The NASA Position

While NASA’s leaders were generally pleased with the course Johnson was recommending—they recognized and mostly agreed with the political reasons for adopting a determined lunar landing program—they wanted to shape it as much as possible to the agency’s particular priorities. NASA Administrator James Webb, well known as a skilled political operator who could seize an opportunity, organized a short-term effort to accelerate and expand a long-range NASA master plan for space exploration. A fundamental part of this effort addressed a legitimate concern that the scientific and technological advancements for which NASA had been created not be eclipsed by the political necessities of international rivalries. Webb conveyed the concern of the agency’s technical and scientific community to Jerome Wiesner on 2 May 1961, noting that “the most careful consideration must be given to the scientific and technological components of the total program and how to present the picture to the world and to our own nation of a program that has real value and validity and from which solid additions to knowledge can be made, even if every one of the specific so-called ‘spectacular’ flights or events are done after they have been accomplished by the Russians.” He asked that Wiesner help him “make sure that this component of solid, and yet imaginative, total scientific and technological value is built in.”²⁶

Partly in response to this concern, Johnson asked NASA to provide for him a set of specific recommendations on how a scientifically-viable Project Apollo, would be accomplished by the end of the decade. What emerged was a comprehensive space policy planning document that had the lunar landing as its centerpiece but that attached several ancillary funding items to enhance the program’s scientific value and advance space exploration on a broad front:

1. Spacecraft and boosters for the human flight to the Moon.
2. Scientific satellite probes to survey the Moon.
3. A nuclear rocket.
4. Satellites for global communications.
5. Satellites for weather observation.
6. Scientific projects for Apollo landings.

Johnson accepted these recommendations and passed them to Kennedy who approved the overall plan.²⁷

The last major area of concern was the timing for the Moon landing. The original NASA estimates had given a target date of 1967, but as the project became more crystallized agency leaders recommended not committing to such a strict deadline.²⁸ James Webb, realizing the problems associated with meeting target dates based on NASA’s experience in space flight, suggested that the president commit to a landing by the end of the decade, giving the agency another two years to solve any problems that might arise. The White House accepted this proposal.²⁹