Chasing the Moon Read online

  Von Braun had been a vocal opponent of the lunar-orbit-rendezvous idea when it was first proposed, as it would reduce the role of his group at the Marshall Center. However, he surprised his colleagues at a meeting in mid-1962 when he unexpectedly endorsed the plan. He believed it would balance managerial coordination between Robert Gilruth’s group, his group in Huntsville, and those at the Cape, along with the primary contractors, which would eventually include Boeing, North American Aviation, Grumman, and Douglas Aircraft. It was a politically savvy compromise as well, since it deflected some of the rivalry that had been building between the NASA centers.

  Simultaneously, another group of engineers from Gilruth’s group began considering ways to expand upon Project Mercury, with a second crewed program that would serve as a developmental bridge to Apollo. They coordinated with technicians at McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, the contractor for the Mercury spacecraft, to conceive a larger spacecraft similar to Mercury, dubbed the Mercury Mark II. This soon evolved into a far more complex two-man vehicle renamed Gemini, which would take astronauts on earth-orbital flights for as long as two weeks. These longer missions would pioneer the development of independent electricity-generating fuel cells rather than relying exclusively on batteries and, it was hoped, perfect a method of returning to dry land with the use of a delta-shaped paraglider, forgoing the need of expensive U.S. Navy ocean recoveries.

  Few of NASA’s debates and long-term decisions about how America would get to the Moon garnered a fraction of the media attention given the immediate human drama of Project Mercury. The genuine popular curiosity and enthusiasm about Alan Shepard’s achievement foreshadowed the next chapter in the escalating international competition between the two superpowers: America’s attempt to place a human in orbit. Realizing this moment would likely generate even greater interest, the network news divisions and their counterparts in the print media spent the months prior to the first U.S. orbital mission conceiving how to best tell the story.

  Experienced journalists covering America’s piloted space program realized there was an additional aspect to this flight that was markedly different from the earlier Mercury flights: the astronaut. John Glenn had neither the laconic wariness of Gus Grissom nor the steely arrogance of Alan Shepard. Glenn’s wholesome yet mature smiling freckled face was perfect for the television age. He was an articulate, clean-cut example of American masculinity and seemed the ideal personification of the nation’s dominant culture. A genuine war hero, who had flown sixty-three combat missions in Korea, Colonel Glenn was already a minor celebrity for pioneering the first supersonic transcontinental flight in 1957.

  In fact, Glenn had been scheduled to fly a third suborbital mission. But when the Soviet Union orbited cosmonaut Gherman Titov seventeen times a few days after America’s second Mercury suborbital flight, Glenn’s mission plan was changed to an earth orbital trajectory. He would also be the first human to ride an Atlas, the Air Force’s ICBM missile with a well-known history of launch problems and explosions.

  During the early days of the Mercury program, when an actual emergency occurred it wasn’t fully evident to viewers watching at home. Gus Grissom nearly drowned during the second Mercury flight while Marine helicopters were attempting to recover his sinking capsule from the Atlantic Ocean, but television viewers were largely unaware of the drama as there was no live television from the recovery site. A pool journalist on the recovery ship USS Randolph transmitted a live audio report merely relaying the news that Grissom was in the water but “the concern at the present time is with the capsule.” Unknown to the reporter, Grissom had been forced to abandon Liberty Bell 7 as it began to sink, and once in the ocean his flight suit had begun to fill with water. After four minutes struggling to keep his head above the waves, Grissom was hoisted aboard the helicopter, but his capsule was lost.

  Once a rocket disappeared from visual sight after launch, the television networks were forced to resort to their own creative alternatives to visually tell the story of the early space missions. The Mercury orbital flights involved hours of live television coverage, but with no television camera in the spacecraft, producers relied on images of oscilloscopes, console displays, radio antennae, and prerecorded videos of tense flight directors working in the control center. The audio of Shorty Powers’s reports from Mercury Control was matched with crude animated images showing the rocket speeding into space and a clock that indicated the elapsed time since launch. It then fell to the network correspondents to convey any sense of actual excitement, since there was nothing to see.

