The race to the moon
Kendrick Oliver chronicles the Cold War rivalry that spawned Apollo 11
The moon landing is one of the crowning glories of American history but, for much of the preceding 25 years, it looked like the US might be eclipsed by its Soviet rivals. On the 50th anniversary of this iconic moment, Kendrick Oliver tells the story of the race to the moon, from the hunt for Nazi )GTOCP[oU TQEMGV OGP VQ 5CVWTP 8oU GT[ NCWPEJ
America holds its breath
It was the evening of 15 July 1969, and the acclaimed novelist Norman Mailer was driving along US Highway 1, in Brevard County, Florida, surveying the gathering of Americans – “an encampment of every variety of camper” – on the shoreline across from Merritt Island, site of the Kennedy Space Center. They were there in their many thousands to witness the launch, the following morning, of Apollo 11, the spacecraft that would deliver the first humans to the surface of the moon and then return them to Earth.
Mailer contemplated the diverse hopes and fears drawing these people to the scene: pride in their country, certainly; concern for the safety of the astronauts, yes. But was there something else, some fascinated projection of the Faustian bargain that all Americans – space pioneers and ordinary folks alike –had made with technology, some apprehension that a new machine age was now carrying everyone on a common path to a bleak and dangerous destination? As Mailer put it: “Had we been getting ready to go to the moon out of some deep instinct that already we had killed the nerve which gave life to the Earth?”
Mailer thought back to the event he had just left, a private banquet attended by Wernher von Braun, who had led development of the Saturn V rocket that would lift the considerable weight of Apollo 11 into orbit. At the banquet, von Braun had presented a visionary perspective of the mission – “We are expanding the mind of man” – but a ripple of embarrassment had preceded his remarks, when the banquet host made passing reference to the fact that von Braun had begun his rocketry career in service to the Third Reich. Americans often discussed the enterprise of landing a man on the moon in moral, idealistic terms – “we came in peace for all mankind” – but there was not much about the space age that genuinely transcended partisan politics and earthly ambition. The long countdown to the launch of Apollo 11 was punctuated by conflict and competition, both between nations and within national space establishments…
T-MINUS 26 YEARS, 9 MONTHS, 13 DAYS The spaceship is born
“Do you realise what we accomplished today? This afternoon the spaceship was born!” On 3 October 1942, an A-4 missile left its test stand at the joint Luftwaffe-army rocket centre at Peenemünde, on the Baltic island of Usedom, rose up into the thermosphere to a height of 56 miles, and then arced back into the Baltic Sea 118 miles away. Colonel Walter Dornberger, head of the German army’s rocket programme, was elated, but he told Wernher von Braun, who directed the group responsible for the development of the A-4, that their work was just beginning.
The army would now expect the A-4 to move rapidly into production, a formidable task given the still experimental nature of the rocket and the complexity of its design. Soon, reverses in the German war effort would intensify the pressures upon von Braun. By the end of 1943, the SS was using slave labourers from concentration camps in order to speed up assembly of the A-4s, as von Braun undoubtedly knew. Thousands died from overwork, starvation and disease.
The A-4, now renamed the V2, was first fired in anger on 8 September
1944. One of its targets was Paris, liberated two weeks before. With the Allies already advancing on Germany from east and west, the
V2 (though it killed hundreds of people in London and Antwerp) made little difference to the outcome of the war.
T-MINUS 24 YEARS, 2 MONTHS, 14 DAYS The Allies harvest German rocket men
The Allies had crossed the Rhine, the Red Army was in Berlin, and Hitler was dead. The V2 programme had disintegrated. On 2 May 1945, von Braun, recovering from a car accident at a hotel on the German-Austrian border, decided – together with other members of his team – to surrender himself to a US Army intelligence unit headquartered nearby. Interrogations over the next few weeks revealed to the Americans the value of the expertise possessed by the V2 engineers. US Ordnance forces raced to collect V2 rockets and components, and documents from the programme, before major installations were handed over to the Red Army under the Yalta agreement.
The Soviets were intent on a similar harvest, an effort that continued into early 1946 (about 150 German rocketeers were taken to the USSR late that year). In March 1946, the Soviets established a programme to reproduce V2 rockets for flight testing, under the leadership of Sergei Korolev (pictured below). By that time, von Braun and around 100 other German rocketeers were in the United States, at a secret facility in Fort Bliss, Texas, seeking to do the same thing.
T-MINUS 13 YEARS, 11 MONTHS, 17 DAYS The Americans enter the race to launch a satellite
As young men, both Korolev and von Braun had been enthused by the possibility of using rockets for space travel, but their professional lives had been dedicated to weapons development. In 1950, amid increased concern about American military readiness following a successful Soviet atom bomb test, the US army established an Ordnance Guided Missile Center at Huntsville, Alabama, with von Braun installed as project director. Over the next four years, von Braun’s group would produce a more advanced version of the V2 in the form of the Redstone short-range ballistic missile and begin work on the intermediate-range Jupiter missile.
