American Moonshot

John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race

Douglas Brinkley

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9780062655073
• eBook ISBN: 9780062655080
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historical Biographies
• Index: History

Instant New York Times Bestseller

As the fiftieth anniversary of the first lunar landing approaches, the award winning historian and perennial New York Times bestselling author takes a fresh look at the space program, President John F. Kennedy’s inspiring challenge, and America’s race 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 we intend to win.”—President John F. Kennedy

On May 25, 1961, JFK made an astonishing announcement: his goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade. In this engrossing, fast-paced epic, Douglas Brinkley returns to the 1960s to recreate one of the most exciting and ambitious achievements in the history of humankind. American Moonshot brings together the extraordinary political, cultural, and scientific factors that fueled the birth and development of NASA and the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo projects, which shot the United States to victory in the space race against the Soviet Union at the height of the Cold War.

Drawing on new primary source material and major interviews with many of the surviving figures who were key to America’s success, Brinkley brings this fascinating history to life as never before. American Moonshot is a portrait of the brilliant men and women who made this giant leap possible, the technology that enabled us to propel men beyond earth’s orbit to the moon and return them safely, and the geopolitical tensions that spurred Kennedy to commit himself fully to this audacious dream. Brinkley’s ensemble cast of New Frontier characters include rocketeer Wernher von Braun, astronaut John Glenn and space booster Lyndon Johnson.

A vivid and enthralling chronicle of one of the most thrilling, hopeful, and turbulent eras in the nation’s history, American Moonshot is an homage to scientific ingenuity, human curiosity, and the boundless American spirit.

Part I

Rockets

1

Dr. Robert Goddard Meets Buck Rogers

Earth is the cradle of humanity. But one cannot live in the cradle forever.

—KONSTANTIN TSIOLKOVSKY

History has taught us that artists are often decades ahead of engineers and scientists in imagining the future, and so it was with the idea of voyaging to the moon. In 1865, Jules Verne published From the Earth to the Moon, which detailed the story of three intrepid astronauts blasted from a gigantic cannon in Tampa, Florida, en route to a lunar landing. A devotee of hot air balloons, astronomy, and newfangled gunnery, with a mind that could easily grasp Galileo’s theories on the phenomenon of lunar light, Verne consulted with French scientists about the challenges of a lunar voyage, then translated those complexities for the layman. Enormously popular, From the Earth to the Moon and its sequel, Around the Moon, inspired readers to reimagine what was possible and to beware of “certain narrow-minded people, who would inevitably shut up the human race upon this globe.”

Blessed with a probing curiosity that never rested, Verne was eerily prescient. Writing around the time of the American Civil War, he accurately prophesied that the United States would beat Russia, France, Great Britain, and Germany to the moon, and that the voyage would be launched from the Florida tidal lowlands, at the approximate latitude from which Apollo 11 blasted off in 1969. Verne’s postulation that the projectile would take four days to reach the moon was likewise remarkably accurate.

Verne’s novels exemplified the optimistic spirit of their times, when the potential for industrial and technological progress seemed limitless. It was a spirit that still suffused public discourse and literature into the early years of the twentieth century—especially in the United States, where, as novelist Kurt Vonnegut once noted, the enthusiastic experimenter and inventor with “the restless, erratic insight and imagination of a gadgeteer” has been an archetype since the nation’s birth.

It was into this cultural milieu that John Fitzgerald “Jack” Kennedy was born on May 29, 1917, in the Boston suburb of Brookline, Massachusetts. His parents, Joe and Rose Kennedy, both grandchildren of Irish immigrants, came from families that had thrived in business and politics. Rose’s father, John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald, was a former Massachusetts congressman and mayor of Boston. Joe’s parents had worked their way into the upper middle class through the saloon business and connections in the Democratic Party. The pride of their respective families, Joe and Rose were already well established in Boston society when they started their married life. Joe first made waves as a banker with a gift for spotting opportunity in the fine print of legal documents. Eventually, he became known as a Wall Street speculator or even manipulator, amassing millions by the time Jack was a small boy. The second of what would eventually be nine children, Jack had a sheltered upbringing, wanting for nothing, though this didn’t protect him from contracting scarlet fever at age two. He was quarantined with a 104-degree fever and blisters all over his body. For three weeks, his parents attended church services daily to pray for his recovery. After a month, he took a turn for the better, but he continued to suffer from various afflictions for the rest of his life, despite an outward appearance of robust good health.

Always taking life lightly, Jack could be a scamp of a boy, yet at the end of the day, he wanted only to delve into books by Mark Twain, Robert Louis Stevenson, H. G. Wells, Jules Verne, and others, which created in him a ravenous appetite for world history and high-risk adventure. An appreciation of the seashore, sailing, and maritime culture was ingrained in him at an early age. Simultaneously, his parents instilled in him a focus on politics and global affairs, with suppertime conversations typically turning on the week’s news from the New York Times and The Saturday Evening Post, including the latest developments in aeronautics.

