In August the Russians launched two cosmonauts, in separate spaceships, within 24 hours of each other, the double mission totaling seven days in space at a moment when the total for all four American spaceflights was 11 hours. This year we submitted a space budget which was greater than the combined eight space budgets of the previous eight years. There was no eloquence about space in them, the responses more dutiful than enthusiastic.
In the fall of , Kennedy did a two-day tour of space facilities to see for himself how the Moon program was taking shape. Von Braun showed the president a model of the Saturn rocket that would eventually launch astronauts to the Moon. Von Braun took Kennedy to the firing of a Saturn C-1 rocket as a demonstration of the coming power of American rocketry.
The test—eight engines firing simultaneously, roaring red-orange rocket thrust out of a test stand, with Kennedy, von Braun and the visiting party in a viewing bunker less than a half-mile away—shook the ground and sent shock waves across the Alabama test facility.
When the engines stilled, Kennedy turned with a wide grin to von Braun and grabbed his hand in congratulations. At the cape, JFK visited four launchpads, including one where he got a guided tour from astronaut Wally Schirra of the Atlas rocket and Mercury capsule Schirra was set to ride into orbit in about two weeks.
Kennedy ended the day in Houston, where his popularity was on vivid display. In the blazing early-morning Texas heat—already 89 degree at 10 a. It created an obligation to reach for the Moon, and to reach beyond. 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.
The Rice speech took place on September 12, Not even the NASA people agreed about the wisdom of that. The poetry of the Rice speech, the vision of the future it expressed, is nowhere to be found in the cabinet room that Wednesday. The recordings preserve two high-level conversations about space that reveal a very different Kennedy attitude about the race to the Moon.
Webb had been telling Kennedy that a Moon landing was possible in late , but was more likely in Kennedy wanted it sooner. How do you move it back into ? How about early ? What would that take? Four months here or there over four years is hard to nail down. Thirty minutes into the conversation, the president takes a step back. I think we ought to have that very clear. This is, whether we like it or not, in a sense a race.
The president was being as clear as he possibly could. Not because he needed to fly to the Moon. The conversation continued well after Kennedy lost patience, and left. In the politics of going to the Moon got even more challenging than they were in Webb was worried about the scientific community, many of whom felt that a space program that sent humans into space would consume huge amounts of federal money that could be used for scientific research with more immediate value on Earth.
In April, in an editorial in the prestigious journal Science , the editor, Philip Abelson, provided precisely the cerebral, almost disdainful critique Webb had been hearing in his conversations with scientists. Abelson walked through the justifications—military value, technological innovation, scientific discovery and the propaganda value of beating the Russians—and dismissed each in turn.
The first lunar landing will be a great occasion; subsequent boredom is inevitable. On June 10, Abelson was among a group of ten scientists called to testify, over two days, before the Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences about the future of Apollo.
I believe that [Apollo] may delay the conquest of cancer and mental illness. The Moon has been there a long time, and will continue to be there a long time.
As it happens, on that day NASA announced the end of the Mercury program, the small capsules with just a single astronaut. Next up, the much more sophisticated, and much more ambitious, missions of Gemini.
Only President Kennedy and Jim Webb were present. This meeting with Webb was long—46 minutes. The question was how to sustain Apollo during what were clearly going to be years of spending without years of excitement. This huge project he had set in motion. It would also have been a moment of political calculation.
How do you possibly hang on to a discretionary program of such enormous scale, already under fire, through four more budget cycles? How could he talk with enthusiasm about space, when there were no spaceflights for anyone to be enthusiastic about? In fact Kennedy saw only one strategy for protecting Apollo, an extension of the very first reasoning behind the Moon race.
Webb went deep into the budget negotiations with Kennedy, talking about congressmen by name, but he also pulled back to remind the president of the incredible power of this kind of exploration and science for the life of Americans, for understanding how the world works, and also for the practical value of technology development, and for inspiring American students to pursue science and engineering.
He was talking about all the things that made Americans nervous after Sputnik, all the things Kennedy himself so forcefully argued in his Rice University speech. That seemed to be sending an ominous signal about the fading sense of congressional urgency and enthusiasm for reaching the Moon by the end of the decade. So if John Kennedy had not been assassinated, would Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin have stepped off the ladder of the lunar module Eagle onto the Moon on July 20, ? The program has even become a cultural benchmark.
In the half-century since people visited the Moon, NASA has continued to push the boundaries of knowledge to deliver on the promise of American ingenuity and leadership in space. NASA stands on the verge of commercializing low-Earth orbit. According to AGI's math, the Odyssey spacecraft would have reentered the Earth's atmosphere on May 20, — about five weeks after the explosion that damaged vital oxygen and power connections for Odyssey. AGI will discuss the simulation in a free webinar, called "Revisiting Apollo 13", today April 15 at 2 p.
You can register for it here. While the three astronauts inside would have run out of oxygen weeks before a May return to Earth, history tells us a much happier story.
In reality, astronauts Jim Lovell , Fred Haise and Jack Swigert did return home safely through a complicated rescue effort by the crew, Mission Control and teams around the world.
That hard work paid off with the crew splashing down safely on April 17, — 50 years ago this week. Two of the three astronauts Lovell and Haise are still alive today. Sadly, Swigert died in due to complications from cancer in But it's the alternate reality — what would have happened if the astronauts could not fire the engines as planned to make it back to Earth — that continues to spawn a myth, as explained by space journalist Andrew Chaikin, who wrote an account of the Apollo missions called " A Man On The Moon " and narrates the video.
Or so I always thought. According to Chaikin, he asked AGI in to showcase key moments of the flight, not expecting anything new would come out of it. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Go Paperless with Digital. Get smart. Sign up for our email newsletter. Sign Up. Support science journalism. Knowledge awaits. See Subscription Options Already a subscriber?
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