Korolev had also been extrapolating the design of the V2, developing the nuclear-armed R-5 missile and initiating a programme to build a ballistic missile – the R-7 – that could reach the United States. But on 29 July 1955, the US government announced an intention to launch a scientific satellite during the International Geophysical Year (an international scientific project that ran from July 1957 to the end of 1958). The Soviets swiftly announced that they would also do so, with Korolev managing to convince the Kremlin that he could adapt the R-7 for this purpose without compromising its development as a weapon. In contrast, von Braun, much to his chagrin, was cut out of the US satellite programme, with the Pentagon instead lending its support to the navy’s Vanguard launcher.
In October 1942, a German A-4 missile rose to a height of 56 miles and arced back into the Baltic Sea
T-MINUS 11 YEARS, 9 MONTHS, 12 DAYS Sputnik spurs the US into action
Before 4 October 1957, everything that had been fired into space had swiftly fallen back to Earth or burned up upon re-entry. The Soviet launch of Sputnik (pictured right), an orbiting satellite atop Korolev’s R-7, augured a new age. Possibilities long confined to works of science fiction seemed close to realisation. It was not hard to imagine that the rocket technology that had lifted a metal beach ball into orbit might soon be capable of carrying a man there too; it might also lift a space-based surveillance instrument, and components for a weapon or a permanent space station; it might even throw a probe beyond Earth’s gravitational well to the moon or another planet.
But for Americans, much of the excitement that followed Sputnik’s launch was edged with concern. How had the Soviet Union, a nation using crude command economics to will itself from backwardness into modernity, made it into orbit first? In December, an attempt to deliver an American satellite into space, by means of the Vanguard rocket, was a spectacular failure: Vanguard blew up on the launchpad, live on national television.
There seemed a danger that audiences in the rapidly decolonising ‘Third World’ might read Sputnik as evidence that a communist-style system offered the quickest route to modernisation. It was in the context of such apprehensions that von Braun and the army finally received permission to try to launch a satellite, Explorer 1, using a version of the Redstone rocket. The launch, on 31 January 1958, was successful. The United States had entered the space age.
T-MINUS 10 YEARS, 11 MONTHS, 17 DAYS Nasa enters the fray
Until 1958, America’s activities in space were dominated by its military. Many of the launches that took place during the late 1950s were carried out under the aegis of the Pentagon for classified military and intelligence purposes. As far as most Americans working on US rocket and satellite development were concerned, that would continue to be the case in the 1960s.
But as the 1950s drew to a close, there was a change of direction. The desire to draw a distinction between the American and Soviet approaches to space led President Eisenhower to establish a civilian agency. That agency – the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (better known as Nasa) was given responsibility for the “expansion of human knowledge of the phenomena in the atmosphere and space” and the development of non-military vehicles “capable of carrying instruments, equipment, supplies and living organisms through space”.
Nasa came into existence on 29 July 1958. By the end of 1959, von Braun had transferred his Huntsville operation to the new agency, lured by Nasa’s interest in his plans for a next generation heavy-lift booster, and the Pentagon’s decision to place all military rocket programmes under the control of the air force.
Both the USSR and United States had by then committed to launching a man into space; they had also both attempted to send probes to the moon. But the project of a manned lunar landing still seemed too costly and ambitious for either government to adopt it officially, even as a long-term objective.
Might audiences in the ‘Third World’ read Sputnik as evidence that a EQOOWPKUV UV[NG U[UVGO QʘGTGF VJG quickest route to modernisation?
T-MINUS 8 YEARS, 1 MONTH, 21 DAYS Kennedy promises the moon
“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the Earth.” It was 25 May 1961, and John F Kennedy was delivering a special address to the US Congress on “urgent national needs”.
April had been a cruel month for the new US president. Korolev had scored another space spectacular, as Vostok 1, atop a rocket derived from the R-7 missile, carried Yuri Gagarin into orbit and into the pantheon of Soviet heroes. The mission was, according to the Washington Post, “a psychological victory of the first magnitude for the Soviet Union”. Soon after, a US-trained force of Cuban exiles had landed at the Bay of Pigs in an attempt to overthrow the regime of Fidel Castro and been defeated within three days.
Kennedy had until then been ambivalent about the plans that Nasa had developed for a manned mission to the moon; now, however, he began to see the adoption of this goal as a means of demonstrating his personal capacity for vigorous leadership, giving the space programme new momentum and, should the effort be successful, proving to a worldwide audience the superiority of the American capitalist system.
The Soviets had not yet invested any major resources into a lunar landing project of their own, so there seemed a reasonable chance of American success. When, in early May, Alan Shepard returned safely to Earth following a sub-orbital flight aboard Freedom 7, the last lingering reservations faded. Kennedy was ready to ask Congress, in his special address, to fund the work needed to accomplish the lunar mission, to be termed ‘Project Apollo’. Congress, sharing the president’s view that pre-eminence in space was key to the effective prosecution of the Cold War, was happy to say “yes”.
T-MINUS 7 YEARS, 5 DAYS Nasa reveals how it will get to the moon (and back)
What had not been fully worked out, at the time of Kennedy’s announcement, was how to actually accomplish the task of a manned lunar landing. Over the following months, Nasa officials assumed that two or more of von Braun’s large Saturn boosters would be required to haul the entire Apollo spacecraft system with its three-man crew into orbit, along with sufficient fuel to send it on to the moon, lift it back up off the lunar surface and return it to Earth.
