“…I’m not that interested in space.”

Shocking though it may seem, these words were uttered by President John F. Kennedy at a November 1962 meeting with NASA Administrator James Webb and other staff members.

As we lay the foundation for how the Space Program arrived at its present state, it is important to delve deeper into its origins. You will find that although the truth of the matter is often readily available, it gets hidden by the truncation of information.

It also gets hidden because the truth sometimes takes away from legend, and in this case, the legend of John F. Kennedy as the champion of space, and the visionary behind the Space Program.

As much as I admire President Kennedy, I feel that we have been allowed to vault certain statements he made in a couple of speeches to disproportionate levels. The statements we are most familiar with are these:

1. Announcement of the plan to land a man on the moon by 1970
2. Explaining why we choose to go to the moon

Now, we have seen and heard these clips for decades, and from the public's standpoint, this had become all that is necessary to know about JFK's motivations for the Space Program. Alas, by whittling the context down to these two sound bites, a great deal of information is lost. Information that explains the status of the space program then, as well as now.

Let's start with the expansion of the first clip to its full form -- the Address to a Special Joint Assembly of the Congress on May 25, 1961.

Kennedy had many more issues on the plate besides the Space Program, and yet the Space Program was overtly shown to be integral to the overall strategy of winning the Cold War with the Soviet Union, and to a lesser degree, China. Only after describing many other spending proposals, including an increase in propaganda in places like Central and South America, does he arrive at the ninth segment of the speech, entitled "Space".

To view the speech in its entirity is to unveil a more complete picture of the concerns of the time, and to place the Space Program into a context in which it started, and has never left. It has been, and always will be, a vehicle for national preëminence.

Here is the paragraph which sets forth the new lunar objective:

First, 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. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space; and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish. We propose to accelerate the development of the appropriate lunar space craft. We propose to develop alternate liquid and solid fuel boosters, much larger than any now being developed, until certain which is superior. We propose additional funds for other engine development and for unmanned explorations—explorations which are particularly important for one purpose which this nation will never overlook: the survival of the man who first makes this daring flight. But in a very real sense, it will not be one man going to the moon—if we make this judgment affirmatively, it will be an entire nation. For all of us must work to put him there.

Immediately following the declaration of the goal of a manned lunar landing, he proceeds with this startling proposal:

Secondly, an additional 23 million dollars, together with 7 million dollars already available, will accelerate development of the Rover nuclear rocket. This gives promise of some day providing a means for even more exciting and ambitious exploration of space, perhaps beyond the moon, perhaps to the very end of the solar system itself.

Those of us who have often pondered the possibility of travelling through the solar system at 3 times the speed of today's rockets lament the lack of progress in the area of space propulsion. How different would our capability be if we had such propulsion -- for the last 4 decades?

Now, to the Rice University speech of the fall of 1962. You can watch the entire speech here. We are accustomed to seeing a very small piece of this speech, which begins with tumultuous applause and rousing shouts, as Kennedy begins, "We choose to go to the moon...."

If you watch the entire speech, you will note that the familiar applause is a result of a joke Kennedy made ending a series of questions on why man does what he does ("Why does Rice play Texas?"), so it is lost on those who are only familiar with the short version that the applause is not for the statement that "we choose to go to the moon".

That being said, that day at Rice University, the full energy of the emergent Space Program was in view. Only 19 months since the announcement of the lunar landing goal, we have Kennedy at the podium, Vice President Lyndon Johnson sitting behind him, and a host of spectators in the football stadium. The heat has many of them wiping their faces - repeatedly - during the course of the President's talk. But the speech is rich with the enthusiasm we often hear attributed to Kennedy regarding the Space Program.

Please listen to the whole thing, especially if you have doubts as to the public zest for space in the early 1960's.

In private, the attitude was muted considerably. Let's turn now to the closed meeting mentioned at the beginning of this post. As a manager at an aerospace firm, I recognize the need for hard discussions about budget, and justficiation for expenditures. And this is exactly what we are listening to here and here, as James Webb and JFK converse about a request for an additional $400 million to mitigate a potential slip in Apollo's schedule.

But this is where the real motives behind Project Apollo are laid bare. While they were always out in the open (for those who heard all the words in the speeches above), in this audio recording (the button was pushed by Kennedy himself), we have no doubt that the only reason Apollo existed was to beat the Soviet Union in a "test of the system".

And here it is, on the 17th page of the transcript:

President Kennedy: Everything that we do ought to really be tied into getting onto the Moon ahead of the Russians.

James Webb: Why can’t it be tied to preeminence in space, which are your own....

President Kennedy: Because, by God, we keep, we’ve been telling everybody we’re preeminent in space for five years and nobody believes it because they have the booster and the satellite. We know all about the number of satellites we put up, two or three times the number of the Soviet Union...we’re ahead scientifically. It’s like that instrument you got up at Stanford which is costing us a hundred and twenty-five million dollars and everybody tells me that we’re the number one in the world. And what is it? I can’t think what it is.

Interruption from multiple unknown speakers: The linear accelerator.

President Kennedy: I’m sorry, that’s wonderful, but nobody knows anything about it!

James Webb: Let me say it slightly different. The advanced Saturn is eighty-five times as powerful as the Atlas. Now we are building a tremendous giant rocket with an index number of eighty-five if you give me Atlas one. Now, the Russians have had a booster that’ll lift fourteen thousand pounds into orbit. They’ve been very efficient and capable in it. The kinds of things I’m talking about that give you preeminence in space are what permits you to make either that Russian booster or the advanced Saturn better than any other. A range of progress possible it is so much different [unknown].

President Kennedy: The only.... We’re not going to settle the four hundred million this morning. I want to take a look closely at what Dave Bell.... But I do think we ought get it, you know, really clear that the policy ought to be that this is the top-priority program of the Agency, and one of the two things, except for defense, the top priority of the United States government. I think that that is the position we ought to take. Now, this may not change anything about that schedule, but at least we ought to be clear, otherwise we shouldn’t be spending this kind of money because I’m not that interested in space. I think it’s good; I think we ought to know about it; we’re ready to spend reasonable amounts of money. But we’re talking about these fantastic expenditures which wreck our budget and all these other domestic programs and the only justification for it, in my opinion, to do it in this time or fashion, is because we hope to beat them and demonstrate that starting behind, as we did by a couple years, by God, we passed them.

I pass by the Stanford Linear Accelerator every few weeks if I'm driving down I-280. I wonder how many people today know anything about it....