PREFACE: KENNEDY’S NEW OCEAN
The trophy had been established: “Seven Mercury Astronauts Winners of Collier Trophy,” New York Times, October 8, 1963, p. 24. Starting in 1957, Look magazine had taken over the annual trophy award.
“Some of us”: “Kennedy Presents the Collier Trophy to Astronauts,” New York Times, October 11, 1963, p. 19.
Writing the president’s obituary: Robert Hotz, “An Indelible Mark,” Aviation Week & Space Technology 79, no. 23 (December 3, 1963), p. 1.
“Oh, I think it’s predominantly the responsibility”: Douglas Brinkley interview with Neil Armstrong, September 14, 2001, NASA Johnson Space Center Oral History Project Transcript, https://www.nasa.gov/pdf/6228/main_armstrong_oralhistory.pdf. Also with me to interview Neil Armstrong was the historian Stephen E. Ambrose.
“As the clock was ticking”: Ibid.
“I believe”: Public Papers of the President of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1961 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1962), pp. 403–5.
“You don’t run for President”: William E. Burrows, This New Ocean: The Story of the First Space Age (New York: Random House, 1998), p. 329.
“talked of the heavens”: James Preston quoted in Congressional Record: Proceedings and Debates of Congress April 13, 1959, Vol. 105, Pt. 19, Appendix A-2960, 86th Congress, 1st Session. See also Scott Carpenter and Kris Stoever, For Spacious Skies (New York: New American Library, 2004), p. 197.
The technology: Stacey Bredhoff, Moonshot: JFK and Space Exploration (Washington, DC: Foundation for the National Archives, 2009), p. 38.
“Each invested enormous resources”: Neil Armstrong, “Introduction,” in Alan Shepard and Deke Slayton, with Jay Barbree, Moon Shot: The Inside Story of America’s Apollo Moon Landings (Atlanta, GA: Turner Publishing, 1994), pp. 8–9.
“the lack of effort”: John M. Logsdon, John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), p. 8.
“I think he became convinced”: Quoted in ibid., p. 225.
Because NASA worked in tandem: Shelby G. Spires, “The Teflon Myth and Other Inventions from NASA,” Chicago Tribune, March 5, 2007.
“Why, some say, the moon”: “Address at Rice University, Houston, Texas, 12 September 1962,” Papers of John F. Kennedy, Presidential Papers, President’s Office Files, Speech Files, John F. Kennedy Presidential Library, Boston, MA (hereafter “Kennedy Library”).
“he wasn’t a technical man”: Wernher von Braun, recorded interview by Walter D. Sohier and Eugene M. Emme, March 31, 1964, p. 9, John F. Kennedy Oral History Program, Kennedy Library.
“moon shots”: Steve Marble, “Former Dodger’s Slugger Helped Wally Moon, Whose ‘Moon Shots’ Helped Team Reach Three World Series Dies at 87,” Los Angeles Times, February 10, 2018, https://www.latimes.com/local/obituaries/la-me-wally-moon-20180210-html.story.html.
As early as Kennedy’s Rice: “JFK and NASA” Houston Press, September 12, 1962, p. 10; NASA 1960s Vertical Files, Houston Metropolitan Research Center, Houston, TX.
“from my earliest boyhood”: “News Release: New Exhibition to Celebrate JFK’s Love of the Sea,” March 27, 2000, https://www.jfklibrary.org/about-us/news-and-press/press-releases/new-exhibit-to-celebrate-jfks-love-of-the-sea.
“The eyes of the world”: “Address at Rice University, Houston, Texas, 12 September 1962,” Papers of John F. Kennedy, Presidential Papers, President’s Office Files, Speech Files, Kennedy Library.
“crawling up on the land”: Valerie Neal, Cathleen S. Lewis, and Franklin Winter, Spaceflight: A Smithsonian Guide (New York: Macmillan, 1995), p. 132.
“We rejoice”: John Noble Wilford, We Reach the Moon (New York: Bantam Press, 1969), p. xvii.
“We needed the first man”: Buzz Aldrin with Ken Abraham, Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home from the Moon (New York: Three Rivers Press, 2010), p. 10.
1. DR. ROBERT GODDARD MEETS BUCK ROGERS
Jules Verne published: Burrows, This New Ocean, pp. 28–32.
“certain narrow-minded people”: Jules Verne, From the Earth to the Moon (France: Pierre-Jules Hetzel, 1865).
“the restless erratic insight”: Kurt Vonnegut, Player Piano (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1952), pp. 4–5.
In the wake of the Wright brothers’: Robert H. Goddard, “The Moon Rocket Proposition: Refutation of Some Popular Fallacies,” Scientific American, February 26, 1921.
“supervise and direct”: James R. Hansen, First Man (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2005), p. 130.
new technology’s military applications: https://history.nasa.gov/naca/overview.html.
NACA established the Langley: Sylvia Doughty Fries, NASA Engineers and the Age of Apollo (Washington, DC: NASA, 1992).
unveiled his astronautical ideas: Robert H. Goddard, A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections, vol. 71, no. 2 (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution, 1919).
“It has often proved true”: Robert Goddard, “On Taking Things for Granted,” graduation oration, South High School, Worcester, MA, June 24, 1904, in “Frequently Asked Questions About Dr. Robert H. Goddard,” Clark University Archives and Special Collections, http://www2.clarku.edu/research/archives/goddard/faq.cfm.
“Rocket for Moon”: Colorado Springs Gazette, January 12, 1920, p. 1.
“on nothing that is really impossible”: Goddard, A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, p. 57.
media and public remained uncertain: Paul Dickson, Sputnik: The Shock of the Century (New York: Walker, 2001), p. 40.
a front-page story: “Believes Rocket Can Reach Moon,” New York Times, January 12, 1920, p. 1.
“need to have something better”: “A Severe Strain on Credulity,” New York Times, Topics of the Times segment, January 13, 1920, p. 12.
compared the Worcester rocketeer’s: “All Aboard for the Moon,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 13, 1920, p. 10.
“So much for”: Quoted in “Frequently Asked Questions About Dr. Robert H. Goddard.”
estimate was one hundred thousand dollars: “Nine Want Moon Trip,” St. Albans Messenger, April 6, 1920, p. 1.
“publicity is the worst possible disaster”: Paul G. Carter, “Rockets to the Moon 1919–1944,” American Studies 15, no. 1 (Spring 1974): 33.
nine applications from brave men: “Nine Want Moon Trip,” p. 1.
“the more practical objects”: “To Test Moon-Bound Rocket This Summer,” Philadelphia Inquirer, January 28, 1921, p. 2.
Goddard’s solicitations: “Seeks ‘Rocket to Moon’ Fund,” Kansas City Times, June 28, 1921, p. 1.
constructing a small replica: Dickson, Sputnik, p. 47.
a description of Goddard’s work: Hermann Oberth, Die Rakete zu den Planetenräumen [The Rocket into Planetary Space] (München: R. Oldenbourg, 1923).
“the American professor Dr. Goddard”: Quoted in Asif Siddiqi, “Deep Impact: Dr. Robert Goddard and the Soviet ‘Space Fad’ of the 1920s,” History and Technology 20, no. 2 (2004): 99.
international team of space travelers: Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, Outside the Earth (Vne Zemli: Nauchno-fantasticheskaya povest) (Fairfield, CT: Athena Books, 2006); and Burrows, This New Ocean, p. 43.
“mass fascination with space travel”: Siddiqi, “Deep Impact,” p. 99.
“possibility of cosmic travel”: Burrows, This New Ocean, p. 43.
“I didn’t get a watch”: Quoted in David Halberstam, The Fifties (New York: Ballantine, 1993), p. 609.
“The wagon was wholly out of control”: Wernher von Braun, “Space Man: The Story of My Life,” American Weekly, July 20, 1958, p. 8.
“Here was a task”: Quoted in Daniel Lang, “A Romantic Urge,” New Yorker, April 21, 1951, pp. 75–93.
“Lunetta” (Little Moon): Bob Ward, Dr. Space: The Life of Wernher von Braun (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2015), p. 13.
the world was fourfold: Ibid., p. 15.
“the first man to walk on the moon”: Ernst Stuhlinger, “How It All Began: Memories of an Old-Timer,” July 20, 1999, Wernher von Braun Library of Archives, U.S. Space and Rocket Center, Huntsville, AL.
he did correspond: “Plans Hop to Moon in a Rocket-Plane,” New York Times, May 8, 1927, p. 19.
ambulances, police cars: Associated Press, “Rocket Plows Skyward Alarming District,” Houston Chronicle, July 18, 1929, p. 26.
residents of Auburn forbade: “Dr. Robert H. Goddard, World Rocket Pioneer,” typescript (Washington, DC: NASA), 1960, p. 6.
a nervous breakdown: “Halts Moon Rocket Work,” New York Times, January 17, 1930, p. 3.
enormous box-office hit: “Die Frau im Mond/Der Neue Lang-Film,” Vossische Zeitung (Berlin), October 16, 1929; Heike Langenberg, “Rocket Retrospective,” Nature, November 8, 2001, p. 152.
nine thousand feet in just 22.3 seconds: “Frequently Asked Questions About Dr. Robert H. Goddard.”
“Morning in the desert”: Robert Goddard diary entry (June 2, 1937), quoted in Dave A. Clary, Rocket Man: Robert H. Goddard and the Birth of the Space Age (New York: Hyperion, 2003), p. 169.
2: KENNEDY, VON BRAUN, AND THE CRUCIBLE OF WORLD WAR II
Once, when Jack was a boy: Yanek Mieczkowski, Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment: The Race for Space and the World (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013), p. 260.
“the Literary Digest”: Quoted in Nigel Hamilton, JFK: Reckless Youth (New York: Random House, 1992), p. 86.
“accustomed to the idea”: John F. Kennedy to Christian Causs, October 21, 1935, Papers of John F. Kennedy, Personal Papers, Harvard: Harvard Records, Pre-enrollment material: 1935–1936, Kennedy Library.
“Jack has rather superior mental ability”: Henry Raymont, “Kennedy Data: Years at Harvard,” New York Times, August 3, 1971, p. 26.
accepting nearly every applicant: Harvard was accepting 98.6 percent of its applicants. See Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), p. 205.
the president of Harvard described his method: Karabel, The Chosen, p. 174.
“I feel that Harvard”: John F. Kennedy, application, Papers of John F. Kennedy, Personal Papers, Harvard: Harvard Records, Pre-enrollment material: 1935–1936, Kennedy Library.
“Oberth was the first”: Hermann Oberth Raumfahrt Museum, http://www.Oberth-museum.org, December 28, 1989.
The rocketry concepts developed by Oberth: “Hermann Oberth,” NASA, For Educators, September 22, 2010, https://www.nasa.gov/audience/foreducators/rocketry/home/hermann-oberth.html.
In 1937, Doolittle went to Germany: Winston Groom, The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2013), pp. 182–83.
“with the moon only”: James H. “Jimmy” Doolittle, I Could Never Be So Lucky Again (New York: Bantam, 1994), p. 515.
“I naturally cannot turn over”: R. H. Goddard to Robert Milikin, September 1, 1936, in Esther Goddard and G. Edward Pendray, eds., The Papers of Robert H. Goddard, Including the Reports to the Smithsonian Institution and the Daniel and Florence Guggenheim Foundation, vol. 3 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), pp. 1012–13.
amazed by the quality: John F. Kennedy diary, August 18, 1937, Papers of John F. Kennedy, Personal Papers, Early Years, 1928–1940, Kennedy Library.
“had the added attraction”: John F. Kennedy diary, August 20, 1937, Papers of John F. Kennedy, Personal Papers, Early Years, 1928–1940, Kennedy Library.
“The Germans really are too good”: John F. Kennedy diary, August 21, 1937, Papers of John F. Kennedy, Personal Papers, Early Years, 1928–1940, Kennedy Library.
broad new highways: Billings diary quoted in David Pitts, Jack and Lem: John F. Kennedy and Lem Billings (New York: Carroll and Graf, 2009), pp. 52–67.
“We were all struck”: Michael O’Brien, John F. Kennedy (New York: St. Martin’s, 2005), p. 94.
“For a twenty-two-year-old American”: Whalen quoted in ibid., p. 93.
“astonishing theoretical knowledge”: Ward, Dr. Space, p. 18.
“If you want more money”: Walter R. Dornberger, “The German V-2,” Technology and Culture 4, no. 4 (Autumn 1963): 397.
“arrow stability”: Burrows, This New Ocean, p. 82. See also Michael J. Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich: Peenemünde and the Coming of the Ballistic Missile Era (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 1995), pp. 23–71.
Christened Peenemünde: Dickson, Sputnik, p. 52.
seventy next-generation Aggregat rockets: Ibid., p. 52.
“going to the moon”: Dornberger, “The German V-2,” p. 399.
There is currently a debate: Jared S. Buss, Willy Ley: Prophet of the Space Age (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2017).
“a liquid-propellant rocket can fly”: Quoted in Christopher Potter, The Earth Gazers: On Seeing Ourselves (New York: Pegasus, 2018), p. 82.
“thousands of major problems”: Dornberger, “The German V-2,” p. 399.
“The slim missile rose slowly”: Michael J. Neufeld, Von Braun: Dreamer of Space, Engineer of War (New York: Knopf Doubleday, 2007), p. 118.
“The shocking German success”: O’Brien, John F. Kennedy, pp. 99–100.
turning his attention away: Michael J. Neufeld, “Hitler, the V-2, and the Battle for Priority, 1939–1943,” The Journal for Military History 57, no. 3 (July 1993): 528.
“revolutionary importance for the conduct of warfare”: Quoted in Neufeld, Von Braun, p. 128.
3: SURVIVING A SAVAGE WAR
his most authentic self: Wallace J. Nichols, Blue Mind: The Surprising Science That Shows How Being Near, in, on, or Under Water Can Make You Happier, Healthier, More Connected, and Better at What You Do (New York: Little, Brown, 2014), pp. 5–15.
“cowards or defeatists”: Peter Collier and David Horowitz, The Kennedys: An American Drama (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1984), p. 118.
put his craft above: Frederick I. Ordway III and Mitchell R. Sharpe, The Rocket Team (New York: William Heinemann, 1979), pp. 47–48.
was fond of saying: Von Braun quoted in “Wernher von Braun,” International Space Hall of Fame at the New Mexico Museum of Space History (1976), http://www.nmspacemuseum.org/halloffame/detail.php?id=29.
“was a true ancestor”: Dickson, Sputnik, p. 52.
“In the full glare of the sunlight”: Ibid., p. 49.
“Europe and the world”: Quoted in Halberstam, The Fifties, p. 611.
“Our big-ship navy”: William F. Liebenow, oral history, p. 3, John F. Kennedy Oral History Program, Kennedy Library, https://jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer=archives/JFKOH/Liebenow%2C%20William%20F/JFKOH-WFL-01/JFKOH-WFL-01.
“I’m not so crazy”: Quoted in Thurston Clarke, JFK’s Last Hundred Days: The Transformation of a Man and the Emergence of a Great President (New York: Penguin Press, 2013), p. 14.
