s work was delineated as “exercising control over aeronautical and space activities sponsored by the United States,” with the military services retaining control over “activities peculiar to or primarily associated with the development of weapons systems, military operations, or the defense of the United States.”
Washington lawmakers sought expert opinions from the brightest minds working the aerospace beat for ideas on how NASA should function. Many thoughtful space leaders were put off by Lyndon Johnson’s claim that the “conquest of space” was a Cold War military necessity. “General Donald Putt recently called for an Air Force base on the moon,” director of Caltech’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory W. H. Pickering scoffed at the U.S. Air Force’s anti-NASA reluctance. “These and similar statements, I believe, are nonsense. The direct military value of a space program is almost zero. Satellites may have some value for reconnaissance or communications, though from a Russian point of view this would appear to be quite minor. Space vehicles capable of journeys to the moon or beyond appear to me to be of no military significance.”
General Jimmy Doolittle of the U.S. Air Force worried that the establishment of NASA meant the dissolution of the NACA. Since World War I, the Langley Research Center had been a pioneer in aviation research. Having served as chairman of the NACA right up until 1956, Doolittle knew virtually every employee there by name. “While we [the NACA] knew that missiles would have a very important place, while we knew that space must be explored, we were hesitant to turn over to the missile people and their supporters all of the funds that we had been receiving for the development of the airplane and associated equipment,” Doolittle wrote. “In retrospect, I think we all agree that we were wrong.”
When Eisenhower signed the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 on July 29, some generals and admirals dissented. Didn’t Eisenhower understand the horrific consequences of Sputnik? Did he really believe all that International Geophysical Year nonsense? Space was rapidly being militarized by the Soviets; therefore, America should follow suit. Speaking for many career soldiers, Lieutenant General Gilbert Trudeau, the head of U.S. Army Research and Development, expressed utter dismay. “I just can’t believe,” he said, “that anyone would take the capability of the most capable element in the Nation to explore space and do away with it.” Trudeau was just one of a chorus of pissed-off military officers. Dozens of Pentagon denizens insisted that outside civilian control over their aerospace research spelled doom. Of course, the Department of Defense and its predecessor, the War Department, had exerted such civilian power since the founding of the nation in 1789, and the Pentagon was stocked with civilian administrators. But that was different in one respect: while military personnel were trained to use intimidation and force to maintain the security of the United States and its interests abroad, NASA lacked that motivation, not being subordinated to military objectives. As Lyndon Johnson put it, space exploration for science’s sake was the civilian agency’s purported mandate (at least for public consumption).
Senator John F. Kennedy was still regularly using space exploration as a wedge issue with which to attack President Eisenhower. In a speech in western Pennsylvania on April 18, 1958, he delivered the bitter pill that “Americans were no longer the paramount power in arms, aid, trade or appeal to the underdeveloped world. We are acting largely only in reflex to Soviet initiative.” With the verve of a political powerhouse who had finally hit his stride, JFK suggested instead that “the United States for once appeal to the world with constructive solutions and our own vision of the future.” To Kennedy, trying to beat the USSR in the near vacuum of outer space, satellite by satellite, was untenable. Instead, the senator from Massachusetts asserted, the United States needed to rally toward the cause of beating the Soviets in intermediate-range ballistic missile (IRBM) and ICBM technology and accelerating the production schedules of the Atlas, Thor, Jupiter, and Titan rockets.
At the same time that Kennedy was delivering his anti-Eisenhower campaign speeches, an influential report appeared to support his positions. Deterrence and Survival in the Nuclear Age (commonly referred to as the Gaither Report, after H. Rowan Gaither, the chairman of a blue-ribbon commission whose aim was to offer Eisenhower advice on how to deal with the Soviet Union following Sputnik) called for a tougher stance with Moscow, more money for military research and missile development, and increased U.S. conventional forces. It also recommended that the United States develop an invulnerable second-strike force, warning of a threat that could become critical by 1959 or early 1960 because of the “unexpected Soviet development of the ICBM.” Kennedy embraced the Gaither Report as his personal white paper on the campaign trail and in press releases, while arguing his concern that the Western democracies possessed little reliable information about the USSR’s military and technological strengths and weaknesses. Even the most elementary facts were unavailable—the locations of railroads and bridges, the locations of factories and the nature and volume of their production, the size and readiness of the Soviet army, navy, and air force. The Soviet Union, JFK complained, was tightly wrapped in ominous secrecy.
