John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race

By Douglas Brinkley

“It has often proved true that the dream of yesterday is the hope of today, and the reality of tomorrow.”

Robert Goddard

Imbued with a visionary imagination, mapping out a future career as a physicist, [Robert] Goddard was valedictorian of his high school class, delivering a speech that included the optimistic observation, “It has often proved true that the dream of yesterday is the hope of today, and the reality of tomorrow.”

(Brinkley 2019, 7)

During World War I, Goddard lent his mechanical talents to the U.S. Army, developing the prototype of a tube–based rocket launcher that would later become the bazooka, a light infantry weapon ubiquitous in World War II. The main impetus for Goddard’s work was his unwavering quest to prove that a rocket could navigate space. After the Smithsonian published A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, which included the idea of launching a rocket loaded with flash powder at the moon , such that the impact would be visible from Earth, newspapers across America reprinted his eye–popping pronouncement. ”Communication with the Moon Is Made Possible,” trumpeted the Fort Worth Star – Telegram. ”Rocket for Moon, Plan of Professor ”was the front–page headline in the Colorado Springs Gazette. Even while noting that shooting a flash powder rocket at the moon would not be” of obvious scientific importance,” Goddard believed that for all the inherent logistical and engineering difficulties, such launches depended ”on nothing that is really impossible.”

(Brinkley 2019, 8)

Beginning in 1930, von Braun attended the Technische Hochschule Berlin (Technical University of Berlin), where he apprenticed under his idol Dr. Hermann Oberth and conducted liquid-fueled rocket tests as part of the embryonic German rocket team. The military took note of their work. The provisions of the Treaty of Versailles had neutered German aspirations in traditional weaponry, but it hadn’t banned rocket development. Von Braun believed that what Oberth was trying to power to the world was fourfold: that a machine could sour beyond Earth’s atmosphere; that humans could leave the gravity of Earth; that humans could survive flight in a space vehicle; and that space exploration could be financially profitable. The last goal was, at the time, elusive. Among von Braun’s duties for Oberth was funding-raising for rocket science research at a Berlin retail department store, where he would stand for eight hours a day soliciting money beside a display on interplanetary exploration. From that experience with sales, he learned that the cash barrier was one of the hardest obstacles for a rocketeer to surmount. As part of his 1930 pitch, von Braun would bark, “I bet you that the first man to walk on the moon is alive today somewhere on this Earth!”

That very year, future moon walker Neil Armstrong was born on a farm near the small town of Wapakoneta, Ohio.

(Brinkley 2019, 14)

OVER THE COURSE of a half century, American, German, and Soviet dreams of putting a human on the moon threaded past numerous vital turning points. World events, both large and small, accelerated rocket engineering at an astonishing rate. As the complexity, scale, and malevolence of Hitler’s drive for world domination became manifest, his August 1941 turn on the subject of rocketry was a critical pivot point. No other nation at the time had Germany’s momentum in the field, paired with a dedication to leveraging new science for secret weaponry. Although the connection wasn’t fully understood at the time, Hitler’s commitment to the V–2 advanced the pursuit of a moonshot by perhaps decades. Though Hitler had not expressed interest in reaching the moon, the uncomfortable fact is that the darkest shafts and foulest backwater of human savagery helped bring this loftiest of human dreams to reality. 

Indeed, the engineers at Peenemünde were solving essential questions about celestial navigation and mechanics, about how to innovate easily applicable ways of determining position and velocity when away from Earth’s surface, which would prove all–important in future U. S. lunar voyages. German ballistic missile technology – built to kill people – laid a foundation for spaceflight.

Had Hitler demurred in the August meeting and continued only a halfhearted accommodation of the strange new technology, the course of World War II might have changed. According to many senior Nazi officers at the time (and some military historians since), Hitler’s commitment to the V–2 actually decreased Germany’s chances of winning the war. The voracious appetite of the Peenemünde project drew off resources when an accelerated program for conventional weapons and Luftwaffe aircraft might have made for a stronger German military machine. But to Hitler, the V–2’s perceived value went beyond dollars and cents. Over the following years, as the tides of war shifted, he came to see it as a superweapon that could finally deliver German victory over the Allied nations.

