Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in ... - The Black Vault

Chapter 1
First Steps into Space:
Projects Mercury and Gemini
by Roger D. Launius
Introduction
Humanity has dreamed of traveling into space for centuries, but in the twentieth
century, scientific and technical capabilities converged with this dream for
the first time. From the work of Robert H. Goddard through the heroic era of
spaceflight into the 1960s, the modern age of rocketry signaled a beginning that
would eventually lead to human flights beyond Earth to the Moon. 1 All of these
enthusiasts believed humanity would soon explore and eventually colonize the
solar system. And many of them worked relentlessly to make that belief a reality.
They successfully convinced a large majority of Americans of spaceflight’s possibility.
Through their constant public relations efforts during the decade following
World War II, they engineered a sea change in perceptions, as most Americans
went from skepticism about the probabilities of spaceflight to an acceptance of it
as a near-term reality. 2
This is apparent in the public opinion polls of the era. In December 1949,
Gallup pollsters found that only 15 percent of Americans believed humans would
reach the Moon within 50 years, while 15 percent had no opinion, and a whopping
70 percent believed that it would not happen within that time. In October
1957, at the same time as the launching of Sputnik I, only 25 percent believed
that it would take longer than 25 years for humanity to reach the Moon, while 41
percent believed firmly that it would happen within 25 years, and 34 percent were
not sure. An important shift in perceptions had taken place, and it was largely the
result of well-known advances in rocket technology coupled with a public relations
campaign that emphasized the real possibilities of spaceflight. 3
Indeed, by the end of World War II, all the technical assessments suggested
that it was only a matter of a few years before the United States would be able
1. Robert H. Goddard. “R. H. Goddard’s Diary,” 16–17 March 1926 in Esther C. Goddard,
ed., and G. Edward Pendray, assoc. ed., The Papers of Robert H. Goddard (New York: McGraw-Hill
Book Co., 1970), 2: pp. 580–581; Milton Lehman, This High Man (New York: Farrar, Straus, 1963),
pp. 140–144; David A. Clary, Rocket Man: Robert H. Goddard and the Birth of the Space Age (New York:
Hyperian, 2003), pp. 120–122.
2. This is the core argument of Howard E. McCurdy, Space and the American Imagination
(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1997).
3. George H. Gallup, The Gallup Poll: Public Opinion, 1935–1971 (New York: Random House,
1972), 1: pp. 875, 1152.