On August 14, 1958, Kennedy put a new phrase into the American lexicon, earning himself a prominent citation in the Oxford English Dictionary. Speaking on the floor of the Senate, he said, “Our nation could have afforded, and can afford now, the steps necessary to close the missile gap.” That “missile gap” became Kennedy’s calling card, wielded as a campaign cudgel even though its contention—that the Soviets had hundreds of ICBMs whereas the United States hadn’t deployed a single one—proved to be a fiction. In the wake of JFK’s assertions, the air force and the CIA sparred over how advanced the Soviets actually were. Air force analysts backed Kennedy’s notion that the USSR had stockpiles of ICBMs. The CIA disagreed, insisting that there were fewer than a dozen. (Declassified documents would later show the CIA was right: at the time in question, the Kremlin had only four ICBMs.)
Kennedy’s missile gap was a direct descendant of the “bomber gap,” the mid-1950s fear that the Soviets had a strategic bomber force bigger than America’s. But U-2 reconnaissance flights over the USSR soon proved this to be a fable. Just as Kennedy was propagating the “missile gap” fallacy, U-2 photographs proved that the Soviets were behind in ICBM development. JFK wasn’t given this CIA intelligence until the summer of 1960. Like most U.S. senators in 1958, he had been briefed on the Corona intelligence satellite program, which Eisenhower approved that year. None of this mattered to him. His “missile gap” spiel was a winner. At heart, Kennedy was set in the technocratic idea that the federal government needed to play a huge role in spurring social change at home and abroad through the bankrolling of technological innovation and military modernization.
ON OCTOBER 1, 1958, President Eisenhower signed an executive order to put the National Aeronautics and Space Act into effect by transferring “Certain Functions from the Department of Defense to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration.” But sorting out civilian versus military control remained a tricky proposition. After all, rockets and satellites used very similar technology, infrastructure, and personnel regardless of whether they were deployed for military, scientific research, or communications purposes. Plus, the military was deeply territorial of the field. Von Braun and ABMA’s commander, Major General John Medaris, insisted that control of outer space was the sine qua non of national greatness and that the army had to lead the way. And when Medaris was asked in 1958 if outer space was going to become an active Cold War battleground, he snapped, “As sure as anything in the world.”
Medaris kept fighting, asserting to the Defense Department that giant boosters were needed for army rockets (though he couldn’t cite a single military reason) and calling Eisenhower’s plan to have NASA take over ABMA’s Redstone and Jupiter-C rocket development “rather disastrous.” This disapproval was shared by most top army brass, including such World War II air power generals as Carl Spaatz and Nathan F. Twining, who were dismayed that Eisenhower, of all people, seemed intent on punishing the army. Some, such as Medaris, eventually retired in protest, but all their carping was for naught. On October 21, 1959, after months of bickering, Eisenhower announced he would transfer ABMA, its massive new Saturn project, and von Braun’s Huntsville rocket team from the army to NASA in the coming year. Finally, space exploration and space technology were no longer only the purview of the U.S. military. Like its predecessor, the NACA, NASA would pursue astronomy and astronautics in the interest of scientific knowledge and engineering excellence, rather than building ICBMs for war. Inventing NASA didn’t mean that peaceful exploration of space and military usage could be divided with ease in the organization: the overlap between civilian and military spheres remained. The legislation that had created NASA specified that it make open to defense agencies “discoveries that have military value or significance,” and defense agencies were in turn to provide “information as to discoveries which have value of significance” to NASA.