(Brinkley 2019, 38-39)

“Don’t say that he’s hypocritical , say rather that he’s apolitical. Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department.”

Wernher von Braun

Von Braun was convinced that rocketry was just that kind of symbol, elevating the technological excellence of a civilization. Much later , his convivial comments about the technical achievement of the V–2 betrayed no genuine anguish, only the arch observation that scientific breakthroughs since the fifteenth century had often begun in the sphere of weapons development. But the truth was that rather than elevating civilizations, his V–2 work for the Nazis degraded it, becoming nothing more than a tool by which a three–year–old British girl had been killed willy–nilly, and which would claim thousands more innocents to come . In that respect, Germany’s Wunderwaffe (miracle weapon) was no different from a simple club, hatchet, sword, or bayonet. Or, for that matter, the incendiary bombing raids the USAAF and RAF conducted on Germany.

Both versions of von Braun’s initial reaction to the launch of the V–2 on France, Belgium, and Great Britain might be entirely accurate. The enigmatic engineer often told people what they wanted to hear and showed the colors they hoped to see. If he was a hypocrite and accomplice, he believed, then so be it that was how his rocket program had survived in the Third Reich. If he had an intense concern about the Holocaust happening around him, he never expressed it. Von Braun went into high Nazi circles after September 8.

Everywhere 1944, he was congratulated. With his broad shoulders, groomed hair, and splendid physique, gazing up in the air at parties with thoughtful self–importance, he was treated as the proud exemplar of German rocketry genius, and he possessed an exalted opinion of himself. Von Braun’s amoral hunger to construct rockets governed his embrace of an evil regime. Both during World War II and after, he accepted accolades as an engineering visionary who foresaw the potential of human spaceflight, never admitting that he was essentially a fast–track Nazi arms merchant who developed brutal weapons of mass destruction . In the late 1960s , as the United States was involved in a race with the Soviet Union to land a human on the moon first, humorist Tom Lehrer wrote a song about von Braun’s opportunistic approach to serving whoever would let him build rockets regardless of their purpose:

“Don’t say that he’s hypocritical , say rather that he’s apolitical. Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That’s not my department,” says Wernher von Braun.

Lehrer’s biting satire captured well the ambivalence of von Braun’s indifference on moral questions associated with the use of the V–2 and other rocket technology.

(Brinkley 2019, 66-67)

By the time of the Sputnik launches , von Braun had grown in public acclaim. Not only had Collier’s magazine given him a chance to publish his vision of space exploration, but Walt Disney had provided the German–born engineer with a television platform for Sunday–night talks about the development of the Redstone and Jupiter rockets in Huntsville, and about the cosmos in general. Although his Nazi past still occasioned some resentment, it wasn’t a debilitating public liability. Indeed, von Braun, and his role in American life, had become an embodiment of West Germany reformed by the American way.

(Brinkley 2019, 142)

In the year after Sputnik, von Braun adorned the covers of both Time and Life. Swooning reporters treated him as half rocket scientist, half charming and cultured poet/raconteur, imbued with a deep affinity for all things American. His originality, his commitment to rocketry , and his steady faith in going to the moon were considered priceless national assets . Fan mail poured into Huntsville after these publications , and women wrote von Braun mash notes. 

His aggressive belief that the United States could outperform the USSR in space made him a heroic figure in Cold War America. ”I get about ten letters a day,” he told Life. ”About half come from youngsters who want advice on how to become rocketeers. We tell them to hit math and physics heavily. One lady wrote that God doesn’t want man to leave the Earth and was willing to bet me $10 we wouldn’t make it. I answered that as far as I knew , the Bible said nothing about space flight, but it was clearly against gambling.”

