Abstract
In anticipation of President Kennedy’s decision to approve a lunar landing project as a top priority national undertaking, NASA on May 2, 1961, had begun in earnest to examine just what would be required to carry out the president’s mandate. That examination revealed the immense dimensions of the task. New facilities would be needed, new approaches to space flight would be required, and new hardware would have to be developed. In his book Digital Apollo, David Mindell observes: “For the first couple of years the Apollo project was largely undefined, the money flowed freely, and the nerve-racking deadlines seemed far in the future.”1 This was certainly not the perception of those directly involved with the mobilization of human and financial resources required to carry out the lunar landing project. The second half of 1961 and most of 1962 were marked by a rapid series of decisions. To many of those in the White House and NASA concerned with attempting to meet the late 1967 target date that NASA had set for the first attempt at a lunar landing, there was a sense of urgency in getting a fast start on the needed buildup of people, facilities, and hardware; to them, “nerve-racking deadlines” were a daily reality.
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Notes
David A. Mindell, Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight (Cambridge, MA; The MIT Press, 2008), 112.
Jane Van Nimmen and Leonard Bruno with Robert Rosholt, NASA Historical Data Book, Vol. I, NASA Resources, 1958–1968, NASA SP-4012 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1988), 137–141, 134, 63–119.
Merle Miller, Lyndon: An Oral Biography (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1980), 278.
For a general discussion of how policy decisions were made during the Kennedy administration, see Theodore C. Sorensen, Decision-Making in the White House: The Olive Branch or the Arrows (New York: Columbia University Press, 1963).
For an account of the decision on where to launch the missions to the Moon, see Charles B. Benson and William B. Faherty, Gateway to the Moon: Building the Kennedy Space Center Launch Complex (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2001), chapter 5. For a discussion of locating Saturn production and testing facilities, see Bilstein, Stages to Saturn, chapter 2.
Henry C. Dethloff, Suddenly, Tomorrow Came: A History of the Johnson Space Center, NASA SP-4307 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1993), 36–37.
See Robert Sherill, The Accidental President (New York: Grossman Publishers, 1967), 240 for a skeptical account of the close relationships among those interested in bringing the new NASA facility to Houston.
Reflecting the controversies surrounding its efforts, the group’s report was not issued until almost a year after it had completed its work. Excerpts from the report can be found in John M. Logsdon, Dwayne Day, and Roger Launius, Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in the History of the U.S. Civil Space Program, Volume II: External Relationships, NASA SP-4407 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1996), 318–337.
Memorandum from James E. Webb for Dr. [Hugh] Dryden, Dr. [Robert] Seamans, and Mr. [Abe] Hyatt, May 4, 1962, NHRC, Folder 012518. On Richard Callaghan, see Robert Dallek, Flawed Giant: Lyndon Johnson and His Times, 1961–1973 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998), 23.
Memorandum from Chief, Space Division, Office of Scientific Intelligence, Central Intelligence Agency to Carl Kaysen, “Soviet Interplanetary Probes,” August 25, 1962, Memorandum from Carl Kaysen to Pierre [Salinger], August 31, 1962, and Memorandum from Lieutenant General Marshall Carter to The President, “Publicity on Failure of Soviet Space Probes,” NSF, Box 307, JFKL. John Finney, “The Space Shots: Detection of Soviet Failures Indicates Scope of U.S. Surveillance System,” The New York Times, September 9, 1962, 1.
Much of the following account is based on the discussion of NASA’s Electronic Research Center in Thomas P. Murphy, Science, Geopolitics, and Federal Spending (Lexington, MA: D.C. Heath and Company, 1971), 225–264; in addition, see Andrew Butrica, “The Electronics Research Center: NASA’s Little Known Venture into Aerospace Electronics,” AIAA Paper 2002–1138; and House Committee on Science and Astronautics, Toward the Endless Frontier. This last study was authored by former Congressman Kenneth Hechler.
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© 2010 John M. Logsdon
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Logsdon, J.M. (2010). First Steps on the Way to the Moon. In: John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon. Palgrave Studies in the History of Science and Technology. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230116313_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230116313_9
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