WHEN NASA OPENED its doors in the fall of 1958, it had eight thousand employees, an annual budget of $100 million, and a main office in a brownstone in Northwest Washington (once the home of First Lady Dolley Madison), near the White House. Of course, the new agency was built on the foundation of the NACA, which had been set up back in 1915. The NACA’s Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory, in Virginia; Ames Aeronautical Laboratory, near San Francisco; Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena; and Lewis Flight Propulsion Laboratory, in Cleveland, were all incorporated into NASA, along with the two NACA test-flight facilities: the High-Speed Flight Research Stations at Edwards Air Force Base, in California (for high-speed-flight research), and Wallops Island, Virginia (for research rocket launches).
Furthermore, as noted, on July 1, 1960, the old ABMA facility in Huntsville was officially incorporated into NASA as the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center, dedicated to providing launch vehicles for space exploration. Eisenhower toured von Braun’s Space Science Laboratory and inspected a Saturn I rocket model, which would soon become the largest rocket ever built at the time. The two men were distrustful of each other, but for the sake of NASA they were cordial. Speaking before a huge crowd of ten thousand Alabama workers, Eisenhower praised von Braun’s work. “No doubt this mighty rocket system makes its presence known loudly—possibly too loudly—in Huntsville,” he said. “But it is a significant forward step in our conquest of space and for growth in human comprehension.”
Outside military circles, the creation of NASA wasn’t headline news. Root questions about its specific mandates were relegated to the inside pages of those newspapers that even noticed them. Within NASA, administrators had worked hard to guarantee a smooth transition. “Employees had been reassured for several weeks by the NACA headquarters and by Langley management that they were to come to work as always and do the same things they had been doing,” historian James Hansen explained. “Their jobs already had much to do with the nation’s quickly accelerating efforts to catch up with the Soviet Union and launch America into space. As NASA personnel, they were to keep up the good work.” On October 11, 1958, little more than a week after it became operational, the infant NASA launched Pioneer 1, a three-stage Thor-Able rocket carrying a scientific instrument package intended to measure cosmic radiation between Earth and the moon and to collect information about the lunar surface. Although it was intended to prove that America was in the space race for real, Pioneer 1 failed to achieve lunar orbit, and plunged back into Earth’s atmosphere after forty-three hours, having transmitted back a small quantity of useful scientific information.
To fill the job of NASA’s first chief administrator, Eisenhower approached Air Force General Jimmy Doolittle, who had helped guide the United States through the Sputnik, Vanguard, and Explorer events. However, Doolittle refused, opting instead for a more lucrative position as chairman of the board of TRW Space Technology Laboratories. The NACA director Hugh Dryden, a respected aerodynamicist, was also in the running, until his appearance before the House Select Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration proved a bust; he offered that sending a man into space “has about the same technical value as the circus stunt of shooting a young lady from a cannon.”
Following the false starts of Doolittle and Dryden, Eisenhower nominated T. Keith Glennan, president of the Case Institute of Technology (today’s Case Western Reserve University), in Cleveland. From 1950 to 1952, Glennan was head of the Atomic Energy Commission (a new federal agency) and had excelled. His appeal to Eisenhower was his fiscally conservative viewpoint. Glennan feared that the United States was rushing into a fast-water “socialist stream,” and he rejected the proposition that “the federal government is a 365-day Santa Claus and that the national treasure is an inexhaustible storehouse of largesse.” He was easily confirmed. Furthermore, Dryden disappointed hardened Cold Warriors on the committee when he said that “the prospective space programs are not such as to leapfrog the Soviets immediately or very soon.” Following Sputnik, they wanted a NASA administrator who wanted to beat the Soviets and seize U.S. leadership in space exploration.
Hugh Dryden became NASA’s first deputy administrator. Just three months after NASA was founded, Glennan and Dryden proclaimed Project Mercury America’s first manned space mission and named Robert Gilruth, a talented test engineer, to lead a new Space Task Group at the renamed Langley Research Center dedicated to jump-starting the mission. (The group’s base of operations would remain at Langley until NASA relocated manned space research to Houston in 1962.) NASA promised that a Mercury astronaut would be rocketed into space within three years.