  The launch of Glenn’s Friendship 7 was postponed ten separate times before it was finally on its way, and as a result the networks expended hours of valuable airtime in the days leading up to the February 20, 1962, launch. This not only increased suspense but panicked the network accountants. Days before the launch, Glenn’s flight was already being referred to as television’s “most extensively and expensively reported single news story.” Even live gavel-to-gavel broadcasts of the national political conventions required less expense and labor. By early 1962, Walter Cronkite was no longer required to sit in a car while providing his audio commentary. CBS assembled a semi-permanent structure, referred to as its “Cape Canaveral Control Center,” from which Cronkite could report, seated at a desk with the launchpad visible behind him.

  In the White House, John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson watched the launch of Friendship 7 on television, surrounded by a few members of Congress. While the room was quiet with the tension of the moment, Johnson turned to Kennedy and said regretfully, “If Glenn were only a Negro.”

  The country spent the entire day transfixed by the news of Glenn’s odyssey as he circled the globe, and by late afternoon millions were following reports of his return. The final minutes of his flight were not without additional suspense: A faulty signal erroneously indicated that the spacecraft’s heat shield had detached prematurely. The voice of the otherwise very cool Glenn sounded concerned when he was asked not to jettison the retro-rocket package, an unexpected request added as a safeguard to keep his spacecraft’s heat shield secured. Luckily, Friendship 7’s fiery reentry was over in minutes and word was soon broadcast that Glenn and his capsule were in the process of being recovered in the Atlantic.

  Summing up the nation’s psyche on NBC News that evening was Frank McGee, a journalist typically far less prone to showing personal emotion on air than Cronkite. “We have by this time, it seems to me, reached the point of something bordering on hypnosis—irresistibly drawn to the event, and at the same time repelled by our fears of what might happen.”

  The nation’s emotional reaction to Glenn’s flight only confirmed what President Kennedy had sensed immediately after Shepard’s mission a few months earlier: that television would transform America’s attitude toward spaceflight as it had toward politics. And the television networks realized it too, despite the lack of live images from space. When delivering his evening special report recapping that day’s landmark flight, NBC’s McGee regretfully informed viewers that the network was not yet able to obtain motion-picture film showing the astronaut’s recovery from the Atlantic Ocean. At that moment the 16mm film magazine containing that footage was traveling by air to a facility in Florida, where it would be hastily developed and then transmitted to the nation through NBC’s New York network feed. Instead, the only image McGee could offer viewers was a grainy black-and-white photo of Glenn on board the recovery ship, which had been transmitted via wirephoto equipment, a technology in use since the 1930s. However, within months, and with little advance warning, television news broadcasting would take a startling leap forward.

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  FOLLOWING HIS CONTROVERSIAL address to the broadcasters, Newton Minow had become one of the Kennedy administration’s most public figures. But more quietly, Minow had been working to circumvent the legal issues surrounding placing the first commercial communications satellite in s
pace and had prevailed upon the president to institute a program for the satellite that would benefit everyone on Earth. NASA would play the role of transportation provider for what would be the first privately sponsored space mission.

  Concurrent with Minow’s actions, Arthur C. Clarke delivered a paper in Washington on “The Social Consequences of the Communications Satellites.” He then traveled to the American Rocket Society’s annual conference in New York. During a public panel discussion that included von Braun, Clarke pointed out that if a synchronous television satellite were operational by 1964, it might be possible for everyone around the world to watch the Tokyo Summer Olympic Games. William Pickering, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s director, was sitting in the audience and was so taken with the idea that he mentioned it to Lyndon Johnson. The next day, when Johnson delivered his keynote address, Clarke’s proposal about broadcasting the 1964 Olympics had been inserted into the prepared text.