Early on August 2, 1943: John Hersey, “Survival,” The New Yorker, June 17, 1944, p. 31.
“People that haven’t been there”: Liebenow, oral history, p. 8.
“Most of the courage shown”: Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Fitzgeralds and the Kennedys (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1987), p. 715.
mission to find Peenemünde: Neufeld, Von Braun, p. 128.
“After four weeks of cleanup work”: Dornberger, “The German V-2,” pp. 404–5.
“endurance or death”: Leon Jaroff, “The Rocket Man’s Dark Side,” Time, March 26, 2002, content.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,220201,00.html.
Dora: Andre Sellier, A History of the Dora Camp: The Untold Story of the Nazi Slave Labor Camp (Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee, 2003), p. 5.
In later years, a disingenuous von Braun: Dickson, Sputnik, p. 53. See also Halberstam, The Fifties, pp. 611–12.
a Life magazine story: John Hersey, “PT Squadron in the South Pacific,” Life, May 10, 1943, p. 74.
He spent most of late winter: John Hellmann, The Kennedy Obsession: The American Myth of JFK (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), p. 43.
“They all wait anxiously”: Quoted in Edward J. Renehan Jr., The Kennedys at War, 1937–1945 (New York: Doubleday, 2002), p. 280.
Jack always loved being in Florida: Ibid., pp. 214–16.
Jack decided to learn how to fly: John F. Kennedy, May 19–June 8, 1944, Flight Log, Shapell Foundation Archive, Herzilya, Israel. Thanks to Lavin Montgomery and Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University for bringing this to my attention.
“accelerated schedule”: Halberstam, The Fifties, p. 608.
“a concrete chamber”: Graham M. Simons, Operation LUSTY: The Race for Hitler’s Secret Technology (Barnsley, UK: Pen and Sword Books, 2016), p. 71.
“some kind of a gadget”: Jacob Neufeld, The Development of Ballistic Missiles in the United States Air Force, 1945–1960 (Washington, DC: Office of Air Force History, United States Air Force, 1990), p. 35.
appeared in The New Yorker: Hersey, “Survival.”
“construction of John F. Kennedy”: Hellmann, The Kennedy Obsession, p. 43.
“I firmly believe”: William Doyle, PT 109: An American Epic of War, Survival, and the Destiny of John F. Kennedy (New York: William Morrow, 2015), p. xiii.
Naval Air Corps pilots: Alan Axelrod, Lost Destiny: Joe Kennedy Jr. and the Doomed WWII Mission to Save London (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), p. 160.
incrementally pulling out: Simons, Operation LUSTY, p. 72.
Third Infantry Division captured: Steven J. Zaloga, German V-Weapon Sites, 1943–45 (London: Osprey, 2008), p. 14.
“an oasis of love”: Edward M. Kennedy, True Compass (New York: Twelve, 2009), p. 63.
“While he’s singing”: Kate Thom Kelley, oral history, p. 14, National Archives and Records Administration, Office of Presidential Libraries, Kennedy Library.
4: WHO’S AFRAID OF THE V-2?
“Britons pondered the possibility”: “Ten-Ton Robots Called Possible as Flying Bombs Batter Britain,” New York Times, July 18, 1944, p. 6.
missile test: Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich, pp. 158–90.
installed SS general Hans Kammler: Sellier, A History of the Dora Camp, p. 103; and Heinrich Himmler, “Orders to Hans Kammler Concerning Construction Work for the V2 Missile Program,” http://nuremberg.law.harvard.edu/documents/4279-orders-to-hans-kammler?q=heinrich+himmler.
This rocket landed near: Kenneth Lipartito and Orville Butler, A History of the Kennedy Space Center (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2007), p. 33.
launch two V-2s at London: Norman Longmate, Hitler’s Rockets: The Story of the V-2s (London: Hutchinson, 1985), p. x.
“There wasn’t a mark”: Clare Heal, “The Day Hitler’s Silent Killer Came Falling on Chiswick,” (London) Express, September 7, 2014.
“Von Braun was completely devastated”: Quoted in Neufeld, Von Braun, p. 184.
“When the first V-2 hit London”: Ibid., p. 185.
“With a satisfied eye he witnessed”: Pierre Boulle, The Bridge over the River Kwai (New York: Presidio Press, 1982), p. 96.
“Once the rockets are up”: Tom Lehrer, “Wernher von Braun,” Album/CD That Was the Year That Was (Reprise/Warner), recorded in San Francisco, July 1965. http://www.protestsonglyrics.net/Humorous_Songs/Wernher-Von-Braun.phtml.
“his new missiles until November 8”: Winston Churchill, The Second World War, vol. 6: Triumph and Tragedy (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1953), p. 47.
“V-2 type rocket appears to be”: Robert Goddard, The Papers of Robert H. Goddard (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970), 9:1548.
the V-2 had been copied directly: Frank H. Winter, “Did the Germans Learn from Goddard? An Examination of Whether the Rocketry of R. H. Goddard Influenced German Pre–World War II Missile Development,” History of Rocketry and Astronautics (San Diego: American Astronautical Society, 2016), pp. 106–11.
almost 700 V-2s per month: Walter A. McDougall, . . . the Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age (New York: Basic Books, 1985), p. 42.
“but its role in history”: Potter, The Earth Gazers, p. 115.
“We despise the French”: Quoted in Ordway III and Sharpe, The Rocket Team, p. 274.
“I think you’re nuts”: Dickson, Sputnik, p. 59.
Toftoy had U.S. Army troops race: McDougall, . . . the Heavens and the Earth, p. 44.
“We defeated Nazi armies”: Quoted in G. A. Tokady, “Soviet Rocket Technology,” Technology and Culture 4 (Fall 1963): 523.
plenty of machine and rocket: Eugene Reichl, Project Mercury (Atglen, PA: Schiffer, 2016), p. 4.
“Imagine . . . finding”: Lindbergh quoted in Winston Groom, The Aviators: Eddie Rickenbacker, Jimmy Doolittle, Charles Lindbergh, and the Epic Age of Flight (Washington, DC: National Geographic, 2013), pp. 437–38.
shipped to the Annapolis Experiment Station: Milton Lehman, This High Man: The Life of Robert H. Goddard (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1963), p. 387.
agreement “was a sham”: McDougall, . . . the Heavens and the Earth, pp. 44–45.
“Dropping the bombs”: Harry S. Truman to James L. Cate, December 6, 1952. Truman Papers, President’s Secretary’s File (Atomic Bomb), Harry S. Truman Presidential Library, Independence, Missouri.
“A screaming comes across the sky”: Thomas Pynchon, Gravity’s Rainbow (New York: Penguin, 1973), p. 3.
Considered wards of the army: Ward, Dr. Space, p. 63.
dubbed himself a POP: Ibid.
“The GIs sized me up”: Wernher von Braun, “Why I Chose America,” American Magazine, July 1952.
the Soviets would appropriate: Doran Baker, “The University, Electrical Engineering and Space Travel,” Paper 77, no. 75, in USU Faculty Honor Lectures (Logan: Utah State University Press, 1979).
But some of the imported Germans were sent back: Brian Crim, Our Germans: Operation Paperclip and the National Security State (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2018).
Arthur Rudolph, a close colleague: Dennis Piszkiewicz, The Nazi Rocketeers: Dreams of Space and Crimes of War (Mechanicsburg, PA: Stackpole, 2007), p. 225.
Hubertus Strughold: Colin A. Ross, The CIA Doctors (Richardson, TX: Manitou Communications, 2006).
he managed to design his first trajectories: Ward, Dr. Space, p. 65.
“If we may assume”: Quoted in Sean Kalic, U.S. Presidents and the Militarization of Space, 1946–1967 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2012), pp. 17–18.
“fresh-faced, charming young war hero”: David Nasaw, The Patriarch: The Remarkable Life and Turbulent Times of Joseph P. Kennedy (New York: Penguin, 2012), p. 603. See also “Articles: by John F. Kennedy in the Hearst Newspapers, 1945,” Kennedy Library, www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKPOF-129-003.aspx.
“Jack Kennedy was the only pol in Boston”: Quoted in John T. Shaw, JFK in the Senate: Pathway to the Presidency (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013), p. 26.
the performance of President Truman: Gary A. Donaldson, Truman Defeats Dewey (Lexington: University of Kentucky Press, 2015), p. 6.
Democrats scrambled: Donald R. McCoy, “Harry S. Truman: Personality, Politics, and Presidency,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 12, no. 2 (Spring 1982): 223.
“I told them that Soviet Russia today”: John F. Kennedy, “The Time Has Come: Radio Speech on Russia,” October 1946, Papers of John F. Kennedy, Pre-Presidential Papers, Kennedy Library.
“The war made us get serious”: Quoted in Doyle, PT 109, p. xiii.
“What we do now will”: John F. Kennedy, congressional campaign radio broadcast, 1946, quoted in John F. Kennedy in His Own Words, ed. Eric Freedman and Edward Hoffman (New York: Citadel Press, 2005), p. 140.
“It seems to be a law of nature”: Potter, The Earth Gazers, p. 144; Ward, Dr. Space, p. 68.
5: SPOOKED INTO THE SPACE RACE
Having spent a third of a trillion: Harry S. Truman, “Speech to Congress, March 12, 1947,” in Debating the Origins of the Cold War: American and Russian Perspectives, ed. Ralph B. Levering, Vladimir O. Pechatnov, Verena Botzenhart-Viehe, and C. Earl Edmondson (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2002), p. 83.
“an almost impenetrable veil of secrecy”: Arthur C. Clarke, The Making of a Moon (New York: Harper and Brothers, 1957), pp. 18–19.
technological leaps: Boris Chertok, Rockets and People, ed. Asif A. Siddiqi, vol. 3: Hot Days of the Cold War (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2009), p. 284.
“no ballistic missiles worth mentioning”: Mieczkowski, Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment, p. 40.
a new National Military Establishment: “About the Department of Defense,” U.S. Department of Defense, www.defense.gov/About/.
Major General Curtis LeMay: “General Curtis Emerson LeMay,” U.S. Air Force, http://www.af.mil/About-Us/Biographies/Display/Article/106462/general-curtis-emerson-lemay/.
“Whose imagination is not fired”: RAND Corporation, Preliminary Design of an Experimental World-Circling Spaceship (SM-11827), May 2, 1946, www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/special_memoranda/2006/SM11827part1.pdf.
rocket ultimately named the Viking: Mike Gruntman, Blazing the Trail: The Early History of Spacecraft and Rocketry (Reston, VA: American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, 2004), p. 216.
“The U.S. Navy wanted no part”: Baker, “The University, Electrical Engineering and Space Travel.”
The U.S. Army was continuing: Neufeld, The Rocket and the Reich, pp. 270–71.
Electronic navigation and anti-icing: Winston Groom, The Aviators, 434.
“one of the laziest men”: Quoted in Robert Caro, The Passage of Power: The Years of Lyndon Johnson (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1982), p. 29.
“the most important thing in history”: James Mahaffey, Atomic Awakening: A New Look at the Future History of Nuclear Power (New York: Pegasus, 2009), pp. viii–ix.
stripping this authority from the military: Clark Clifford, Counsel to the President (New York: Anchor, 1992), p. 277.
the USSR lagged behind: Mieczkowski, Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment, p. 13.
a thrust yield of at least eight hundred thousand pounds: Erik Bergaust, Rocket City U.S.A. (New York: Macmillan, 1963), p. 14.
Soviet Union had detonated: Robert C. Albright, “Grave Senate Hears Soviet A-bomb News,” Washington Post, September 24, 1949, p. 1.
“months and even years”: United Press, “Indifference to Civil Defense Cited,” Washington Post, October 10, 1949, p. 11.
“onrushing tide of communism”: John F. Kennedy, John Fitzgerald Kennedy: A Compilation of Statements and Speeches Made During His Service in the United States Senate and House of Representatives (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1964), pp. 41–42.
“I never had the feeling”: Quoted in Shaw, JFK in the Senate, p. 26.
“current emotional heat wave”: Genevieve Reynolds, “Capitol Has Own Heat Wave, Attributed to John Kennedy,” Washington Post, May 22, 1949, p. 57.
“I knew Jack”: John D. Lane, oral history interviews, October 12 and December 6, 2006, Senate Historical Office, no. 2, p. 49, https://www.senate.gov/artandhistory/history/resources/pdf/OralHistory_LaneJohn.pdf (hereafter “Lane oral history interviews”).
Addison’s disease: Richard Lacayo, “How Sick Was J.F.K.?” Time, November 24, 2002, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,393754,00.html.
“Sometimes you read that [Jack] was a reluctant figure”: Quoted in Thomas Oliphant and Curtis Wilke, The Road to Camelot: Inside JFK’s Five-Year Campaign (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017), p. 8.
“at a tempo for peace”: Quoted in Ward, Dr. Space, p. 74.
being “too fantastic”: Halberstam, The Fifties, pp. 607–8.
“McMahon was home ill”: Lane oral history interviews, no. 2, p. 54.
“the hardest campaigner”: Quoted in Caro, The Passage of Power, p. 30.
“Kennedy told me later”: Lane oral history interviews, no. 1, p. 29.
courted by both political parties: Robert H. Ferrell, “Eisenhower Was a Democrat,” Kansas History 13, no. 3 (Autumn 1990): 135.
“to demand the abolition”: Robert C. Byrd, The Senate 1789–1989: Addresses on the History of the United States Senate (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1988), 1:606.
Saint Lawrence Seaway: Caro, The Passage of Power, 30.
a senator or journalist: Paul B. Fay, recorded interview with James A. Oesterle, November 11, 1970, p. 214, John F. Kennedy Library Oral History Program, Kennedy Library.
“Every gun that is made”: Dwight Eisenhower, “The Chance for Peace” speech, April 16, 1953, https://www.eisenhower.archives.gov/all_about_ike/speeches/chance_for_peace.pdf.
Eisenhower, in his postpresidential memoir: Dwight D. Eisenhower, Waging Peace, 1956–1961; The White House Years (New York: Doubleday, 1965), pp. 207–9.
To put this into perspective: Mieczkowski, Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment, p. 40.
the Redstone would go on: Eugene M. Emme, Aeronautics and Astronautics, 1915–1960 (Columbus, OH: BiblioGov, 2012), p. 72.
“You should know how advertising”: Potter, The Earth Gazers, pp. 146–47.
“At the present time our engineering efforts”: Quoted in Roger D. Launius, The U.S. Space Program and American Society (Carlisle, MA: Discovery Enterprises, 1998), p. 16.
“In addition to the cogent scientific arguments”: Alan Dulles to Charles Erwin Wilson, January 29, 1955, CIA Library Reading Room, https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0006513734.pdf.
Kennedy’s stature in the Senate: Oliphant and Wilke, The Road to Camelot, p. 2.
“This was the first time”: Caro, The Passage of Power, p. 50.