Historian Walter A. McDougall wrote that once NASA was established, the big question was a Hamlet-like pondering over whether “to race, or not to race” the Soviets in space. Eisenhower was against both the militarization of space and trying to one-up the USSR feat by feat. The dilemma the president faced—one that Senator Kennedy exploited—was that each time the Kremlin put space points on the board, American critics charged that the Cold War was being lost. “One purpose of Eisenhower’s strategic posture was to restrain those elements in government and society willing to jettison limited government and financial restraint in order to prove American superiority,” McDougall wrote. “Racing with the Soviets for space spectaculars ran against his grain.”
Regardless of Eisenhower’s cautionary approach to the space race between the United States and the USSR, the competition was on. By the fall of 1958, America had launched four orbiting satellites to the Soviet Union’s three. The Soviet satellites were heavier, which was a credit to their advanced rocketry. While Explorer 1 was lighter, it was able to perform many of the same functions, which was a credit to American ingenuity. The U.S. satellites also uniformly orbited at a higher altitude than their Soviet counterparts. In anticipation of manned flight, the Soviet space program had performed more animal experiments in their laboratories, while the Americans felt confident that they had amassed more supporting data on the challenges of humans in space. On October 5, 1958, the New York Times correctly opined that “the balance sheet of a year of effort since Sputnik I would seem to indicate that the United States was not as far behind at the time of the launching of the first satellite as was then imagined.”
The Soviets had enjoyed an early advantage because their space-related activities were streamlined, with the central government in Moscow overseeing all developments in IRBMs, ICBMs, satellites, and space exploration. But the Kremlin didn’t yet realize what an advantage unfettered capitalism would be to the Americans’ new space agency. Established with the cooperaton of the army, air force, and navy, NASA became the lucky beneficiary of an astounding, interconnected network of industrial contractors and aerospace firms that had invested in the development of long-range missiles even before the civilian agency’s creation, and of an even wider net of innovators and suppliers that would join the effort as the space race wore on. For example, there was simply no entity in the Soviet Union as dynamic as North American Aviation’s Rocketdyne Division, the leading designer and manufacturer of liquid-fueled engines for most of the army and air force missiles during the Truman and Eisenhower years. When tight Communist control competed with free-market capitalism on the playing field of large-scale innovation, the Americans outshone the Soviets, and space wasn’t the only beneficiary.
At Langley, the Space Task Group was beginning another NASA tradition: leveraging space-related research for the benefit of commercial air transport. NASA partnered with aviation companies such as Boeing of Seattle, Convair’s Astronautics division of San Diego, General Electric of Philadelphia, the Martin Company of Baltimore, and McDonnell Douglas of St. Louis. Having shed their NACA smocks for NASA ones, Langley engineers were still modernizing in the realm of flight research and wind tunnel testing, solving a variety of problems related to the transonic flow regime (mach.8-1.2) through the implementation of swept-wing design. During World War II American pilots had controllability problems with some planes’ suddenly diving down and accelerating to transonic speeds; these problems had to be rectified at the NACA. They also invented the idea of grooved runways, which offer better grip for aircraft tires in heavy rain. Any way one peered into the looking glass, the truth was that most aerospace-related research and development had military applications. John F. Kennedy understood that if the nation’s goal was beating the Soviets in space, U.S. military and civilian aims had to be integrated.
At the end of 1958, NASA launched Pioneer 3 (the first U.S. satellite to ascend to an altitude of 63,580 miles), while the air force achieved the first long-distance flight of an ICBM (anAtlas 12B, which flew more than 6,300 miles). Three weeks later, another Atlas ferried a communications relay satellite into orbit as part of Project SCORE (Signal Communication by Orbiting Relay Equipment), which broadcast President Eisenhower’s Christmas message to the world—the first voice sent from space. The development that gave America its greatest edge over the Soviets in 1958 came courtesy of the private sector. Working separately, electrical engineers Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments and Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor invented the monolithic integrated circuit, also known as the microchip—with that innovation, transistors, resistors, capacitors, and connecting wiring, all previously separate components, could be placed onto a single small “chip” of semiconductor material. This tiny, integrated circuit would soon lead to the development of portable, efficient, and affordable high-speed communication systems, revolutionizing both space exploration and terrestrial technologies.
