Author Topic: Mission Moon - Part 6 - All about winning - NASA’s Apollo project aimed high  (Read 718 times)

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Houston Chronicle By Mike Tolson 5/16/2019

One in an occasional series

On a rainy, late November day in 1962, President John F. Kennedy popped into the Cabinet Room at the White House for a brief meeting with officials of his space agency. A suggestion had been made to ask Congress for another big chunk of money, with hopes that it might speed up NASA's grand new mission.

Kennedy was all for it. Supplemental budget requests often were viewed skeptically, but if it meant reaching the goal a few months earlier, why not? Time was of the essence.

"The only justification for it," Kennedy acknowledged, "is because we hope to beat them."

Beating the Russian Bear was everything, the gist of a billion-dollar program that was starting to get more and more publicity — as well as its share of critics. For all the lofty rhetoric Kennedy had employed to sell America on his "new" Apollo program and its heightened urgency, the truth was that it was less about space than image. The only way to prove to people that the United States was pre-eminent in exploration despite the obvious successes of the Soviet Union was to put an American on the moon first, he said.

Others at the meeting, including new NASA Administrator James Webb, were wary of a shorter timetable and unwilling to concede that being first to the moon was all that mattered. A wide swath of scientists, some of them colleagues, were actively opposed to spending so much just so a human could plant a flag.

Kennedy was adamant. The old Apollo program — a gradual lunar follow-up to the Mercury missions that was commissioned in President Dwight Eisenhower's waning months — was dead. There was no chance of resurrection. Without the moon program, NASA meant little to him.

"The Soviet Union has made this a test of the system," he said. "So that's why we're doing it. Everything we do ought to really be tied to getting onto the moon ahead of the Russians."

And so it was, and so we did.

More: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/local/space/mission-moon/article/All-about-winning-NASA-s-Apollo-project-aimed-13828720.php


About the series

Nearly 50 years have passed since Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin became the first humans to walk on the moon. The July 20, 1969, moon landing changed the world and forever changed Houston. Our "Mission Moon" project will explore how the country came together to fulfill President John F. Kennedy's goal of reaching the lunar surface by 1970, NASA's bold missions – and crippling tragedies – since that historic day, the future of space exploration and the fate of Houston as America's "Space City."

Read our entire series here: https://www.houstonchronicle.com/news/space/mission-moon/