As the century progressed and real-world technological advances closed the gap on Verne’s fiction, space travel moved into the realm of plausibility. In the wake of the Wright brothers’ first flight, at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, the skies were suddenly open to mankind, and even space travel seemed attainable. In 1910, a year out of the White House, Theodore Roosevelt became the first U.S. president to fly in a plane—it was the future, he declared. If Orville and Wilbur Wright could devise aircraft controls that made fixed-wing powered flight attainable, and if TR flew, then why couldn’t the moon be conquered someday? After Kitty Hawk, space was talked about as a “new frontier,” to be conquered by rockets instead of Conestoga wagons and the Pony Express, and the news reported regularly on the latest advances in the burgeoning fields of aviation and rocketry.

In the early years of the 1920s, northeast of Los Angeles, astronomer Edwin Hubble was observing the solar system through the Mount Wilson Observatory’s just-completed Hooker Telescope, at one hundred inches, then the world’s largest. By 1924, his findings would shatter the common notion that the Milky Way encompassed the entire cosmos, proving instead that it was just one among potentially billions of galaxies in an unimaginably vast universe. CBS Radio often hosted astronomers speculating about life in other galaxies, while top-tier universities began hiring space physicists. Interest in space transcended regionalism. Every village, it seemed, had a space buff, with discerning eyes for the moon.

Wearing aviator’s caps, fancy goggles, and exotic silk scarves with calf-high leather boots, aviators—like Eddie Rickenbacker—had become American heroes in the First World War. Even though airpower hadn’t been a determining factor in the war per se, the U.S. government recognized its future potential in warfare. The pursuit of aeronautical innovation that would eventually take us to the moon, in fact, had come into being during World War I. A group led by Charles D. Walcott, secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, had lobbied Congress to create an advisory committee that would coordinate aeronautical innovation efforts across government, industry, and academia, with the goal of producing cutting-edge military aircraft. In 1915, with President Woodrow Wilson determined to keep the United States neutral even as war consumed Europe, congressmen had quietly slipped a rider into a naval appropriations bill calling for the creation of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) to “supervise and direct the scientific study of the problems of flight to their practical solution.” It was an attempt to achieve aeronautical parity with the European powers, which, in the decade since the Wright brothers’ flight, had been busily studying the new technology’s military applications.

Initially charged with meeting just a few times a year, the committee soon expanded its role, building America’s first civilian aeronautical research laboratory. The year Jack Kennedy was born, the NACA established the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory (LMAL) in Hampton, Virginia, situated on the Little Back River off the Chesapeake Bay, at the end of a peninsula running between the James and York Rivers. The regrettable fact was that no single airplane flown by U.S. pilots in World War I had been built in an American factory. The NACA leaders wanted this lack of foresight to end. In 1920, the NACA got a public relations boost with the appointment of the legendary aviator Orville Wright to the agency’s board. Soon the government-sponsored test laboratory was conducting research in aerodynamics, aircraft structures, and propulsion systems for both industrial and military flights while pioneering such innovations as wind tunnels, engine test stands, and test-flight facilities. It was at the NACA that safety solutions for flying “blind” (in fog, blizzards, and thunderstorms) were created. Although the NACA would build additional laboratories in Ohio and California during the Second World War, it would be primarily at the Hampton incubator that the idea of launching Americans to the moon would get its first serious discussion.

Six hundred miles north of Hampton, some of the most aspirational aeronautical news in the world had emanated from the working-class city of Worcester, Massachusetts, about forty miles west of where Jack Kennedy spent his toddler years. There, in 1919, Dr. Robert H. Goddard, a professor at Clark College (now Clark University), unveiled his astronautical ideas in the sixty-nine-page A Method of Reaching Extreme Altitudes, issued as part of the Smithsonian Miscellaneous Collections. The document, written as bait to attract grant funding, illuminated a method of constructing a two-stage, solid-propellant rocket to use for atmospheric research. But what most fired the public imagination was Goddard’s assurance that a rocket fueled by a combination of gasoline and liquid oxygen would be able to dispense thrust beyond Earth’s atmosphere.

Goddard had grown up in Worcester to a family with New England roots dating to the seventeenth century. Sickly as a boy, often bedridden with pleurisy and bronchitis, he engaged his mind with the telescope, microscope, and a subscription to Scientific American provided by his father, a mechanical inventor of the type that propelled New England textile manufacturing throughout the Industrial Revolution. Amid peers more interested in football and hockey, Goddard scoured the local library for books on the physical sciences. When he was sixteen, he read H. G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds (1897), became fixated on the cosmos, and attempted to construct a balloon out of aluminum, crafting the metal in his home laboratory, dreaming of the moon and Mars.

