The Kennedy Perspective on Space

In 1960 John F. Kennedy, a Senator from Massachusetts between 1953 and 1960, ran for president as the Democratic candidate, with party wheelhorse Lyndon B. Johnson as his running mate. Using the slogan, “Let’s get this country moving again,” Kennedy charged the Republican Eisenhower Administration with doing nothing about the myriad social, economic, and international problems that festered in the 1950s. He was especially hard on Eisenhower’s record in international relations, taking a Cold Warrior position on a supposed “missile gap” (which turned out not to be the case) wherein the United States lagged far behind the Soviet Union in ICBM technology. He also invoked the Cold War rhetoric opposing a communist effort to take over the world and used as his evidence the 1959 revolution in Cuba that brought leftist dictator Fidel Castro to power. The Republican candidate, Richard M. Nixon, who had been Eisenhower’s Vice President tried to defend his mentor’s record but when the results were in Kennedy was elected by a narrow margin of 118,550 out of more than 68 million popular votes cast.¹

Kennedy as president had little direct interest in the U.S. space program. He was not a visionary enraptured with the romantic image of the last American frontier in space and consumed by the adventure of exploring the unknown. He was, on the other hand, a Cold Warrior with a keen sense of Realpolitik in foreign affairs, and worked hard to maintain balance of power and spheres of influence in American/Soviet relations. The Soviet Union’s non-military accomplishments in space, therefore, forced Kennedy to respond and to serve notice that the U.S. was every bit as capable in the space arena as the Soviets. Of course, to prove this fact, Kennedy had to be willing to commit national resources to NASA and the civil space program. The Cold War realities of the time, therefore, served as the primary vehicle for an expansion of NASA’s activities and for the definition of Project Apollo as the premier civil space effort of the nation. Even more significant, from Kennedy’s perspective the Cold War necessitated the expansion of the military space program, especially the development of ICBMs and satellite reconnaissance systems.²

While Kennedy was preparing to take office, he appointed an ad hoc committee headed by Jerome B. Wiesner of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to offer suggestions for American efforts in space. Wiesner, who later headed the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) under Kennedy, concluded that the issue of “national prestige” was too great to allow the Soviet Union leadership in space efforts, and therefore the U.S. had to enter the field in a substantive way. “Space exploration and exploits,” he wrote in a 12 January 1961 report to the president-elect, “have captured the imagination of the peoples of the world. During the next few years the prestige of the United States will in part be determined by the leadership we demonstrate in space activities.” Wiesner also emphasized the importance of practical non-military applications of space technology—communications, mapping, and weather satellites among others—and the necessity of keeping up the effort to exploit space for national security through such technologies as ICBMs and reconnaissance satellites. He tended to deemphasize the human spaceflight initiative for very practical reasons. American launch vehicle technology, he argued, was not well developed and the potential of placing an astronaut in space before the Soviets was slim. He thought human spaceflight was a high-risk enterprise with a low-chance of success. Human spaceflight was also less likely to yield valuable scientific results than, and the U.S., Wiesner thought, should play to its strength in space science where important results had already been achieved.³

Kennedy only accepted part of what Wiesner recommended. He was committed to conducting a more vigorous space program than had been Eisenhower, but he was more interested in human spaceflight than either his predecessor or his science advisor. This was partly because of the drama surrounding Project Mercury and the seven astronauts that NASA was training.⁴ Wiesner had cautioned Kennedy about the hyperbole associated with human spaceflight. “Indeed, by having placed the highest national priority on the MERCURY program we have strengthened the popular belief that man in space is the most important aim for our non-military space effort,” Wiesner wrote. “The manner in which this program has been publicized in our press has further crystallized such belief.”⁵ Kennedy, nevertheless, recognized the tremendous public support arising from this program and wanted to ensure that it reflected favorably upon his administration.

But it was a risky enterprise—what if the Soviets were first to send a human into space? what if an astronaut was killed and Mercury was a failure?—and the political animal in Kennedy wanted to minimize those risks. The earliest Kennedy pronouncements relative to civil space activity directly addressed these hazards. He offered to cooperate with the Soviet Union, still the only other nation involved in launching satellites, in the exploration of space. In his inaugural address in January 1961 Kennedy spoke directly to Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and asked him to cooperate in exploring “the stars.”⁶ In his State of the Union address ten days later, he asked the Soviet Union “to join us in developing a weather prediction program, in a new communications satellite program, and in preparation for probing the distant planets of Mars and Venus, probes which may someday unlock the deepest secrets of the Universe.” Kennedy also publicly called for the peaceful use of space, and the limitation of war in that new environment.⁷

In making these overtures Kennedy accomplished several important political ends. First, he appeared to the world as the statesman by seeking friendly cooperation rather than destructive competition with the Soviet Union, knowing full well that there was little likelihood that Khrushchev would accept his offer. Conversely, the Soviets would appear to be monopolizing space for their own personal, and presumably military, benefit. Second, he minimized the goodwill that the Soviet Union enjoyed because of its own success in space vis-à-vis the U.S. Finally, if the Soviet Union accepted his call for cooperation, it would tacitly be recognizing the equality of the U.S. in space activities, something that would also look very good on the world stage.⁸