The Moon Race - Space and the Superpowers

A New Frontier or Just a 240,000 mile cul de sac

2011-12-21T10:58:00.000-08:00

I'm delighted to be published today in the on-line Academic Journal '49th Parallel'. You can read the article here and I would very much welcome any feedback on the piece.

49th Parallel Piece well on track

2011-11-14T04:33:00.000-08:00

Having got my piece for the journal 49th Parallel through peer review, it has just come back from sub-editing and, again has survived largely intact - it seems my purple prose isn't too colourful for this particular journal.

The 240,000 mile cul de sac piece should feature in the Winter 2011/2012 issue once I've crossed the 't's, dotted the 'i's and answered half a dozen comments and queries. Given I spend my non-academic life editing other people's prose, it's weird to have my own under such firm but benevolent scrutiny.

Now, what actually is Chicago-style end-noting...?

Mixed feelings

2011-11-04T07:20:00.000-07:00

Up until about 5pm, yesterday was a really good day. I'd written one lecture; sorted out some seminar notes; read some good stuff for the PhD; delivered a lecture that went down well and had a really interesting seminar with my first years looking at women in 19th century USA.

Then, before I left the lecture hall, I made the mistake of checking my emails only to find I'd been knocked back on not one but two funding applications. I've been planning a trip to the Truman and Eisenhower Presidential Libraries which I was looking at making next February. As a self-funded student, with a large mortgage and three kids, external funding is the only way that I can get to the key archives (all in the US) and so far, I've led a charmed life. Two applications in the first months of the PhD both led to travel grants and I even got some funding from a corporate client! Nearly two years down the line, any hope of corporate funding is remote at best, while the foundations in the US have less money and more applications to deal with. If ever there could be a really bad time to hit the peak period of research on a PhD, I seem to have found it!

The last couple of hours have been spent searching for other sources of funding - and there aren't many around that would wish to part with spondoolicks to enable me to chase down connections between Eisenhower and his key advisers on space.

No point getting maudlin though - I'll just keep plugging on.

Still plugging away

2011-10-13T06:08:00.000-07:00

Okay, it's an hour until I deliver my third lecture/second seminar of the term - today we're moving from the Civil War into Reconstruction - and so far, so good.

Work's picking up too on the PhD. I've been refocusing the research somewhat so that it's a lot less about Kennedy - a path well and truly trodden when it comes to space research - and a lot more about Eisenhower and how his reach towards new policy in a wholly new area built on experience and relationships that had proved successful for him already in his Presidency. The likes of Jim Killian and Jim Hagerty are my current heroes - policy influencers from slightly unexpected sources. The diaries/memoirs of both have proved good sources to mine in the past few weeks.

There was good news too that a paper of mine - 'The Helping Hands to the Hidden Hand' - has been accepted by the Australian and New Zealand American Studies Association's biennial conference in Brisbane next July. All fantastic in theory, but I now need to get well north of £1500 together to get myself over there to present . The paper covers a significant chunk of my PhD chronology - so it will be great to get it both written and shared with other researchers.

With a return trip to Abilene planned for the New Year, it's good to have some goals to aim for over the next nine months.

240,000 Mile Cul De Sac article has survived peer review

2011-08-08T07:51:00.000-07:00

I've been quiet on here recently as I've been trying to re-steer the PhD work down a slightly less trodden path - and getting up to speed on US history from 1850-1914 in preparation for teaching next term.

My lecture notes and seminar 'primary sources for discussion' are beginning to take shape....and the module outline is probably now publishable. Just lots and lots of reading of texts to do now to ensure I'm more on top of the subjects than the students.

In terms of the PhD, the focus is shifting ever more towards Eisenhower. Kennedy on space has been covered very well by a number of writers (notably John Logsdon in the last year), but Ike's space policy is still not understood properly and is still seen as a a response to Sputnik.

I'm addressing that to a degree in a paper submitted to 49th Parallel. I had the peer review report back over the weekend and was delighted to learn that, subject to minor revisions, it has been accepted for publication - another good step forward on the road to academe.

The key criticism was that it was a bit too short and didn't go deeply enough into Ike's pre-Sputnik actions nor address head on his space policy differences with JFK. I'd chopped some of this out of an earlier draft...so can revisit it. I'll also be looking at some of the more recent writing on Ike (though there isn't a whole lot this century!) to explore the lines they take. I actually think I've got a killer opening - but need to back my supposition with evidence, so will be diving back into my Abilene documents to back my hunch.

Anyway, between the module preparation and the article submission, I know what I'm doing for the next six weeks.

US History revamped in a month

2011-06-02T06:58:00.000-07:00

I will be teaching a Level 1 undergraduate US History 1850-1989 course from September this year and am in the midst of revamping last year's module (pretty good, all made sense, but heavily reliant on one text).

I'm looking at bringing in David Reynold's Empire of Liberty and will probably use High Brogan's Penguin History as recommended reading alongside last year's title, Foner's Give me Liberty!

The fun now is searching out a series of primary source materials to use as the basis for our seminar sessions - Civil War, Civil Rights, Camelot, The Great White Fleet, War from the Top, War from the Bottom, Star Wars, Indian Wars, Truman Doctrine, Sputnik, New Deal, Great Society, Great Depression, Watergate, Irangate, Doughboys, Wilsonian Peace, Progressives, Red Scares and Reds under the bed. Taylor to Reagan - there are an awful lot of possibilities to investigate.

I'm very open to suggestions of accessible documents that would be worthy of analysis and debate by primarily UK students taking their first steps as undergrads.

New issue of '49th Parallel' Out - my Taft review is featured

2011-05-26T02:53:00.000-07:00

The Spring 2011 issue of 49th Parallel is now out - you can find it here. It includes my review on The Political Principles of Robert a Taft.

Writing the review article was an interesting and challenging experience. I read all the time, but applying an academic frame of mind to what I was reading and coming up with a constructive critique that might make other readers consider the text was a new experience. I worry still as to whether I was fair and just - although the review will probably only be read by a very tiny number of people - and most of them won't care a jot about what I have to say!

Still, there's a much longer article for the same academic journal in peer review at the moment, and another review article to research - this time on Truman and Immigration. All part of the rich academic learning experience.

JFK's moon pledge through the wrong end of the telescope

2011-05-25T02:47:00.000-07:00

50 years ago today John Fitzgerald Kennedy, a new president struggling to capitalise on the 'honeymoon period' of his first 100 days in office stood before the two houses of Congress addressing both the US political elite and the nation as a whole. His 'Second State of the Union' speech is best remembered for his pledge to send a man to the moon and return him safely to the earth before the decade ended. But perhaps that's because Kennedy was dead two and a half years later and because Johnson ensured his legacy was, indeed, to take America to the moon.

For historians, this popular recollection presents a problem. Kennedy didn't stride to the lectern in triumph - and at the time, the moon pledge did not hugely stand out in a speech that covered an awful lot of other ground before turning to the heavens. The reality of what Kennedy had to say that day has been distorted by subsequent events and it's important to separate the veneration of a presidency unfulfilled from the nuts and bolts of a middling Kennedy speech.

The following is a portion of my Masters Dissertation, completed for Brunel University in 2009 and is copyright Mark Shanahan 2011

Hindsight would have it that Kennedy stood before Congress on May 25th 1961 with the moon landing at the centre piece of a directive that swiftly galvanised 400,000 Americans in every state of the Union into a relentless drive to the moon where this time, the Soviets would finally be beaten. However, it is worth deconstructing the myth to look at the reality of Kennedy’s speech and the degree of direction it actually provided.

Undoubtedly the speech was meant to revive the spirit of optimism of the early weeks of the Presidency and, in the run-up to the June summit with Khrushchev was planned to show Khrushchev that Kennedy was not the callow youth the older leader took him for. But the speech gained so much resonance across the world and across four decades of regular repetition not as a whole, but because one section, towards the end, was pounced upon by the media and endlessly replayed – especially after Kennedy’s death, and most especially once the pledge to put a man on the moon and return him safely to earth before this decade is out had been achieved.

The speech was a set-piece: it was unusual for the President to address Congress directly, but Kennedy valued the public platform and knew it was essential to recapture the high ground at a time when his new presidency could lose all momentum and credibility due to the body blows inflicted on it by the Bay of Pigs failure and Gagarin’s success.

On May 25th, the Washington Post remarked on the short notice given that the President would address Congress in person saying: “There was no public expectation that the President would speak on urgent national needs.” The article later stated: “Ever since the Cuban invasion fiasco, the bloom has been off the bright rose of the early days of the Administration. Now may be the time to recreate the spirit of the January 30th State of the Nation Speech.” The networks were primed to take the speech live and transcripts were made available for print journalists to have as soon as Kennedy stepped down from the podium.

But the moon announcement actually comprised only the last fifth of the speech. Before reaching that most famous passage, Kennedy had talked about stimulating the economy at home, fostering global progress by fighting the advance of communism, extending the US Information Agency and tripling the budget for fallout shelters at home – essentially all the issues raised in the media and rejected by Eisenhower a little over two years previously. The space passage came after calls for an Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, almost as an afterthought. That’s certainly how the Los Angeles Times reported it the following day, in an editorial that was distinctly critical of Kennedy’s address. Robert T Harman wrote: “We expected extraordinary proposals....but he outlines rather ordinary plans...leaked to favourite TV and newspaper reporters days and weeks ago, so there was little impact of surprise. (The speech) was something of a dud....slightly spiced with a 10-year space adventure which Mr. Kennedy didn’t seem too certain of himself.”

The speech did receive national front page coverage and the space pledge drew the headlines. But equal focus on the analysis was placed on the other elements of the speech. Don Shannon, writing the lead news article for the Los Angeles Times, for instance noted that Kennedy had “urged Congress to back a multi-billion programme to put an American on the moon and counter the Soviet Union on earth.” He reflected Congress was split on the ‘omnibus’ plan and “noticeably cool on all except his call for a US challenge in space.” It is perhaps unsurprising that the Los Angeles Times was critical of Kennedy’s speech. California had backed Nixon in the 1960 election (just), and the Times was noted for its conservative stance.

The Democrat-leaning Washington Post was slightly more positive – but only slightly. In its news lead, John G Norris reported: “He (Kennedy) committed the United States to an all-out race to overtake Russia in space and to be the first to put men on the moon...”It is time”, said the President, for a great new American enterprise; time for this nation to take a clearly-leading role in space achievement.”

The news report chimed with the intent of the President, picking up on his request for a spending boost for space, arms and the jobless, but undercut this when stating that the proposals would be unsatisfactory to liberals since they favoured big business. Equally Norris noted, they would not satisfy conservatives since the spending boosts would not go far enough. Interestingly, in the ‘Freedom Doctrine’ editorial within the same issue, going to the moon does not even rate a mention.

