CAPE CANAVERAL AND PALM BEACH
The Miami Herald reporter Nixon Smiley wrote of Kennedy’s visit to the Cape Canaveral Space Center, “You had the feeling the air was electrified from the time of the President’s arrival until a moment after his departure.” Smiley described his hair as being “back lighted by filtered sunshine” and “distinctly reddish,” adding, “He wore a deeper tan than most of the men around him. He was a picture of health.” Dr. Wernher von Braun, who had come to brief Kennedy on the rocket that would launch U.S. astronauts toward the moon, also found his tan impressive and called him “in the very best of health.”
While standing outside the Saturn Control Center, the astronauts Gus Grissom and Gordon Cooper briefed Kennedy and von Braun on the long-duration flights they were taking to prepare themselves for a moon voyage. Inside the windowless blockhouse, where technicians manned the panels that would monitor and control the missile launches, Kennedy sat on a folding chair, surrounded by NASA officials and listening impatiently as Dr. George Mueller, the associate administrator for manned space flight, delivered a fifteen-minute lecture summarizing developments in the lunar program. Briefings that required him to sit passively as someone reeled off facts and figures drove Kennedy crazy. As Mueller droned on, running his pointer over charts and explaining NASA’s organization, Kennedy began interrupting him with questions. The moment Mueller stopped, he jumped up, grabbed one of the scale-model missiles arranged on a table in front of him, and asked if it was a Redstone, the one that had launched Alan Shepard and Grissom on their suborbital flights. After being told it was, he held it against a model of the Saturn V, von Braun’s lunar-mission rocket, and asked if they were built to the same scale. The Redstone model was a foot high, the Saturn seven times that. When Mueller confirmed that they were, he exclaimed, “Amazing!” “Fantastic!” and “Gee, looks like we’ve come a long way.” Robert Seamans, who headed NASA, believed this was the moment that Kennedy finally grasped the dimensions of the project he had launched. Von Braun found his boyish enthusiasm “deeply sincere and very charming.”
Kennedy knew that his brother Joe had died while on a mission to obliterate bunkers on the French coastline that were being prepared as launching sites for the unmanned rockets that the Germans planned to fire at British cities, and he knew that von Braun, who had belonged to the Nazi Party, had engineered those rockets. He had mentioned this when they met in 1953 at a New York television studio while waiting to appear on a program announcing the nominations for Time’s Man of the Year. When von Braun later recounted their conversation, he spoke of Joe being killed “in an airplane accident that was closely related to the fledgling missile technology,” a delicate way of framing his connection to the Kennedy family.
After emerging from the Saturn Control Center into the blinding sunshine, von Braun and Kennedy were driven to a launch pad where the skyscraper-high Saturn I rocket stood pointed at the heavens. Von Braun explained that when it was launched the next month, it would be more powerful and would carry a heavier payload than anything the Soviet Union had shot into space.
After staring at it for several moments, Kennedy said, “Now, this will be the largest payload that man has ever put in orbit. Is that right?” After von Braun again assured him that it was, he said, “That is very, very significant.”
While briefing Kennedy at the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville the previous year, von Braun had noticed that he was a man who liked to evaluate things on the basis of what he could see and touch, so he was not surprised when Kennedy suddenly strode toward the Saturn I rocket, not stopping until he stood directly underneath it. He looked up and, rocking back and forth on the balls of his feet, said in a soft voice, “When this goes up we’ll be ahead of the Russians. . . . When this goes up we’ll be ahead of the Russians.”
