50 years later, Apollo 11 remains an inspiration

The moon landing was so far from a sure thing as to seem improbably quixotic. Historian Douglas Brinkley tells the story of the politics, the money, the personalities and the engineering in “American Moonshot: John F. Kennedy and the Great Space Race.”

One of the biggest takeaways from this book is that the moon landing was not inevitable.

Neil Armstrong said they had about a 50/50 chance of having a successful mission. The risk of it was just unbelievably high.

The origins had to do with some of the technology of World War II, the idea of rocketry, of offensive weapons that were born in Germany.

That’s exactly right. The U.S. Army brought into America, after World War II, 137 of the top German rocket engineers — top among them Wernher von Braun. And it’s Von Braun, a former SS officer for Adolf Hitler, who creates the Saturn 5 rocket that brought Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon.

How did President Eisenhower’s and President Kennedy’s differing points of view about the state of the world after the war change the nature of what was then an incipient space program?

President Eisenhower, having been the supreme Allied commander ... knew firsthand about the Holocaust and the concentration camps. To build Hitler’s rockets ... they used Jewish slave camp labor. And so Eisenhower never cottoned to the idea of greenlighting Von Braun’s big projects.

John F. Kennedy … thought Von Braun was just a German working for Germany, as Kennedy [as a Navy officer during the war] was an American working for America. Kennedy liked the cut of his jib and his cando attitude.

One of the triumphs of the space program that may not have been obvious at the time was that it was taken away from … the military and became a civilian undertaking.

Eisenhower deserves a lot of credit for that. He had warned in his farewell address to the nation about an industrial-military complex. Kennedy was very proud of the industrial-military complex. He thought it’s a great thing that Fortune 500 companies get contracts and subcontracts with the U.S. government to pioneer in space exploration, because it would be good for national security, it would be good for the American spirit and morale. Kennedy believed the world was watching this contest between the Soviets and the U.S., and if we could win that, it would convince the world that democratic capitalism was superior to totalitarianism of the communist stripe.

So the message that was left on the moon, “We came in peace for all mankind,” was something that the nature of the program itself could back up.

In [a] packet [left behind by Armstrong and Aldrin] are medals that commemorate Soviet cosmonauts who died in their space program, meaning we weren’t trying to gloat that we won the moon. We were there on the moon honoring even our adversaries, because we were pulling together in the realm of space.

You grew up in the age of space. And now you’ve spent three years working on this book. What for you is the most moving moment in this whole grand story?

The heroism of people like Neil Armstrong and John Glenn. And they hold up under scrutiny. To put yourself in a tin can and be shot up into space with 50/50 chances of survival — there really is a kind of raw courage that holds true.

But the other thing that I realized is … we [didn’t] go to the moon because of astronauts or even Kennedy. We have this engineer infrastructure, and it was [about] 400,000 people that brought us to the moon.

There’s a lot of public happiness that America used to be able to do incredible things and work together. And now we’re in such a stark partisan divide in this country that I think the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11 reminds us we do better in the U.S. when we collaborate, when we negotiate instead of dividing into enemy camps.

We’ve all been looking at the moon forever. It controls our tides and our calendar. Poets and philosophers talk about it. And starting in 1969, we visited there, we left Earth and went to another celestial body. And it may have been the defining moment of an entire generation, the moonshot generation.