That pledge is often reported today as a directive for NASA. But that was not within Kennedy’s power. Instead Kennedy was posing a question – would Congress agree to the proposal and would it authorise the funding? Congress could have said no, indeed with just 15 minutes of actual space flight behind them and a very uncertain path to the moon, logic appears to have been outmanoeuvred by the strength of Kennedy’s rhetoric.

Two Republican Representatives are quoted opposing Kennedy’s call for support: The Los Angeles Times reports Representative Steven Derounian from New York saying: “Not once did I hear him say a word pledging that we would not retreat one inch from the communist tyrants. This was a tired speech full of apologies.” Fellow member of the House, Representative Glenard P Lipscomb added: “This was a lot of words with not enough justification of needs.”

A counterview comes from James Baughman, biographer of American media giant Henry R Luce, the proprietor of Life, Time, and Fortune magazines. In an email exchange with this writer, Baughman recalled his research on Luce and the space programme, noting: “I’m struck, even now, by how few sceptics I could find, in the press and politics, regarding the space programme. I can think of only one senator, Norris Cotton of New Hampshire, who gently questioned JFK’s man on the moon proposal.”

With the hindsight of the President’s assassination and the subsequent success in landing a man on the moon in 1969, the rest of the speech has been forgotten. The final section has been raised to a mythical level at odds with its immediate reaction. It actually took a lot of legwork on Capitol Hill by Vice President Johnson, already the father of space legislation, to ensure that Congress supported Kennedy’s man on the moon funding request. This was achieved by promising a space-industry job boost, with the programme of works for Gemini and Apollo divided up among contractors in every State of the Union.

Kennedy was driven by political motives unrelated to any commitment to a moon landing. He had no great scientific or even romantic attachment to the race to the moon, but had done his homework prior to the May 25th speech. On April 20th, just after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy wrote to Johnson, the space expert in the Administration, asking for the answers to five questions: “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 programme which promises dramatic results in which we could win?” Johnson assembled a committee of advisors including Frank Stanton, head of the broadcaster CBS, Donald Cook of American electric Power, George Brown from engineering company, Brown and Root, Air force Missile Chief Bernard Schriever, Senator Kerr, the newly-appointed chairman of the Senate Space Committee and NASA Administrator Jim Webb. In both a telephone conversation with Johnson and through a detailed five page memo, Von Braun provided a detailed argument to go to the moon. Johnson was convinced, and pulled the rest of the panel towards his view.

By April 23rd, Johnson had provided the answers and Kennedy had shifted his position from his immediate comments following Gagarin’s launch. At his press conference that day, he said: “If we can get to the moon before the Russians, then we should.” Johnson’s panel had convinced Kennedy that a lunar landing was viable for the Americans – but not for the Russians who were way behind on technology and would need an unfeasibly large rocket to lift their larger, heavier technology out of earth orbit and on the way to the moon. That panel was probably swayed more by Johnson’s strength of feeling than by a logical belief that a moon landing could be achieved within a decade. Even his phrasing: “Before this decade is out”, gave Kennedy a get-out card. Even if he fulfilled a complete two-term presidency, Kennedy would almost certainly be out of office before the moon landing. If it failed, it would not be on his watch – and potentially could be laid at the feet of Johnson, the Administration’s most persuasive space advocate. And that would likely be the case if the Soviets got there first as well.

Whereas the media had initially set the space agenda for Eisenhower, Kennedy had turned the tables. He was now attempting to set the agenda, using the New Frontier of space as a way to regain standing and challenge the Soviets to what Wolfe describes as ‘single combat’ on the Cold War battlefield. Domestically, the speech coalesced all thinking around space on one goal. The public, press and networks were now focused on one message that summed up the “invention, innovation imagination, decision” of Americans.

The President’s claim that: “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” recalled the romance and adventure of Lewis and Clark. Coupled with the relief and outpouring of positivity that Shepard’s successful Mercury flight had achieved, and the carefully-nuanced image of an All-American Astronaut elite ready to struggle against the unknown travails of space, the mixture was potent. Congress would never turn Kennedy down, and the perceived failure to get an American into space first could be turned into a positive: a catalyst for America’s next great adventure. However, not all the elements were truly aligned yet, and a Gallup poll completed as Kennedy spoke showed that the public remained sceptical of the President’s pledge being delivered. Asked whether participants viewed the US or Russia as being ahead in the Space Race, the response was evenly split. And on which would be first to send a man to the moon, 34% said the US, 33% said Russia and 33% didn’t know . There was clearly still much work to be done on public opinion.

Rep. Lipscomb’s comments on the speech: “This was a lot of words with not enough justification of needs” were prescient. Kennedy had put the building blocks in place to turn the media and public opinion on space from adversary through ally to involved partner. He had set a goal that defined the next lap of the space race. He had made space a core part of the Administration’s policy. He had control of the agency that would deliver space success. But still there were sceptics in the media and in Congress. The US had just 15 minutes of space experience and was clearly still some way behind the Soviets. The moon seemed an awfully long way away.

Books, books and a day out in Kent

2011-05-16T07:43:00.000-07:00

Delving into Craig Allen's Eisenhower and the Mass Media, while flicking through Dan Rather's The Camera Never Blinks....James Hagerty's Diaries are on their way.

In the quest to finally finish my literature review, I'm on the hunt for William Safire's Before the Fall and Samuel Rosenman's Walking with Roosevelt. If anyone has a copy of either they don't want, please get in touch.

Hoping to head into campus this afternoon to pick up a couple of theory titles: Hill's The Policy Process: a reader and Greenaway's Deciding Factors in British Politics but have to wait for one (any?) member of my family to get home to let the rest in before I can go.

Meanwhile, I now have confirmation that I'm giving a presentation on June 15th at the SE Regional Hub History conference at the University of Kent.....it'll be a variation of the 240,000 mile cul de sac theme.

Anyway back to the books.

The Presidents and the Press (and TV & Radio)

2011-05-06T07:45:00.000-07:00

My supervisors' comments back on my first PhD chapter plus the response from the room to my presentation at this year's research conference have all been good - today I'm tired but boosted by the feeling that I'm finally on the right lines after rather floundering my way through the first year and a bit of PhD life.

My Literature Review is pretty much complete in terms of early space race literature and also presidential leadership literature from the time (Wright Mills, Neustadt, Sorensen, McDougall et al). But what's missing is the body of text (if such a body exists) on the interaction of the Presidency and the media. I'm especially interested in titles covering the WW2-Vietnam period but would stretch to cover the Teddy Roosevelt - Ronnie Reagan period if there were uneful ideas to uncover and apply to 'my' Presidents: Ike and JFK.

My target to get this third leg of the Literature Review complete is mid-June - if anyone can suggest any titles, I'd love to hear them.

Old paper is exciting

2011-04-18T05:00:00.000-07:00

Is there any reason why I should be inordinately excited about receiving bundles of paper from the Kennedy and Nixon Presidential libraries? Given the fact that I'm funding my own PhD while attempting to run my own micro-business on the side, the chances of a trip to Boston or the Los Angeles environs this year are somewhere between exceedingly slim and nil. So, the last few weeks has involved a large degree of online searching plus liaison with the archive researchers at the above institutions to dig out some useful research material (with its attendant vast photocopying bill) from Kennedy and Nixon's 1960 campaign files.

The task now is to analyse the papers to see if a) there was more than a hair's breadth of difference between the proposed space policies of these two doughty Cold War campaigners during the campaign; b) to see if the papers offer any likely pointers to how Nixon may have acted on NASA and the manned space programme had he won in 1960; and c) if there are any indications in the papers on how highly Kennedy rated space as an agenda item for his 1961 policy making before he moved into the White House.

Plenty then to get my teeth into over the next couple of months.

Build a rocket boys

2011-04-11T10:11:00.000-07:00

How appropriate that I should be writing my Research Student Day presentation while Elbow's 'Lippy Kids' with its excellent refrain 'Build a rocket boys' fills the background with a bit of tuneful (prog) rock.

After several months of a fairly isolated student existence, I'm feeling a bit more part of the research community at the moment. I began to get a bit more momentum into the work as a deadline approached for my revised hypothesis/structure and literature review and I started playing my hypothesis past a few of the big players - the likes of Logsdon, Launius, Hansen and McCurdy and McDougall while asking for their views on what a Nixon presidency in 1961 might have looked like in terms of space policy.

My current working hypothesis (based on my growing realisation that I don't think there was a direct causal effect of the media on Executive decision making) states: More than 50 years on from President Kennedy’s inauguration, a myth persists that the USA’s triumph in landing a man on the moon expanded the nation’s frontiers into the heavens – and that this expansion owes its success to the policy-making of Kennedy. In recent years, this established wisdom has been reinforced by anniversary-driven hagiography, popular television rehash and, most of all, through the lionising of JFK.

This thesis will take an evidential approach in debunking the myth by presenting Kennedy as the master of political expediency, and re-evaluating Eisenhower’s role in developing effective space policy that was not limited by a race to the moon. The thesis will show how Eisenhower, from his inheritance of competing armed forces rocket programs, through the International Geophysical Year’s satellite development to his response to the Sputnik Autumn of 1957 set in track a process that enabled the creation of an agency that could deliver a space programme that, step-by-step, would open space in its widest sense to the American spirit of exploration. Using primary evidence from NASA’s Historical Collection and the Eisenhower Presidential Library, primary evidence from the Kennedy Presidential papers and recordings, and by extrapolating what a Nixon Presidency in 1961 might have meant for space policy, the thesis demonstrates that far from stretching America’s frontier to the heavens, Kennedy’s space policy was little more than an expedient reaction to the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the first earth orbit of Yuri Gagarin. Source material from both Eisenhower and Kennedy’s White House circles shows that Kennedy hijacked Eisenhower and NASA’s systematic and logical plan for space exploration, replacing it with a single-focus event: high on symbolic achievement, but entirely limiting in terms of truly extending America’s frontier into space.

The thesis will add to the discourse on the politics of the early years of space endeavour by making a first attempt to compare and contrast directly Eisenhower and Kennedy’s space policy decision making, highlighting Eisenhower’s low-key response to the Soviet ‘smoke and mirrors’; preference for unmanned space missions; and desire to separate scientific and military uses of space, with Kennedy’s direct challenge to Khrushchev which coalesced all NASA’s focus into the race for the moon. It also speculates on what might have been different had Nixon triumphed in the 1960 Presidential election.

In using space policy as the case study for Presidential decision making, this paper applies another contextual layer: the changing role of the media as the 1950s gave way to the 1960s and ushered in a new era of television news and debate; a new breed of space-enthralled journalist, and a new passion for all aspects of popular media: space as conquered by its ‘all American Boys’.