Soviet domination in ICBM development: Philip Nash, “Bear Any Burden? John F. Kennedy and Nuclear Weapons,” in Cold War Statesmen Confront the Bomb: Nuclear Diplomacy Since 1945, ed. John Lewis Gaddis et al. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), p. 122.
Sixty-seven countries: Manu Saadia, “Is America Facing Another Sputnik Moment?” New Yorker, October 4, 2017.
“specifically ordered to forget”: “Space: Reach for the Stars,” Time, February 17, 1958, pp. 21–25.
6: SPUTNIK REVOLUTION
“Senator and Mrs. Kennedy”: Wernher von Braun, recorded interview by Walter D. Sohier and Eugene M. Emme, March 31, 1964, p. 1, John F. Kennedy Oral History Program, Kennedy Library.
“the accident occurred with an obsolescent type”: Ibid.
“The senator pointed at the close relationship”: Ibid., p. 2.
“I would raise a question”: Ibid.
“When I published my first space novel”: Neil McAleer, Arthur C. Clarke: An Authorized Biography (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1992), p. 215.
“The cost of continuing”: S. Everett Gleason, “Discussion at the 329th Meeting of the National Security Council, Wednesday, July 3, 1957,” NSC Records, DDE Presidential Papers, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, Kansas, July 5, 1957, p. 2.
the night of October 4, 1957: Dickson, Sputnik, p. 1.
Kremlin confirmed the stunning report: William J. Jorden, “Soviets Fire Earth Satellite into Space: 560 Miles High,” New York Times, October 5, 1957, p. 1.
three boldface lines: Ibid.
American Radio Relay League: Dickson, Sputnik, p. 13.
“second in importance”: Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 5.
While Sputnik was newsworthy: Responses of twenty-two-year-old female and forty-year-old white male, File 87: Correspondence, Rhoda Metraux Papers, Library of Congress Manuscript Division, Washington, DC.
“In the pre-Sputnik days”: Rachel Carson to Dorothy Freeman, February 1, 1958, in Rachel Carson: Silent Spring and Other Writings on the Environment, ed. Sandra Steingraber (New York: Library of America, 2018), p. 374.
“Oh Little Sputnik”: Quoted in Burrows, This New Ocean, p. 192.
“In the Open West”: Lyndon Baines Johnson, Vantage Point: Perspectives of the Presidency, 1963–69 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), p. 272.
George Reedy, a high-powered Democratic strategist: George E. Reedy to Lyndon B. Johnson, October 17, 1957, Lyndon B. Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, Texas.
“The Roman Empire controlled”: Ibid., pp. 275–76.
he rejected the idea: Craig Ryan, Sonic Wind: The Story of John Paul Stapp and How a Renegade Doctor Became the Fastest Man on Earth (New York: Liveright, 2015), p. 257.
the launch of Sputnik “spooked”: Neil deGrasse Tyson, Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier (New York: W. W. Norton, 2012), p. 5.
an official investigation to gauge: Kevin J. Fernlund, Lyndon B. Johnson and Modern America (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2009), p. 151.
“the age of Sputnik”: “Blue Key Banquet” (speech), University of Florida, Gainesville, Florida, October 18, 1957, item JFKSEN-0898-018, Papers of John F. Kennedy, Pre-Presidential Papers, Senate Files: Speeches and the Press, Speech Files: 1953–1960, Kennedy Library.
“losing the satellite and missile race”: Christopher A. Preble, “Who Ever Believed in the ‘Missile Gap’? John F. Kennedy and the Politics of National Security,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 33, no. 4 (2003): 801–26.
British reporter informed von Braun: Neufeld, Von Braun, p. 311.
“suddenly been vaccinated”: Ibid., pp. 311–12.
“words tumbled over one another”: Thomas M. Coffey, Iron Eagle: The Turbulent Life of General Curtis LeMay (New York: Crown, 1986), p. 349.
“useless hunk” . . . “basketball game”: Wilson and Adams quoted in Halberstam, The Fifties, pp. 624–25.
“a brown star racing northward”: Bob Kealing, Kerouac in Florida: Where the Road Ends (Arbiter Press, 2011), p. 30.
a weightless environment: Dr. David Whitehouse, “First Dog in Space Died Within Hours,” BBC News, October 28, 2002.
“outstripped the leading capitalist country”: William Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era (New York: W. W. Norton, 2003), p. 378.
“a battle more important”: Robert A. Divine, The Sputnik Challenge: Eisenhower’s Response to the Soviet State (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), pp. xv–xvi.
“a total politician”: Kenneth P. O’Donnell and David F. Powers, with Joe McCarthy, “Johnny, We Hardly Knew Ye”: Memories of John Fitzgerald Kennedy (Boston: Little, Brown, 1972), pp. 127–28.
“the solemn consequences”: “Kansas Democratic Club Banquet” (speech), Topeka, Kansas, November 6, 1957, item JFKSEN-0898-027, Papers of John F. Kennedy, Pre-Presidential Papers, Senate Files: Speeches and the Press, Speech Files: 1953–1960, Kennedy Library.
“It is now apparent”: Ibid.
“stood in so critical a position”: Associated Press, “Kennedy Assails U.S. Missile Lag,” New York Times, November 7, 1959, p. 16.
“go frantic”: Dwight Eisenhower, President’s New Conference, March 26, 1958, Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, Kansas (hereafter “Eisenhower Library”).
“the race for advantage”: Hal Willard, “Kennedy Calls for Federal School Aid,” Washington Post, October 11, 1957, p. 1.
comparing American and Soviet performance: “Crisis in Education,” Life, March 24, 1958, p. 26.
“It’s the Americans’ turn”: “U.S. Turn Now, Bulganin Says,” New York Times, November 12, 1957, p. 27.
“It would have been better”: Philip Nash, The Other Missiles of October: Eisenhower, Kennedy, and the Jupiters, 1957–1963 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999), p. 3.
“in a race” with the Kremlin: “John Foster Dulles to James C. Hagerty, October 8, 1957: ‘Draft Statements on the Soviet Satellite,’” October 5, 1957, John Foster Dulles Papers, Eisenhower Library, https://history.nasa.gov/sputnik/15.html. See also Dwight D. Eisenhower, The White House Years, vol. 2: Waging Peace: 1956–1961 (New York: Doubleday, 1965).
“Vanguard will never make it”: Quoted in Neufeld, Von Braun, p. 312.
reserved a late-January launch date: “Reach for the Stars,” Time, February 17, 1958, http://content.time.com/time/subscriber/article/0,33009,862899-7,00.html.
“a confusing aura”: Norman Mailer, Of a Fire on the Moon (Boston: Little, Brown, 1970), p. 70.
von Braun adorned the covers: Time, February 17, 1958; Life, November 18, 1957.
“I cannot share”: “Letters,” Time, March 3, 1958, http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,893837,00.html.
“I wasn’t truly aware”: Wernher von Braun to Alan Fox, January 22, 1971, Correspondence file, Wernher von Braun Library and Archives, U.S. Space and Rocket Center, Huntsville, Alabama.
“small satellite spheres”: Constance McLaughlin Green and Milton Lomask, Project Vanguard (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2009), p. 198.
Kennedy regarded the “mismanagement”: Ibid., p. 202.
“duplicating each other’s efforts”: “Kansas Democratic Club Banquet.”
“unannounced but unabashed run”: “Man Out Front,” Time, December 2, 1957, p. 19.
Kennedy had not written: Herbert S. Parmet, JFK: The Presidency of John F. Kennedy (New York: Dial Press, 1983).
fought the accusation relentlessly: Klaus P. Fischer, America in White, Black and Gray (New York: Continuum, 2006), p. 96n10.
“we must work as though”: “Johnson’s Talk to Democratic Senators,” New York Times, January 8, 1958, p. B3.
“where the initiative”: “Legislative Origins of the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958: Proceedings of an Oral History Workshop,” Conducted April 3, 1992, Moderated by John M. Logsdon, Monographs in Space History, no. 8 (Washington, DC: NASA History Office, 1998), https://history.nasa.gov/40thann/legorgns.pdf.
“the flaunting of the Soviets”: “Women’s Club of Richmond” (speech), Richmond, Virginia, January 20, 1958, item JFKSEN-0899-005, Papers of John F. Kennedy, Pre-Presidential Papers, Senate Files: Speeches and the Press, Speech Files: 1953–1960, Kennedy Library.
“lap up publicity and attention”: Quoted in Michelle L. Evans, The X-15 Rocket Plane: Flying the First Wings into Space (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2013), p. 70.
“God gave man a fixed number”: Quoted in Milton O. Thompson, At the Edge of Space: The X-15 Flight Program (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992), pp. 9–41.
“had a mind that absorbed”: Quoted in Richard R. Truly, “Neil A. Armstrong,” in Memorial Tributes: National Academy of Engineering (Washington, DC: National Academies Press, 2013).
“Neil was probably the most”: Thompson, At the Edge of Space, pp. 9–41.
“All in all”: Hansen, First Man, p. 53.
7: MISSILE GAPS AND THE CREATION OF NASA
“When the elevator”: “Harvard Club” (speech), Boston, Massachusetts, March 21, 1958, item JFKSEN-0900-012, Papers of John F. Kennedy, Pre-Presidential Papers, Senate Files: Speeches and the Press, Speech Files: 1953–1960, Kennedy Library.
“cautioned Dr. von Braun”: John Medaris, Countdown for Decision (New York: G. P. Putnam, 1960), pp. 143–73.
“It makes us feel that we paid”: Ibid.
“I sure feel a lot”: Mieczkowski, Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment, p. 129.
“not make too big”: Dickson, Sputnik, p. 175.
“This is the beginning”: Wernher von Braun quoted in “America in Space, January 31, 2008, 50th Anniversary,” Huntsville Times Commemorative Edition, February 1, 2008, https://www.kozmiclazershow.com/Huntsville-Times%20Gala%20Edition.pdf.
it proved a trouper: Green and Lomask, Project Vanguard, p. 187.
Advanced Research Projects Agency: Lloyd Norman, “G.E. Executive Chosen to Head Space Agency,” Chicago Tribune, February 8, 1958, p. 2.
“It doesn’t look so screwball”: Jack Manno, Arming the Heavens: The Hidden Military Agenda for Space, 1945–1995 (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1984), p. 52.
Such a nuclear arsenal: Halberstam, The Fifties, p. 702.
“Dear Jack, don’t buy”: Larry Sabato, The Kennedy Half-Century: The Presidency, Assassination, and Lasting Legacy of John F. Kennedy (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 46.
Select Committee on Astronautics: Mieczkowski, Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment, p. 141.
“LBJ was eager”: Quoted in Dickson, Sputnik, pp. 151–52.
the National Defense Education Act: Lawrence J. McAndrews, Broken Ground: John F. Kennedy and the Politics of Education (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 10.
Teller’s group concluded: Lieutenant General Donald L. Putt, USAF deputy chief of staff development, to Hugh L. Dryden, NACA director, January 31, 1958, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA HQ.
earned the Distinguished Flying Cross: Thompson, At the Edge of Space, pp. 9–41.
On his inaugural X-15 flight: Richard Branson, Reach for the Skies: Ballooning, Birdmen, and Blasting into Space (New York: Penguin, 2011), p. 257.
“The highest priority should go”: Quoted in George Robinson, “Space Law, Space War, and Space Exploration,” Journal of Social and Political Studies 5 (Fall 1980): 165.
“exercising control over aeronautical”: The full text of the National Aeronautics and Space Act of 1958 can be found on the NASA website, https://history.nasa.gov/spaceact.html.
“General Donald Putt recently called”: Dr. W. H. Pickering to Dr. W. V. Houston (president of the Rice Institute), April 19, 1958, Fondren Library, NASA Files, Rice University, Houston, Texas.
“While we [the NACA] knew”: Doolittle, quoted in Dik Alan Daso, Doolittle: Aerospace Visionary (Dulles, VA: Potomac Books, 2003), pp. 105–6.
“the most capable element in the Nation”: Albon B. Hailey, “Army Fights Proposal to Transfer Its Space Experts to Civilian Agency,” Washington Post, October 23, 1958, p. A1.
“Americans were no longer”: “Eighth Annual Pittsburgh World Affairs Forum” (speech), Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, April 18, 1958, item JFKSEN-0900-021, Papers of John F. Kennedy, Pre-Presidential Papers, Senate Files: Speeches and the Press, Speech Files: 1953–1960, Kennedy Library.
offer Eisenhower advice: John C. Donovan, The Cold Warrior: A Policy Making Elite (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath, 1974), p. 134.
“unexpected Soviet development”: Greg Herken, Counsels of War (New York: Knopf, 1985), p. 113.
“Our nation could have afforded”: Quoted in Preble, “Who Ever Believed in the ‘Missile Gap’?,” pp. 801–26.
U-2 photographs proved: Glenn Hastedt, “Reconnaissance Satellites, Intelligence, and National Security,” in Steven J. Dick and Roger D. Launius, eds., Societal Impact of Spaceflight (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2007), p. 369.
control of outer space: Alexander McDonald, The Long Space Age: The Economic Origins of Space Exploration from Colonial America to the Cold War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2017), pp. 165–66.
“As sure as anything”: Ben Price, “Medaris Has to Be out of This World,” Washington Post, February 2, 1958, p. E3.
most top army brass: Hailey, “Army Fights Proposal to Transfer Its Space Experts to Civilian Agency,” p. A1.
“discoveries that have military value”: John M. Logsdon et al., eds., Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History of the U.S. Civil Space Program, vol. 1: Organizing for Exploration (Washington, DC: NASA, 1995), pp. 334–45.
were all incorporated into NASA: Burrows, This New Ocean, pp. 213–16; McDougall, . . . the Heavens and the Earth, pp. 170–76.
George C. Marshall Space Flight Center: “Dr. Wernher von Braun; First Center Director, July 1, 1960–Jan. 27, 1970,” MSFC History Office, Marshall Space Flight Center, https://history.msfc.nasa.gov/vonbraun/bio.html.
“No doubt this mighty rocket system”: Public Papers of Dwight D. Eisenhower, 1960–1961 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1961), p. 690.
“Employees had been reassured”: James R. Hansen, Spaceflight Revolution: NASA Langley Research Center from Sputnik to Apollo (Toronto: ChiZine Publications, 2017), p. 2.
NASA launched Pioneer 1: NASA Langley Research Center from Sputnik to Apollo, https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/nmc/spacecraft/display.action?id=1958-007A.
Doolittle refused: William D. Putnam and Eugene M. Emme, “I Was There: The Tremendous Potential of Rocketry,” Air and Space Magazine, September 2012, https://www.airspacemag.com/space/i-was-there-the-tremendous-potential-of-rocketry-18946468/.
“the same technical value”: U.S. House of Representatives Select Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration, “Authorizing Construction for NASA,” 85th Congress, science advisor James Killian (Washington, DC, 1958), pp. 9–12.
From 1950 to 1952: Glennan quoted in Mieczkowski, Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment, p. 285.
“One purpose of Eisenhower’s strategic posture”: McDougall, . . . the Heavens and the Earth, p. 200.
