_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [39]
But what confounded those in the know was a single question: Why?
NASA had everything it needed to monitor astronaut flight at Cape Canaveral. Mercury Control had worked perfectly for six manned missions, and besides, the agency had just purchased 88,000 acres next door on Merritt Island. The huge real-estate grab was more than enough land for NASA’s Apollo launch pads and moonport—a moonport with administrative and training buildings, big rocket hangars, and the mammoth Vehicle Assembly Building, or VAB. In this, the great Saturn V moon rockets would be assembled.
This was enough acreage, along with the waters of the Atlantic, to safely buffer the public from any rocket catastrophe, and if NASA needed more facilities, there was enough land left over for a second Pentagon and a medium-size city. And best of all, it was all linked to the nation’s Atlantic Missile Range—a multi-billion-dollar, five-thousand-mile string of natural tracking islands that would not have to be duplicated with more waste of taxpayer dollars.
It was said that after President Kennedy announced Project Apollo, all NASA had to do was grab buckets and head for Capitol Hill. There the buckets would be filled to overflowing with greenbacks. So despite more money than every sailor in the navy could spend on a Saturday-night bender, the question was still asked: Why in the world does NASA need to go elsewhere and build something twice?
The answer? The agency didn’t.
Everything they were proposing to build in Texas was already under construction at the new Merritt Island Moonport. Even if politicians built ten more Mission Controls, the same facility and flight-monitoring hardware had to be up and running at the launch site for the spacecraft and rockets to fly.
So, again, why was NASA going to Texas?
Because Lyndon Johnson had promised his Lone Star state the lion’s share of the Earth to the Moon Project, and when it came to gobbling up pork, Johnson had no equal. He had the glad hand and the political clout to make it happen.
Seven hundred engineers and their families loaded their cars and trucks for the long trip, and NBC thought I should tag along. When we arrived on the flat Texas wastelands, no one could believe this deserted, unproductive place would be the epicenter of the country’s effort to send astronauts to the moon.
There not only was a Mission Control and a Manned Spacecraft Center to be built, but homes, shopping centers, hotels, hospitals, everything had to be constructed—a community had to be raised from piss-poor pasture land where only a few underfed cows grazed. When I said this in my NBC reports, Johnson’s friends grinned and said, “Don’t y’all worry about that. We’ll build all that stuff for you and at a fair price.”
While workmen in Texas were trying to make silk out of a pig’s ear, NASA was pleased its image had been boosted by stretching the last Mercury flight to its limit. Gordon Cooper had ridden around the planet for more than thirty-four hours. But no amount of praise for Cooper’s great performance could persuade the public that America was catching up. The numbers spoke for themselves. While NASA was busy building, the Russians were slinging their hammers in space.
On June 14, 1963, four weeks after Cooper emerged from his dead-stick reentry, Vostok V, with cosmonaut Valery F. Bykovsky, headed for Earth orbit, where he would stay only minutes shy of five days, a staggering amount of time.
But even Bykovsky’s flight was pushed off the headlines. Two days into his marathon mission, Vostok VI—Sea Gull—was launched. Bykovsky watched from orbit as the first woman cosmonaut roared away from the Baikonur launch pad. Her name