(Brinkley 2019, 143)

On August 14, 1958, Kennedy put a new phrase into the American lexicon, earning himself a prominent citation in the Oxford English Dictionary. Speaking on the floor of the Senate, he said, ”Our nation could have afforded, and can afford now, the steps necessary to close the missile gap.” That ”missile gap” became Kennedy’s calling card, wielded as a campaign cudgel even though its contention that the Soviets had hundreds of ICBMs whereas the United States hadn’t deployed a single one – proved to be a fiction. In the wake of JFK’s assertions , the air force and the CIA sparred over how advanced the Soviets actually were. Air force analysts backed Kennedy’s notion that the USSR had stockpiles of ICBMs. The CIA disagreed , insisting that there were fewer than a dozen. (Declassified documents would later show the CIA was right: at the time in question, the Kremlin had only four ICBMs.)

Kennedy’s missile gap was a direct descendant of the ”bomber gap,” the mid–1950s fear that the Soviets had a strategic bomber force bigger than America’s. But U–2 reconnaissance flights over the USSR soon proved this to be a fable. Just as Kennedy was propagating the ”missile gap” fallacy, U–2 photographs proved that the Soviets were behind in ICBM development. JFK wasn’t given this CIA intelligence until the summer of 1960. Like most U.S. senators in 1958, he had been briefed on the Corona intelligence satellite program, which Eisenhower approved that year. None of this mattered to him. His ”missile gap” spiel was a winner. At heart, Kennedy was set in the technocratic idea that the federal government needed to play a huge role in spurring social change at home and abroad through the bank rolling of technological innovation and military modernization.

(Brinkley 2019, 166-167)

At NASA , the hunt for astronauts was on.

Many names that should have been shoo–ins were absent from the lottery. Iven Kincheloe, once on track to become America’s first astronaut with the air force’s now – defunct MISS program, had been killed the previous summer on a test flight after ejecting too late from a crashing plane for his parachute to open. Two other men in the MISS group were above forty , and deemed too old. Neil Armstrong, for his part, chose not to apply, remaining loyal to his work on the X–15. Chuck Yeager, the first man to break the sound barrier, also declined to apply. His lack of a college degree would have made him ineligible in any case. NASA’s insistence on academic credentials reflected the dual role envisioned for NASA’s astronauts: not just ”a man in a can,” as some aviators had said disparagingly, but contributing to the ongoing engineering of their flights in the manner of X–15 engineer – pilot Scott Crossfield.

While Armstrong passed on the Mercury program, another Korean War veteran from Ohio, John Glenn, looked on it as a ”tonic.” Considered an overgrown Boy Scout by other test pilots, full of gentlemanly manners and a quarterback’s drive, Glenn believed from the outset that NASA would move the United States into space in an organized way, one that would also advance his career. Glenn’s guiding light was merit: a challenge fought for and achieved by sheer willpower and self–conquest over natural limitations.

At the time of Pearl Harbor, Glenn was a twenty–year–old student at Muskingum College in New Concord, Ohio. Hungry for combat action, he left his engineering studies to join the armed forces. After stints with the U.S. Army Air Corps and naval aviation, he was given a commission in the marines and acquitted himself well, flying Corsair fighters in the Pacific Theater. After the war, he remained in the Marine Corps, accepting relatively dull assignments with equanimity. Even after the United States entered the Korean War, Glenn initially remained stuck stateside in administrative posts, a ”non entity,” as a friend termed him. Finally ordered into the war in early 1953, he flew Panther jets with the marines‘ ”Tomcat” squadron before being seconded to the air force, where he began flying transonic fighter jets for the Twenty–Fifth Fighter – Interceptor Squadron and was credited with three kills in dogfights.

(Brinkley 2019, 173-174)

The press gushed enthusiasm for these new instant space cadet heroes in no uncertain terms. Leading the charge was the New York Times’s James ”Scotty” Reston, who was enthralled by all things Project Mercury. ”Those gloomy students of the American character who think we’ve lost the hop on our fast ball should have been around here this week when seven young American men dropped into Washington way to outer space,” he marveled.