Sidey, who overheard this, had also been with him at a campaign stop in Oklahoma City in 1960 when he had told an audience, “I will take my television black and white. I want to be ahead of them [the Russians] in rocket thrust.” And when he had been at the White House on April 14, 1961, two days after the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had become the first human to orbit the earth, Kennedy had invited him into the Cabinet Room so that he could listen to his advisers debate the wisdom of racing the Soviet Union to the moon. “What can we do now?” Kennedy had demanded. “Is there any place we can catch them?” The science adviser Jerome Wiesner and NASA’s director, James Webb, argued that a manned lunar landing would not be as scientifically important as several less costly and dramatic ventures. NASA’s chief scientist, Hugh Dryden, thought it might require an investment similar to the Manhattan Project, the government program that had developed the atomic bomb. Budget Director David Bell wondered if the nation could support such a huge expenditure. Sorensen was concerned that it would divert resources from social programs. But Kennedy cared more about beating the Russians to the moon. “If someone can just tell me how to catch up,” he said. “Let’s find somebody—anybody. I don’t care if it’s the janitor if he knows how.” After the meeting ended inconclusively, Sidey stopped him at the door and asked what he had decided. “Wait here,” he said, gesturing for Sorensen to follow him into the Oval Office. Several minutes later Sorensen emerged and said, “We are going to the moon.”
Kennedy traveled by helicopter from the launch pad to a Navy vessel from which he would watch a submarine launch a Polaris missile. On the way he passed over Merritt Island, where construction was proceeding for the 87,000-acre Moonport. He looked down to see a thrilling incarnation of American power in the middle of the American Century, an undertaking as ambitious and historic as the Panama Canal and the Manhattan Project. Seamans pointed out the future launch pad and Vertical Assembly Building, where the Saturn missiles would be assembled and stored. Once completed, it would be the fourth-largest structure on earth, bigger than the Pentagon and taller than anything south of the Washington Monument.
The previous year, during a speech at Rice University, Kennedy had said, “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.” He had then compared the lunar mission to the exceptionalism of the founders of the Plymouth Bay Colony, quoting Governor William Bradford, who had said that “all great and honorable actions are accompanied with great difficulties, and must be . . . overcome with answerable courage.” Here, rising on this sandy barrier island, was a twentieth-century incarnation of Bradford’s “Shining City on a Hill” and his “answerable courage.” Here, captured in brick and mortar, was the exploring spirit of Lewis and Clark. Here, too, was proof that, as Kennedy had proclaimed in his American University speech, “Man can be as big as he wants. No problem of human destiny is beyond human beings,” as well as evidence that he was poised to marry the power of the presidency to the poetry of the stars.
The Polaris launch combined several things that Kennedy loved—the U.S. Navy, the ocean, and technological wizardry. But despite the handsome windbreaker that he received upon landing on the missile support ship and immediately put on (because it was not a hat), and the missile with “Beat Army” painted on its fuselage shooting dramatically from the water with a great swoosh and an explosion of orange flames, all he wanted to talk about during the flight back to the mainland was the space program. Referring to the Saturn I rocket, he asked Seamans, “Now, I’m not sure I have the facts straight on this. Will you tell me about it again?”
Seamans ran through the size of its payload and the magnitude of its liftoff thrust.
“What’s the Soviet capability?” he asked.
Much less, Seamans said, only 15,000 pounds of usable payload and a thrust capacity of 800,000 pounds as compared with 1.5 million for the Saturn.
“That’s very important,” he said. “Now be sure the press understands this.” He gave Seamans the name of a reporter he wanted him to brief, and as they parted he reminded him to stress that the United States was about to score an important victory over the Soviet Union. Seamans did as he was told, and a front-page article in the New York Times the next day reported that the president had been “enthralled” by the sight of the Saturn I missile, which was expected to make “space history” the following month by putting the United States ahead of the Soviet Union in the weight of payload sent into orbit.
Four days before leaving for Cape Canaveral, Kennedy had signed a directive instructing NASA’s Webb “to assume personally the initiative and central responsibility within the Government for the development of a program of substantive cooperation with the Soviet Union in the field of outer space.” The directive stipulated that discussions with the Soviets should include “cooperation in lunar landing programs,” with a progress report to be on the president’s desk by December 15. But now, having stood in the shadow of the Saturn rocket and flown over the Moonport, Kennedy’s competitive spirit had been revived, and his emotional connection to the space program rekindled, leaving him once again determined to beat the Soviets to the moon.