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

390 Project Apollo: Americans to the Moon
early January 1961; the council decided that Low should continue his planning
effort. However, outgoing NASA Administrator T. Keith Glennan reminded Low
that such a program would require presidential approval, and that approval had
not been forthcoming. Indeed, as President Dwight D. Eisenhower left office
on 20 January 1961, the future of NASA’s program of human spaceflight was
extremely uncertain. There were no funds in the President’s final budget proposal
to support Project Apollo, and it was known that the incoming President, John F.
Kennedy, was receiving advice skeptical of the value of launching humans into
space. There certainly was no sense that Kennedy would, within four months,
decide to send Americans to the Moon.
The Decision to Go to the Moon 4
As he entered the White House, President Kennedy was aware that he would
be faced with decisions that would shape the future of U.S. space efforts. One
of his top advisors during the period between the election and his taking office,
Harvard professor Richard Neustadt, told Kennedy in December 1960 that the
United States had been in a race for dramatic space achievements, a race that
the Soviet Union was winning because of their superior space launch capability.
Neustadt asked “if we are behind and are likely to stay behind in the race for
‘Sputnik-type firsts,’ should we get out of the race and divert the resources now
tied up in it to other uses which have tangible military, scientific or welfare value?”
Neustadt was skeptical of the value of the Saturn rockets, 5 which he noted were
needed “only in order to put a man on the moon” before Russia, but he did support
the development of a very large rocket motor (the F-1). He asked Kennedy “in the
longer run, what proportion of government resources, for what span of years,
should go into developing the technology of space travel?” (Volume I, III-4)
Kennedy also appointed during the transition an “Ad Hoc Committee on
Space,” which was chaired by the man who would become his science advisor, MIT
Professor Jerome Wiesner. This committee recognized that “manned exploration
of space will certainly come to pass and we believe that the United States must play
a vigorous role in this venture,” but that “because of our lag in the development of
large boosters, it is very unlikely that we shall be first in placing a man into orbit.”
However, the committee believed that too much emphasis had been placed on
Project Mercury in comparison to its actual scientific and technological payoffs,
and recommended that “we should stop advertising MERCURY as our major
objective in space activities. . . . We should find effective means to make people
appreciate the cultural, public service, and military importance of space activities
other than [human] space travel.” (Volume I, III-5)
4. Most of the account of this decision is taken from Logsdon, The Decision to Go to the Moon.
This study of the Kennedy decision, published in 1970, remains the accepted version of the events
leading to Kennedy’s 25 May 1961 announcement that “we should go to the moon.”
5. At this point, Saturn was the name of the Wernher von Braun-led program to develop a
larger booster than anything the United States was otherwise planning, but still far short in lifting
power of what was ultimately developed as the Saturn V for the lunar landing program.