”Somehow they had man on their aged to survive the imagined terrors of our affluent society, our waist high culture, our hidden persuaders, power elite and organization men, and here they were, aged 32 to 37 and all married, in the first stages [W]hat of training for the first manned rocket flights into space…made them so exciting was not that they said anything new, but that they said all the old things with such fierce conviction.“

(Brinkley 2019, 183)

During a series of four televised debates – the first presidential debates ever in American history – both candidates promised a new era and a sharp turn from Eisenhower’s methodical style, but Kennedy seemed to embody change. While Nixon presented himself as an old style politician of finesse, JFK appealed to voters who wanted a man of action , in touch with the moment and possessed of the charisma and vision to move democracy forward by thwarting communism. “I look up and see the Soviet flag on the Moon,” Kennedy goaded Nixon at the October 21 debate. ”Polls on our prestige and influence around the world have shown such a sharp drop that up till now the State Department has been unwilling to release them.” Pushing this theme of GOP complacency further , Kennedy mocked the vice president as a weak–kneed Cold Warrior. ”You yourself said to Khrushchev, ‘You may be ahead of us in rocket thrust, but we’re ahead of you in color television.’” Kennedy chided Nixon, hoping to get a rise. ”I will take my television in black and white. I want to be ahead of them in rocket thrust.”

Optics mattered in the end. A majority of Americans watching on TV believed the calm and collected Kennedy won the debate; Nixon, by contrast, had kept glancing at the camera, as if it were an invader. Those listening on the radio gave the nod to Nixon, where his makeup–free, sweaty lip didn’t offend.

(Brinkley 2019, 203-204)

There’s an old engineers ‘saying that their slide–rule tribe typically overestimates what can be accomplished in a year and under estimates what can be accomplished in a decade. Kraft’s NASA team certainly hoped this aphorism was true, because Project Mercury was already behind schedule even as the president was committing them to an exponentially more difficult Apollo goal. But if the men and women at Mercury Control in Cape Canaveral were excitedly baffled by Kennedy’s speech, von Braun and the other rocketeers at Huntsville’s Marshall Space Flight Center were beside themselves with glee. Alabama was regularly in the news for all the wrong reasons. Birmingham, only a hundred miles from Huntsville, was racked by systemic racism, white supremacy, and police antagonism against African Americans. But due to Kennedy’s pledge, the focus in northern Alabama shifted virtually overnight to making America proud of the new family of Saturn launch vehicles being developed there for an eventual moonshot.

The race to the moon was on. In practical terms, Kennedy’s May 25 speech to Congress put Huntsville at the vortex of the New Frontier. Only sixteen years earlier, von Braun had been working for the Nazis at Peenemünde, aiming to destroy London and Antwerp. Now he was the indispensable partner of a popular young U.S. president determined to use his rockets to go to the moon. If there really was something called the American dream, von Braun was living it beyond his wildest imagination. Unwaveringly self–confident, an energized von Braun claimed no worries about achieving Kennedy’s moonshot goal by late 1969, as long as the federal funding came through. ”Of course, the moon [had] a romantic connotation for me as a young guy,” von Braun recalled,” but I must confess, that as soon as President Kennedy announced we were going to land there within this decade, I began to identify it more and more with the target in space and time …. It was a constant reminder, ‘We’ll get you before this decade is out.‘”

Mercury astronaut Deke Slayton considered May 25, 1961, one of the gold–starred days in American history. No longer did astronauts have to worry about job security. What impressed him most about the moonshot speech was the brash ”by the decade’s end ” challenge. ”What Kennedy did with the moon program was to pick a goal people could relate to,” he recalled. ”It has to be something under ten years; if you give people a thirty–year goal, they won’t waste time thinking about it, it’s too far away.“

(Brinkley 2019, 261-262)

Gus Grissom’s flight had been suborbital, lasting barely fifteen minutes. The full–orbiting Vostok 2, by contrast , broke every record once and made history. One can imagine hearts at NASA sinking as on the books. Just four months earlier, Gagarin had circled Earth Vostok 2 cruised past that mark, then past the three orbits that many Soviet scientists believed to be the absolute limit of human endurance in space, then past five, then ten. Eventually, Vostok 2 made an astonishing 17.5 orbits of Earth in just over a day’s time.

