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John Hagen, the gentle astronomer who was heading the American space probe, Project Vanguard, puffed his pipe in his dingy corner of the Naval Research Laboratory and foresaw the coming competition. But his soul was geared to an earlier age, and his rocket remained rooted to its Cape Canaveral pad. Hagen's men were perfectionists; they were searching for data, not power. And that's where they erred. By then, politics was taking over. The Vanguard was hurried, and when its engine was finally ignited in December 1957, the slender missile lurched and exploded. John Hagen's kindly eyes wept with no tears. Senator Lyndon Johnson raged, "How long, how long, O God, how long will it take us to catch up with Russia's satellites?"
Out of the Army's Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville, Ala., came Wernher von Braun, 45, the exuberant Prussian who had fathered the German V-2 rockets. He had been among those who rushed into American hands when the Third Reich collapsed. Von Braun souped up his Redstone missile, put a tiny satellite dubbed Explorer on top and sent it into orbit. There was no turning back.
It was still no piece of cake. The Soviets orbited Yuri Gagarin, the first man in space, in April 1961, when a new young President was getting ready to prove what a tough guy he was at Cuba's Bay of Pigs. Adding insult to injury, the news began to trickle out when John Kennedy had just tossed the first baseball of the season in Griffith Stadium, and he was eating a good old American hot dog. In the perverse ways of a frontier, the discouraging news would goad Kennedy and the country to achievements beyond their dreams.
"If somebody can just tell me how to catch up," Kennedy complained one < night to his staff. "Let's find somebody--anybody, I don't care if it's the janitor, if he knows how." Kennedy fidgeted, ran his hand through his hair, grimaced at the news that it would take $40 billion and ten years to get a man on the moon--and then he might be greeted by a Soviet cosmonaut. But frontiers are not conquered by cost accountants. Kennedy left the meeting and went into the Oval Office. In a few minutes his aide Ted Sorensen came out and told a friend, "We are going to the moon." It was a goal that suddenly gave real meaning to Kennedy's slogan of a "New Frontier."
Kennedy's call brought out the dreamers, the tinkerers, the organizers, the suppliers. Lyndon Johnson never tired of telling the story of how Americans had found Teflon "for your old fryin' pan" on the way to the moon. But there was heavy counterpoint to this melody of invention. Nikita Khrushchev raged at Kennedy in Vienna in 1961. The Berlin Wall went up. The Soviets tested their huge hydrogen bomb, the one U.S. scientists had said they would not have for years.
The space race had become more than a poetic dream. It was now a military imperative. While the Soviets were pushing ahead with their missile program, American strategists had clung to the notion that manned bombers rather than rockets were the most suitable, and somehow the most romantic, way to fight wars in the Atomic Age. With alliances and airfields that ringed the globe, the U.S. had seen no reason to bring the nuclear race into space. Now it was necessary.