Kennedy and LBJ 8 September 2017

Johnson was Senate Majority Leader Johnson: “In the Open West you learn to live closely with the sky. But somehow, in some new way, the sky seemed almost alien. I also remember the profound shock of realizing that it might be possible for another nation to acieve technological superiority over this great country of ours.” No event since Pearl Harbor had set off such repercussions in public life. Rockefeller: “This was a race we cannot afford to lose.” Harvard President: “Sputnik required a vast increase in the share of the national product devoted to education: NDEA, public universities”

LBJ’s Space Race: what we didn’t know then by Alan Wasser Few people today realize or remember, but a single man, Lyndon Baines Johnson, “LBJ”, is primarily responsible for both starting and ending “The Space Race”. In 1957 and 1958, Johnson, then Senate Majority Leader and leader of the Democratic political opposition to Republican President Dwight Eisenhower, created such a controversy over the USSR’s launch of Sputnik that Eisenhower was forced into a public space race he didn’t want. That race led to the amazing accomplishments of the next ten years, including the first human landings on the Moon. Almost a decade later, Johnson was forced to virtually shut down the program he had worked so hard to sell to the government and to the public. By 1966 and 1967, Johnson, then President, desperately needed to cut expenditures to pay for the escalating Vietnam War. So he proposed to the leaders of the Soviet Union that they agree to a treaty, which became the 1967 Outer Space Treaty, to eliminate the key prizes to be won in the space race, especially the right of either nation to claim the Moon. That allowed both sides to move expensive space development to the back burner—where it has stayed ever since.

Only a month earlier, President Eisenhower had said the US was not in a space race, and is supposed to have commented, “Lyndon Johnson can keep his head in the stars if he wants. I’m going to keep my feet on the ground.” But Johnson was going to force Eisenhower into a space race, whether the President liked it or not.

Strategy is a form of Economy Eisenhower: Resources were limited Kennedy: The US must mobilize, with a national goal. Technology was our tool Johnson: The Great Society could undertake to solve all problems. US was in an era of prosperity. Guns and Butter! (VietNam had not raised its ugly spectre)

“Control of space means control of the world,” Johnson declared. From space, the masters of infinity would have the power to control the earth’s weather, to cause drought and flood, to change the tides and raise the levels of the sea, to divert the gulf stream and change temperate climates to frigid.Johnson continued:  In essence, the Soviet Union has appraised control of space as a goal of such consequence that achievement of such control has been made a first aim of national policy. [In contrast], our decisions, more often than not, have been made within the framework of the Government’s annual budget. Against this view, we now have on record the appraisal of leaders in the field of science, respected men of unquestioned competence, whose valuation of what control of outer space means renders irrelevant the bookkeeping concerns of fiscal officers.

Freedom of Space? Sergei Korolev was the Sputnik mastermind, inspired by books of Konstantin Tsiolkowsky IGY inadvertently dovetailed with with Eisenhower’s national space policy, to establish freedom of space Was NASA just a sparrow in a falcon’s nest? Benign Hypocrisy: Beat Russians, claiming benefit for all mankind Issues: Leadership vs. Imperialism Cooperation vs. Competition Civil vs. Military

Summary The US had to respond in kind to Soviet technocracy A new era was dawning, in which organized brainpower for military and civilian science and technology was the dearest national asset Scientists on the Space Science Board supported manned space flight Space policy had to shield military uses But still it must appear open and cooperative Eisenhower balked at a Moon program, but Kennedy used it as a distraction and a noble goal His advisers were the ‘best and the brightest’, but they also gave us the Viet Nam war. What was the best path? Johnson embraced the Apollo program, as he had from the first: It had both domestic and foreign returns