One-sided race to the Moon nearly derailed

It’s a popular narrative that the race to land a man on the Moon in the 1960s was launched by President John F. Kennedy in a speech to Congress in May of 1961, and was a gung-ho, nonstop effort until the goal was achieved in 1969. In fact, the space policy expert Dr. John M. Logsdon says the whole thing was nearly undone in 1963.

Space policy expert Dr. John Logsdon
spoke June 13 at the Museum of Flight.
Photo: Greg Scheiderer.

Logsdon is the founder and longtime director of the Space Policy Institute at the George Washington University and author of John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon (Palgrave Macmillan, 2013) and After Apollo?: Richard Nixon and the American Space Program (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). He gave a talk titled, “John Kennedy, Richard Nixon, and the American Space Program” last weekend at the Museum of Flight.

Logsdon pointed out some interesting contrasts between the two presidents. Richard Nixon was an early space booster, arguing for a civilian space agency when he was Vice President under Dwight Eisenhower. Some historians think of Nixon as the father of NASA. Meanwhile Kennedy didn’t have much interest in space until the Soviet Union launched Yuri Gagarin into orbit in April of 1961. This got Kennedy’s attention, and he gave his advisors the task of coming up with a space effort that the United States could win. Their answer was landing on the Moon, and that became Kennedy’s goal.

“It had very little to do with a view of humanity’s future in space or some romantic image of the space frontier,” Logsdon explained. “This was a Cold War, deliberate act of competition, seeing space as an area to demonstrate which social system, which governmental system was superior.”

Ramping up space spending

“Kennedy not only talked the talk, but he backed up his rhetoric with commitment,” Logsdon added. “This was a war-like mobilization of human and financial resources.”

Indeed, the NASA budget nearly doubled the first year and more than doubled again the second, and the skyrocketing cost came under considerable criticism. Kennedy was sensitive to this for a couple of reasons. He was concerned about the political impact of the Apollo program losing support, and worried that spending on space could be a negative in his 1964 re-election campaign. There was some talk of cutting the budget or relaxing the end-of-decade timeline for the goal. Kennedy also spoke openly of making the quest for a Moon a cooperative venture with the Soviet Union. Logsdon said that Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev originally expressed some interest in the idea, but was talked out of it by advisors worried that cooperation would reveal that the Russians really didn’t have lunar launch capability.

The one-sided race

“The United States was racing only itself,” Logsdon said of that lack of capability. “The Soviet Union, as of September of 1963, didn’t have a lunar program” and, in fact, didn’t decide to try until 1964.

“It was not reality as long as Kennedy was president. It became reality by the end of the decade,” Logsdon said.

Kennedy visited the launch center in Florida on Nov. 16, 1963 and was impressed by the rockets and the facilities.

“This visit excited Kennedy,” Logsdon said. “He came away from the visit full of regained enthusiasm for the program.”

On Nov. 21 Kennedy made a speech in San Antonio in which he said that the conquest of space must and will go ahead. He was assassinated the next day, and that ended any possibility that Apollo would be scrubbed. It became a memorial to the fallen president. Logsdon said it is interesting to speculate about what might have happened if JFK had lived or if Khrushchev had said “yes” to collaboration.
Logsdon said he doesn’t see Kennedy as a visionary in terms of humanity’s future in space.

“He was rather a pragmatic politician that saw a leadership-oriented space program as in the national interest in the particular situation of the early 1960s. He chose the lunar landing as a way of demonstrating the capabilities of this country,” Logsdon said.

Nixon and Apollo

Nixon was sworn in as president six months to the day before Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin landed on the Moon with Apollo 11.

“Unlike Kennedy, who saw space in geopolitical and foreign policy terms, Nixon viewed the space program as an issue of domestic politics: of technology, of innovation, of job creation, of something that is part of what the government does to stimulate society,” Logsdon said.

He contends that Nixon made three key decisions about space. He didn’t set a grand goal like going to the Moon or Mars. He opted to treat space exploration as just another one of the things that government does, nothing special. And his administration approved the space shuttle, though Logsdon said they chose to, “build a program around the shuttle without a long-term goal for the shuttle to serve.”

Logsdon said there may have been some wisdom there. A big goal, and an accompanying big budget, could have been a target, while a small, sustainable space program didn’t attract much opposition.

“Nixon was totally convinced of the importance of human spaceflight and of keeping astronauts in orbit, and that human spaceflight was essential to a U.S. leadership position,” Logsdon said. “He was intrigued by the various national security uses of the shuttle, which never happened.”

Naturally, electoral politics entered into it as well. The shuttle program created jobs in California, and Nixon needed to win California to gain re-election.

Logsdon is an engaging speaker and used a lot of video and audio clips in his presentation. His books are worth a look for anyone interested in the history of the space program. To buy the books click the links or book covers above.

A dim view of the future of funding for space exploration

Dr. John M. Logsdon does not paint a very optimistic picture of the future of funding for space exploration. Logsdon, considered the dean of space policy and the founder of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University, gave a talk titled “What Do We Expect of a Space Program?” today at the 225th meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle.

Dr. John Logsdon speaking Jan. 5, 2015, at the 225th
meeting of the American Astronomical Society in Seattle.

Logsdon pulled the title of his lecture from a line in a Nixon Administration memo about the future of the space program. He says a big part of the problem is that, in more than four decades since the memo, the underlying question has not been adequately answered.

Logsdon pins much of the blame for the situation on President Nixon, who scaled back funding for NASA after the race to the Moon was won.

“The decisions he made from the ’69 through ’71 period, culminating in the January 5, 1972 announcement of the approval of the space shuttle, really characterized the program that NASA executed for the next 40-plus years, and basically avoided answering the question ‘What do we expect?’ by developing capabilities rather than seeking goals,” Logsdon said.

We had the answer under President Kennedy, according to Logsdon, when the goal was not just to put people on the Moon, but to achieve preeminence about all things in outer space.

“What is distinctive about Kennedy is he not only talked the talk, but he walked the walk,” Logsdon said. “He made a commitment of human and financial resources, peaceful but warlike mobilization of resources, to carry out that program of preeminence.”

Logsdon pointed out that the budget for NASA was $964 million when JFK urged the US to go the Moon; it had ballooned to $5.2 billion by 1965. Space science shared in the growth, its part of the NASA budget going from $131 million to $767 million in the same time frame.

Logsdon is tackling the history of presidential support for space exploration in his scholarship. He published John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon in 2010. His new book, After Apollo?: Richard Nixon and the American Space Program, is due out in March. The latter goes into great detail about Nixon’s approach and its lasting impact.

While NASA’s budget has fluctuated over the years, Logsdon sees a silver lining in the nation’s investment in science.

“The ups and downs in the overall NASA budget are not reflected in the budget for space science, which has shown a rather gradual but steady increase for the past 25 or 30 years, and has not vacillated,” he said. “Compared to the human spaceflight part of NASA, the space science, robotic science program, including Earth science, is in pretty good shape and is not being argued about.”

Logsdon served on the Columbia Accident Investigation Board, which opined in 2003 that NASA was being forced to do too much without adequate resources. He said that’s still a problem. The reason he doesn’t see a good solution ahead is that there are three possible responses, two of which he views as unlikely. He doesn’t foresee a great increase in our ambitions or some Sputnik-like incident that creates urgency about space. Nor does he anticipate a significant increase in spending, though that could depend in part on who the next president turns out to be.

“The most likely outcome is that we just keep muddling along, as we have since 1971, with a suboptimal program,” he concluded.

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