“the balance sheet of a year”: Hanson W. Baldwin, “The Sputnik Era—Where the U.S. and Soviet Union Stand,” New York Times, October 5, 1958, p. E6.
a “non-entity”: Frank Van Riper, Glenn: The Astronaut Who Would Be President (New York: Empire Books, 1983), p. 103.
morning of July 16, 1957: George C. Larson, “John Glenn’s Project Bullet,” Air and Space Magazine, July 2009, https://www.airspacemag.com/history-of-flight/john-glenns-project-bullet-138177585/.
“pretty good position”: Van Riper, Glenn, p. 123.
“I have never seen anybody”: George Smathers, Oral History, Lyndon Baines Johnson Presidential Library, Austin, Texas (hereafter “Johnson Library”).
“match the Russians missile for missile”: “Remarks of Senator John F. Kennedy, Jefferson-Jackson Day Dinner, Detroit, Michigan, May 23, 1959,” Papers of John F. Kennedy, Pre-Presidential Papers, Senate Files: Speeches and the Press, Speech Files: 1953–1960, Kennedy Library, https://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/JFK-Speeches/Detroit-MI_19590523.aspx.
“outer space is fast becoming the heart and soul”: U.S. Congress, House Select Committee on Astronautics and Space Exploration, The United States and Outer Space, H.R. Rep. No. 2710, 85th Congress, 2nd Session (1959), p. 6.
“second-place status”: Mieczkowski, Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment, p. 244.
8: MERCURY SEVEN TO THE RESCUE
a “mystical lure of the unknown”: Ray Allen Billington, America’s Frontier Heritage (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1963), p. 26.
“It is my pleasure”: Logsdon and Launius, eds., Exploring the Unknown, vol. 7: Human Spaceflight: Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2008).
“We didn’t know what”: Quoted in DeGroot, Dark Side of the Moon, p. 107.
The press gushed enthusiasms: James Reston quoted in Carpenter and Stoever, For Spacious Skies, p. 197.
“poked, prodded”: Michael Collins, Carrying the Fire: An Astronaut’s Journey (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1974), p. 27.
Psychologists also administered: DeGroot, Dark Side of the Moon, p. 105.
“I’d go so far as to say”: Wally Schirra with Richard N. Billings, Schirra’s Space (Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 1988), pp. 65–66.
“Scientist alone”: Allen Ginsberg, “Poem Rocket,” in Kaddish and Other Poems (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1961), p. 38.
“opened the door”: Lehman, This High Man, p. 46.
“Man is still the best computer”: Quoted in Charles R. Pellegrino and Joshua Stoff, Chariots for Apollo: The Untold Story Behind the Race to the Moon (New York: Avon, 1999), p. 15.
What von Braun envisioned: “IBM Commemorates NASA’s 50th Anniversary of First U.S. Manned Space Flight and the IBMers Who Supported It,” May 5, 2011, https://www-03.ibm.com/press/us/en/pressrelease/34449.wss.
“Kennedy identifies enthusiastically”: Van Riper, Glenn, p. 36.
biggest story of the day: Max Frankel, “Soviet Rocket Hits Moon After 35 Hours; Arrival Is Calculated Within 84 Seconds; Signals Received Till Moment of Impact,” New York Times, September 14, 1959, p. 1.
Kennedy essentially agreed with a snarky: Swenson, Grimwood, and Alexander, This New Ocean, pp. 281–88.
“first but, first and”: Michael R. Beschloss, The Crisis Years: Kennedy and Khrushchev, 1960–1963 (New York: HarperCollins, 1991), p. 28.
9: KENNEDY FOR PRESIDENT
“formative stage”: “U.S. Aeronautics and Space Activities,” Report to Congress from the President of the United States, January 31, 1962, https://history.nasa.gov/presrep1961.pdf.
“a serious man on a serious mission”: Quoted in Clarke, JFK’s Last Hundred Days, p. 343.
“Jack was always out”: Shaw, JFK in the Senate, p. 183.
a “pathetic” congressman: “Reminiscences of President Lyndon Baines Johnson,” August 19, 1969, Oral History Collection, Johnson Library.
referred to as “the boy”: O’Brien, John F. Kennedy, p. 430.
“sort of Irishman”: Elizabeth Hardwick, The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick (New York: New York Review of Books, 2017), p. 85.
“I had not realized”: Glennan quoted in Potter, The Earth Gazers, p. 171.
“intrinsic merit”: Michael R. Beschloss, “Kennedy and the Decision to Go to the Moon,” in Roger D. Launius and Howard E. McCurdy, eds., Spaceflight and the Myth of Presidential Leadership (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1997), p. 60.
“high-thrust space vehicles”: Roger E. Bilstein, Stages to Saturn: A Technological History of the Apollo/Saturn Launch Vehicles (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1980), p. 50.
“I am profoundly worried”: Wernher von Braun, “Space,” Washington Post, March 20, 1960 (reprinted in Current News).
“space is the greatest new frontier”: T. Keith Glennan, comments on “Report from Outer Space,” World Wide 60, NBC, May 14, 1960. See also Susan Landrum Magnus, “Conestoga Wagons to the Moon: The Frontier, The American Space Program, and National Identity” (PhD dissertation, Ohio State University, 1999), p. 72.
“undeviated Republicanism”: Logsdon, John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon, p. 7.
“Whatever the scale and pace”: Kalic, US Presidents and the Militarization of Space, 1946–1967, pp. 62–63.
“its cherished Jupiter missile”: Erik Bergaust, Wernher von Braun (Lanham, MD: Stackpole, 1976), p. 406.
“the image of the god Apollo”: Quoted in Courtney G. Brooks, James M. Grimwood, and Loyd S. Swenson Jr., Chariot for Apollo: The NASA History of Manned Lunar Spacecraft to 1969 (Washington, DC: NASA History Series SP-4205, Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1979), p. 15.
“the next spacecraft beyond Mercury”: Hugh C. Dryden, “NASA Mission and Long-Range Plan,” in NASA–Industry Program Plans Conference (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1960), p. 8.
lambasted the Johnson campaign: Larry Tye, Bobby Kennedy: The Making of a Liberal Icon (New York: Random House, 2016), p. 111.
“uneasy and joyless marriage”: Richard Nixon, RN: The Memoirs of Richard Nixon (New York: Grosset and Dunlap, 1978), p. 215.
“The New Frontier of which I speak”: John F. Kennedy, “Address of Senator John F. Kennedy Accepting the Democratic Party Nomination for the Presidency of the United States—Memorial Coliseum, Los Angeles,” July 15, 1960, at John Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-senator-john-f-kennedy-accepting-the-democratic-party-nomination-for-the.
giant aerospace corporations: Rachel Reeves, “Aerospace: The Industry That Built South Bay” Easy Reader News, October 17, 2013. https://easyreadernews.com/aerospace-chronicles-industry-built-south-bay/.
“Even before Kennedy took office”: William E. Leuchtenburg, The American President: From Teddy Roosevelt to Bill Clinton (New York: Oxford University Press, 2015), p. 387.
United States had lost its lead: “Split Over Space Issue,” New York Times, October 26, 1960.
advocate for accelerated deployment: Mieczkowski, Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment, pp. 245–46.
“I could expose that phony”: Quoted in Gary Donaldson, The First Modern Campaign: Kennedy, Nixon and the Election of 1960 (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), p. 128.
“This is year three”: Allan C. Fisher Jr., “Exploring Tomorrow with the Space Agency,” National Geographic 118, no. 1 (July 1960).
Kennedy would sometimes retell: Author interview with Ted Sorensen, July 18, 2004, Boston, Massachusetts.
“The people of the world”: “Speech of Senator John F. Kennedy, Multnomah Hotel, Portland, OR,” September 7, 1960, The American Presidency Project, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=25675.
apparently spotted Echo 1: Chertok, Rockets and People, p. 47.
Strelka gave birth: Allison Gee, “Pushinka: A Cold War Puppy the Kennedys Loved,” BBC News Magazine, January 6, 2014, www.bbc.com/news/magazine-24837199.
“with too many slums”: “Address to the Greater Houston Ministerial Association” (video), September 12, 1960, Kennedy Library, https://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/ALL6YEBJMEKYGMCntnSCvg.aspx.
“I am tired of reading”: John F. Kennedy, “Speech by Senator John F. Kennedy at a Democratic Fund-Raising Dinner in Syracuse, N.Y.,” September 29, 1960, Kennedy Library, https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/JFKSEN/0912/JFKSEN-0912-021.
“We have been repeatedly reassured”: Jonathan Croyle, “John F. Kennedy Campaigns in Syracuse in 1960,” Syracuse Post-Standard, September 29, 2016, p. 1.
“I look up and see”: “‘Face-to-Face, Nixon-Kennedy’ Vice President Richard M. Nixon and Senator John F. Kennedy Fourth Joint Television-Radio Broadcast, October 21, 1960,” Kennedy Library, https://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/JFK-Speeches/4th-Nixon-Kennedy-Debate_19601021.aspx.
“You may be ahead of us in rocket thrust”: Ibid.
“The Republican presidential candidate”: John W. Finn, “Johnson Assails U.S. Space Delay,” New York Times, October 31, 1960.
10: SKYWARD WITH JAMES WEBB
“Let the word go forth”: John F. Kennedy: “Inaugural Address,” January 20, 1961, Kennedy Library, https://www.jfklibrary.org/learn/about-jfk/historic-speeches/inaugural-address.
“I was so proud of Jack”: Ralph G. Martin, A Hero for Our Time: An Intimate Story of the Kennedy Years (New York: Macmillan, 1983), p. 12.
Each of these sites: Neal, Lewis, and Winter, Spaceflight: A Smithsonian Guide, pp. 58–59.
a three-stage Minuteman: T. A. Heppenheimer, Countdown: A History of Space Flight (New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1999), p. 146.
some Republicans faux-congratulated: McDougall, . . . the Heavens and the Earth, p. 328.
“Who ever believed”: Mieszkowski, Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment, p. 246.
“neither fair nor carefully prepared”: Bilstein, Stages to Saturn, p. 54.
“met with complete failure”: T. Keith Glennan, The Birth of NASA: The Diary of T. Keith Glennan (Washington, DC: NASA History Office, 1993), p. 304.
NASA’s primate program: Burrows, This New Ocean, p. 317.
seventeen candidates: Piers Bizony, The Man Who Ran the Moon: James Webb, NASA, and the Secret History of Project Apollo (New York: Thunder’s Mouth Press, 2006), p. 15.
“technological anticommunism”: McDougall, . . . the Heavens and the Earth, pp. 344–45.
“blabbermouth”: Bizony, The Man Who Ran the Moon, p. 18.
advice on the best person: W. Henry Lambright, Powering Apollo: James E. Webb of NASA (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), pp. 82–83.
“I want you because”: Ibid., p. 84.
“President Kennedy said”: Nola Taylor Redd, “James Webb: Early NASA Visionary,” Space.com, November 21, 2017.
failed missions and dead astronauts: McDougall, . . . the Heavens and the Earth, p. 309.
“one of the ablest”: Wolfe, The Right Stuff, pp. 226–27.
reassuring them of his commitment: Roscoe Drummond, “NASA Now Could Come into Own,” Washington Post, February 15, 1961, p. E5.
“John Kennedy, perhaps for the first”: Logsdon, John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon, p. 64.
Vostok 1 cosmonaut: “Soviet Lands Man After Orbit of World,” Washington Post, April 13, 1961, p. A1.
“We feel there is no better means”: “Administrator’s Presentation to the President,” March 21, 1961, NASA History Office, Washington, DC.
JFK had a tireless advocate: McDougall, . . . the Heavens and the Earth, p. 317.
11: YURI GAGARIN AND ALAN SHEPARD
Gagarin completed a single low orbit: Gruntman, Blazing the Trail, p. 345.
“Modest; embarrasses”: Asif Siddiqi, Challenge to Apollo: The Soviet Union and the Space Race, 1945–1974 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 2000), pp. 261–62.
“The road to the stars”: Roger D. Launius, The Smithsonian History of Space Exploration: From the Ancient World to the Extraterrestrial Future (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2018), p. 7.
weighing 5 tons: Roger D. Launius, Frontiers of Rocket Exploration, 2nd ed. (Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, 2004), p. 99.
“walking on thin ice”: Neal Thompson, Light This Candle: The Life and Times of Alan Shepard, America’s First Spaceman (New York: Crown, 2004), p. 250.
“However tired anybody may be”: John F. Kennedy, “The President’s News Conference,” April 12, 1961, at John Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/the-presidents-news-conference-211.
“had no real grasp”: Theodore Sorensen, Kennedy (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), p. 345.
the president’s disposition: Hugh Sidey, John F. Kennedy, President (New York: Atheneum, 1964), p. 119.
“our two major organizational concepts”: James Webb to Keith Glennan, April 14, 1961, NASA History Office, https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4105.pdf.
When Shepard first learned: Francis French and Colin Burgess, Into That Silent Sea: Trailblazers of the Space Era, 1961–1965 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2009), p. 57.
“the most expensive funeral”: Quoted in ibid., p. 57.
“I didn’t like it worth a damn”: Christopher Kraft, Flight: My Life in Mission Control (New York: Dutton, 2001), p. 132.
“Of course, we tried to derive”: Nikita Khrushchev, Khrushchev Remembers: The Last Testament (Boston: Little, Brown, 1974), p. 53.
“the Americans talked a lot”: Hugh Sidey, “How the News Hit Washington—with Some Reactions Overseas,” Life, April 21, 1961, pp. 26–27.
“trying to break the chains of imperialism”: McDougall, . . . the Heavens and the Earth, pp. 245–46.
“Is there any place”: Hamish Lindsay, Tracking Apollo to the Moon (London: Springer-Verlag, 2001), p. 21.
“Jefferson’s expeditions”: Julie M. Fenster, Jefferson’s America: The President, the Purchase, and the Explorers Who Transformed a Nation (New York: Crown, 2016), p. 367.
“Kennedy began to really get”: Logsdon, John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon, p. 77.
“anguished and fatigued”: Quoted in John Noble Wilford, “Race to Space, Through Lens of Time,” New York Times, May 23, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/24/science/space/24space.html.
a gala at the White House: Godfrey Hodgson, JFK and LBJ (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2015), p. 109.
“All you bright fellows”: John Noble Wilford, “Race to Space, Through the Lens of Time,” New York Times, May 23, 2011.
“Do we have a chance”: Quoted in Richard W. Orloff and David M. Harland, Apollo: The Definitive Sourcebook (New York: Springer Science and Business Media, 2006), p. 12.
“dramatic accomplishments in space”: Lyndon B. Johnson to John F. Kennedy, April 28, 1961, LBJ Library, http://www.lbjlibrary.org/assets/uploads/news/LBJ-response-to-JFK.pdf
“Manned exploration of the moon”: Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson to President John F. Kennedy, April 28, 1961, memorandum, LBJ Library, http://www.lbjlibrary.org/assets/uploads/news/LBJ-response-to-JFK.pdf.