In summary, this paper re-evaluates Eisenhower’s contribution to the United States’ journey into space and, in so doing, places Kennedy’s mass-appeal rhetoric and policy making in true perspective: not as the champion of Apollo, but as the limiting factor that caused America to lose its way as it sought to push its frontier to the heavens.

None of the greats have knocked back my hypothesis and the general response has been positive. Now it sits with my supervisors for their comment - and it'll be open to the scrutiny of the Brunel research community on May 4 (may the fourth be with me!).

I've just been through a Saturday school where I had the chance to try out a shortened version of my presentation which drew precisely no questions.....probably not good - but the audience was made up of economists, organisational learning experts, educators and IT pros, with only one other historian in attendance. Still, I would have liked to elicit at least some reaction - but it was a long day and everyone was rather more concerned with their own presentation.

Anyway, it was just good to get together with other PhD students and have the kind of nerdy conversation that you just can't have at home - although why my kids aren't more interested in the US separation of government, I'll never know.

Kennedy, Glenn and 'frontier rhetoric'

2011-04-04T09:18:00.000-07:00

With all the 'Kennedy 50th' interest, this seems as good a time as any to post the final piece from my Masters disso. All the following content is copyright Mark Shanahan 2011

Chapter 3: God speed John Glenn

In his inaugural address, Kennedy has challenged the US public saying: “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country.” In the case of Astronaut John Glenn, his task was to restore American prestige and fill the credibility gap between Kennedy’s speech to Congress in May 1961 and eight months of further space activity that had seen one more sub-orbital flight in the Mercury Programme, and 17 orbits by Russian Cosmonaut Gherman Titov. Kennedy’s rhetoric in his speech to Congress in May 1961 was not enough on its own to convince either the media or the American public that the US would win the race to the moon. The nation had already fallen short both in the race for satellites and the race to put a man into space. Now Kennedy and NASA needed a significant step forward to align the media and the nation behind the drive for the moon. With the flight of John Glenn, the politicians and space administration worked far more proactively to manage Glenn’s flight as an event. The result, as this chapter will show was a high point in the US space programme where the nation was truly uplifted by NASA’s achievement.

The flight’s success on February 20th 1962 cemented the public-media-and governmental alliance behind Kennedy’s pledge to send a man to the moon and return him safely to the earth before the decade was out. From the choice of astronaut, naming of the capsule, and mission announcement months before take-off (unlike Shepard and Grissom’s sub-orbital shots) NASA and the Executive were at pains to identify the mission with Kennedy’s foreign policy agenda. Their goal was to finally win Congress and the American public over to belief that manned spaceflight and an aggressive drive for the moon was at the heart of the nation’s interests.

When the Mercury Seven were first presented to the media through a Washington press conference on April 9, 1959, they were not a particularly prepossessing bunch. Most had little to say that was either interesting or original . Introduced by NASA’s first Director of Public Information, Walter T Bonney , the ‘lonesome marine’ John Glenn stood out for his down-home humour and implicit leadership of the group. Already a ‘name’ for his July 1957 transcontinental speed record when he flew from Los Angeles to New York in 3 hours and 23 minutes and his subsequent appearances on the hit NBC TV show Name That Tune, Glenn established an immediate rapport with the journalists present. As Tom Wolfe wrote in The Right Stuff, “John Glenn came out of it as tops among seven very fair haired boys...all seven emerged collectively in a golden haze....A blazing aura was among them all.” Though Shepard, regarded as both the brightest and the best pilot among the Seven, got the nod to be the US’ first man in space, NASA knew that the key flight in the programme would be the first orbital mission. Glenn was pencilled in for this journey at a very early stage.

The US still needed reassurance that Kennedy’s aspiration would be achieved. There was still residual opposition to the pledge both among the American public and, particularly, among Republican Senators and Representatives. Representative Tom Pelly of Washington described the lunar programme as: "a spectacular piece of nonsense.... the most inflationary proposal in American Political History” . Meanwhile Senator Gordon Allot of Colorado noted the space race connotation, calling Kennedy’s pledge: “a useless contest with the Russians...(Can) such a contest be worth...the cost to the American people?” Yet as Time noted, Pelly was able to muster only 83 house members to oppose the President’s spending plans in 1961. The eventual vote on the budget package – including NASA’s increased budget - was passed by 352 to 59. Still, with just Shepard’s 15 minute hop to Bermuda to demonstrate the country’s space flight excellence, the US population was divided on whether the US had caught up with the Soviets as a space power.

In June 1961, a Gallup Poll asked: “Congress has been asked to approve a program, costing 7 to 9 billion dollars during the next five years, to enable the US to send a man to the moon and bring him back safely. Do you think Congress should adopt the program or reject it?” Only 42% of respondents said adopt it, while 46% said reject it, with the remainder having no opinion. It was hardly a ringing endorsement of Kennedy’s rhetoric. When the Mercury Program was once again eclipsed by Titov’s 24-hour orbital trip a New York Times editorial noted that Washington officials were concerned by NASA's "easy pace" in implementing the lunar landing programme outlined by President Kennedy.

However, NASA had a PR coup planned. Glenn’s flight was announced as soon as the chimp Enos had been recovered safe from the Atlas-Mercury 5 flight test in November 1961. It was quite contrary to NASA’s previous reluctance to confirm any astronaut until they had to, but Glenn’s trip was different. Until Neil Armstrong stepped onto the moon, Glenn was the US space programme’s number one All-American Hero: the epitome of Tom Wolfe’s ‘Right Stuff’. Glenn’s flight, the first by an American into orbit, presented him as a pioneer and clearly evoked the spirit of frontier adventure. In interviews, the astronaut himself stated the flight would ‘pave the way’ for voyages to ‘the moon and beyond’”. Life magazine was working hard to present a rounded image that reflected Kennedy’s ‘New Frontier’ boldness: the lean marine with the buzz cut, square jaw and easy smile, with the nuclear family for the nuclear age of the perfect wife and two teenage boys, slotted easily into the pioneer spirit encouraged by NASA. His striving for the new frontier of space rapidly captured the imagination.
Glenn was the perfect fit for the Astronaut NASA had originally envisaged when inviting applicants for the role. Described by Life’s John Dille as “the senior man on the team...sternly self-disciplined and almost ascetic in his pursuit of perfection”, he was also “warm, convivial and friendly.” He certainly fitted the picture of ‘daring and courageous men, cool and resourceful under pressure’ that Dille gives as NASA’s requirements for its first astronauts. Yet Glenn was actually little different from the six other married fathers, all highly experienced test pilots, who comprised the Mercury Seven. But more than Shepard and more than Grissom, his image had been cultivated within NASA and presented through carefully chosen words and pictures made readily available by NASA’s Public Affairs team to an eager, if somewhat lazy, media. In the last years of printed media’s dominance over television, they were more than ready to lap up the wealth of material provided by NASA. It is worth noting that the media operated at two distinct levels. Most newspapers had a Washington reporter and they were briefed and managed by NASA Administrator James Webb and his HQ Public Affairs team. This team worked closely with Pierre Salinger, Kennedy’s Press Secretary, and discussed space matters with reporters at a high policy level, ensuring all commentary around Mercury and subsequent NASA programmes was in line with the President’s wider political agenda.

However, a second level of space reporter had emerged, with a beat that ran from the Langley Research Facility to Cape Canaveral. These ‘on the spot’ reporters covered events in the space calendar – astronaut announcements, launches and tests. Their language was a mix of technical reporting and awe at the achievements of the programme and its astronauts. As the previous chapter explained, this second breed was far removed from the questioning journalism that would emerge as the decade rolled on. Norman Mailer was still on the periphery of the group, and the likes of Jay Barbree and Martin Caidin who covered every launch were, by their own admission, undemanding.

Paul Haney worked in public Affairs for NASA before becoming a special correspondent for ITN. He explained NASA’s policy on managing the media at the Cape. “NASA issued technical releases on every aspect of the flight, but they were rather dull. They were designed to be informative rather than inspiring. Most of the people I worked with were either ex-military and didn’t want to reveal anything beyond the technical specification about the flights, or were career civil servants originally hired from regional newspapers. Their role was to answer reporters’ questions but not to offer any opinion on strategy or the higher meaning of space exploration. They were also to be a barrier between reporters and our key NASA managers. Where were succeeded best as a team was in providing lots of ready-made copy and images. Much of the copy was generated in Washington, and pictures, such as the now iconic Mercury Seven in pressure suits at Langley, were made freely available for the press to use. Almost every reporter worked to very tight deadlines and probably too many too readily accepted the material NASA provided and reproduced it without much editorial analysis.

“Our team on the ground were much happier talking about valves and heat shields than pioneering missions to new frontiers. We left that to Pierre Salinger’s people and the Life editorial writers. However, I eventually found myself using their language and imagery on later Mercury and Gemini flights. It just seemed to seep into the set-piece announcements.”

Strangely, a string of 10 postponements allowed the public to get to know Glenn better. His flight was tentatively scheduled for December and postponed further in January after Glenn had spent six hours strapped into the tiny Mercury spacecraft . The delays allowed ample time for the press to venerate Glenn as a hero before he had even left the launch pad. Crucial to this process was Life which lavished attention on the ‘unswerving and self-denying man’ and his dedication to the ‘stern, dangerous pursuit’ of spaceflight. Even the name of his craft was significant: Friendship 7 was at once homely and inclusive and carried an implicit message of global friendship – albeit under an American flag.

By the time Friendship 7 launched on February20th 1962, Life had run a number of emotive spreads on Glenn, his training schedule and his family, providing the public with the heroic personification of the US space program. Through no fault of his own, Glenn’s flight was less than heroic. Glenn reached orbit and was cleared for orbital flight. However, before even one had completed, he was in trouble. The automatic attitude control system was malfunctioning, prompting a persistent drift to the right. Glenn corrected this by switching to manual control. But telemetry on the ground showed a further, more threatening problem. A reading suggested that Glenn’s heat shield may have been partially dislodged during separation from the Atlas rocket. If the shield was damaged, it would almost certainly cause the Mercury craft to burn up as it attempted re-entry to the earth’s atmosphere. NASA controllers decided to bring Glenn down as quickly as possible – at the end of his third orbit, and instructed him not to jettison his retro rocket pack as it was felt this may hold the potentially errant heat shield in place. Controllers were ‘less than candid’ with Glenn, while the watching media and public knew nothing of the potential disaster waiting to happen.

While it was Soviet policy not to announce anything about their space flights until success was assured, NASA trumpeted the fact that they operated all their missions in the full media glare. Yet in this case, they chose not to inform their pilot of the full nature of the danger he faced. Therefore, since Public Affairs Announcer Shorty Powers monitored the capcom feed and interpreted astronaut communications for the world’s media, no-one beyond the mission controllers were aware of the difficulties the flight faced. It could be argued that NASA was playing the Soviet game. More likely it was weighing the odds of damage limitation aimed at preserving NASA and US prestige should Glenn perish.

