When America Went to the Moon
The cold war inspired it, big bucks backed it and Yankee ingenuity made it happen; 25 years later, the footprints in the lunar dust still inspire awe
America's historic Apollo voyages to the moon were born of genuine national desperation. Now that the former Soviet Union lies in ruins, it is difficult to recall how deeply our chief cold war rival's tiny, beeping Sputnik had stunned this nation in 1957. Not only had the backward Russians sent up the first Earth satellite but the powerful rockets that launched it meant that U.S. soil was, for the first time since the British burned the White House in 1814, vulnerable to direct foreign attack. Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's transcendent orbit of the Earth aboard spaceship Vostok I in April 1961, four months into the new Kennedy administration, was equally shattering; it showed, many feared, the ability of the Soviet system not only to marshal critical high technology but to enlist it in the war to win the hearts of uncommitted Third World nations. "Failure to master space means being second best in every aspect, in the crucial arena of our cold-war world," cried Lyndon Johnson, then vice president. "In the eyes of the world, first in space means first, period; second in space is second in everything."
A shaken John Kennedy told a White House meeting that "there's nothing more important" than finding a way to catch up. Doing so quickly was out of the question, however. The Soviet lead in rocket boosters guaranteed that. The only U.S. space program underway was Project Mercury, which was never intended to go beyond orbital flights by single astronauts, and Alan Shepard had yet to make the first American spaceflight. Kennedy asked LBJ: "Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip to the moon and back with a man? Is there any other space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win?"
Six weeks after Gagarin's orbit, Kennedy stood before Congress and dramatically upped the ante. "This nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before the decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth. No single space project will be more important to mankind or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish." Even the space enthusiasts at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration who dreamed of someday exploring the heavens were shocked by the magnitude of the challenge. "I could hardly believe my ears," says Robert Gilruth, who was to become director of the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. "I was literally aghast at the size of the project."
Kennedy's promise to land men on the moon inspired the greatest peacetime mobilization of people and resources ever, a herculean, forced-draft, high-risk national effort, a supreme political act that was a surrogate for war. The Apollo project cost more than $25 billion. In 1966, spending on the space program reached its height at nearly $6 billion--over 4 percent of the entire federal budget and more than Washington spent that year on housing and community development combined. At its peak, more than 400,000 people in government and industry labored to push the project forward; many were so devoted to the mission that they worked long extra hours without overtime pay. Three astronauts--Gus Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee--lost their lives in a tragic fire while testing the spacecraft on the ground in 1967.
advertisement