  Audiences didn’t have to wait until the 1964 Olympics to see the first live intercontinental satellite television broadcast. It happened only nine months later, while those living in the eastern United States were enjoying a hazy summer afternoon. Viewers who tuned in for the regularly scheduled broadcasts of the soap opera The Edge of Night or the game show To Tell the Truth discovered that both had been preempted by a special news report. NBC’s Chet Huntley, CBS’s Walter Cronkite, and ABC’s Howard K. Smith alternated hosting duties from studios in New York for a transmission seen not only all over America but in sixteen European countries as well. Two weeks earlier a Thor-Delta rocket had lifted off from Cape Canaveral to place Bell Labs’s Telstar 1 in a non-synchronous orbit three thousand miles above the Earth. Cronkite told viewers at the opening of the broadcast, “The plain facts of electronic life are that Washington and the Kremlin are now no farther apart than the speed of light—at least technically,” a statement that failed to mention the broadcast was not being seen in Russia. Huntley then introduced a transition to one of President Kennedy’s news conferences, already in progress at the State Department’s auditorium. With apologies, Huntley cut away two minutes later to introduce John Glenn. Sitting in the Mercury control room at Cape Canaveral, Glenn spoke to the camera about projects Gemini and Apollo before introducing astronaut Wally Schirra, dressed in his silver flight suit.

  Unable to view the historic Telstar broadcast was one person who had worked for years to make it happen. During the summer of 1962, Arthur C. Clarke was in Ceylon, though in a nursing home, slowly recovering from a mysterious near-fatal paralysis. His doctors assumed he had suffered a spinal injury as a result of an accidental blow to his head, but decades later, when he was in his seventies, was it determined that Clarke had actually contracted poliomyelitis.

  The summer of Telstar, Kennedy was facing a series of difficult decisions regarding NASA’s projected 1964 budget. There was a faction within NASA pushing him to increase spending, to eliminate any possibility that the Russians might get to the Moon first, though James Webb was not among them. The president’s advisers suggested he conduct a fact-finding tour of NASA facilities and prime contractors to see how all the money was being spent. In St. Louis, the president addressed five thousand workers in a huge assembly room at McDonnell Aircraft Corporation, the prime contractor for both the Mercury and soon-to-be-delivered two-man Gemini spacecraft. He praised their part in “the most important and significant adventure that any man has been able to participate in [in] the history of the world.”

  A few minutes later, Kennedy looked across the crowd and saw the face of Newton Minow, who had traveled on the vice president’s plane.

  Kennedy crooked his finger and motioned for his celebrity FCC commissioner to come over, then addressed him privately.

  “I understand why Jim Webb and the NASA people are here, but what are you doing here?” he asked.

  “Well, Mr. President, space exploration isn’t only the manned program. I think communications satellites are more important than sending a man into space.”

  “And just why do you say that?” Kennedy asked.

  “Because,” Minow continued, “communications satellites will send ideas into space, and ideas last longer than people.”

  Kennedy didn’t respond, but his reflective gaze conveyed to Minow that he had made his point.

  NASA Administrator James Webb looks on as President John F. Kennedy speaks to journalists during a September 1962 visit to the space agency’s new facility in Houston, Texas. Towering behind them is a preliminary design of the lunar module, the vehicle the United States intends to land on the moon before the end of the decade.

  Earlier that day, before arriving in St. Louis, the president had addressed a crowd of forty thousand Texans seated in Rice University’s football stadium in Houston. Speaking in the blazing sun in ninety-degree heat, he gave a speech that morning that, along with his address to Congress a year earlier, would become one of the most often-quoted pieces of space-advocacy rhetoric in history. It was here that he asked his fellow Americans, and the rest of the world:

  But why, some say, the Moon? Why choose this as our goal? And they may well ask, “Why climb the highest mountain? Why, thirty-five years ago, fly the Atlantic? Why does Rice play Texas?”

  We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the 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, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others too.