Glenn landed safely and, together with NASA, was hailed by the American public, even though Gagarin had beaten him into orbit by almost a year. The flight dominated every news bulletin and every newspaper across the country and, indeed, much of the world. The Los Angeles Times, so recently a critic of Kennedy, covered the story under the title ‘Astronauts’ Epic’ . I t dominated pages 1-7, 10-12, 14-15 and 19, using a large number of photographs supplied by NASA. In a show of confidence, the agency was also able to report to the newspaper that Glenn’s flight was the US’ 67th successful space launch, compared to 13 for the Soviets. What is perhaps most notable is the way that both Johnson and Kennedy were inextricably linked with the flight and the celebration of its success. The newspaper quoted Johnson who said: “This is a great day for the free world and therefore for all humanity...outer space has become a pathway for mankind and we hope and pray that it is a pathway to peace.” Kennedy kept up the voyager metaphor and was quoted by the Los Angeles Times saying: “We have a long way to go in this space race. We started late. But this is a new ocean and I believe the United States must set sail on it and be in a position second to none. “

Suddenly the politicians sounded like those journalists who, in 1959 compared the Mercury Seven to Columbus, De Gama and the other great explorers of history. Glenn addressed Congress saying: “I am certainly glad to see that pride in our country and its accomplishments are not a thing of the past.” His implication was that his Mercury flight had renewed that pride in Americans.

On February 21 1962, the New York Times declared the flight to be “one of the greatest dramatic events in modern times.” The paper’s leader writers were quick to contrast the worldwide publicity surrounding Glenn’s flight with the secrecy shrouding the Soviet space programme. On the same day, the Washington Post lauded Glenn, stating: “the new spaceman, holding his life in his own hands as test pilots have always done, can bring his fragile craft more surely to its destination than any quantity of automatic control.” This was a thinly veiled attack on the Soviets who made a virtue of the automation of their craft. At a more parochial level, regional newspapers across the US pledged themselves firmly behind NASA. The Hartford Courant in Connecticut for instance asserted that ‘American heroism has entered a new period.’

While the drive for the moon was a naked attempt to beat the Soviets in a world-awing set-piece, pride in American accomplishment was at the root of both Kennedy and NASA’s drive for space. McDougall describes Congress’ support of Kennedy’s pledge to land a man on the moon as: “the greatest open-ended commitment in peacetime by Congress in history.” Drawing on the almost mythical stature of the narrative of Lewis and Clark’s trailblazing across the American west a century before, the drive for space created a new narrative echoing America’s frontier myth. In telephone remarks to NASA’s first Conference on the Peaceful Uses of Space , Kennedy expressed America’s determination to be “a pioneer in the New Frontier of Space.” The language of the media and the Administration was coalescing around a new frontier hero, created through a magnificent adventure and underpinned by a carefully constructed image.

NASA’s filmed record of the flight The Voyage of Friendship 7 , released in the weeks following Glenn’s return stressed the adventure and chose not to dwell on the risks the flight encountered. The colour film which received nationwide and international distribution replayed the voyager image and focused on ‘a captain of a new kind of ship about to set sail on a new ocean, the infinite ocean of space’. In-flight film shows Glenn actively piloting the craft – far removed from the passenger status of Gagarin and Titov. Noting that the launch was broadcast live across the US by all the major networks who, in turn, carried the launch to ‘all nations of the free world’, the film stresses the ‘open’ nature of America’s voyage into space uniting 4,000 contractors across the nation, while the Mercury-Atlas’s course is charted across ‘the emerging nations of Africa’ with the implication that the mission may help win their support for the US. Glenn’s flight over the Atlantic, where he is seen controlling the craft, is compared to Lindbergh’s first solo Atlantic crossing. This parallel had been first aired in Life prior to the flight, and found its way into a number of subsequent media reports.

Back in the US, with more time to reflect, the news magazines were certain that NASA was back on track in beating the Soviets to the moon. Glenn featured on the covers of Time, Newsweek and Life in the first week in March, with Time reporting: “In terms of national prestige, Glenn’s flight put the US back in the space race with a vengeance, and gave the morale of the US and the entire free world a badly needed boost.” In the wake of the Berlin Wall dispute and Khrushchev’s carefully orchestrated smoke and mirrors in space, the still-new President Kennedy badly needed media positivity. He would have welcomed Newsweek’s response in the same week which noted that Glenn had: “lifted the self-doubt that had plagued the United States since the first Sputnik flashed through the night skies.” No longer need America be tormented by “the nagging suspicion that the American political and economic system was somehow inadequate to the new challenges which the space age posed.”

The positive media coverage around the world was echoed in the hundreds of thousands of letters Glenn received from over 100 countries including the Soviet Union. The well-named Friendship 7 went on tour across 17 countries, with a well-oiled NASA publicity machine ensuring millions had the opportunity to look inside the craft. Finally, in a PR triumph, on the first anniversary of the flight, Friendship 7 was presented to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington where it was displayed alongside Lindbergh’s Spirit of St Louis. This was a very deliberate action aimed at evoking the same spirit of exploration, triumph over adversity and conquering new frontiers that Lindbergh had stirred among Americans with his first solo aeroplane crossing of the Atlantic 35 years earlier.

The alignment of the planets politic and media was complete on March 1 1962 when President Kennedy accompanied Glenn and his wife Annie through the streets of New York where the returning hero enjoyed a tickertape parade. This followed a similarly joyful reception in Washington DC when Vice President Johnson joined Glenn in the motorcade on their way to address Congress on February 26th – a triumphal valediction of the Mercury missions capturing an image of national success and national pride. 1961-62 was NASA’s ‘golden year’ . Tthe cover of Life on March 9, 1962 with a smiling Glenn taking the adulation of the Washington crowd as Johnson looks on neatly distilled the apogee of the Mercury programme, and finally set a solid foundation of public and media support for the Apollo programme to come. Kennedy had used success in the space race to strengthen his own position, and it’s worth noting that his approval rating peaked at 83% in the fortnight following Glenn’s flight.

How much this was a product of an active space policy by Kennedy’s Administration or even simple relief that Glenn’s flight had put the US back in the space race is open to debate. But this writer would argue that the ‘triumph’ would not have reached such a peak without an active public relations effort that used the rhetoric of the Administration, the creative writing and powerful photographic imagery of Life and the extensive reach of the NASA public affairs machine to turn an already impressive man and extraordinary enterprise into a world-uniting, heroic event. The flight of Friendship Seven was a totem for Kennedy, and enabled him to regain much of the prestige he had lost following the US failure in the Bay of Pigs.

Would it all have been different if Nixon had won in 1960?

2011-02-28T05:43:00.000-08:00

I'm doing some work today on my paper for 49th Parallel which builds on my presentation delivered in Oxford last November. That was called 'A New Frontier or just a 240,000 mile cul de sac'. It's still my working title for the printed paper, but I'm tempted to use a great Kennedy quote instead.

In a meeting held in December 1962 with NASA Administrator Jim Webb, a gathering of the great and the good from NASA management and also JFK's Budget Director, the President rather flippantly said: "I'm not that interested in space." I think it makes a pretty good title for a piece revisiting Eisenhower and Kennedy's role in US space exploration.

However, I'd also like to use the piece to put forward a view on whether anything would have been different had Nixon won the Presidential election in 1960.

While defence and the missile gap loomed large in the 1960 election campaign, I can't find much from Nixon particularly on space policy after his work on the 1958 Space Act. Would he have followed Kennedy's single-minded route to the moon? Would he have taken on Khrushchev over space? Who knows. It's fun to speculate. This morning I've spent some time putting the question to a number of renowned space historians. I will be interested in their views if they choose to come back to me.

Masters Dissertation Chapter 2 - NASA and the reversal of trends

2011-01-25T08:02:00.000-08:00

It's quite some time since I posted the introduction and Chapter 1 of my disso - and it's amazing how far my thinking around and understanding of the early years of the space race has matured in the last 15 months. But while I wait for an edited version of the disso to finally run in the pages of Spaceflight, here's the unabridged version of the second chapter. It seems appropriate now to turn to John F Kennedy as we recall his Inauguration 50 years ago. All the material on this entry and, indeed across this blog is copyright Mark Shanahan, 2011

Chapter 2: NASA and the reversal of trends
The period from October 1958 to May 1961 provided the hinge for US space aspirations and a 180 degree change in policy. While Eisenhower had provided strong foundations for the Space Programme as a response to intense media activity, he had done so reluctantly. Once he had seen off Nixon in the race for the White House, Kennedy inherited an agency and space programme that was achieving quiet success but was no longer buoyed aloft on media fervour. At first, he was antipathetic to space and even initially looked for co-operation rather than competition with the Soviets. But the Bay of Pigs fiasco swiftly followed by Gagarin’s space flight changed the attitude of a President looking for an expedient way to recover prestige and set his overall political agenda back on course.

This chapter assesses how the relationship between the President, the media and NASA changed in regard to America’s efforts to catch-up the Soviets and set the course that would ultimately win the space race. In so doing, it will focus on the foundation of NASA; the announcement of the Mercury 7; Life’s astronaut contract, the early space media corps, the Kennedy-Nixon presidential race, and most notably, Kennedy’s ‘Second State of the Union Address’.

The foundation of NASA as a civilian agency (albeit entirely dependent on the military machine) provided both stability and credibility for the US space programme. However, in moving away from the Committee-Director structure of the previous NACA to NASA’s direct responsibility to the President, the new agency became an arm of national and international political policy. While Eisenhower had little time to use the agency to advance his own agenda, and indeed asked Vice President Nixon to lead on space issues, Kennedy proved a much more active manipulator. In this, he was aided by his own Vice President, Johnson who had previously used space policy as a means to further his own national political aims. NASA’s launch in October 1958 was generally met positively by the media – especially as it came into being around four months sooner than predicted. However, its coverage was low-key. In fact it rated only a page 16 story in the Chicago Daily Tribune. .

Eisenhower favoured unmanned scientific rocketry over what he saw as a pointless race to put a man in space. He still would not use the ‘space race’ term or image. He was hugely heartened by the launch and perfect performance of the world’s first meteorological and navigational satellites in the last year of his presidency. But though these were real scientific achievements which changed weather forecasting and marine navigation forever, they were not the attention grabbers that would draw interest to the space programme.

As Eisenhower dealt with increasing tensions in Berlin, NASA was swiftly learning the value of good PR. Recognising the value of symbolic gesture, the agency chose to announce Project Mercury on the 55th anniversary of the first Wright Brothers flight, tapping into the American adventure-mythology that would shape its messaging in the early years. It would seem this was a tacit acknowledgement of the success of Khrushchev’s strategy of tying launches to significant historical events: the prime example being the launch of Sputnik 2 on the commemoration of the 40th anniversary of the October Revolution.

