century. Speaking as a mathematician, I should say that the odds are about three to one against survival. The risk of war by accident—an unintended war triggered by an explosive situation such as that in Cuba—remains and indeed grows greater all the time. For every day we continue to live, remain able to act, we must be profoundly grateful.
With towering intellectual figures like Russell—who co-wrote the iconic Principia Mathematica, won the Nobel Prize in Literature, and championed logic and freedom at the beginning of the twentieth century—making these sorts of dire pronouncements in a hedonistic outlet like Playboy, living for the moment seemed like an entirely rational idea. If everything is going to hell in a handbasket, why not?
The Dark Side of the Moon
A new president was attempting to turn the tide of fear and to restore a sense of wonder to science, not out of vision so much as desperation. By May 1961, John F. Kennedy had been in office for a little more than three months and had already stumbled into deep trouble, seemingly justifying the public’s growing skepticism of the government. The recession of 1958—the worst since the end of World War II—had been quickly followed by another that began during the presidential campaign of 1960 and lasted into 1961. The Bay of Pigs had already occurred, resulting in an embarrassing failure for the new administration. Five days before the thwarted invasion, the Soviets had sent the first human into orbit, pulling the rug out from under Kennedy’s campaign rhetoric about besting them in the space race. Aiming to take advantage of the growing social upheaval in the West, Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev was testing Kennedy in every way he could, a pattern that would continue all year long and include the building of both the Berlin Wall and the nuclear-missile sites that would result in the Cuban Missile Crisis. His credibility on the line at home and abroad, Kennedy looked weak, inexperienced, and outmaneuvered. He needed a way to assert his leadership—and America’s. He turned to the moon—not for science’s sake, but to beat Khrushchev. He later admitted as much in a November 1962 meeting with NASA administrator James Webb. “I am not that interested in space,” he told Webb. The main reason he wanted Apollo was its importance in the Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union.
The Russians had led with Sputnik 1 in 1957 and, a month later, had sent a dog into space on Sputnik 2. Two years after that, they had crash-landed Luna 2 on the moon. Now, on April 12, 1961, they had beaten the United States yet again by sending the first human, Yuri Gagarin, into space. On May 25 of that year, Kennedy addressed a joint session of Congress and laid out several “urgent national needs,” among them getting America back into the space race:
Recognizing the head start obtained by the Soviets with their large rocket engines, which gives them many months of lead-time, and recognizing the likelihood that they will exploit this lead for some time to come in still more impressive successes, we nevertheless are required to make new efforts on our own. For, while we cannot guarantee that we shall one day be first, we can guarantee that any failure to make this effort will make us last.
He laid out a bold agenda, a desperate and visionary agenda, to regain the military and ideological lead, and, at the same time, to turn around the economy by landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth. The effort would require a peacetime science mobilization on par with the Manhattan Project, requiring the building of entire cities to support it. At its peak, the Apollo program would employ some four hundred thousand people.
There were just two problems: the United States didn’t have a clue how to do it, and, with the country in a recession and federal tax revenues down, it didn’t have the money either. To make matters worse, Kennedy’s inspirational ideas for domestic policy were getting shot down. He had painted a grand vision of the New Frontier and the War on Poverty, but he couldn’t get Congress to pay for a major expansion of social programs—at least not yet. If a program were tied to the Cold War, however, he thought he could get Congress to support it, as it had the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act five years earlier and the National Defense Education Act of 1958. Apollo could be a bold new vision and a jobs program in one, an economic stimulus with benefits. The cultural anxiety was so high by then that the very idea of Russians crawling all over the moon caused a visceral reaction in many Americans. Kennedy thought he had a winner.
But once the budget numbers came back, they showed that the program would cost almost $20 billion over eight years, eating up all the discretionary funds that Kennedy needed for his War on Poverty. If he wanted Apollo, he would have to sacrifice every other goal of his presidency. He began looking for a way out.
He realized that, if he took away the Cold War justification, he’d lose the support of fiscal conservatives, and he could use that loss as an excuse to move the deadline back indefinitely. So, feigning friendship, he reached out to Khrushchev, his worst enemy, at the Vienna summit. Over lunch, he suggested that they bury the space-race hatchet and go to the moon together as a cooperative venture. Surprised, Khrushchev said no. Kennedy looked at him silently and, finally, Khrushchev said, “All right, why not?” But as they talked further he thought about what it was going to cost and changed his mind again, now saying that disarmament was a prerequisite for cooperation in space. Both sides were hoping to avoid the costly space race.
Kennedy took this nugget of an offer and sold the idea in a speech at the University of California, Berkeley, in March 1962, and another at the United Nations in September 1963. Fiscally conservative Democrats who had backed the program now saw Kennedy’s support wavering and started jumping ship. The Senate responded to the changing political climate by proposing to cut NASA’s funding and scrap the Apollo program. Kennedy’s political escape plan was working.
In general, Americans were more concerned about domestic issues like poverty, race relations, and the economy, and suspicion of science was growing. In 1962, marine biologist Rachel Carson’s book Silent Spring came out and made a permanent impact on the national psyche, shocking Americans already suspicious of science into an awareness of chemical pollution, reaffirming Eisenhower’s warnings about the scientific-technological elite, and launching the field of environmental science and the modern environmental movement. That year, only about 35 percent of Americans thought Apollo was worth the cost.
Democracy’s Most Severe Test
At the same time, opposition to Apollo was also building in the scientific community. By 1963, the Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences was holding hearings, at which scientists were testifying that human spaceflight was inordinately expensive and risky, since its paramount objective was not research but bringing astronauts back alive. Unmanned spaceflight with robots, they said, would cost much less and return much more information, since we didn’t have to worry about feeding or protecting the lives of robots, or about bringing them back, cutting fuel costs by more than half.
The nation was adrift, and the public hardly thought of the space program as a good thing. Why couldn’t we spend our money on putting our best scientific minds to work solving issues here on Earth? The cost of funding the newly created NASA and the Apollo program was incredible. By 1966, it would reach 4.5 percent of the federal budget, an astronomical figure compared to today, when it is about one-ninth of that.
But then, in November 1963, everything changed. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, and the next year the elections went overwhelmingly to the Democrats. The new president, Lyndon Johnson, committed to the Apollo program and the Great Society in honor of Kennedy’s memory. Very few could stand opposed. Enacting Kennedy’s dream had become a national cause célèbre, and, in a dramatic turnaround, both initiatives were funded.
Still, the funding of Apollo stood in contrast with the mainstream culture’s attitude. In 1965, Ralph Lapp, the former head of the nuclear physics branch of the Office of Naval Research, captured this growing fear when he published The New Priesthood, in which he reiterated Eisenhower’s argument that the “scientific elite”—people who understood how science and technology work—were starting to supplant the country’s elected leadership. Lapp’s argument reflected an emerging and critically important idea: that “democracy faces its most severe test in preserving its traditions in an age of scientific revolution.”
Carpe Diem