“a performance jump by a factor 10”: Wernher von Braun to Lyndon Johnson, April 29, 1961, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC, https://history.msfc.nasa.gov/vonbraun/documents/vp_ljohnson.pdf.
“We were being rushed”: Quoted in Bergaust, Wernher von Braun, pp. 406–7.
secretly arranging a summit meeting: Günter Bischof, Stefan Karner, and Barbara Stelzl-Marx, eds., “John F. Kennedy and His European Summitry in Early June 1961,” in The Vienna Summit and Its Importance in International History (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2014), p. 113.
one final test: Ernest Barcella, “Balloonist’s Widow Gets Kennedy Call,” Washington Post, May 7, 1961, p. A6.
“He was hard to get”: Quoted in French and Burgess, Into That Silent Sea, p. 45.
“I’m cooler than you are”: Quoted in John Noble Wilford, “Alan B. Shepard Jr. Is Dead at 74; First American to Travel in Space,” New York Times, July 23, 1998, p. 1.
“Boy, what a ride!”: quoted in Richard Witkin, “U.S. Hurls Man 115 Miles into Space,” New York Times, May 6, 1961, p. 1.
“My name is José Jimenez”: Thompson, Light This Candle, p. 259.
“Hello, commander”: Ibid., p. 306.
“the greatest ‘suspense drama’”: Howard Stentz, “Space Shot Top Television Thriller,” Houston Chronicle, May 5, 1961, p. 16.
“a symbol of the twentieth century”: Quoted in Logsdon, John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon, p. 225.
“We had a big laugh”: Quoted in French and Burgess, Into That Silent Sea, p. 74.
“even more thrilled”: Alan B. Shepard Oral History, June 12, 1964, pp. 1–2, John F. Kennedy Oral History Program, Kennedy Library.
“Thus Alan Shepard”: Steven Watts, JFK and the Masculine Mystique: Sex and Power on the New Frontier (New York: Thomas Dunne/St. Martin’s, 2016), p. 342.
TASS’s rote criticism: Von Hardesty and Gene Eisman, Epic Rivalry: The Inside Story of the Soviet and American Space Race (Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2007), p. 125.
“incentive to everyone”: News Conference 11, May 5, 1961. Kennedy Library, https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other.resources/john-f-kennedy-press-conference-11.
“In choosing the lunar landing mission”: Logsdon, The Decision to Go to the Moon, p. 124.
the point of Project Apollo: McDonald, The Long Space Age, pp. 166–67.
“He talked to them”: “Posthumous DFC Given to Prather,” Washington Post, May 21, 1961, p. B4.
12: “GOING TO THE MOON”: WASHINGTON, DC, MAY 25, 1961
The White House had billed: W. H. Lawrence, “Kennedy Asks 1.8 Billion This Year to Accelerate Space Exploration, Add Foreign Aid, Bolster Defense,” New York Times, May 26, 1961, p. 1.
“As far as President Kennedy”: Quoted in Deborah Hart Strober and Gerald S. Strober, The Kennedy Presidency: An Oral History of the Era (Washington, DC: Brassey’s, 2003), pp. 248–49.
consult with a wide array: Theodore Sorensen, Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), p. 336.
“You’re the people”: Hugh Dryden, interview by Walter D. Sohier, Arnold Frutkin, and Eugene M. Emme, March 26, 1964, p. 18, John F. Kennedy Oral History Program, Kennedy Library.
moon was starting to win out: Wolfe, The Right Stuff, pp. 218–19.
“JFK was obviously prepping”: Paul Haney, foreword to French and Burgess, Into That Silent Sea, p. xviii.
“public discovery”: Daniel Boorstin, “The Rise of Public Discovery,” in John M. Logsdon et al., Apollo in Historical Context (Washington, DC: Space Policy Institute/George Washington University, 1990), p. 21.
“Well, I’m glad they got”: Quoted in John Glenn with Nick Taylor, John Glenn: A Memoir (New York: Bantam/Random House, 1999), p. 275.
Congress had already signaled: “Dollars for Man to Go to Moon,” Business Week, June 3, 1961, p. 18.
“What we had in mind”: James E. Webb, interview with H. George Frederickson, Henry J. Anna, and Barry Kelmachter, May 15, 1969, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
“I’m a relatively cautious person”: Lambright, Powering Apollo, p. 95.
“Every time the Air Force”: Paul B. Stares, Space Weapons and US Strategy (London: Croom Helm, 1985), p. 64.
no “man-on-the-moon” requirement: U.S. Congress, Senate Committee on Armed Services, Military Procurement Authorization for Fiscal Year 1964, Hearing, 88th Cong., 1st sess. (1963), p. 152.
Kennedy would be pushing: W. H. Lawrence, “President to Ask an Urgent Effort to Land on Moon,” New York Times, May 23, 1961, p. 1.
to buy NASA more time: Mike Wall, “The Moon and the Man at 50: Why JFK’s Space Exploration Speech Still Resonates,” Space.com, May 25, 2011.
by ad-libbing: The John F. Kennedy Presidential Library has various versions of the speech. The original reading copy of the speech, with Kennedy’s edits, can be located in Papers of John F. Kennedy, Presidential Papers, President’s Office Files, Box 34, Kennedy Library.
“our skills and our capital”: John F. Kennedy, “Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs,” May 25, 1961, at John Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/special-message-the-congress-urgent-national-needs.
“If we are to win the battle”: Ibid.
“We go into space”: Ibid.
“I believe this nation should commit”: Ibid.
“his audience was skeptical”: Theodore Sorensen, Counselor: A Life at the Edge of History (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), p. 336.
“stunned doubt and disbelief”: Logsdon, John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon, p. 115.
Republican leaders scribbled notes: Alvin Shuster, “Congress Wars on Cost, But Likes Kennedy’s Goals,” New York Times, May 26, 1961, p. 13.
“The president is ahead”: Robert C. Albright, “President’s Arms, Space Aims Get Full Backing by Congress,” Washington Post, May 27, 1961, p. A6.
“doubting the value”: Robert Seamans, Aiming at Targets (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1997), p. 88.
“our debt may reach”: “Public Debt Limit, Hearing Before the Committee on Finance,” U.S. Senate, 87th Cong., 1st sess., June 27, 1961 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1961).
“Damn it, I taught”: Quoted in Beschloss, The Crisis Years, p. 166.
“make the so-called race”: Washington (DC) Sunday Star, June 13, 1971.
“anybody who would spend $40 billion”: Mieczkowski, Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment, p. 269.
“Space technology will eventually”: 107 Cong. Rec. S917496 (June 8, 1961).
“It will cost thirty-five billion”: Quoted in Mieczkowski, Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment, p. 265.
“My head seemed to fill with fog”: Kraft, Flight, p. 143.
“We’ve only put Shepard”: Ibid.
Robert Gilruth: Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox, Apollo (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), p. 4.
“Of course, the moon”: Neufeld, Von Braun, p. 354.
“What Kennedy did with the moon program”: Quoted in Strober and Strober, The Kennedy Presidency, pp. 251–52.
“what would propel us to the moon”: Quoted in Neil McAleer, Arthur C. Clarke (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1992), p. 216.
“power to persuade”: Richard E. Neustadt, Presidential Power: The Politics of Leadership (New York: Wiley, 1960), p. 10.
“greatest open-ended peacetime commitment”: McDougall, . . . the Heavens and the Earth, p. 305.
NASA’s annual operating budget: James L. Kauffman, Selling Outer Space: Kennedy, the Media, and Funding for Project Apollo, 1961–1963 (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 1994), p. 2.
“spirit of discovery”: Sorensen, Kennedy, p. 525.
13: SEARCHING FOR MOONLIGHT IN TULSA AND VIENNA
“seething with excitement”: “The Moon by 1967 or Bust,” Business Week, June 3, 1961, p. 18.
“deals with the very heart”: John F. Kennedy: “Remarks by Telephone to the Conference on Peaceful Uses of Space Meeting in Tulsa,” May 26, 1961. Online at Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-telephone-the-conference-peaceful-uses-space-meeting-tulsa.
“Man has progressed”: United Press International, “Moon Landing Sure, Top Scientists Say,” May 26, 1961.
“If you want me in the landings”: A. M. Sperber, Murrow: His Life and Times (New York: Fordham University Press, 1998), p. 624.
“Landlords will not rent”: Edward R. Murrow, May 24, 1961, National Press Club Luncheon Speakers, Library of Congress Recorded Sound Research Center, Library of Congress, Washington, DC, https://www.loc.gov/rr/record/pressclub/murrow.html.
“The first colored man”: Edward R. Murrow to President John F. Kennedy, April 23, 1962, “Memorandum for the President,” Kennedy Library.
“The Russians are now graduating”: Quoted in “An American on the Moon—A $20 Billion Boondoggle?” U.S. News & World Report, August 20, 1962, p. 59.
“I am quite sure”: “Thirring: Sending a Man in Space Is Nonsense,” U.S. News & World Report, May 22, 1961, p. 49.
“really rather a nuisance”: “Man Is a Nuisance in Space,” U.S. News & World Report, August 20, 1962, p. 56.
“I’m not saying that it’s unwise”: Ibid., p. 57.
dark side of the moon program: Elizabeth Gibney, “The Quest to Crystallize Time,” Nature 543 (March 9, 2017): 165.
“What was difficult for us”: Eric Berger, “JFK’s Speech Today Would Be Hard to Believe,” Houston Chronicle, September 12, 2012, p. 1.
the best general design: Anthony Young, The Saturn V F-1 Engine: Powering Apollo into History (New York: Springer Science and Business Media, 2008), p. 18.
secure a massive government contract: John W. Finney, “Capital Worried by Lags in Plans on Race to Moon,” New York Times, August 13, 1961, p. 1.
“We thought it was too risky”: Quoted in James R. Hansen, “Enchanted Rendezvous: John C. Houbolt and the Genesis of the Lunar-Orbit Rendezvous Concept,” Monograph in Aerospace History, ser. 4 (January 25, 1999), p. 4, https//:nasa.gov.archive/nasa/casi.ntrs.nasa.gov/19960014824.pdf.
“Houston’s first reaction”: Quoted in Bergaust, Wernher von Braun, p. 408.
“No, Jim, I cannot bring”: Keith Glennan to James Webb, July 21, 1961, Glennan Personal Papers, Archives, Kevin Smith Library, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio.
five times the speed of sound: “X-15 Rocket Plane Flies 3,370 M.P.H.,” Chicago Tribune, May 26, 1961, p. 2.
American commitment to space: “Remarks at the Dedication of the Aerospace Medical Health Center, San Antonio, Texas, November 21, 1963,” Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: John F. Kennedy, 1963 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1964), p. 882, https://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/JFK-Speeches/San-Antonio-TX_19631121.aspx.
“With respect to the possibility”: The President to Chairman Khrushchev, Vienna, June 3, 1961, Memorandum of Conversation, p. 2, Office of the Historian, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v24/d107.
“At first he said no”: Ibid.
“if we cooperate”: Quoted in James Schefter, The Race (New York: Doubleday, 1999), p. 145.
categories of “competition” and “cooperation”: W. D. Kay, “John F. Kennedy and the Two Faces of the U.S. Space Program,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 28, no. 3 (Summer 1998): 576–79.
“Mr. Kennedy’s reaction”: James Reston, “Kennedy Is Firm on Defense Aims,” New York Times, June 6, 1961, p. 1.
14: MOON MOMENTUM WITH TELEVISION AND GUS GRISSOM
“You know, Lyndon”: Robert Dallek, “Johnson, Project Apollo, and the Politics of Space Program Planning,” in Launius and McCurdy, eds., Spaceflight and the Myth of Presidential Leadership, p. 72. See also Newton Minow, interview, March 19, 1971 (oral history), Johnson Library.
“Space was the platform”: Johnson, Vantage Point, p. 285.
NASA’s proposed Manned Spacecraft Center: McDougall, . . . the Heavens and the Earth, pp. 302–3. See also Minow interview.
“Many friends of Lyndon Johnson”: Shepard, Slayton, with Barbree, Moon Shot, p. 165.
“Maybe I watch more newscasts”: Don Mahan, ETC: A Review of General Semantics 27, no. 1 (March, 1964): 114–15.
“Kennedy felt very strongly”: Pierre E. G. Salinger, recorded interview by Theodore H. White, August 10, 1965 (no. 2), p. 108, John F. Kennedy Library Oral History Program, Kennedy Library.
every sixteen days: Ibid., p. 109.
“reveal his innate characteristics”: Virginia Kelly, “Will TV Audience Get Too Much JFK?” Long Beach Independent Press-Telegram, February 19, 1961, p. 14.
“the real factor in all of this”: “Dangerous White House Procedure,” Shreveport (LA) Times, January 31, 1961, p. 6.
“undisguised exercises”: “The Skill of President Kennedy,” Los Angeles Times, February 3, 1961, p. 41.
“Whatever the doubts”: Ibid.
“while the eyes”: Walter Cronkite, quoted in DeGroot, Dark Side of the Moon, p. 253.
hosting the network’s live coverage: Lyle Johnston, “Good Night, Chet” (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2003), p. 83.
“an open policy” of space information: John Krige, “NASA as an Instrument of U.S. Foreign Policy,” in Dick and Launius, eds., Societal Impact of Spaceflight, pp. 210–11.
“competition without war”: McDougall, . . . the Heavens and the Earth, p. 241.
“between freedom and tyranny”: John F. Kennedy, “Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs,” May 25, 1961, at John Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/special-message-the-congress-urgent-national-needs.
acquired the nickname “Gus”: Betty Grissom and Henry Still, Starfall (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1974), pp. 8–12.
“I usually flew wing position”: Quoted in John Darrell Sherwood, Officers in Flight Suits: The Story of American Air Force Fighter Pilots in the Korean War (New York: New York University Press, 1996), pp. 11–13.
“a little bear”: Gordon Cooper with Bruce Henderson, Leap of Faith: An Astronaut’s Journey into the Unknown (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), p. 22.
“I can see the coast”: “Mercury-Redstone 4 Mission Journal, Friday, July 21, 1961,” John Pfannerstill’s Space Chronicle, NASA History Office, Washington, DC, https://history.nasa.gov/40thmerc7/MR-4.html.
“Well, I was scared”: Mary C. White, “Detailed Biographies of Apollo I Crew—Gus Grissom,” NASA History Office, https://history.nasa.gov/Apollo204/zorn/grissom.htm.
“the great Cape Canaveral tape caper”: See, for instance, Harrisburg (IL) Daily Register, July 26, 1961.
“It won’t happen again”: United Press International, “U.S. Orbit Shot Next Year to Avoid Tape ‘Booboo,’” Cumberland (MD) Evening Times, July 26, 1961.
“That was the last thing he wanted”: Colin Burgess, Liberty Bell 7: The Suborbital Mercury Flight of Virgil I. Grissom (Cham, Switzerland: Springer, 2014), p. 149.
“was angry about being blamed”: Quoted in Francis French and Colin Burgess, In the Shadow of the Moon (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), p. 1.