The Chicago Daily Tribune , reported that this marked a speed-up in efforts to get man into space, though Administrator T Keith Glennan expressed NASA’s pre-Kennedy caution by saying: “We shall be working very hard, but at the very earliest, success in this venture is several years away.”
Khrushchev appeared to the US public as much less cautious. His policy of propaganda was not particularly sophisticated, but between 1957 an 1960, it was particularly effective. Khrushchev hid the deficiencies of his missile force and space technology by camouflage and subterfuge . While his force was actually weak, by playing the space card and implying greater rocket strength than he actually possessed, Khrushchev hoped to force the US to weaken its own position. Rattling his atomic rockets in the wake of Sputnik’s launch is a tad ironic, since by 1957, Khrushchev’s decision to reduce spending on conventional arms and focus on a high tech missile deterrent had produced just four ICBMs.

NASA really first connected with the media in April 1959 when it introduced the world to the Mercury Seven – the original US astronauts. The Soviets selected and trained their cosmonauts in complete secrecy. NASA, on the other hand introduced its newly-coined ‘Astronauts’ in the full glare of publicity, long before the seven military test pilots had ever gone near a rocket. Playing on the theme of nationalism, encompassing prestige, national strength and a US lead in international co-operation, NASA considered its image carefully when selecting and publicising ‘the Original Astronauts’. All were presented as ‘all-American, exemplary citizens’, and their introduction to the press brought initially widespread curiosity, soon to be replaced by seemingly unwarranted adulation. But it is worth noting the low-key role NASA’s Public Affairs team played in presenting the Mercury Seven. In April 1959, NASA HQ in Washington issued 100 pages of media material. Two thirds of this was directly to do with the Mercury Astronauts. The press conference announcement was a buried within a three-page release of April 7th 1959 titled: “Seven to enter Mercury Training Program.” In support of the press conference, NASA released a detailed paper covering a blow-by-blow account of the Astronaut selection process; three-page career biographies on each of the Astronauts and a transcript of the Press Conference. A week later, the agency was forced to issue a ‘Press Memorandum’ stating: As soon as they arrive at Langley they will begin Project Mercury orbital flight training. Each will have an important role in engineering and scientific development of the space vehicle, sub-orbital build-up missions and finally manned satellite flight. The training will be conducted on an extremely tight schedule. For these reasons the Astronauts will not be available for special interviews or other public activities for the time being. NASA will report progress on Project Mercury as it occurs, and as the training and work program of the Astronauts permits, we will arrange for special public activities in the future. We know that we have your understanding and cooperation in this activity.”

Several points are worth noting: unlike their Soviet counterparts, the seven were to have active roles in the Mercury development. Second, there is a distinct increase in pace and urgency implied by the note. Finally, the implication is that NASA was surprised by the reaction to the Mercury Seven announcement, and had not yet developed a tactic to deal with the clamour for a piece of the new ‘heroes’. Once the Mercury Seven were announced, the media did indeed have its heroes to face off against the faceless Soviets, small-town, lantern jawed risk-taking frontiersmen, echoes abounded from Davy Crockett to Charles Lindbergh. The Chicago Daily Tribune reported on the Mercury Seven announcement as a page 14 story the day after the April 7th Washington press conference. But three days later, the Seven were on page one. Two were noted to be from ‘Chicagoland’

What is significant in assessing the US media’s response to the Mercury Seven is that there was really no such thing as a daily national news media in the US. Newspapers were local and fiercely parochial, looking for the local angle on any story, be it national or international. Hence the interest in the astronauts’ birth places, where they came from, went to college and had previously worked. There was interest too in their families, their religious beliefs and all the traits that brought a chink of individuality to a fairly homogenous group. From the first, the newspapers focused on the astronauts as heroes: James Reston of the New York Times famously stated that “The astronauts may make Columbus and Vasco de Gama look like shut-ins before they’re through.” This was a new frontier adventure; one was soon to find an echo with Kennedy’s far wider-reaching New Frontier presidential candidacy. As Wolfe wrote: “Within 24 hours of their Washington DC introduction, the astronauts were heroes.” Reston summed up the mood of the media: “What made them exciting was not that they said anything new, but that they said all the old things with such fierce convictions. They spoke of ‘duty’ and ‘faith’ and ‘country’ like Walt Whitman’s pioneers.” These solid citizens appeared to have ‘The Right Stuff’ and an implicit alliance of NASA’s public affairs team and the Washington press corps ensured that nothing would dent that image.

That ‘Right Stuff’ was captured and played back nationally and internationally (though syndicated features and international editions), by one of the key segments of the American media: the news magazines. Without national newspapers and with TV news restricted to generally around 15 minutes a day, news magazines led the public opinion agenda. Newsweek devoted a double page spread to the press conference in its April 20th 1959 issue, presenting an image of the Mercury Seven based on ‘family and faith’ where the seven aviators (and much was made of their test pilot backgrounds, thanks to NASA’s extensive briefing notes) were “fearless but not reckless”, attributes that would stand them in good stead in their endeavours beyond the earth’s atmosphere. Almost equally important was the trade press, with titles such as Collier’s, Popular Mechanics and New Scientist all strong in driving popular opinion. But if NASA’s new Mercury Seven were to shine, they needed the backing of Newsweek, The New Republic, Time and Life all of which had been disparaging of Eisenhower’s apparent hesitancy in embracing the space race they had done so much to create. If there was any opposition to the new manned space programme, it remains terribly well hidden, and even by 1962, Newsweek was reporting that many reporters “are under the temptation to function as rooters for ‘The Team’ – a role abhorrent to most newsmen.”
With the announcement of the Mercury Seven, there was a subtle change in emphasis on the way that space news and features were handled. Up to this point, space had been largely a political story handled by Washington reporters. It stayed a political mainstay during the Nixon/Kennedy election race. However, the growing amount of activity at NASA’s Langley and Cape Canaveral facilities, plus the endless round of astronaut visits to the spacecraft manufacturers up and down the country called for active media management from NASA, and the emergence of a new breed of space reporter who understood the scientific and engineering complexities, but could synthesise them for mass audiences.

Of course, NASA had to maintain a positive public perception if the American public was going to support the agency’s need for billions of Federal dollars to be spent on manned exploration of space. The agency had a good cohort of Governmental PR personnel to call on under the Eisenhower administration. Public relations as a government practice had grown exponentially in the 1950s, and in 1957, the US Civil Service Commission listed 679 personnel as ‘Information and Editorial Employees’ – somewhat more than the numbers of DC news reporters. Walter T Bonney, head of Public Affairs for the NACA took on the same role at NASA. The 1958 Space Act stated that NASA must “provide for the widest practicable and appropriate dissemination of information concerning its activities and accomplishments.” Within months, Bonney had one of the largest public affairs teams in government – over 100 people supporting an engineering and scientific team of some 8,000 NASA employees. It had a dual aim of providing up-front material for journalists to use on every aspect of the space programme, and also a remit to answer media questions “so that reporters won’t besiege the administrator and other management.” Once the Astronauts had been announced, the Public Affairs team also took on the role of barrier between reporters and their prey.

By January 1959, all media enquiries were referred to Bonney’s office and that all material for release, no matter what its source, had to be routed through his Office of Public Information at least a week prior to release. This was significantly ahead of its time in terms of news management and could have caused untold reporting problems had not the media been quite so prepared to take NASA’s pronouncements at face value. Yet given the vast amount of information that NASA provided on an almost daily basis to reporters (the pre-launch press release for Alan Shepard’s 15 minute sub-orbital flight ran to 22 pages for instance), it is hardly surprising that they were so unchallenging. This was an entirely new scientific and technological area: NASA had the best engineering brains and they were planning to deliver a completely new engineering challenge. They simply overwhelmed most journalists with the sheer quantity of available material. But the material was largely technical or procedural. Almost from the outset, NASA devoted its media machine to scientific and engineering issues as well as the logistics of appointments and launches. Personal information about the astronauts swiftly became the remit of Life magazine.

As coverage moved to Cape Canaveral in May 1959 NASA fought an uneasy battle with the Air Force on how to accommodate the needs of the media without compromising national security. The Air Force was all for a media blackout: almost impossible to impose as rockets flashed across the Florida sky. NASA, on the other hand, took the view that it had a duty to report all activities – success or failure. The philosophy of ‘do first, talk second’ became a mantra, with the aim of making known the facts of any launch, and Congressional information and any supplier contract award promptly and accurately. This was 180 degrees removed from the Soviet policy of ‘Do first....and only if it’s a success, spin the story.’

The new NASA facilities being planned for Cape Canaveral were on Merritt Island. However, the early satellite and Mercury’s manned launches took place from the Cape Canaveral Air Force station using an Air Force-run launch pad and blockhouse. After the early very public failures of the Vanguard launches, the Air Force was doubly wary of allowing reporters to cover tests on site, or indeed provide any pre-launch information. However, journalists are generally well-networked, and most knew when a rocket test was likely and even if not officially invited to witness the test, would do so from beyond the reach of the Air Force Cocoa Beach. By the time of the Mercury flights, the Air Force was forced to back down as the TV networks and reporters from all across the US successfully lobbied NASA for access to the launch sites. However, the constant stream of missile tests and even defence satellite launches were conducted, as far as possible, beyond the reach of the media.

At NASA Bonney decreed: “The distinction between publicity and public information must be kept constantly in mind. Publicity to manipulate or ‘sell’ facts or images of a product, activity, viewpoint or personality to create a favourable impression, has no place in the NASA programme. The essential aim of our information work is to furnish Congress and the media with facts – unvarnished facts – about the progress of NASA programmes.” This may have worked in the conservative Eisenhower era, and worked alongside a massive get-out clause in terms of the astronauts’ Life contract. But it had no place after 1960 when space was wrapped up into JFK’s overall ‘New Frontier’ plan. NASA’s administrators and senior managers were political appointments. Bonney moved on the day before JFK took office. Glennan was replaced by Jim Webb.

If NASA was still learning its way in news management, the media were learning their way in reporting space too. A new breed of reporter was emerging, trained largely in the post-Sputnik era. Reporters had mastered a vast amount of scientific and technological complexity, and were still deciding whether to educate the public or merely report events. Some, such as William Hines at the Washington Star and Reg Turnill at the BBC chose the former, but most took the latter route, preferring to hang out at Cocoa Beach in thrall to that new breed of celebrity: the astronaut. NBC’s Jay Barbree was a prime example. His memoir describes the free-flowing relationship between reporters and astronauts beyond the confines of the Cape Canaveral ranges. There was a strong code of respect from the reporters to the new celebrities: astronauts are never asked for information, they have to volunteer it; reporters don’t speak until spoken to; and the party lifestyle, including many women, much drinking and a lot of roaring around in sports cars never, ever, makes it into print or on the air. Thus the image of the seven All-American heroes was never tarnished. James Schefter reflects that this was simply the way journalism operated at the time. “There was an unwritten gentlemen’s agreement between reporters and the astronauts. If it didn’t get entered on a police blotter, it wasn’t a story” The impression is that the reporters were hungry for stories and that anything to do with space was a prime assignment. The ‘collegiate’ atmosphere at the Cape and Langley that drew together a community of astronauts, engineers, hotel owners, reporters, waiters, car salesmen and everyone involved in the enterprise was fragile and relied on a collective management. It would quickly come crashing down if a reporter shattered the great illusion. NASA had to put no rules in place to manage the manufactured presentation of the astronauts’ image. The media managed themselves.