In preparation for manned Project Mercury spaceflight, NASA modified the U.S. Navy’s jet aircraft suits (the inside lined with neoprene-coated nylon, the exterior aluminized nylon) for surviving galactic conditions. Recognizing that a hard-shell suit was unworkable, NASA designers made soft silver suits that could furnish oxygen, regulate temperature, enhance flexible movement, generate communications, and shield against solar radiation. At NASA, the hunt for astronauts was on.
Many names that should have been shoo-ins were absent from the lottery. Iven Kincheloe, once on track to become America’s first astronaut with the air force’s now-defunct MISS program, had been killed the previous summer on a test flight after ejecting too late from a crashing plane for his parachute to open. Two other men in the MISS group were above forty, and deemed too old. Neil Armstrong, for his part, chose not to apply, remaining loyal to his work on the X-15. Chuck Yeager, the first man to break the sound barrier, also declined to apply. His lack of a college degree would have made him ineligible in any case. NASA’s insistence on academic credentials reflected the dual role envisioned for NASA’s astronauts: not just “a man in a can,” as some aviators had said disparagingly, but contributing to the ongoing engineering of their flights in the manner of X-15 engineer-pilot Scott Crossfield.
While Armstrong passed on the Mercury program, another Korean War veteran from Ohio, John Glenn, looked on it as a “tonic.” Considered an overgrown Boy Scout by other test pilots, full of gentlemanly manners and a quarterback’s drive, Glenn believed from the outset that NASA would move the United States into space in an organized way—one that would also advance his career. Glenn’s guiding light was merit: a challenge fought for and achieved by sheer willpower and self-conquest over natural limitations.
At the time of Pearl Harbor, Glenn was a twenty-year-old student at Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio. Hungry for combat action, he left his engineering studies to join the armed forces. After stints with the U.S. Army Air Corps and naval aviation, he was given a commission in the marines and acquitted himself well, flying Corsair fighters in the Pacific Theater. After the war, he remained in the Marine Corps, accepting relatively dull assignments with equanimity. Even after the United States entered the Korean War, Glenn initially remained stuck stateside in administrative posts, a “non-entity,” as a friend termed him. Finally ordered into the war in early 1953, he flew Panther jets with the marines’ “Tomcat” squadron before being seconded to the air force, where he began flying transonic fighter jets for the Twenty-Fifth Fighter-Interceptor Squadron and was credited with three kills in dogfights.
Glenn returned home from Korea a highly decorated hero, and was able to fly the most advanced jet airplanes of the era. Hoping to get a serious aviation education, he sought admission to the test pilot school at Naval Air Station Patuxent River, in Maryland. As Glenn was aware, he was ill prepared for this elite institution in one respect: he still lacked a college degree. Even without completing his bachelor’s at Muskingum, he used enthusiastic recommendations from his superiors in Korea to win a coveted place at Patuxent River. And then, after pulling every string to get in, he nearly quit. He just didn’t speak the same language as the college-trained pilots at the school. The word used for Glenn at such times was dogged. Patching together courses at local colleges and getting tutoring when he could, he managed to stay abreast of his training and graduate from Patuxent with distinction.
Ironically, Glenn’s persistence in learning about aeronautical engineering, combined with his certification as one of the navy’s newest test pilots, earned him a desk job in Washington examining airplane designs. At pains to understand how all aircraft worked, he heard talk of a proposed supersonic cross-country flight to stress-test the Pratt and Whitney J-57 jet engine, and he volunteered for the assignment. On the morning of July 16, 1957, he took off from Los Alamitos Naval Air Station in California, piloting his Vought F-8U Crusader at a speed of over 725 miles per hour and touching down at New York’s Floyd Bennett Field 3 hours, 23 minutes, and 8.4 seconds later, setting a new transcontinental record. This supersonic event turned Glenn into a minor celebrity, earning him an appearance on the television show Name That Tune, partnered with the child star Eddie Hodges. When NASA started thinking in earnest about its first astronaut class at the end of 1958, Glenn was certain that he was “in a pretty good position” to join it. Among navy aviators, he was known as the best man to land safely if something went wrong with a craft’s controls or if the wind didn’t cooperate on final approach.