But then there was a change of tack. On 11 July 1962, Nasa announced that it had opted for a different method: in lunar orbit, a lightweight lander containing a two-man crew would detach from the main command module and travel down to the surface; landing accomplished, it would then ascend to ‘rendezvous’ with the command module, which would carry the whole crew home.
The use of a separate lunar module involved certain risks – if rendezvous failed, the two astronauts inside would be stranded, drifting around the moon. But it also offered such substantial fuel savings that the complete Apollo apparatus could be launched atop a single Saturn V. The adoption of the lunar-orbit rendezvous method afforded Apollo’s engineers an early conceptual focus that their Soviet counterparts lacked. It was only in 1964 that the Kremlin approved the objective of a manned lunar programme; what’s more, the limited budget it allocated to the programme was divided between Korolev, who was developing a new, large N1 booster to facilitate landing missions to the moon and Mars, and his rival, Vladimir Chelomey, who had proposed an alternative circumlunar voyage using a converted intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM).
T-MINUS 2 YEARS, 5 MONTHS, 19 DAYS Death stalks the space race
By the end of 1966, America had leapfrogged the USSR to take a clear lead in the race to the moon. Nasa had just successfully completed a series of 10 two-man missions – the Gemini programme – using a Titan ICBM, which had offered its astronauts vital experience of long-duration spaceflight, rendezvous and excursions outside the spacecraft.
Unmanned launches of von Braun’s Saturn rockets had generally gone well. The first crewed Apollo mission, intended to test the command module in Earth orbit, was scheduled for February 1967. But on 27 January, a fire broke out within the module during a systems test, with the crew sealed inside. All three astronauts died. The Apollo programme was placed on hold. The investigation into the fire prompted a redesign of the command module, while Nasa managers sought to refocus the attention of their own staff and the agency’s contractors on quality control and safety over the drive – at all costs – to beat the Soviets to the moon.
Meanwhile, the Soviet lunar programme itself continued to stutter. In January 1966, during a hospital operation, Korolev suffered a haemorrhage and died. In April 1967, a mission to test the Soyuz command module, a core component of Soviet plans for the moon landing and other space projects, ended in tragedy when the module’s descent parachute failed to open upon re-entry. The module crashed into the ground, killing the cosmonaut inside.
T-MINUS 6 MONTHS, 22 DAYS *WOCPKV[ IGVU KVU TUV XKGY of Earth
“We are now approaching lunar sunrise, and for all the people back on Earth, the crew of Apollo 8 has a message that we would like to send to you.” It was Christmas Eve 1968, and an Apollo command module was in orbit around the moon. The manned Apollo programme had resumed two months previously, when the crew of Apollo 7 fully flight-tested the command module by circling the Earth 163 times.
Apollo 8, however, represented an achievement of a different order: its astronauts were the first to be launched atop the Saturn V and the first to voyage to the vicinity of the moon. While there, they captured an iconic image of the Earth rising above the lunar surface and delivered a live broadcast to a huge radio and television audience, concluding with a reading of the Bible’s account of the creation of the cosmos.
Although the complete Apollo system, including the lunar module, would not be certified for a landing mission until after the flights of Apollo 9 (in March) and Apollo 10 (in May), Apollo 8 signalled to the world that Nasa was back on track to meet the deadline set by President Kennedy back in 1961.
Conscious that their own N1 booster had yet to be launched successfully, Soviet spokesmen started to downplay the significance of the lunar landing goal. After Apollo 8, it was evident that, barring some major new disaster in the American programme, the Americans would beat their Soviet rivals to the moon.
T-MINUS 8.9 SECONDS Saturn V’s engines begin to accelerate to full thrust
Norman Mailer was watching from the Kennedy Space Center Press Site three-anda-half miles away as von Braun’s Saturn V engines ignited and began to accelerate to full thrust. A few seconds later, the hold-down arms retracted and the massive rocket, the Apollo 11 spacecraft at its head, lifted slowly from the launchpad. The noise from its engines only reached the press site six seconds after launch. “Therefore,” Mailer wrote, “the lift-off itself seemed to partake more of a miracle than a mechanical phenomenon, as if all of huge Saturn itself had begun silently to levitate and was then pursued by flames.”
Afterwards, Mailer did not know how he felt. The men who had made Apollo did not share his politics and belonged to a conformist culture that he habitually disdained, but the launch they had conjured had nevertheless been a wondrous thing. “A ship of flames was on its way to the moon.” Kendrick Oliver is professor of American history at the University of Southampton. His books include To Touch the Face of God: The Sacred, the Profane and the American Space Program, 1957–75 (John Hopkins, 2013) WATCH & LISTEN
From the real story of the Apollo 11 mission to a stargazing special starring Brian Cox and Dara Ó Briain, the BBC is marking the 50th anniversary of the moon landings across TV, radio and its online platforms. For more information, check listings guides
•• To read our feature about the other issues making headlines across the world in July 1969, turn the page
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