That image was brought most fulsomely to life through the pages of Life, Henry R Luce’s large-format, picture-led magazine that carried his Cold War, anti-Soviet crusade into the homes of millions of Americans and others around the world each week. It became NASA’s mouthpiece in the popular media . Certainly the publication, which was an outlet for Luce’s unbridled patriotism enabled NASA to get around Bonney’s dictum that all public information should be ‘unvarnished’. In mid-1959, ironically at Bonney’s suggestion, NASA invited the press to bid for the exclusive rights to cover the Mercury seven astronauts’ personal stories. Bonney knew that his team of Washington civil servants and former engineers simply didn’t have the experience to meet the demands of the press on personal rather than programme issues. His team’s background with the NACA had been developed through promoting aircraft engineering advances since 1915 – and doing so in a quiet, low-key manner. Promoting the Mercury 7 was an entirely different proposition and needed very different skills.

In the event, the low-bidder Life won, and set about depicting the seven, and their families, as America’s perfect citizens. Prose and photographs combined to build a compelling narrative blending the inherent drama of the programme with the kitchen sink drama of the wives and children standing behind their men. The contract was good for NASA as it bound the astronauts as a group into one coherent, controlled storyline, enabling the agency to popularise the space programme without significant cost, while it helped boost sales of the magazine to beyond seven million copies each week. Indeed, research at the time suggests the reading figures for the publication were six or seven times that, making it the most influential media instrument in the pre-TV era. While other magazines complained of being rather frozen out by the exclusive contract, NASA could contain the personal narrative and ensure a positive image of the astronauts and of Mercury. NASA had a contractual clause approving all ‘personal stories’ and the ‘apple pie America’ text was backed by Life’s key differentiator high quality, feature photography.

Many of the best Life pictures of the Astronauts and their families, including those reproduced here, were taken by Ralph Morse, a Life staffer who developed a close relationship with the Mercury Seven and their wives. NASA had access to all Life images, and many were syndicated for other journalists, enabling the agency to keep control of the visual image of the Astronauts as well as what appeared in print . Throughout an 11-year relationship, Life‘s uncritical coverage of the space programme gave NASA an unprecedented platform for presenting a positive spin on manned spaceflight and, in time, its race to the moon. What is most notable about Life is that its readership was two thirds women. Thus the space race moved from the male perspective of Newsweek and Popular Mechanics into a much wider popular consciousness. There’s no indication that this was a deciding factor in awarding the contract to Life – low bidder status appears to have carried the day. However, being able to reach such a wide audience was a definite if unplanned benefit to NASA.

Under Luce, its fiercely patriotic proprietor, Life set a heroic tone of voice for its coverage of the astronauts, one that was to align significantly with Kennedy’s ‘New Frontier’ agenda through his election campaign and into his Presidency. In the Introduction to We Seven , a contemporaneous account of the Mercury Seven with the strong hand of Life holding the pen, John Dille refers to the astronauts as: “part engineer, part explorer, part scientist, part guinea pig – and part hero.” They are complimented on their “rare standards of courage and stamina, skill and alertness, vision and intelligence.” The men were described as “The raw material for the great adventure.” They were bound as a team, working together, helping each other, but each was filled with “driving ambition.” Unlike the Soviet cosmonauts, each was engaged in a “daring and honest gamble, representatives of a free and open society.” NASA provided the fact: the hyperbole came from Life and was picked up by the rest of the media. It happened to resonate with the campaign plan Robert Kennedy was putting together for his brother’s run for the Presidency.

As NASA’s activities were accelerating, so was the Presidential race between Kennedy and Nixon. Kennedy’s vigorous campaign and decision to compete in the primaries won a significant public groundswell and saw off the challenge of Stevenson before the Democrat Convention. Johnson had chosen not to compete in the primaries but felt his wide and deep Congressional network would be enough to earn him the nomination when the candidates convened in Los Angeles. The media was to play a key role in deciding the candidate. Johnson challenged Kennedy to a televised debate – and the erudite, vigorous and well-prepared Kennedy won handsomely. Johnson’s national support eroded leaving him only his power base in the south west. Nixon had used his Vice Presidency to establish a national power base and was never seriously challenged for the Republican nomination.

Kennedy accepted the Democratic nomination by criticising Nixon’s old ideas and “pledge to the status quo.” Noting that the world was changing and that “The old ways will not do”, Kennedy outlined his “New Frontier” platform, with echoes of the New Deal and the Fair Deal, but focused on the future. Reflecting that he was standing (in Los Angeles) on what was once the last frontier for the pioneers, he noted that America now stood on “a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils”, beyond which stood the “uncharted areas of science and space, unsolved problems of peace and war.” His clarion call was for Americans to be pioneers of the New Frontier through “new invention, innovation, imagination, decision.” A vigorous space policy appeared to fit seamlessly within that platform.

As the campaign moved towards the Presidential election space became a battle ground for the two in the media. Nixon initially held the space high ground. Seen as more pro-space and pro-missile than Eisenhower, the Vice President had already engaged Khrushchev head-on in the ‘kitchen debate’ in Moscow. But when it came to campaigning a year later, the Republican nominee came up against a staunch Cold Warrior in Kennedy. Their own early blows were played out not in the national TV debates, but in the pages of the trade magazine Missiles and Rockets. The journal asked the candidates to respond to a series of statements on space and defence, the first asking if they recognized that the US was in a space race with Russia? Kennedy, setting his stall for the next three years said: “We are in a strategic space race...and we have been losing. We cannot run second in this vital race. To insure peace and freedom, we must be first.” Immediately Kennedy set the rhetorical tone that aligned with the voice of the media over the previous two years.

One might have expected Nixon to stick to Eisenhower’s conservative pragmatism, but on issues such as the missile gap and space exploration, Nixon had more radical views than Eisenhower and had been constrained by the President’s more taciturn approach. Stressing his independence from his leader’s position he responded by agreeing the US was in a race, but pointed out it was in the lead in terms of “instrumentation, communications, electronics, reliability and guidance.” For Nixon the race was certainly on and he concluded by saying: “We will continue to maintain a clear-cut lead in the race for space.”

Missiles and space remained a warm issue throughout the campaign. But neither candidate drew any real difference between the weapons of war, the weapons of prestige or even scientific exploration. Kennedy continually stressed the ‘missile gap’ even after briefings from CIA Director Allen Dulles ensured he and Johnson knew the true extent of Soviet missile power. But Kennedy was shrewd: a record of his speech to an American Legion Convention in October 1960 showed him consistently referring to old reports and views to stress the missile gap: a Rockefeller report of 1958; Republican testimony that same year to Johnson’s Senate Preparedness Committee, and arch-hawk Lt. General James Gavin’s comment: “We are in mortal danger. The missile lag portends serious trouble.” All the views were genuine and Kennedy dutifully recorded them – knowing them to be out of date but supportive of his cause.

It may be argued that what won Kennedy victory was the media – notably the contrast in the candidate performances in the first televised debate, broadcast from Chicago on September 26th, 1960. Nixon, still recovering from an infected knee looked tired, underweight and ill in front of the 80 million viewers . Refusing television makeup, he also appeared sweaty with a heavy five o’clock shadow. His performance was less sure-footed that of his competitor. Kennedy won the debate. Though Nixon’s performance improved in the later three debates, they never won such a large television audience. First impressions last, and this event may just have swayed the election.

While pledging strength against the USSR in missile defence, stating that he would never “dare tempt them with weakness” in his inauguration speech, Kennedy sought co-operation in space: “Together let us explore the stars.” For a brief moment, the space race was off. But reaction to Gagarin’s flight ensured it would be rapidly resumed. On April 12th, reports appeared across the country such as the Chicago Daily Tribune’s ‘Reds orbit and land man’ . Details were sketchy. But it was clear that the US had lost another lap in the space race. Just how weak Kennedy’s position was in relation to space was clear a day later. The Chicago Daily Tribune’s Philip Dodd reported on Kennedy’s reaction at a White House press conference. “We are behind in the space race with Russia,” Kennedy stated. Dodd noted Kennedy’s comments that the news would get worse before it got better, and it would be some time before the US caught up. Tellingly, the report picked up on Kennedy’s telegram to Khrushchev in which the President said it was “his sincere desire that...our nations can work together to obtain the greatest benefit to all mankind.” That view hardened in the coming weeks.

Hindsight would have it that Kennedy stood before Congress on May 25th 1961 with the moon landing at the centre piece of a directive that swiftly galvanised 400,000 Americans in every state of the Union into a relentless drive to the moon where this time, the Soviets would finally be beaten. However, it is worth deconstructing the myth to look at the reality of Kennedy’s speech and the degree of direction it actually provided. Undoubtedly the speech was meant to revive the spirit of optimism of the early weeks of the Presidency and, in the run-up to the June summit with Khrushchev was planned to show Khrushchev that Kennedy was not the callow youth the older leader took him for. But the speech gained so much resonance across the world and across four decades of regular repetition not as a whole, but because one section, towards the end, was pounced upon by the media and endlessly replayed – especially after Kennedy’s death, and most especially once the pledge to put a man on the moon and return him safely to earth before this decade is out had been achieved.

The speech was a set-piece: it was unusual for the President to address Congress directly, but Kennedy valued the public platform and knew it was essential to recapture the high ground at a time when his new Presidency could lose all momentum and credibility due to the body blows inflicted on it by the Bay of Pigs failure and Gagarin’s success. On May 25th, the Washington Post remarked on the short notice given that the President would address Congress in person saying: “There was no public expectation that the President would speak on urgent national needs.” The article later stated: “Ever since the Cuban invasion fiasco, the bloom has been off the bright rose of the early days of the Administration. Now may be the time to recreate the spirit of the January 30th State of the Nation Speech.” The networks were primed to take the speech live and transcripts were made available for print journalists to have as soon as Kennedy stepped down from the podium. But the moon announcement actually comprised only the last fifth of the speech. Before reaching that most famous passage, Kennedy had talked about stimulating the economy at home, fostering global progress by fighting the advance of communism, extending the US Information Agency and tripling the budget for fallout shelters at home – essentially all the issues raised in the media and rejected by Eisenhower a little over two years previously.