The cosmonaut piloting the Vostok 2 was Gherman Titov, an ex gymnast who, at twenty–five, was the youngest per pert skier and son ever to fly in space. Always pushing the ”edge of the envelope” as a test pilot he was also the first person ever to nap in space, a feat that seemed extraordinary to a generation still wide–eyed by the thought of spaceflight. Titov actually slept for thirty minutes during the flight. With life–support equipment and radio and television devices monitoring his condition, his mission proved that astronauts or cosmonauts no longer had to operate on an anxiety–ridden red alert; they could relax, live, work, and sleep in space, suffering little more than the space version of motion sickness. In fact, sometime during his thirteenth orbit, Titov, after a fitful start to slumber, became so comfortable that he overslept his nap. This fact brought many smiles at the secret Star City, outside Moscow, where Soviet cosmonauts trained , lived with their families, and benefited from village school facilities and a shopping district.

Piloting Vostok 2 personally – unlike the previous ”man–in–a–can” flights, controlled from Earth – Titov still had time to snap photo graphs from his cockpit. He also used a Konvas – Avtomat movie camera to film Earth for ten glorious minutes before reentry. Ejecting once his capsule had pierced the atmosphere on return, he parachuted to a landing near Krasny Kut, Saratov Oblast, six hundred miles southeast of Moscow. Having fulfilled the Soviet dream, an unqualified winner, he was then driven three miles to where his capsule had made a hard–impact landing, to recover his film and journal.

(Brinkley 2019, 308-309)

Staying on schedule, President Kennedy left Cape Canaveral late on the afternoon of September 11, bound for Houston. The holiday atmosphere of the ”space tour” was such that in a city of just over nine hundred thousand people, some three hundred thousand turned out to greet JFK upon his arrival. 

Addressing the adoring crowd, he said, ”I do not know whether the people of the Southwest realize the profound effect the whole space program will have on the economy of this section of the country. The scientists, engineers, and technical people who will be attracted here will really make the South west a great center of scientific and industrial research as this nation reaches out to the moon. In this place in America are going to be laid the plans and designs by which we will reach out in this decade to explore space.” Among other things, Kennedy’s positive words were intended to repair damage from a gaffe Robert F. Kennedy had made while visiting the University of Indonesia, in Jakarta, the previous February. Asked by a student about the Mexican War of 1846-48, RFK replied, ”Some from Texas might disagree, but I think we were unjustified. I do not think we can be proud of that episode.” Many Texans were furious at this sentiment, forcing the president to control the damage rather than risk losing votes in 1964.

(Brinkley 2019, 359-360)

Inspired by Kennedy’s vision, women were America’s astronaut corps, applying to NASA, working behind the scenes, and inundating the White House with enlistment pleas. For example, Kennedy received a letter from Susan Marie Scott of Kentucky asking to audition for Gemini. His secretary, Evelyn Lincoln, forwarded the letter to O. B. Lloyd Jr., director of NASA’s Office of Public Services and Information. In his response to Scott, Lloyd wrote, ”Many women are employed in the program – some of them are in extremely important scientific posts. But we have no present plans to employ women in spaceflights. There are no women pilots to our knowledge, who have the degrees of scientific and flight training required for the success of those missions. Since there is no shortage of qualified male candidates, there is no need to train women for space flight at this stage in the program.“

(Brinkley 2019, 376)

”I think this gets back to the way our social order is organized. It is just fact. The men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them. The fact that women are not in the field is a fact of our social order.”

John Glenn

After meeting American aviator Geraldyn ”Jerrie” Cobb in 1959, Lovelace invited her to take the same tests as the Mercury astronauts and was amazed at her aptitude. Beginning in 1960, Lovelace had begun testing this hypothesis at his privately financed Lovelace Foundation for Medical Education and Research, in Albuquerque. Intrigued as to whether Cobb was an anomaly, Love lace accepted a financial gift from the fabled pilot Jackie Cochran, the leader of the Women Airforce Service Pilots (WASP) program in World War II, to examine eighteen other seasoned female pilots at his New Mexico clinic for secret testing. These women, all dexterous airplane pilots with commercial ratings, were put through a series of rigorous tests on centrifuges to simulate the pressure of launch and reentry. They graduated with flying colors. When word of the tests leaked to the media, the top twelve, along with Jerrie Cobb, were christened the ”Mercury 13.” These women pilots ranged in age from twenty–three to forty one, and ran the gamut from flight instructors to homemakers and from scientists to bush pilots.

