Starman_ The Truth Behind the Legend of Yuri Gagarin - Jamie Doran [70]
Stunned by the figures involved, Kennedy nevertheless decided to support Apollo. In a historic speech before Congress on May 25, 1961 he said, ‘I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind, or more important for the long-range exploration of space, and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.’
Meanwhile, Webb and Johnson, canny southern politicians both, began to lay down a subtle and far-reaching network of aerospace contract pledges, construction schemes and political patronage to ensure funding approval for Apollo across forty states. Within four years, NASA’s spending would command 5 per cent of the nation’s entire annual federal budget, and would employ upwards of 250,000 people from coast to coast. Webb called his financial bluff an ‘administrator’s discount’. Modern NASA was built on his belief that the agency had only this one chance to establish itself as a permanent feature of national life, before the momentum for space exploration slackened off. He was quite right. Over the last four decades no other President since Kennedy has been so supportive, nor so willing to spend money on space.4
All this happened because Alan Shepard flew just twenty-three days later than Yuri Gagarin. John Logsdon raises a fascinating conjecture. ‘The flight that Shepard made on May 5 1961, just three weeks after Gagarin, should have happened in March, but a previous Mercury test on January 31 had a chimpanzee called “Ham” on board. The retro-rockets fired late, sending Ham [210 kilometres] downrange of the correct splashdown zone, and it took several hours to recover him – which made for one very unhappy chimpanzee, by the way. The technical problem was very simple, very easy to fix, but they had to do another test of the Mercury before committing a human. So it’s an interesting question: what would have happened if Gagarin had been second? I think history would have worked out very differently.’
But Gagarin was first, and the American reaction was inevitable, particularly given the President’s driven personality. Logsdon says, ‘This wasn’t a Soviet success, but an American failure. I don’t think it was just a question of Kennedy’s responding to public opinion [about Gagarin]. I think he had his own very personal reaction. He always had a very strong need to be first. He was a very competitive person . . . Perhaps he was looking for an opportunity to show leadership and take some kind of bold action.’
Hugo Young, a journalist from the London Times, observed something similar in 1969:
Kennedy’s response disclosed more than anything the sight of a man obsessed with failure. Gagarin’s triumph pitilessly mocked the image of dynamism which he had offered the American people. It had to be avenged almost as much for his sake as for the nation’s.5
Science advisor Jerome Wiesner surrendered to the inevitable, although he still could not see the point of spending such colossal sums on Apollo. He salved his conscience by forcing a promise from Kennedy. ‘I told him the least he could do was never to refer publicly to the moon landing as a scientific enterprise, and he never did so.’6
The West quickly developed an obsession with the Space Race, much to the bemusement of cosmonaut Gherman Titov and his friends. ‘What kind of race were they talking about? There wasn’t a race, because we Russians were already ahead of the entire planet.’
Nikita Khrushchev and the Politburo did not immediately respond to Kennedy’s speech with their own moon project. Instead, Khrushchev pressured Korolev for short-term