Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [69]
Three days later Kennedy suffered another, more serious defeat. A 1,300-strong force of exiled Cubans, supported by the CIA, landed at the ‘Bay of Pigs’ in Cuba, with the intention of destroying Fidel Castro’s communist regime. Kennedy had personally approved the scheme, but Castro’s troops learned of the operation well ahead of time and were waiting on the beaches. The raid was a total disaster, because the CIA failed to deliver the promised support. Contrary to all expectations, the ‘subjugated’ population of Cuba showed absolutely no desire to participate in Castro’s overthrow. To the CIA’s lasting embarrassment, no attempt was made to rescue the invaders.
The Kennedy administration seemed to be faltering in its first 100 days, the traditional ‘honeymoon’ period during which a new president is supposed to shake things up and make his mark. Kennedy immediately turned to space as a means of reviving his credibility. In a pivotal memo of April 20, he asked Vice-President Lyndon Johnson to prepare a thorough survey of America’s rocket effort:2
1. Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the moon, or by a rocket to land on the moon, or by a rocket to go to the moon and back with a man? Is there any other space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win?
2. How much additional would it cost?
3. Are we working 24 hours a day on existing programs, and if not, why not? If not, will you make recommendations to me as to how work can be speeded up.
4. In building large boosters should we put our emphasis on nuclear, chemical or liquid fuel, or a combination of these three?
5. Are we making maximum effort? Are we achieving necessary results?
This single-page document can be read either as one of the most sensational directives of the twentieth century or as a hastily dictated panic response to a bad week at the White House, but without doubt it laid the foundations for the largest technological endeavour since the wartime ‘Manhattan’ development of the atomic bomb: the Apollo lunar landing project.
NASA’s chief administrator James Webb certainly believed that the Soviets could beat America at the short-term goals outlined in Kennedy’s famous memo, such as orbital rendezvous and simple space stations. He suggested a landing on the moon as a longer-range goal, requiring such a tremendous input of resources and technical development that, in all likelihood, the Soviets could not match it. Webb persuaded Kennedy and Johnson to take the longer view, because the short-term battle for rocket supremacy was already lost.3
A final decision hinged on NASA literally getting their manned space programme off the ground. On May 5, just twenty-three days after Gagarin had flown, US astronaut Alan Shepard was launched atop a small Redstone booster. His flight was not a full orbit, merely a ballistic ‘hop’ of fifteen minutes’ duration. In contrast to Vostok’s orbital velocity of 25,000 kmph, Shepard’s Mercury achieved only 8,300 kmph. Vostok girdled the globe, while the Mercury splashed down into the Atlantic just 510 kilometres from its launch site. But this cannonball flight was enough to prove NASA’s basic capabilities.
Immediately in the wake of Shepard’s successful flight, Webb made good use of the opportunity to strengthen NASA’s position. His budget advisors within the space agency suggested that he should keep the cost estimates for a moon project as low as possible, if he was to obtain presidential approval,