Gearing Up for Project Apollo

The first challenge NASA leaders faced in meeting the presidential mandate was securing funding. While Congress enthusiastically appropriated funding for Apollo immediately after the president’s announcement, NASA Administrator James E. Webb was rightly concerned that the momentary sense of crisis would subside and that the political consensus present for Apollo in 1961 would abate. He tried, albeit without much success, to lock the presidency and the Congress into a long-term obligation to support the program. While they had made an intellectual commitment, NASA’s leadership was concerned that they might renege on the economic part of the bargain at some future date.³³

Initial NASA estimates of the costs of Project Apollo were about $20 billion through the end of the decade, a figure approaching $150 billion in 1992 dollars when accounting for inflation. Webb quickly stretched those initial estimates for Apollo as far as possible, with the intent that even if NASA did not receive its full budget requests, as it did not during the latter half of the decade, it would still be able to complete Apollo. At one point in 1963, for instance, Webb came forward with a NASA funding projection through 1970 for more than $35 billion. As it turned out Webb was able to sustain the momentum of Apollo through the decade, largely because of his rapport with key members of Congress and with Lyndon B. Johnson, who became president in November 1963.³⁴

Project Apollo, backed by sufficient funding, was the tangible result of an early national commitment in response to a perceived threat to the United States by the Soviet Union. NASA leaders recognized that while the size of the task was enormous, it was still technologically and financially within their grasp, but they had to move forward quickly. Accordingly, the space agency’s annual budget increased from $500 million in 1960 to a high point of $5.2 billion in 1965.³⁵ The NASA funding level represented 5.3 percent of the federal budget in 1965. A comparable percentage of the $1.23 trillion Federal budget in 1992 would have equaled more than $65 billion for NASA, whereas the agency’s actual budget then stood at less than $15 billion.

Out of the budgets appropriated for NASA each year approximately 50 percent went directly for human spaceflight, and the vast majority of that went directly toward Apollo. Between 1959 and 1973 NASA spent $23.6 billion on human spaceflight, exclusive of infrastructure and support, of which nearly $20 billion was for Apollo.³⁶ In addition, Webb sought to expand the definition of Project Apollo beyond just the mission of landing humans on the Moon. As a result even those projects not officially funded under the Apollo line item could be justified as supporting the mission, such as the Ranger, Lunar Orbiter, and Surveyor satellite probes.

For seven years after Kennedy’s Apollo decision, through October 1968, James Webb politicked, coaxed, cajoled, and maneuvered for NASA in Washington. A longtime Washington insider- -the former director of the Bureau of the Budget and Undersecretary of State during the Truman Administration—he was a master at bureaucratic politics, understanding that it was essentially a system of mutual give and take. For instance, while the native North Carolinian may also have genuinely believed in the Johnson Administration’s Civil Rights bill that went before Congress in 1964, as a personal favor to the President he lobbied for its passage on Capitol Hill. This secured for him Johnson’s gratitude, which he then use to secure the administration’s backing of NASA’s initiatives. In addition, Webb wielded the money appropriated for Apollo to build up a constituency for NASA that was both powerful and vocal. This type of gritty pragmatism also characterized Webb’s dealings with other government officials and members of Congress throughout his tenure as administrator. When give and take did not work, as was the case on occasion with some members of Congress, Webb used the presidential directive as a hammer to get his way. Usually this proved successful. After Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, moreover, he sometimes appealed for continued political support for Apollo because it represented a fitting tribute to the fallen leader. In the end, through a variety of methods Administrator Webb built a seamless web of political liaisons that brought continued support for and resources to accomplish the Apollo Moon landing on the schedule Kennedy had announced.³⁷

Funding was not the only critical component for Project Apollo. To realize the goal of Apollo under the strict time constraints mandated by the president, personnel had to be mobilized. This took two forms. First, by 1966 the agency’s civil service rolls had grown to 36,000 people from the 10,000 employed at NASA in 1960. Additionally, NASA’s leaders made an early decision that they would have to rely upon outside researchers and technicians to complete Apollo, and contractor employees working on the program increased by a factor of 10, from 36,500 in 1960 to 376,700 in 1965. Private industry, research institutions, and universities, therefore, provided the majority of personnel working on Apollo.³⁸

To incorporate the great amount of work undertaken for the project into the formal bureaucracy never seemed a particularly savvy idea, and as a result during the 1960s somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of NASA’s overall budget went for contracts to purchase goods and services from others. Although the magnitude of the endeavor had been much smaller than with Apollo, this reliance on the private sector and universities for the bulk of the effort originated early in NASA’s history under T. Keith Glennan, in part because of the Eisenhower Administration’s mistrust of large government establishments. Although neither Glennan’s successor, nor Kennedy shared that mistrust, they found that it was both good politics and the best way of getting Apollo done on the presidentially-approved schedule. It was also very nearly the only way to harness talent and institutional resources already in existence in the emerging aerospace industry and the country’s leading research universities.³⁹

In addition to these other resources, NASA moved quickly during the early 1960s to expand its physical capacity so that it could accomplish Apollo. In 1960 the space agency consisted of a small headquarters in Washington, its three inherited NACA research centers, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Goddard Space Flight Center, and the Marshall Space Flight Center. With the advent of Apollo, these installations grew rapidly. In addition, NASA added three new facilities specifically to meet the demands of the lunar landing program. In 1962 it created the Manned Spacecraft Center (renamed the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in 1973), near Houston, Texas, to design the Apollo spacecraft and the launch platform for the lunar lander. This center also became the home of NASA’s astronauts and the site of mission control. NASA then greatly expanded for Apollo the Launch Operations Center at Cape Canaveral on Florida’s eastern seacoast. Renamed the John F. Kennedy Space Center on 29 November 1963, this installation’s massive and expensive Launch Complex 34 was the site of all Apollo firings. Additionally, the spaceport’s Vehicle Assemble Building was a huge and expensive 36-story structure where the Saturn/Apollo rockets were assembled. Finally, to support the development of the Saturn launch vehicle, in October 1961 NASA created on a deep south bayou the Mississippi Test Facility, renamed the John C. Stennis Space Center in 1988. The cost of this expansion was great, more than 2.2 billion over the decade, with 90 percent of it expended before 1966.⁴⁰