  Rice University had been chosen as the site of the address because, the previous autumn, Houston had been selected as the home of the new NASA Manned Spacecraft Center, to succeed the facility overseen by Robert Gilruth at the Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia. A long list of potential sites in the southern half of the United States had been discussed. However, it was the lobbying effort of Congressman Albert Thomas that managed to make his home district of Houston the winning location for the world’s most renowned space-mission control center. Congressman Thomas not only represented Houston and was a Rice University alumnus, but he chaired the powerful House Appropriations Committee, which oversaw NASA’s budget. Using his network of connections in Texas business and real estate and at Rice—plus a bit of Washington wheeling and dealing—Thomas arranged that one thousand acres of cattle-grazing land previously donated to Rice by the Humble Oil Company for a federal academic research facility be designated as the location for NASA’s new center.

  On the day of Kennedy’s speech, Rice University was still segregated, in accordance with the wishes of its original founder, who in 1891 established the Rice Institute for the free instruction of white Texans. But if, as planned, Rice University was to partner with NASA’s new facility and obtain federal-government funding to create a nearby department of space science, problems lay ahead.

  Under the intense Texas sun, Kennedy enticed his listeners with the promise of the future. “Houston, your city of Houston, with its Manned Spacecraft Center, will become the heart of a large scientific and engineering community.” What he well knew but didn’t mention that day was that his brother, as attorney general, could call upon the Department of Justice to deny any federal money from going to a segregated public institution.

  Two weeks after Kennedy spoke at Rice, the university’s board of trustees voted unanimously to give the thousand acres to NASA and in a second unanimous vote approved a motion to file a lawsuit to change Rice’s charter to admit black students. The trustees’ vote was not without controversy; Rice alumni protested, and it wasn’t until February 1964 that a jury trial resolved the situation in favor of the trustees.

  Kennedy’s aspirational rhetoric was not only calling for personal sacrifice to further democracy and freedom and explore the heavens; he was also asking the country to enact social chan
ge in order to resolve the effects of the sins of the past. It had only been a year since the pictures of the Freedom Riders’ burning bus were seen on television.

  As the three-year reign of the seven Mercury space celebrities was nearing an end, NASA held a press conference at the University of Houston to introduce the world to the nine new astronauts slated to fly on the upcoming Gemini and Apollo missions. One of these men might even become the first human to set foot upon the Moon. They were not only younger than their Mercury predecessors, Astronaut Group Two—or “the New Nine,” as they came to be known—included the first two civilian astronauts. NASA wanted to make the public aware of this distinction and did so in a savvy and memorable moment of media history. CBS coordinated with NASA to transport a modest middle-aged couple from Ohio to New York, where they appeared as contestants on the prime-time game show I’ve Got a Secret. As the cameras focused on the faces of Viola and Stephen Armstrong, their secret was superimposed onscreen, revealing to television viewers: “Our son became an ASTRONAUT today.”

  After the secret was guessed correctly following an interrogation by the panel of celebrities, host Garry Moore emphasized that the couple’s son, Neil Armstrong, was a civilian pilot, albeit one who had already flown to the edge of space in NASA’s experimental X-15 rocket plane. Moore then asked a logical yet prescient question: “Now, how would you feel, Mrs. Armstrong, if it turned out—of course, nobody knows—but if it turns out that your son is the first man to land on the Moon? How would you feel?”

  Armstrong was unable to see the program or hear his mother’s understated response wishing him “the best of all good luck,” his selection having been announced only hours earlier at the press conference. NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center director Robert Gilruth revealed that women had been among the 253 applicants, but “none were qualified.” At the long front table with Armstrong were Frank Borman and Ed White, who had attended West Point; James Lovell and Thomas Stafford, who had gone to the Naval Academy; two additional former naval aviators, John Young and Elliot See; James McDivitt, an Air Force pilot who had graduated from the University of Michigan; and Charles “Pete” Conrad, the only astronaut of his generation with an Ivy League education. Conrad, a prep-school dropout with dyslexia (then little known and undiagnosed), went on to graduate from Princeton University with a full Navy ROTC scholarship. Eight of the New Nine would make history in outer space before they were in their early forties.