“Once again we have demonstrated”: “Space Bill Is Approved by Kennedy,” Spokane Daily Chronicle, July 21, 1961, p. 11.
the Republic of Technology: Quoted in McDougall, . . . the Heavens and the Earth, p. 452.
“Ever since Kennedy declared”: Quoted in Neufeld, Von Braun, pp. 364–65.
“big-spending and self-promoting ways”: Ibid.
“As planning for Apollo began”: Robert Seamans, introduction to 1975 edition of Robert Cortright, ed., Apollo Expeditions to the Moon: The NASA History (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2009), p. xii.
“a sophisticated senior official”: James Webb, “A Perspective on Apollo,” in Cortright, ed., Apollo Expeditions to the Moon, p. 12.
“My answer was just as direct”: Ibid.
“The fact that every part”: Alan Shepard quoted in Gene Kranz, Failure Is Not an Option: Mission Control from Mercury to Apollo 13 and Beyond (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2000), p. 201.
the geographical advantages: Howard Simons, “Canaveral Selected for Moon Shots,” Washington Post, August 25, 1961, p. A4.
buying eighty thousand acres: United Press International, “Expansion for Moon Shots Finds Canaveral Area Set,” Washington Post, August 27, 1961, p. A6.
“The American test site”: Walter Cronkite, A Reporter’s Life (New York: Random House, 1996), p. 272.
difference in the two reactions: “A City with Growing Pains,” Palm Beach Post, July 11, 1965, p. 66.
an important role in raising consciousness: W. Henry Lambright, “NASA and the Environment: Science in a Political Context,” in Dick and Launius, eds., Societal Impact of Spaceflight, pp. 313–30.
Manned Spacecraft Center to Houston: Eric Berger, “A Worthy Endeavor: How Albert Thomas Won Houston NASA’s Flagship Center,” Houston Chronicle, September 14, 2003.
“like a divine right monarch”: Jack Valenti, This Time, This Place (New York: Crown, 2007), p. 30.
“The key to the selection”: Quoted in William D. Angel Jr., “The Politics of Space: NASA’s Decision to Locate the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston,” Houston Review 6, no. 2 (1984): 66.
waves of astromania swept: Kevin M. Brady, “NASA Launches Houston into Orbit: The Economic and Social Impact of the Space Agency on South Texas, 1961–1969,” in Dick and Launius, eds., Societal Impact of Spaceflight, pp. 451–65, https://history.nasa.gov/sp4801-chapter23.pdf.
to create a planned community: Ibid., pp. 452–53. The NBA franchise the Rockets was originally founded in San Diego in 1967 because the Atlas rocket was manufactured in Southern California.
15: GODSPEED, JOHN GLENN
countdown had begun: “U.S. Follows Launching,” New York Times, August 7, 1961, p. 7.
17.5 orbits of Earth: Details of the Vostok 2 can be found at Anatoly Zak, RussiaSpaceWeb.com, https://spaceflight.nasa.gov/outreach/SignificantIncidents/assets/vostok-2-mission.pdf.
boosted Kremlin military spending: Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr., A Thousand Days: John F. Kennedy in the White House (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965), p. 385.
ratcheted up his rhetoric: Bischof, Karner, and Stelzl-Marx, “Introduction,” in The Vienna Summit and Its Importance in International History, p. 24.
the Pittsburgh Press fretted: “East Germans Fleeing Reds One a Minute,” Pittsburgh Press, August 6, 1961, p. 1.
“looked about the size of a marble”: Associated Press, “Satellite Is Seen in S.C.,” Greenwood (SC) Index-Journal, August 7, 1961, p. 5.
“the lag can never be made up”: “Soviet Shot Viewed by World as Big Advance in Space Race,” New York Times, August 7, 1961, p. 7.
ninety-minute monologue broadcast: Pittsburgh Press, August 7, 1961, p. 1.
“antifascist protection rampart”: Tye, Bobby Kennedy, p. 246.
“It’s not a very nice solution”: John Lewis Gaddis, The Cold War: A New History (London: Penguin Press, 2005), p. 115.
“permanently kill[ed] Mercury-Redstone 5”: Donald K. Slayton and Michael Cassutt, Deke! U.S. Manned Space Flight: From Mercury to Shuttle (New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 1994), p. 104.
“The next flight”: Donald K. Slayton, Deke! U.S. Manned Space: From Mercury to the Shuttle (New York: Forge Books, 1995).
Mercury capsule was fired off: Burrows, This New Ocean, p. 340.
Holmes established a third NASA project: Lambright, Powering Apollo, pp. 108–11.
“The chimpanzee who is flying”: Theodore C. Sorensen, “Let the Word Go Forth”: The Speeches, Statements and Writings of John F. Kennedy, 1947 to 1963 (New York: Delacorte, 1988), p. 174.
“less than a 50-50 chance”: John Troan, “January Still Target of Moon Shot; 2 Test Failures May Not Delay On-Spot Probe,” Pittsburgh Press, November 21, 1961, p. 24.
“The Russians will be able”: Henry A. Berry Jr., “Anti-Satellite Weapon for Soviets Seen,” Shreveport (LA) Times, December 1, 1961, p. 1.
“Never before has a major scientific venture”: George J. Feldman, “Spacemen and the Law—Or Lack of It,” New York Times, October 8, 1961, p. M17.
was suddenly delayed: Drew Pearson, “Washington Merry-Go-Round,” San Mateo (CA) Times, February 24, 1962, p. 14.
“hurry-up plans”: Jerry T. Baulch, “U.S. Delays Manned Space Shot,” Troy (NY) Record, December 7, 1961, p. 1.
“Gemini’s a Corvette”: Quoted in Walter Cunningham, foreword to French and Burgess, In the Shadow of the Moon, p. 2.
“This nation belongs among”: “Transcript of the President’s Address to Congress on Domestic and World Affairs,” New York Times, January 12, 1962, p. 12.
“one human being”: John H. Glenn Jr., recorded interview by Walter D. Sohier, June 12, 1964, pp. 1–2, John F. Kennedy Library Oral History Program, Kennedy Library.
the astronaut offered to come back: Glenn and Taylor, John Glenn, p. 394.
“John tries to behave”: John Dille, introduction to William E. Burrows et al., We Seven: By the Astronauts Themselves (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1962), p. 13.
“Don’t be scared”: Glenn and Taylor, John Glenn, p. 258.
“[M]ay the good Lord”: Ibid., p. 344.
businesses locked their doors: “He’s Off!” Dover (OH) Daily Reporter, February 20, 1962, p. 18.
a bank robber got away: “Two Enter Guilty Plea in Holdup,” Allentown (PA) Morning Call, February 23, 1962, p. 9.
Michigan Bell Telephone: “Time Almost Stood Still in Michigan,” Traverse City (MI) Record-Eagle, February 21, 1962, p. 9.
Casey Stengel: “Everything Halts for Glenn’s Hop,” Titusville (FL) Herald, February 21, 1962, p. 1.
On site at Cape Canaveral: “The Man in the Street,” Fremont (OH) News-Messenger, February 28, 1962, p. 28; Seymour Beubis, “‘Go, Baby, Go,’ Shouted at Atlas,” Fort Lauderdale News, February 20, 1962, p. 10.
“Wonderful as man-made art may be”: Glenn and Taylor, John Glenn, p. 350.
for ten straight hours: Douglas Brinkley, Cronkite (New York: Harper, 2012), p. 233.
“united the nation and the world”: Jack Gould, “Radio, TV Networks Convey Drama of Glenn Feat,” New York Times, February 21, 1962, p. 91.
“I knew that if the shield”: Quoted in Colin Burgess, Friendship 7: The Epic Orbital Flight of John H. Glenn, Jr. (New York: Springer, 2015), p. 138.
“How do you feel”: Thompson, Light This Candle, p. 275.
outpouring of love and excitement: Michael J. Neufeld, “Mercury Capsule Friendship 7,” in Michael J. Neufeld, ed., Milestones of Space: Eleven Iconic Objects from the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum (Minneapolis: Zenith Press, 2014), pp. 16–19.
“The best moment”: Walter Cronkite, “Outstanding Moments During TV Coverage of John Glenn,” New York Herald Tribune, April 29, 1962.
“The distance to the moon”: Shepard and Slayton, with Barbree, Moon Shot, p. 152.
“Orbit Day”: Bob Wells, “A World Symbol for Space Age,” Long Beach Independent, February 21, 1962, p. 3.
“vastly impressed by John Glenn”: C. L. Sulzberger, The Last of the Giants (New York: Macmillan, 1970), p. 915.
“Here I am in Lucerne”: Quoted in Ward, Dr. Space, p. 131.
“We were on the plane,” Glenn and Taylor, John Glenn, pp. 372–73.
“I still get a hard to define feeling inside”: Glenn quoted in DeGroot, Dark Side of the Moon, p. 159.
“We have a long way”: Quoted in Ward, Dr. Space, p. 131.
“risk putting him back in space again”: Bob Jacobs, “NASA Remembers American Legend John Glenn,” Washington, DC, NASA Headquarters, December 8, 2016, https://www.nasa.gov/press-release/nasa-remembers-american-legend-john-glenn.
“When I came back”: John Glenn, oral history interview, June 12, 1964, pp. 4–5, Kennedy Library, www.jfklibrary.org/sites/default/files/archives/JFKOH/Glenn%2C%20John%20H/JFKOH-JHG-01/JFKOH-JHG-01-TR.pdf.
“I think early in the program”: Ibid.
“His vision set an inspiring example”: Glenn and Taylor, John Glenn, p. 373.
“It was so wonderful”: Author interview with Ethel Kennedy, March 14, 2018, Palm Beach, Florida.
“May I humbly offer”: Martin W. Sandler, ed., The Letters of John F. Kennedy (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), p. 150.
“If our countries pooled”: Chairman Khrushchev to President Kennedy, February 21, 1962, Moscow, Historical Documents, Foreign Relations of the United States, 1961–1963, vol. 6, document 35, Office of the Historian, Department of State, Washington, DC, https://history.state.gov/historicaldocuments/frus1961-63v06/d35. See also Preston Grover, “K Calls for Joint U.S.-Soviet Space Effort,” Washington Post, February 22, 1962, p. A16.
“I am replying to his message”: “Text of President Kennedy’s Conference with the Press: Response to Khrushchev,” Washington Post, February 22, 1962, p. A10.
commemorative stamps: Cathleen S. Lewis, “The Birth of the Soviet Space Museum: Creating the Earthbound Experience of Space Flight During the Golden Years of the Soviet Space Programme, 1957–68,” in Martin Collins and Douglas Millard, eds., Studies in the History of Science and Technology, Artefacts Series (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2005).
“a well-thought-out scientific”: Teasal Muir-Harmony, “Friendship 7’s ‘Fourth Orbit,’” in Neufeld, ed., Milestones of Space, pp. 16–17.
“100,000 Foot Club”: Alan J. Stein, “Astronaut John Glenn Visits the Seattle World’s Fair on May 10, 1962,” www.historylink.org/File/3697.
16: SCOTT CARPENTER, TELSTAR, AND PRESIDENTIAL SPACE TOURING
“He has yet to provoke”: George Gallup, “Critics of Kennedy Lack Unity of Aims,” (Phoenix) Arizona Republic, April 2, 1962, p. 15.
“acquire billions’ worth”: Bergaust, Wernher von Braun, p. 411.
“from muskrats to moon ships”: “NASA’s Michoud Assembly Facility,” NASA, www.nasa.gov/centers/marshall/michoud/maf_history.html.
Two hundred times heavier: John Noble Wilford, “Wernher von Braun, Rocket Pioneer, Dies,” New York Times, June 18, 1977, pp. 1, 19.
all three networks broadcast: Barbara A. Perry, Jacqueline Kennedy: First Lady of the New Frontier (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2004), p. xiv.
three out of four TVs: Mary Ann Watson, “A Tour of the White House: Mystique and Tradition,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 18, no. 1 (Winter 1988): 95.
The army was the most cooperative branch: Stephen B. Johnson, “The History and Historiography of National Security Space,” in Steven J. Dick and Roger D. Launius, eds., Critical Issues in the History of Spaceflight (Washington, DC: NASA, 2006), p. 536.
“could render no greater service”: John Kennedy to Nikita Khrushchev, March 7, 1962, item JFKWHSFPS-010-010, Papers of John F. Kennedy, Presidential Papers, White House Staff: Files of Pierre Salinger, Subject Files: 1961–1964, Khrushchev/Kennedy letters: 7 March 1962–20 January 1963, Kennedy Library.
“Let the atom be a worker”: Quoted in United Press International, “U.S. Soviet Plan Exchange on Atom Ideas,” Tyrone (PA) Daily Herald, May 21, 1963, p. 2.
“Ever since the longbow”: Hugh Sidey, introduction to John F. Kennedy, Leadership: The European Diary of John F. Kennedy: Summer 1945 (Washington, DC: Regnery, 1995), pp. xix–xxi.
authorized a leading Southern California think tank: Stares, Space Weapons and US Strategy, p. 74.
Strategic Defense Initiative: Sharon Begley, “A Safety Net Full of Holes,” Newsweek, March 22, 1992; William J. Broad, “Technical Failures Bedevil Star Wars,” New York Times, September 18, 1990; Kevin Crowley, “The Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI): Star Wars,” The Cold War Museum, Warrenton, VA, www.coldwar.org/articles/80s/SDI-StarWars.asp.
“[The president] made it clear”: Glenn T. Seaborg, oral history, June 11, 1964; June 18, 1964; June 25, 1964; June 27, 1964; July 1, 1964 (no. 1), p. 85, John F. Kennedy Oral History Program, Kennedy Library, https://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKOH-GTS-01.aspx.
“On April 23”: Ibid., p. 94.
discuss aerospace technology: “Wilton Talk Slated by Defense Official,” Bridgeport (CT) Post, May 7, 1962, p. 47.
“long-standing proposal”: Richard Witkin, “Pentagon to Push Space Plan Study,” New York Times, May 13, 1962, p. 56.
“The furor that greeted”: Stares, Space Weapons and US Strategy, p. 77.
“The reports from [our] representatives”: Seaborg, oral history interview, 1965 (no. 1), p. 99, Kennedy Library; Carroll Kirkpatrick, “Kennedy Hails Flight in Talk with Carpenter,” Washington Post, May 25, 1962, p. A8.
“He was completely ignoring”: Kraft, Flight, p. 170.
In preparation for reentry: Carpenter and Stoever, For Spacious Skies, pp. 294–95.
“President Kennedy bent down”: Ibid., pp. 304–5.
“One might argue that Carpenter”: Wolfe, The Right Stuff, p. 315.
“I know there has been disturbance”: John F. Kennedy, “The President’s News Conference,” May 9, 1962, Kennedy Library, http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=8642.
“the most intricate instrument”: John F. Kennedy, “Address at Rice University in Houston on the Nation’s Space Effort,” September 12, 1962, at Woolley and Peters, The American Presidency Project, www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/index.php?pid=8862.