Just before these women finalists were to gather at the Naval School of Aviation Medicine, in Pensacola, Florida, for advanced aeromedical examinations, they received telegrams informing them that their program was being effectively shut down. NASA hadn’t certified gender in Lovelace’s work. In fact, when NASA leadership learned of the experiment, they made it abundantly clear that the agency wasn’t going to employ women astronauts. The impetus for NASA’s decision was Kennedy’s May 25, 1961, moonshot announcement , and Webb’s belief that all the agency’s astronaut-training energy had to be targeted toward that lunar objective . In other words, it wasn’t the time for a shift in gender. That didn’t stop the American press from lion ”Astrogals Can’t Wait for Space,” ”Spunky Mom Eyes Heavens,” and ”Why Not ‘Astronauttes‘ Also?”

Fueled by the media attention and desire to shatter the glass ceiling, Janey Briggs Hart refused to give up her space dream easily. The wife of Michigan senator Phil Hart and the mother of eight children, Hart orchestrated a letter–writing campaign to the White House, arguing that women deserved to be included in the NASA space program. The pressure became so intense that Kennedy booted the issue to Congress, where a special subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics convened. On the first day of testimony, Hart and the other women pilots spoke righteously on behalf of women’s equality, and they were gaining momentum. Then, a most unlikely spoiler appeared before the subcommittee: John Glenn, who echoed Webb’s contention that funding women in space drained money needed for the moonshot, and was generally a waste of tax dollars. ”I think this gets back to the way our social order is organized,” Glenn testified, ”It is just fact. The men go off and fight the wars and fly the airplanes and come back and help design and build and test them. The fact that women are not in the field is a fact of our social order.”

The Mercury 13 pilots were devastated that Glenn, whom they all admired, was opposed to female astronauts, putting the U.S. space program on the wrong side of history. The following year, the Soviets did what the Americans wouldn’t, making Valentina Tereshkova the first woman in space. At heart, this was a stunt to one–up the Americans. Lifting off aboard Vostok 6 on June 16, 1963, Tereshkova became a global hero after making forty–eight Earth orbits over the course of seventy hours, at one point coming within three kilometers of Cosmonaut Valery Bykovsky, who’d launched aboard Vostok 5 just two days earlier. Frustrated that NASA had flummoxed his Mercury 13 project, Lovelace kept fighting a rearguard action from his home in New Mexico, hoping for the inclusion of a woman astronaut on the Gemini roster. But in December 1965, he and his wife were killed in a plane crash, depriving the Mercury 13 of their most devoted advocate. It would be nearly twenty years before Sally Ride became the first American woman in space, lifting off aboard the Space Shuttle flight STS–7 – the Challenger – on June 18, 1983.

(Brinkley 2019, 377-379)

NASA was lucky to have a rocket engineer as talented as von Braun to work on Apollo. But he shouldn’t be remembered as an American hero. His direct role in the Nazi concentration camp labor programs , where thousands perished under inhumane conditions, makes him a pariah figure of sorts. As historian Michael J. Neufeld ably summarized in the German Studies Review: ”Von Braun made a Faustian bargain with the German Army and National Socialist regime in order to pursue his long–term dream of exploring space, and late in World War II found out what that bargain meant. His career, however admirable in many other aspects , serves as an exemplary warning of the dangers of the amoral pursuit of science and technology in the twentieth century and the twenty – first.”

(Brinkley 2019, 456)

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References

Brinkley, Douglas. 2019. American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race. N.p.: HarperCollins.

ISBN 978-0-06-265506-6