The space passage came after calls for an Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, almost as an afterthought. That’s certainly how the Los Angeles Times reported it the following day, in an editorial that was distinctly critical of Kennedy’s address. Robert T Harman wrote: “We expected extraordinary proposals....but he outlines rather ordinary plans...leaked to favourite TV and newspaper reporters days and weeks ago, so there was little impact of surprise. (The speech) was something of a dud....slightly spiced with a 10-year space adventure which Mr. Kennedy didn’t seem too certain of himself.”

The speech did receive national front page coverage and the space pledge drew the headlines. But equal focus on the analysis was placed on the other elements of the speech. Don Shannon, writing the lead news article for the Los Angeles Times, for instance noted that Kennedy had “urged Congress to back a multi-billion programme to put an American on the moon and counter the Soviet Union on earth.” He reflected Congress was split on the ‘omnibus’ plan and “noticeably cool on all except his call for a US challenge in space.” It is perhaps unsurprising that the Los Angeles Times was critical of Kennedy’s speech. California had backed Nixon in the 1960 election (just), and the Times was noted for its conservative stance.

The Democrat-leaning Washington Post was slightly more positive – but only slightly. In its news lead, John G Norris reported: “He (Kennedy) committed the United States to an all-out race to overtake Russia in space and to be the first to put men on the moon...”It is time”, said the President, for a great new American enterprise; time for this nation to take a clearly-leading role in space achievement.” The news report chimed with the intent of the President, picking up on his request for a spending boost for space, arms and the jobless, but undercut this when stating that the proposals would be unsatisfactory to liberals since they favoured big business. Equally Norris noted, they would not satisfy conservatives since the spending boosts would not go far enough. Interestingly, in the ‘Freedom Doctrine’ editorial within the same issue, going to the moon does not even rate a mention.

That pledge is often reported today as a directive for NASA. But that was not within Kennedy’s power. Instead Kennedy was posing a question – would Congress agree to the proposal and would it authorise the funding? Congress could have said no, indeed with just 15 minutes of actual space flight behind them and a very uncertain path to the moon, logic appears to have been outmanoeuvred by the strength of Kennedy’s rhetoric. Two republican Representatives are quoted opposing Kennedy’s call for support: The Los Angeles Times reports Representative Steven Derounian from New York saying: “Not once did I hear him say a word pledging that we would not retreat one inch from the communist tyrants. This was a tired speech full of apologies.” Fellow member of the House, Representative Glenard P Lipscomb added: “This was a lot of words with not enough justification of needs.”

A counterview comes from James Baughman, biographer of American media giant Henry R Luce, the proprietor of Life, Time, and Fortune magazines. In an email exchange with this writer, Baughman recalled his research on Luce and the space programme, noting: “I’m struck, even now, by how few sceptics I could find, in the press and politics, regarding the space programme. I can think of only one senator, Norris Cotton of New Hampshire, who gently questioned JFK’s man on the moon proposal.”

With the hindsight of the President’s assassination and the subsequent success in landing a man on the moon in 1969, the rest of the speech has been forgotten. The final section has been raised to a mythical level at odds with its immediate reaction. It actually took a lot of legwork on Capitol Hill by Vice President Johnson, already the father of space legislation, to ensure that Congress supported Kennedy’s man on the moon funding request. This was achieved by promising a space-industry job boost, with the programme of works for Gemini and Apollo divided up among contractors in every State of the Union.

Kennedy was driven by political motives unrelated to any commitment to a moon landing. He had no great scientific or even romantic attachment to the race to the moon, but had done his homework prior to the May 25th speech. On April 20thth, just after the Bay of Pigs fiasco, Kennedy wrote to Johnson, the space expert in the Administration, asking for the answers to five questions: “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 programme which promises dramatic results in which we could win?” Johnson assembled a committee of advisors including Frank Stanton, head of the broadcaster CBS, Donald Cook of American electric Power, George Brown from engineering company, Brown and Root, Air force Missile Chief Bernard Schriever, Senator Kerr, the newly-appointed chairman of the Senate Space Committee and NASA Administrator Jim Webb. In both a telephone conversation with Johnson and through a detailed five page memo, Von Braun provided a detailed argument to go to the moon. Johnson was convinced, and pulled the rest of the panel towards his view.

By April 23rd, Johnson had provided the answers and Kennedy had shifted his position from his immediate comments following Gagarin’s launch. At his press conference that day, he said: “If we can get to the moon before the Russians, then we should.” Johnson’s panel had convinced Kennedy that a lunar landing was viable for the Americans – but not for the Russians who were way behind on technology and would need an unfeasibly large rocket to lift their larger, heavier technology out of earth orbit and on the way to the moon. That panel was probably swayed more by Johnson’s strength of feeling than by a logical belief that a moon landing could be achieved within a decade. Even his phrasing: “Before this decade is out”, gave Kennedy a get-out card. Even if he fulfilled a complete two-term presidency, Kennedy would almost certainly be out of office before the moon landing. If it failed, it would not be on his watch – and potentially could be laid at the feet of Johnson, the Administration’s most persuasive space advocate. And that would likely be the case if the Soviets got there first as well.

Whereas the media had set the space agenda for Eisenhower, Kennedy had turned the tables. He was now attempting to set the agenda, using the New Frontier of space as a way to regain standing and challenge the Soviets to what Wolfe describes as ‘single combat’ on the Cold War battlefield. Domestically, the speech coalesced all thinking around space on one goal. The public, press and networks were now focused on one message that summed up the “invention, innovation imagination, decision” of Americans. The President’s claim that: “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” recalled the romance and adventure of Lewis and Clark.

Coupled with the relief and outpouring of positivity that Shepard’s successful Mercury flight had achieved, and the carefully-nuanced image of an All-American Astronaut elite ready to struggle against the unknown travails of space, the mixture was potent. Congress would never turn Kennedy down, and the perceived failure to get an American into space first could be turned into a positive: a catalyst for America’s next great adventure. However, not all the elements were truly aligned yet, and a Gallup poll completed as Kennedy spoke showed that the public remained sceptical of the President’s pledge being delivered. Asked whether participants viewed the US or Russia as being ahead in the Space Race, the response was evenly split. And on which would be first to send a man to the moon, 34% said the US, 33% said Russia and 33% didn’t know . There was clearly still much work to be done on public opinion.

Rep. Lipscomb’s comments on the speech: “This was a lot of words with not enough justification of needs” were prescient. Kennedy had put the building blocks in place to turn the media and public opinion on space from adversary through ally to involved partner. He had set a goal that defined the next lap of the space race. He had made space a core part of the Administration’s policy. He had control of the agency that would deliver space success. But still there were sceptics in the media and in Congress. The US had just 15 minutes of space experience and was clearly still some way behind the Soviets. The moon seemed an awfully long way away. What would make the difference was action. As the final chapter will show, that ‘action’ came in the form of the flight of Friendship 7.

the challenge of teaching: attitude and aptitude...on both sides

2011-01-18T02:37:00.000-08:00

I'm beginning to reflect on my first term of undergraduate teaching: an experience I enjoyed more than I expected.

Last term I co-convened a module on US Foreign Policy to be delivered to second year politics and history undergrads. Over 90 signed up for the module, and though lecture attendee numbers dropped off dramatically in the last couple of weeks of term (when essay writing was really biting), for the most part, the sessions were well attended. the scary part was that all but a few of the students were born after the fall of the Berlin wall. For them, the Cold War was history.

Being dropped in to deliver 11 lectures and half a dozen seminar sessions was a terrific first teaching experience - and being older than the average newbie really helped me. One poor chap called me 'Dr. Shanahan' throughout the term - and wouldn't be disabused of the fact that I was still some way short of completing my PhD. Because I'm mid-40s and have a fair bit of conference presenting and training behind me, most of the rest simply assumed I was a regular lecturer.....little did they know that I was hitting the books pretty hard each week to shape my thoughts, keep a week ahead of them and deliver something that was even half-way convincing.

Some weeks went better than others. The Truman Doctrine, Marshall Plan, Communism at Home and Kennedy's Khrushchev summit all elicited interesting questions and comments and rather more interaction from the students than, say, the sessions on NSC 68 or Eisenhower's Presidency - you can tell which topics get covered at A Level! The sessions where I felt I was rather talking to myself for an hour were tougher - particularly one or two of the earlier ones which were followed by videos rather than a live seminar. I still find it weird to see students standing up and walking out before the session's over - not while I'm lecturing, but both during the screenings and worse still, while their colleagues were debating in the seminar sessions. I find that quite rude and it's an aspect of the modern student life that I'd reverse if I had the chance.

I'm none too impressed either by the students who habitually turn up 15 minutes late for the lecture. My habit is simply to stop (often in mid sentence) when they arrive and pick up from where I've left off only when they've finally sat down. Most got the message, but there were one or two rhino-skinned characters who really didn't seem to care. The lecture theatre had doors on the front on either side. So one week, after the latest flurry of latecomers had arrived with the usual 'Sorry we're late!' sentiments, I disappeared out one door, walked back in the other, paused, looked up at the students and went: "Sorry, I'm late." Sadly, my poor attempt at sarcasm went right over the heads of most - while some didn't even appear to notice.

In terms of lecturing, there were two other changes I noted from my days as an undergrad. The first was the large number of students who arrived with laptops and netbooks and proceeded to type up my every utterance and every word of every slide. I could never quite reconcile how they had time to listen to, or digest, anything as they seemed totally absorbed in note taking. At the other end of the sphere was a small group who seemed far more concerned to keep up a low level of conversational buzz throughout the whole session. It was the same people week in and week out and frankly, it was pretty tiresome. I don't think I'd ever have had that level of disrespect for my lecturers or, particularly. my fellow students. Thankfully, it was a very small group and most students were both attentive and encouraging.

Presiding over seminar sessions (which were structured debates) and then marking the follow-up essays was an eye-opener too. At the start of term, students rushed to sign up to debate sessions. But as the weeks rolled round and the need to work as a team to structure a good argument kicked in, so did the propensity for some students to try and wriggle out of the work. It was quite amazing how many serious accidents and misfortunes befell not the students, but generally their nearest and dearest, with the result that they couldn't complete their assignments. I have no doubt that some of the reasons were genuine, but I swiftly became quite cynical as people simply didn't turn up to their presentation sessions and then submitted weak essays, often late.

The debates were often quite good. Generally there's be one or two really good speakers per team....while the rest had a tendency to read from a script or address their slides rather than the audience (or both). Again, this generation of students appears to be weaker than my generation when it comes to public speaking - and structuring a debate. But there again, I went to an independent school and we were pushed into fairly regular public speaking from a pretty young age. This generation seems to have far greater swagger than mine. But when it comes to a pretty critical aspect of education, a lot less confidence.