“Telstar was the first true communications satellite”: Neufeld, “Mercury Capsule Friendship 7,” in Milestones of Space, p. 25.
Rockefeller was leading Goldwater: “Romney Gaining in Popularity as G.O.P. Presidential Choice,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 17, 1962, p. 23.
“The clock has already run too long”: “Barry Calls for All-Out Military Space Program,” Tucson Daily Citizen, July 17, 1962, p. 6.
“The armed forces should already”: United Press International, “Space Warfare Plans Urged,” Pittsburgh Press, July 17, 1962, p. 10.
the Senate opened a debate: John G. Norris, “Senate Hears Demands for Building Strong Military Capability,” Washington Post, August 21, 1962, p. A1.
“The United States believes”: “Kennedy to Tour Space Facilities,” New York Times, September 6, 1962, p. 16.
selection of Hancock County: Robert Dallek, An Unfinished Life: John F. Kennedy, 1917–1963 (Boston: Little, Brown, 2003), p. 515.
“This is the vehicle designed”: “JFK Sees Saturn Test at Huntsville Center,” Montgomery Advertiser, September 12, 1962, p. 1.
“Just as the last echoes”: Bergaust, Wernher von Braun, p. 207.
“I understand that Dr. Wiesner”: Bilstein, Stages to Saturn, p. 67; Logsdon, John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon, p. 144.
“Look at von Braun”: Quoted in Bergaust, Wernher von Braun, p. 207.
“Jerry’s going to lose it”: Quoted in Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox, Apollo: Race to the Moon (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1989), p. 143.
“Who said John Glenn”: “JFK Cape Briefing ‘Brief,’” Orlando Evening Star, September 2, 1962, p. 2.
“We shall be first”: Quoted in Ward, Dr. Space, p. 132.
the two Mercury astronauts: Jay Barbree, “Live from Cape Canaveral”: Covering the Space Race, From Sputnik to Today (New York: Smithsonian/Collins, 2007), p. 98.
17: “WE CHOOSE TO GO TO THE MOON”: RICE UNIVERSITY, SEPTEMBER 12, 1962
“I do not know whether”: John F. Kennedy, quoted in Houston Press, September 12, 1962 (Rice University Special Collections).
“Some from Texas might disagree”: Quoted in John Lewis Gaddis, On Grand Strategy (New York: Penguin Press, 2018), pp. 311–12.
“The people here realize”: “Kennedy’s Visit,” Houston Chronicle, September 12, 1962, sec. 1, p. 20.
“May God continue to guard”: Forrest Fischer, “Kennedy Puts U.S. in Orbit . . . Hails Heat of Space Effort,” Houston Press, September 12, 1962.
“Sixty firms have moved”: “JFK and NASA,” p. 10.
“everyone perspired” in the “roaster”: Marie Dauplaise, “Dignitaries Sat Close to JFK—But Never Heard a Word,” Houston Press, September 12, 1962, p. 2.
Pitzer committed the university: Jessica P. Cannon, “Owls in Space: Rice University’s Connections to NASA Johnson Space Center,” Houston in History 6, no. 1 (1963): 33.
“educational pilot plant”: “JFK and NASA,” p. 10.
“I can remember it clearly today”: Eric Berger, “JFK’s Speech Today Would Be Hard to Believe,” Houston Chronicle, September 12, 2012.
“We meet at a college noted for knowledge”: Kennedy, “Address at Rice University in Houston on the Nation’s Space Effort,” https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/JFKPOF/040/JFKPOF-040-001.
“Surely the opening vistas”: Ibid.
“The exploration of space”: Ibid.
“politically uncommon fiscal candor”: Neil deGrasse Tyson, Space Chronicles (New York: W. W. Norton, 2002), pp. 1–5.
“This year’s space budget”: Kennedy, “Address at Rice University in Houston on the Nation’s Space Effort.”
“We choose to go to the moon”: Ibid.
“British explorer George Mallory”: “Address at Rice University, Houston, Texas, 12 September 1962,” p. 3, Papers of John F. Kennedy, Presidential Papers, President’s Office Files, Speech Files, Kennedy Library.
the stadium erupted in applause: “46 Keel Over from Heat During President’s Speech,” Houston Chronicle, September 12, 1962, sec. 1, p. 2.
“I remember the times”: Mark Carreau, “The Quest Begins: At Rice, President Kennedy Inspired a Nation to Look at the Stars,” Houston Chronicle, October 10, 2002, p. 46.
“Now you guys do the details!”: Ted Sorensen told this story on Focus on Youth, a syndicated radio show hosted by Sandy Kenyon of ABC News. Thanks to documentary filmmaker Rory Kennedy—daughter of RFK and close friend—for bringing this to my attention.
“I certainly remember it”: Douglas Brinkley, interview with Neil Armstrong, September 19, 2001, in Clear Lake City, Texas.
“encapsulates all of recorded history”: Jade Boyd, “JFK’s 1962 Moon Speech Still Appeals 50 Years Later,” Rice University News & Media, August 30, 2008, http://news.rice.edu/2012/08/30/jfks-1962-moon-speech-still-appeals-50-years-later/.
“blew me away” . . . “I came away”: Ibid.
The astronauts escorted the president: Cannon, “Owls in Space,” p. 33.
within the decade: Warren Burkett, “Kennedy Pleased with Houston Space Briefing,” Houston Chronicle, September 13, 1962.
“To talk of placing”: John F. Kennedy, “Remarks at the NASA Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston,” September 12, 1962, Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the-nasa-manned-spacecraft-center-houston.
“By all means, we must carry on”: Dwight D. Eisenhower, “Are We Headed in the Wrong Direction,” Saturday Evening Post, August 11, 1962, p. 24.
Kennedy needed Eisenhower’s . . . support: E. W. Kenworthy, “Eisenhower Tells Kennedy of Tour,” New York Times, September 11, 1962, p. 1.
“Every citizen of this country”: Tom Yarborough, “Kennedy Visit,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 13, 1962, p. 5.
contractor on the Apollo lunar module: Richard Thruelsen, The Grumman Story (New York: Praeger, 1976).
“By forceful implication”: Alvin Spivak, “Pledge to Beat Russia to Moon,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 13, 1962, p. 1.
“all of us are so committed to the sea”: John F. Kennedy, “Remarks on Australian Ambassador’s Dinner for America’s Cup Race,” Newport, Rhode Island, September 14, 1962, item JFKPOF-040-005, Papers of John F. Kennedy, Presidential Papers, President’s Office Files, Speech Files, Kennedy Library.
“If at any time the Communist build-up”: Press Conference, September 13, 1962, item JFKPOF-057-012, Papers of John F. Kennedy, Presidential Papers, President’s Office Files, Kennedy Library.
18: GEMINI NINE AND WALLY SCHIRRA
Gemini’s launch schedule: Project Gemini: A Chronology, Part 1 (B), “Concept and Design,” NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, Greenbelt, Maryland, https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4002/p1b.htm.
“NASA was not looking for”: Colin Burgess, Moon Bound: Choosing and Preparing NASA’s Lunar Astronauts (New York: Springer Praxis Books, 2013), p. 54.
included six civilians: “2d Generation of Spacemen Make World Debut in Houston,” Houston Chronicle, September 17, 1962, p. 1.
about two years younger: “Space Voyagers Rarin’ to Orbit,” Life, April 20, 1959, p. 22.
“born under the second law”: Neil Armstrong, “The Engineered Century,” March 1, 2000, National Academy of Engineering, www.nae.edu/publications/bridge/thevertiginousmarchoftechnology/theengineeredcentury.aspx.
Slayton instructed Armstrong to report to Houston: Hansen, First Man, p. 202.
“In the opinion of individuals”: Ibid., pp. 207–8.
The Gemini Nine were the lucky test pilots: Grissom quoted in French and Burgess, In the Shadow of the Moon, p. 2.
from $530 million to $745 million: Eugene Reichl, Project Gemini (Atglen, PA: Schiffer, 2013), p. 18.
“Many women are employed”: O. B. Lloyd Jr. to Susan Marie Scott, June 18, 1962, University of Houston—Clear Lake, NASA Archive Collection, No. 2018-0001, Records of NASA Johnson Space Center, Library and Archives of the University of Houston, Clear Lake, Clear Lake City, Texas.
“NASA did not state gender”: French and Burgess, Into That Silent Sea, p. 202.
They graduated with flying colors: Dianna Wray, “The Real Story of NASA’s First Female Astronauts,” Miami New Times, September 19, 2017, www.miaminewtimes.com/content/printView/9681122. See also Margaret Weitekamp, Right Stuff, Wrong Sex: America’s First Women in Space Program (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004).
Some of the choice headlines: Roger Launius to Douglas Brinkley, November 5, 2018.
“I think this gets back to the way”: Quoted in Martha Ackmann, The Mercury 13: The True Story of Thirteen Women and the Dream of Space Flight (New York: Random House, 2004), p. 168.
$5,147, to $3,283: Andrew Cohen, Two Days in June: John F. Kennedy and the 48 Hours That Made History (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2014), p. 62.
The idea of an African American: Roger D. Launius, The Smithsonian History of Space Exploration: From the Ancient World to the Extraterrestrial Future (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2018), p. 142.
“My rambunctious approach”: Quoted in French and Burgess, Into That Silent Sea, p. 232.
“Not a fancy name”: Ibid.
“In mission control, I winked”: Kraft, Flight, p. 178.
“The President was always extremely interested”: Richard Witkin, “Schirra Orbits Earth Six Times, Landing Near Carrier in Pacific After Almost Flawless Flight,” New York Times, October 4, 1962, p. 24.
“I ate and I wasn’t hungry”: “‘Astronauts Will Eat, Sleep by Numbers’—Schirra,” Houston Chronicle, October 8, 1962, clipping, Fondrun Library, Rice University.
“would have turned a robot green”: Shepard and Slayton, with Barbree, Moon Shot, p. 157.
still paled in comparison: Witkin, “Schirra Orbits Earth Six Times,” p. 1.
At a press conference: Transcript of Press Conference for Walter Schirra, Rice University, October 8, 1962, Fondrum Library, NASA Archives, Rice University, Houston.
At 9:25 a.m.: Ernest May and Philip R. Zelikow, eds., The Kennedy Tapes (New York: William Morrow, 2002), p. 31.
“I know who you are”: Jerry T. Baulch, “It’s Back to Work Now,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, October 17, 1962, p. 2.
“Why would the Soviets”: May and Zelikow, The Kennedy Tapes, p. 49.
hundred-dollar-a-seat fund-raiser: George Tagge, “Kennedy Plugs for Yates,” Chicago Tribune, October 20, 1962, p. 1.
“the space program was understandably preoccupied”: Krantz, Failure Is Not an Option, p. 94.
“how much bad advice”: Sheldon M. Stern, The Week the World Stood Still: Inside the Secret Cuban Missile Crisis (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 217.
put the problem succinctly: “Space Goals Put Strain on Budget,” New York Times, November 5, 1962, pp. 1, 6.
“keep me thinking of the taxpayers’ money”: “Reaching for the Moon,” Time, August 10, 1962, p. 54.
“one which we intend to win”: “Address at Rice University, Houston, Texas, 12 September 1962,” p. 3.
“programs for scientific investigations in space”: W. D. Kay, Defining NASA: The Historical Debate over the Agency’s Mission (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2012), p. 82.
“No, sir, I do not”: “Transcript of Presidential Meeting in the Cabinet Room of the White House: Supplemental Appropriations for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), November 21, 1962,” tape 63, Papers of John F. Kennedy, Presidential Papers, President’s Office Files, Presidential Recordings collections, Kennedy Library.
“The people that are going to furnish”: Ibid.
“I would certainly not favor”: Ibid.
“We ought to get it”: Ibid.
“In Berlin you spent”: Ibid.
19: STATE OF SPACE EXPLORATION
“an extraordinary technical accomplishment”: “Remarks on Presentation of Mariner II Model,” January 17, 1963, JFKPOF042-024-p0001, Papers of John F. Kennedy, Presidential Papers, President’s Office Files, Speech Files, Kennedy Library.
The overall earmark: Michio Kaku, The Future of Humanity: Terraforming Mars, Interstellar Travel, Immortality, and Our Destiny Beyond Earth (New York: Doubleday, 2018), p. 30.
New Frontier budget as “austere”: Howard Simons, “Increase of $2 Billion Asked in Space Funds,” Washington Post, January 18, 1963, p. A12.
“maintain a position of world leadership”: The Budget Message of the President, January 1963, p. 18, item JFKPOF-071-006, Papers of John F. Kennedy, Presidential Papers, President’s Office Files, Legislative Files, Kennedy Library.
“Efforts are being concentrated”: Ibid., p. 19.
Former president Eisenhower: Mieczkowski, Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment, p. 268.
He even went so far: Arthur Krock, “Mr. Kennedy’s Management of the News,” Fortune, March 1963, pp. 198–202.
“We have had limited success”: Associated Press, “News Tinted by Kennedy Says Krock,” Des Moines Register, February 24, 1963, p. 5. See also Krock, “Mr. Kennedy’s Management of the News,” p. 82.
“The official [White House] release of information”: Arthur Krock, “Mr. Kennedy’s Management of the News,” Fortune, March 1963.
“The eyes of all ages”: Arthur C. Clarke, “Space Flight and the Spirit of Man,” Reader’s Digest, February 1962.
“a race of education and research”: Hal Willard, “Kennedy Calls for Federal School Aid,” Washington Post, October 11, 1957, p. 1.
confident that advanced computer technology: Leslie Berlin, Troublemakers: Silicon Valley’s Coming of Age (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017), p. 11.
“Remember when NASA”: Ibid., p. 23.
conduct a thorough review: John F. Kennedy to Lyndon B. Johnson, April 9, 1963, and Lyndon B. Johnson to John F. Kennedy, May 13, 1963, John F. Kennedy Presidential Files, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
BENEFITS TO NATIONAL ECONOMY: Lyndon B. Johnson to the President, May 13, 1963, with attached report, John F. Kennedy Presidential Files, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
“That’s just wonderful”: Quoted in Ward, Dr. Space, p. 132.
from his White House bedroom: “President Watches,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 16, 1963, p. 3.
“I had to initiate retrofire”: L. Gordon Cooper Jr., “Astronaut’s Summary Flight Report,” in Walter C. Williams, Kenneth S. Kleinknecht, William M. Bland Jr., and James E. Bost, eds., Mercury Project Summary, NASA Publication SP-45 (Washington, DC: NASA, 1963), p. 356, https://history.nasa.gov/SP-45/contents.htm.
“I know that a good many people”: John F. Kennedy, “Remarks Upon Presenting the NASA Distinguished Service Medal to Astronaut L. Gordon Cooper,” May 21, 1963, at John Woolley and Gerhard Peters, The American Presidency Project, https://www.jfklibrary.org/asset-viewer/archives/JFKWHF/WHN15/JFKWHF-WHN15/JFKWHF-WHN15.
“One of the things which warmed us”: Ibid.