Glenn’s record-breaking flight had positioned him well for Mercury, but he had other deficits besides his education: he was a little heavy and was near NASA’s age limit. On the plus side, he was also one of the few marines with an interest in the program—important because corps brass had informed NASA that they expected at least one marine to be chosen for the Mercury team. There was also a certain fund of decency in Glenn’s overall character that military leaders admired. There was never a calculated love of battle, grandstanding, medals, or glory. Instead, Glenn exhibited, often with a self-deprecating smile, a Midwestern devotion to duty, honor, and country. While waiting to hear from NASA, he lost forty-one pounds, intent on being in shape should he get the call. He also tried, without success, to turn his hodgepodge of college credits into a degree from Muskingum.
WHILE GLENN WAS dieting madly, Kennedy was preparing for Election Day 1958 in a curious way. From Labor Day to the first Tuesday in November, he spent only seventeen days in Massachusetts, mostly to rest and relax at Cape Cod. Two-thirds of his time were spent in other states or in Washington, DC. He had become a national figure, and that became part of his senatorial appeal in his home state. He oversaw a well-oiled staff that offered up surrogates, rather than the candidate himself, to do his campaigning. JFK continually referred to himself not as the senator from Massachusetts, but as the “senator of New England.” As it turned out, Kennedy could do no wrong in Massachusetts, coasting to a second Senate term with 74 percent of the vote. Winning the race so handily seemed just another step on the way to the 1960 presidential election. Doubters of his political chops were forced to admit to having underestimated his talent.
What might be called Kennedy’s presidential years, in fact, started right after the 1958 election. Free and easy with the press, he was unquestionably aiming for the White House and positioned as the front-runner. His political persona rose so steeply that it was no longer easy to see the line between the man and the image he had created. Long gone were the days when he arrived to give a speech disheveled and harried, quickly tucking in his shirt on the way to the dais. Now he was the crisp Ivy Leaguer, radiating self-esteem and eminently comfortable with himself. Nearly all politicians choose which part of their personalities to project and which to leave at home, but Kennedy had edited himself with unusual precision, becoming one of the most unique and recognizable public figures of the late 1950s. Perhaps he was “sold like a box of Wheaties,” as Adlai Stevenson had said about attempts to market Kennedy as a national leader. If so, there were few constituent complaints about him from the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.
But in truth, voters didn’t know the real JFK. Even though he exuded confidence and political combativeness, he camouflaged a lot, including his precarious balance of vigor and infirmity, which necessitated prodigious use of prescription medicine. But the well-rounded image Kennedy projected as the nation’s potential next president was convincing because it was a real part of the truth about himself. His questioning intelligence and keen alertness were integral to his being. As the 1958 election receded, he faced two years in which to reach Americans and sell them on the hawkish humanitarian he had become. Nobody feared he would ever capitulate to the Soviets. JFK may have been a product, but in yet another contradiction, he also seemed the least artificial senator in Washington. “I have never seen anybody in my life develop like Jack Kennedy did as a personality and as a speaker, and as an attractive person, over the last seven, eight years of his life,” Democratic senator George Smathers from Florida recalled. “It was a miracle transformation.”
Smathers was in a position to know. First elected to the U.S. Senate in 1950, he was widely considered Kennedy’s best friend in Washington. Tall and handsome, and the former captain of the University of Florida basketball team, he often partied with Kennedy in both Georgetown and Palm Beach. Smathers was pleased that Cape Canaveral was in his state—he would talk a blue streak with Kennedy about aerospace industries of tomorrow—but when it came to civil rights, unlike Kennedy, he was a determined segregationist, one of the Dixiecrats who had signed the 1956 Southern Manifesto, which denounced the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown v. Board of Education ruling as a “clear abuse of judicial power.”