Imbued with a visionary imagination, mapping out a future career as a physicist, 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.” He attended Worcester Polytechnic Institute and then Clark College, from which he received an MA and PhD in physics in 1910 and 1911, but Goddard was more than a blackboard genius and armchair theorist: he was his father’s son, and he wanted to build and launch his own rockets to prove his bold theories. Always self-motivated, he had already conducted several rocketry experiments while scouring for funding to conduct more.

The crucial theoretical turning point for Goddard occurred when he realized that Isaac Newton’s Third Law of Motion applied to motion in space, too. That opened up a universe of possibilities in his mind. By 1912, he became the first American to credibly explore mathematically the practicality of adopting rocket propulsion to reach high altitudes and even the moon. Following in the time-honored tradition of Alexander Graham Bell and Thomas Edison, and wanting to make money on his innovations, Goddard applied for patents steadily, eventually receiving 214 of them from the federal government, including the first for a multistage rocket.

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 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.”

Though the paper laid the theoretical foundation for U.S. rocket development in the twentieth century, the contemporary media and public remained uncertain. On January 12, 1920, the New York Times ran a front-page story about Dr. Goddard’s wizardry, titled “Believes Rocket Can Reach Moon.” The next day, however, the Times editors admitted to “uneasy wonder” over the idea, maintaining that Goddard’s proposed rocket would “need to have something better than a vacuum against which to react.” Goddard, the Times editors derided, “lacked the knowledge ladled out daily in high schools,” comparing him uncomplimentarily to Albert Einstein and equating some of his ideas to “deliberate step[s] aside from scientific accuracy” as observed in Verne’s From the Earth to the Moon. Even this criticism wasn’t as bad as that of the Philadelphia Inquirer, which compared the Worcester rocketeer’s idea to a Mother Goose nursery rhyme.

The snarky reaction in the Times and elsewhere made it open season on Goddard. Insipid jokes about his pie-in-the-sky moon trip abounded, even as respected aeronautical engineers stepped forward to support his principal contention: that a rocket could indeed function in a vacuum, needing no atmospheric pressure to push against. Goddard, an introverted man, balding, with a close-trimmed little mustache, and always impeccably dressed in a tailor-made suit, cringed at the skepticism and sophomoric humor that greeted his ideas, and he was determined to prove his detractors wrong. Though averse to showmanship, he conducted public demonstrations before an assembly of undergraduates, rigging a .22-caliber pistol loaded with a blank cartridge to the top of a spindle, inserting it into a bell jar, and then pumping out the air to mimic the vacuum of outer space. When fired remotely, the gun kicked back and made four full revolutions on its spindle, dramatically demonstrating thrust and velocity. As he watched the pistol spin, Goddard remarked dryly, “So much for The New York Times.” More than fifty subsequent simulation tests using vacuum chambers proved beyond question that rocket propulsion could indeed operate in a void. Eventually, both the times and the Times caught up with his ideas: to the newspaper’s credit, it issued a public retraction of its 1920 commentary forty-nine years later, after Apollo 11 was launched to the moon.

By 1921, still adhering to the hard, everyday, hermetic work of experimentation, Goddard was convinced that he would achieve greater thrust by switching from solid- to liquid-fueled rockets, utilizing cylindrical combustion chambers with impinging jets to atomize and mix liquid oxygen and gasoline. To test his ideas, he needed money. As the decade unfolded, Goddard realized that firing a rocket into space would require funding far in excess of the five-thousand-dollar grant he’d received from the Smithsonian. His own estimate was one hundred thousand dollars. In an era when few federal dollars were flowing into aviation technology research, even for military purposes—the NACA was still in its infancy—Goddard knew he had to think outside the box. Though secretive by nature, he determined that the garish publicity swirling around his high-minded plans for space rocketry held a wow factor that could potentially compel interest from private-sector investors. After all, he was that rare scientist of stature in America: one who’d proposed launching a rocket to the moon.

Publicity can be a double-edged sword, and as a colleague later observed, Dr. Goddard had “early discovered what most rocket experimenters find out sooner or later—that next to an injurious explosion, publicity is the worst possible disaster.” Yet Goddard himself stoked the disaster, or at least the publicity, announcing in April 1920 that he had already received nine applications from brave men who wanted to soar to the moon in the first rocket. Of course, there was no manned rocket planned—Goddard had never written anything serious about that possibility—but it didn’t matter. In homes like that of the Kennedys, in tree-lined Brookline, a new debate replaced the old one, as people stopped wondering whether a moon rocket was really possible and turned to the even more adventurously romantic questions: Would you go? Do you h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Frontispiece
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface: Kennedy’s New Ocean
• Part I: Rockets
• Part II: Generation Sputnik
• Part III: Moonbound
• Part IV: Projects Gemini and Apollo
• Epilogue: The Triumph of Apollo 11
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Notes
• Index
• Photo Section
• About the Author
• Also by Douglas Brinkley
• Copyright
• About the Publisher