“Help us in our future space endeavors”: Carroll Kilpatrick, “250,000 Give Cooper Hero’s Welcome,” Washington Post, May 22, 1963, p. 1.
once back in Houston: Carpenter and Stoever, For Spacious Skies, pp. 310–11.
“other aspects of human needs”: “Critics Urge Slowdown in U.S. Moon Program,” Asbury Park (NJ) Press, July 1, 1963, p. 6.
“To allow the Soviet Union”: Ibid.
“the United States space program is receiving”: Howard Simons, “Space Program Being Scrutinized by Budget-Minded Congress,” Washington Post, July 1, 1963, p. A2.
Webb warned that cuts: Roulhac Hamilton, “House Group Cuts NASA Drastically,” Orlando Sentinel, July 10, 1963, p. 2.
“will lead a great America”: No. 3 Cong. Rec. H13906 (August 1, 1963) (statement of Rep. Fulton).
“We cannot say definitely”: “The Soviet Space Program,” Central Intelligence Agency, National Intelligence Estimate 11-1-62, December 5, 1962, p. 6.
“in a state of perfect inertia”: Max Frankel, “Test-Ban Hopes Linger,” New York Times, May 19, 1963, p. E4.
“it would provide insurance”: Paul B. Stares, The Militarization of Space (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1985), p. 88.
“examine our attitude toward peace itself”: John F. Kennedy, “Commencement Address at American University in Washington: June 10, 1963,” at Woolley and Peters, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/commencement-address-american-university-washington.
“the best speech by any president since Roosevelt”: Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, p. 602.
“freedom is indivisible”: “Ich bin ein Berliner” speech, “Remarks of President John F. Kennedy at the Rudolph Wilde Platz, Berlin, June 26, 1963,” Kennedy Library, https://www.jfklibrary.org/Research/Research-Aids/JFK-Speeches/Berlin-W-Germany-Rudolph-Wilde-Platz_19630626.aspx.
20: “THE SPACE EFFORT MUST GO ON”
At the Marshall Space Flight Center: Richard Witkin, “Kennedy Pushes Project Apollo,” New York Times, July 8, 1962.
“the antithesis of fiscal soundness”: Dwight D. Eisenhower to Charles Halleck, May 26, 1963, White House Presidents, NASA History Office, Washington, DC.
no “substantial military value”: Bizony, The Man Who Ran the Moon, pp. 101–2.
“The man-in-space program”: Richard Witkin, “Lunar Program in Crisis,” New York Times, July 11, 1963.
When a top-tier NASA engineer: “Lift-Off! The U.S. Space Program,” Kennedy Library, https://www.jfklibrary.org/Exhibits/Permanent-Exhibits/Lift-off-The-US-Space-Program.aspx.
“The point of the matter”: “News Conference 58,” July 17, 1963, Papers of John F. Kennedy, Presidential Papers, President’s Office Files, Kennedy Library.
“He told me many times”: Interview with Sergei N. Khrushchev, Red Files, PBS, www.pbs.org/redfiles/moon/deep/interv/m_int_sergei_khrushchev.htm.
“interested in an international program”: Howard Simons, “JFK Probed Kremlin on Joint Moon Trip,” Washington Post, September 22, 1963, p. A1.
“The bombers were stopped”: Hugh Sidey quoted in Andrew Cohen, Two Days in June: John F. Kennedy and the 48 Hours That Made History (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2014), pp. 22–23.
“It is rarely possible”: John F. Kennedy, “Special Message to the Senate on the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty,” August 8, 1963, Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/special-message-the-senate-the-nuclear-test-ban-treaty.
At a White House meeting: Steven Levingston, Kennedy and King: The President, the Pastor, and the Battle over Civil Rights (New York: Hachette Books, 2017), p. 426.
“a ray of light appears”: Carroll Kilpatrick, “Kennedy’s Aides, 6 Other Scientists Join in Endorsing Test-Ban Treaty,” New York Times, August 25, 1963, p. A1.
“We’ll have worked to fly by”: John F. Kennedy, meeting with James Webb (audiotape), September 18, 1963, Kennedy Tapes, Kennedy Library. See also Ted Widmer, Listening In: The Secret White House Recording of John F. Kennedy (New York: Hyperion, 2012).
“this can be an asset”: Carolyn Y. Johnson, “JFK Had Doubts About Moon Landing,” Boston Globe, May 25, 2011.
“if we cooperate”: John Noble Wilford, “Race to Space, Through the Lens of Time,” New York Times, May 24, 2011, p. D1.
short- and medium-range missiles: “Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, Including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies,” January 27, 1967, Bureau of Arms Control, Verification and Compliance, U.S. State Department, www.state.gov/t/isn/5181.htm.
“In a field where”: John F. Kennedy, “Address Before the 18th General Assembly of the United Nations,” September 20, 1963, at John Woolley and Gerhard Peters, Kennedy Library, https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/united-nations-19630920.
“were just exercises in image-building”: Wilford, “Race to Space Through the Lens of Time,” p. D1.
“We have received no response”: John F. Kennedy Press Conference, October 9, 1963, Kennedy Library, https://www.jfklibrary.org/Asset-Viewer/Archives/JFKPOF-061-003.aspx.
that Khrushchev was “unquestionably planning”: Bureau of Scientific Intelligence, CIA, “A Brief Look at the Soviet Space Program,” October 1, 1963, National Security File, Box 308, Kennedy Library.
Unbeknownst to the CIA: Logsdon, John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon, p. 179.
“If the United States ever experiences”: Arthur Krock, “The Intra-Administration War in Vietnam,” New York Times, October 3, 1963, p. 34.
“I don’t know of any technical problem”: John W. Finney, “Apollo Capsules Now Being Built,” New York Times, October 13, 1963, p. 80.
“What could be better”: Theodore Shabad, “Russians Report Launching Craft That Shifts Orbit,” New York Times, November 2, 1963, p. 1.
“an homage”: Douglas Brinkley, Dean Acheson: The Cold War Years, 1953–71 (New York: Yale University Press, 1992), p. 172.
create proposals on accommodating: National Security Action Memorandum No. 271, November 12, 1963, Papers of John F. Kennedy, Presidential Papers, National Security Files, Meetings and Memoranda Series: National Security Action Memoranda, Kennedy Library.
21: CAPE KENNEDY
biggest payload that any nation: Richard Witkin, “First U.S. Hydrogen-Fueled Rocket Is Orbited,” New York Times, November 28, 1963, p. 9.
“began to realize the dimensions”: John M. Logsdon, “Analyzing the New Kennedy Tape,” Space Review, May 31, 2011, www.thespacereview.com/article/1856/1.
“the myths of the future”: Clarke, “Space Flight and the Spirit of Man,” p. 78.
“We gave him a first-class”: Gordon Cooper with Bruce Henderson, Leap of Faith: An Astronaut’s Journey into the Unknown (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), p. 131.
“Now, be sure”: Robert Seamans, Aiming at Targets: The Autobiography of Robert C. Seamans, Jr. (Charleston, SC: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2012), p. 115.
“Many Americans”: Kennedy, “Remarks at Aero-Space Medical Health Center Dedication, San Antonio, Texas, 21 November 1963,” Papers of John F. Kennedy, Presidential Papers, President’s Office Files, Speech Files, Kennedy Library.
The term space medicine: Since 1976, NASA has annually published Spinoff, a handsome publication featuring technological innovations from space research. I read all copies to glean the technologies that were most viable. There is a profusion of mythology regarding the medical advances NASA did or didn’t innovate.
“Examinations of the astronauts’ physical”: Kennedy, “Remarks at Aero-Space Medical Health Center Dedication, San Antonio, Texas, 21 November, 1963.”
“how, as a boy”: “Remarks at Aero-Space Medical Health Center Dedication, San Antonio, Texas, 21 November 1963.”
“We were at Brooks Air Force Base”: Cooper, with Henderson, Leap of Faith, p. 159.
“It would be a disgrace”: “Harris GOP Chief Urges Cordiality,” Houston Chronicle, November 21, 1963, p. 9.
the NASA connection had lured corporations: Cody C. Stanley, “Albert Thomas: Space in the Bayou,” MA thesis, January, 2016, Stephen F. Austin State University, Nacogdoches, Texas, https://library.sfasu.edu/find/SummonRecord/FETCH-proquest_journals_18346716083.
By the time the Manned Spacecraft Center: Kevin M. Brady, “NASA Launches Houston into Orbit: The Economic and Social Impact of the Space Agency on Southeast Texas, 1961–1969,” in Dick and Launius, eds., Societal Impact of Spaceflight, pp. 451–65.
“He has helped steer this country”: “Remarks at Representative Albert Thomas Dinner, Houston Coliseum, Texas, 21 November 1963,” Papers of John F. Kennedy, Presidential Papers, President’s Office Files, Speech Files, Kennedy Library.
“[Kennedy] and I had a big argument”: Quoted in Dallek, “Johnson, Project Apollo, and the Politics of Space Program Planning,” p. 73.
“We have regained the initiative”: “Undelivered Remarks for Dallas Citizens Council, Trade Mart, Dallas, Texas, 22 November 1963,” Papers of John F. Kennedy, Presidential Papers, President’s Office Files, Speech Files, Kennedy Library.
“a mecca for those who see”: Saul Friedman, “Dallas Frame of Mind Has Led to Outbreaks of Violence Before,” Houston Chronicle, November 22, 1963, p. 6.
“He wanted to go to the Cape”: Olin E. Teague to NASA historian Eugene Emme, January 24, 1979, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC. See also Clarke, JFK’s Last Hundred Days, p. 34.
On a more somber note: Dickson, Sputnik, 55.
“That was a bad day”: Dr. Robert Gilruth, oral history interview with the National Air and Space Museum, February 27, 1987, Washington, DC, https://airandspace.si.edu/research/projects/oral-histories/TRANSCPT/GILRUTH5.HTM.
“I called Bobby and Ethel”: Glenn and Taylor, John Glenn, p. 395.
“We loved John”: Douglas Brinkley interview with Ethel Kennedy, December 14, 2018.
Over the decades: Author interview with John Glenn, November 1, 2004, Columbus, Ohio.
“He was devastated”: Thompson, Light This Candle, pp. 294–96.
“Before the assassination”: Carpenter and Stoever, For Spacious Skies, pp. 317–18.
“everything will be different”: Taubman, Khrushchev: The Man and His Era, pp. 603–5.
from Pensacola to Houston: Hansen, First Man, pp. 223–24.
a “50-50 chance”: Paul Gallagher, “Neil Armstrong Last Interview: Rare Glimpse of Man and Moon Mission,” Guardian, August 25, 2012, https://www.guardian.com/science/2012/aug/25/neil-armstrong-last-interview.
“that’s going to be forgotten”: Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis, oral history interview, January 11, 1974, pp. 7–8, John F. Kennedy Oral History Program, Kennedy Library.
would be renamed the John F. Kennedy Space Center: Cabell Phillips, “Canaveral Space Center Renamed Cape Kennedy,” New York Times, November 29, 1963, p. 1.
“The loss of John Kennedy”: Cooper, with Henderson, Leap of Faith, p. 131.
“make sure Mr. Webb”: Bonnie Holmes/Wernher von Braun office diary, December 9, 1963, in private collection.
the “one time I ever saw”: “Behind the Scenes with von Braun,” Huntsville Times, September 8, 1994, p. 1.
achieved a major milestone: Witkin, “First U.S. Hydrogen-Fueled Rocket.”
EPILOGUE: THE TRIUMPH OF APOLLO 11
“We cannot be the first”: Lyndon B. Johnson speech, October 25, 1964, Atlantic University, Boca Raton, Florida, www.fau.edu/fiftieth/speech.php.
Johnson evoked the martyred JFK: Roger D. Launius “What Are Turning Points in History, and What Were They for the Space Age?” in Dick and Launius, eds., Societal Impacts of Spaceflight, pp. 34–35.
“Ten times in this program”: “Statement to the President Following the Completion of the Final Flight in the Gemini Program,” November 15, 1966, Public Papers of Lyndon B. Johnson.
“do something for grandma with medicine”: Roger D. Launius, “Interpreting the Moon Landings: Project Apollo and the Historians,” History and Technology 22, no. 3 (September 2006): 225–55.
“We’ve always known”: Webb quoted in Dickson, Sputnik, p. 219.
Newspaper stories about the Apollo 1: Burgess, Liberty Bell 7: The Suborbital Mercury Flight of Virgil I. Grissom, p. 219.
By October 1968 President Johnson had grown weary: W. Henry Lambright, Powering Apollo: James E. Webb of NASA (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995).
Webb was right: Rod Pyle, Destination Moon: The Apollo Missions in the Astronauts’ Own Words (New York: HarperCollins/Smithsonian, 2005), 8.
“The world of space holds vast promise”: “James E. Webb” (biography), International Space Hall of Fame, New Mexico Museum of Space History, Alamogordo, New Mexico, www.nmspacemuseum.org/halloffame/detail.php?id=122.
“drastically revised and expanded”: Dwight D. Eisenhower to Frank Borman, June 18, 1965. Dwight D. Eisenhower Presidential Library, Abilene, Kansas. Also in Yanek Mieczkowski, Eisenhower’s Sputnik Moment: The Race for Space and World Peace, p. 268.
the New York World’s Fair: McDougall, . . . the Heavens and the Earth, p. 399.
engraved the initials JFK: Chris Matthews, Jack Kennedy: Elusive Hero (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011), p. 402.
“In our elation” . . . “I so thank you”: Wernher von Braun to Jacqueline Kennedy, February 1, 1964, and Jacqueline Kennedy to Wernher von Braun, February 11, 1964, both in Correspondence file, Wernher von Braun Library and Archives, U.S. Space and Rocket Center, Huntsville, Alabama.
Von Braun’s Huntsville team: Andrew Duna and Stephen Waring, Power to Explore: History of Marshall Space Flight Center 1960–1990 (Washington, DC: NASA, 2018), p. 3.
“Von Braun made a Faustian bargain”: Michael J. Neufeld, “Wernher von Braun, the SS, and Concentration Camp Labor: Questions of Moral, Political, and Criminal Responsibility,” German Studies Review 25, no. 1 (February 2002). The quote is from a published letter he wrote defending his interpretation on December 2002, which appeared in “Wernher von Braun and Concentration Camp Labor: An Exchange,” German Studies Review 26, no. 1 (2003).
an “act of graciousness”: Stephen Bull to H. R. Haldeman, June 13, 1969, Memorandum, Richard Nixon Presidential Library, Yorba Linda, California. See also John Logsdon, After Apollo?: Richard Nixon and the American Space Program (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
refused to evoke: John Logsdon, ed., The Penguin Book of Outer Space Exploration (New York: Penguin, 2018), p. 236.
“Houston . . .”: “One Small Step . . . A Giant Leap,” Houston Magazine, September 1969, p. 18.
“I am absolutely isolated”: Collins, Carrying the Fire, p. 402.
The 528 million moon-mad global citizens: Wilford, We Reach the Moon, p. xvii.
“Task Accomplished July 1969”: Logsdon, John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon, p. 223.