As for NASA, Kennedy’s view was exactly in sync with Smathers’s: no more Soviet “firsts” in space. But Kennedy didn’t try to bring space business to Massachusetts the way Smathers did in Florida. In fact, he practically rushed into 1959 largely oblivious to the beehive of activity around Project Mercury, though one bit of space-related news undoubtedly caught his attention because of its implications for the upcoming Democratic primary battle. In November 1959, at President Eisenhower’s request, Lyndon Johnson gave an important speech on space at the United Nations. Kennedy believed that by accepting Ike’s request, Johnson had aligned himself with the president and with policies that had birthed Kennedy’s favorite subject: the alleged missile gap. At his own public appearances, JFK argued for a smarter approach to the Soviet rivalry. “It is not necessary that we match the Russians missile for missile, invention for invention,” he said in a Detroit speech. “If the Russians succeed in sending a man to Hell, there is no need for each of our defense agencies to clamor the next morning for a new appropriation to match them. But neither can this challenge be met by men of little minds and little vision—by those who fix weapons policies as a part of our budgetary policies. The Democratic Party rejects the principle of a cheap, second best defense—and it intends to see that we have the money and brainpower necessary to do the job.”
Influenced by a 1958 CBS News two-hour television special titled Shooting for the Moon (hosted by Walter Cronkite and starring Wernher von Braun), Kennedy leaned toward a beefed-up NASA but hedged his bets in public, not wanting to alienate the army, where some still had bitter emotions over Eisenhower’s ABMA transfer. Nevertheless, he was understandably proud that the United States notched some productive successes in early 1959, including the launch of communications and weather satellites and, on March 3, the launch of Pioneer 4, which made the first successful flyby of the moon by a U.S. spacecraft. These were important steps toward a goal on which nearly every American public official in the post-Sputnik era agreed: getting an American astronaut into space soonest. What mattered to Kennedy was that NASA wasn’t window dressing for a lack of commitment in space exploration; he wanted to ensure that the new agency was well funded and results oriented.
Every time NASA administrator Keith Glennan circulated around the Senate looking for increasing NASA appropriations, Kennedy essentially said, “Well, of course, uncap the faucet.” JFK understood that in the realm of global prestige, NASA astronauts were going to be seen as knights of American exceptionalism—when a Mercury astronaut eventually broke the shackles of Earth to soar into space, average citizens in India, Venezuela, or Portugal weren’t going to debate whether NASA (civilian) or the U.S. Air Force (military) deserved the credit. The buzz would be that America had pioneered into the galaxy, proving definitively that democratic capitalism was superior to state-run communism. And Kennedy agreed with the House Select Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration conclusion that “outer space is fast becoming the heart and soul of advanced military science. It constitutes at once the threat and the defense of man’s existence on earth.”
More so than President Eisenhower or even Lyndon Johnson, Kennedy was a prestige maven when it came to space-related issues: it was about winning boasting rights. Refusing to be first in space, JFK would say, telegraphed the wrong signals to Third World countries debating the political virtues of democracy over communism. Given this beat-the-Soviets attitude, he offered blanket endorsements of all things NASA related and marketed a doomsday scenario due to the missile gap with the Soviets. According to Kennedy, the USSR could destroy “85 percent of our industry, 43 of our 50 largest cities, and most of the nation’s population.” As historian Yanek Mieczkowski explained, for Kennedy the term missile gap encompassed “Sputnik, the Gaither Report, military decline, vanishing prestige, and deep-seated worry that the U.S. under Eisenhower had reached second-place status.” When convenient, Kennedy used missile gap as a general term for the chronic Eisenhower malaise for falling behind the Soviets. But he knew he also needed an optimistic catchphrase in which to bundle his better-days-are-a-comin’ rhetoric. As NASA stories circulated in the public press, he circled around “the New Frontier” as his uplifting New Deal/Fair Deal–type moniker.