It has been interesting to see just how spoon fed some (by no means all) students want to be. in the early weeks I was continually badgered for my slides and asked to provide my lecture notes. But this isn't like the American system (yet). There is no foreign policy 101: my notes tended to be scribbles for me and the slides tended to contain more pictures than words - copying them faithfully wasn't going to gain an A in the essay or exam. They simply reflected my view at a certain time and were intended to stimulate the students to think for themselves about the subject matter.

Some certainly grasped that. I marked some really strong essays demonstrating incredibly sharp minds among these budding historians. Many of the essays were a real pleasure to read and gave the feeling that people had gained something from the class. But I marked some stinkers too - poorly researched, full of factual errors, incredibly badly written and with no coherent argument. In some cases, I wondered how the writers had got so far through the educational system - and why on earth they were studying a subject they clearly had no aptitude for. I first went to university when it was rather more elitist, but I began to think over Christmas, when marking a pretty mediocre batch of essays, that perhaps the pendulum has swung too far.

The problem for middle-ranking universities like mine is that they need to keep student numbers up - more so than ever now as Government funding dries up. The result is that they're far more likely to take a chance on a less gifted student now, and will do all they can to keep the cohort solid once students have signed up and paid the fees. That seems even more apparent when it comes to foreign students - of course, a great source of revenue. My class was absolutely a rainbow nation - and generally all the better for that. But, in some cases, I had students whose grasp of English was so poor that I really didn't know if they were good, bad or indifferent as scholars since their written English simply did not enable them to express themselves properly. However, there are always surprises. Some of the very best essays I marked came from International students while I was just about to recommend one student should sign up for the free seminars on academic writing for students with English as a foreign language when I realised the student was, in fact, white, middle class, British and a product of our own education system.

The last surprise was how few students could be bothered to come and collect their essays. Even during my Masters, I'd be knocking on the lecturer's door as soon as I knew one of my essays was ready for collection. When I handed over to my co-convener last week, I also handed him probably half of the essays I'd marked.

I learned a lot - and there's much I can work on to make me a far better lecturer going forward. It has taken me some time to get used to the changing attitudes of students and the differing aptitudes that are bound to exist within a class of 90+ students. But I've come through this experience feeling very positive - and with a real appetite for more.

Peer to Peer peering

2010-10-26T09:23:00.001-07:00

Today was lecture five of 11 and the the Peer-reviewed session - though my 'Peer' was a tall, distinguished professor (as opposed to my short undistinguished self). For the second time in five weeks, my slides stuck - but I just busked through the first part of the session....and then got a student to crank the presentation on.

It helped that today's subject matter was the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan so I could talk without any great need for the slides anyway.

The students were alive, awake and chipped in usefully when asked - they're a good bunch - over 70 turned up today which, at week five on a wet windy afternoon seems pretty decent.

The immediate feedback was 'very good and no substantive criticism' - that made my day. Now it's on to NS-68 and the formation of NATO.

The demanding transition

2010-10-19T03:40:00.000-07:00

Today I'll deliver my fourth lecture on American foreign policy - 1945-62. I'm a third of the way through the teaching and we're still on...1946.

Actually the first lecture covered 150 years' of the new Republic's flirtations with the rest of the world while weeks two and three covered the US entry to World War 2 through to Kennan's Long Telegram.

Now we're moving on to the serious stuff; the real Cold War if you like. Today's romp covers the Sinews of Peace speech; Byrnes statement of "firmness" in dealing with the communist 'threat' and the various flashpoints and potential flashpoints that put the US further on edge.

More than 90 students have signed up for the module - and more than 80 of them attended last week, despite no policy of compulsory lectures and seminars at Brunel.

it seems to be going well - but I've yet to receive any formal feedback...peer assessment is next week.

Becoming more 'academic'

2010-09-09T02:49:00.000-07:00

I'm almost a year in to my PhD research but have felt for much of that time that I'm merely scratching the surface of academia. Being part-time with a fairly heavy day-job work load hasn't helped, but while I've been happy to plough my own furrow when it has come to research, I haven't - until recently - had the sense that I was really moving any further into the academic world.

Two issues have changed that in the last few weeks. First, I've picked up my first teaching assignment at Brunel, and second, I've had a paper accepted for an academic conference.

In less than three weeks' time, I'll be delivering my first lecture on a Level 2 American Foreign Policy module. I'm comfortable with the subject matter - it's either close to my main research or formed a part of my MA study. What's more daunting is the 'performance' element of teaching. There are around 90 undergrads signed up for the module - I've got plenty to say, but it's making it succinct; creating a logical flow and ensuring that the subject matter's interesting to them that's the key challenge.

With 20 years' experience in creating corporate speeches, events and presentations, I know I'll be fine once I get started. But I don't want my lecturing to either be too lame or too cheesy - and I have to say I go to bed thinking about Kennan's Long Telegram and wake with my head full of the Truman Doctrine at the moment. This is a first step for me in shifting my career focus from corporate communications to aspects of 20th Century History. I'll be assessed by a significantly more experienced lecturer, and don't want to stuff things up.

Just to add to the fun, I received a very pleasant email the other day stating that my abstract has been accepted for inclusion in the BAAS Postgraduate Conference - American Geographies - to be held at Oxford University's Rothermere Institute in November.

My abstract's at the top of this post - click on it if you want to read it: I have all the Eisenhower material and plenty from NASA's archives on the foundation of NASA - I now just need to nail down the audit trail of the primary source material on Kennedy's expediency......extra fun as I'll have no opportunity to get to Boston before the Conference!

Still, I'm just beginning to feel I'm getting a toenail through the door of academia - and it's both daunting and exhilarating.

One year down, how many to go?

2010-07-22T08:46:00.000-07:00

I've completed one academic year as a PhD student - and have been officially signed-off to continue into year two. As a part-timer, my target is to complete the PhD in five years, though secretly, I'd love to nail it inside four.

Yesterday was my Masters graduation - a nice morning in Uxbridge where, fittingly, Helen Sharman, Britain's first cosmonaut, received an honorary Doctorate for her services to science. She was based at Brunel before her trip to Mir, and I now have a research office in her old project building.....I wonder if she popped back for a nostalgic look round yesterday? The graduation marks a milestone for me: I can now firmly put the MA behind me and move forward much more deeply into the PhD research.

The high point of the first year of study was undoubtedly my visit to the US, both to NASA in Washington DC and perhaps more surprisingly, to Abilene in Kansas. I'd been working on the hypothesis that there was a direct formative effect of the media on US policy making at the beginning of the space race. But working through Eisenhower's presidential papers and the collections that surround these, it has become ever clearer that the process of presidential decision making was much more nuanced - though there were times when Ike's policy decisions really did appear to be made on the fly as he updated draft speeches and memos in the hours before meeting the NSC, briefing the press or meeting the leaders on the Hill.

So, I've moved my position somewhat. I'm still fascinated by the space race and the respective roles of the President, NASA, Congress and the media in shaping US policy. But my focus now is on the contrasts in presidential decision making between Eisenhower and Kennedy and the role the different strands of the media played in flavouring the audit trail towards decisions. I have about 1,000 pages of Eisenhower documents that I'm slowly working through, and am already thinking about a trip to Boston to put Kennedy's role in space policy under the same microscope.

Aside from getting my photographed documents into some kind of order, I'm still working through those papers and books that delve into my area of interest. I'm currently reading Harlen Makemson's 'Media, NASA and America's quest for the moon'. As to what I make of it? Well, for once I'm reading it professionally for a commissioned review piece for Spaceflight magazine. So for the moment, my thoughts remain my own.

The great lurch forward

2010-06-16T07:26:00.000-07:00

So I'm back from my trip to Washington DC and Abilene, Kansas and have approaching a thousand pages of documentation to analyse - or at least digital pictures of the paperwork of space policy making under Eisenhower.

Working my way through his own papers, those of Press Secretary Jim Hagerty and his personal secretary (and Assistant Press Secretary) Ann Whitman was a thoroughly fascinating voyage - and I hope I've absorbed even a tenth of what I read.

The 10 days in the US have made a change in my thinking around the project. No longer can I see a direct cause/effect relationship between what the media printed or broadcast and the actions Ike took. The relationship is more subtle - and filtered through the likes of the Dulles brothers, Neil McElroy and Donald Quarles, congressional big shots such as LBJ - and most especially the president's scientific advisers - Jim Killian and George Kristiakowsky. Ike used his press conferences as a sounding board for policy - but used his pre-briefings for these public engagements as opportunities to make policy on the run. While the President wasn't immune from the impact of the media, he dis not respond directly to it, but built standpoints grounded in the opinions of a very close circle around him.

I've much to do to crystallise these thoughts, but the thesis is lurching towards an investigation in Presidential decision making and what role the media took in this. I suspect there'll be a huge contrast between Eisenhower and Kennedy and look forward to making a similar deep dive into the Kennedy papers next year.

Thoughts from the former colonies

2010-06-06T08:42:00.000-07:00

I'm sitting in my hotel room on the campus of Gallaudet University in Washington DC waiting to head off on my trip to Abilene, Kansas, and the Eisenhower Presidential Library. I've been here since Wednesday night and it has been a very busy few days - built around two days in the NASA HQ Historical Referenced Collection. I had a flying visit to the Collection back in 2006 - but it was literally a couple of hours. This time round, I was at NASA HQ all day Thursday and for most of Friday too. Many many thanks to Jane Odom for making me so welcome (and taking me out of the bowels of the building!) in what was clearly a very trying week for her, and to Liz Suckow for her great patience and understanding in keeping me stocked with research boxes and escorting me around the labyrinthine corridors of the NASA underground world.

I never thought I'd get back-ache from research, but hunching over and photographing documents all day has done nothing for my already rubbish posture. However, the volume of material I've collected on this trip means that digital images are essential - I couldn't afford the extra baggage charges for many hundreds of pages of photocopying.

So, what have I gleaned from my tow days with my nose stuck in papers from '57-60? Well, first, that I spent too much time reading the material and not enough copying it for later analysis....well at least at first!

While the Sputnik 1 media coverage and IGY papers reflected much I'd already seen, several interesting seams of information opened up.

For one thing, it was interesting to trace the challenges NASA's Head of Public information Walt Bonney faced as NACA became NASA and the interest in space exploded. Papers show he was understaffed - especially when it came to press officers - and thus NASA's attempt at image making was largely ineffective. The media managers were reactive - responding to hundreds of calls and an average of 45 in person requests every day - and were a team of around half a dozen; the field officers had a tendency to go native - either favouring their chosen beat reporters and correspondents or working to the agendas of local management rather than NASA HQ. As Scheer took over the wider Public Affairs mandate, his memos became increasingly waspish as he sought to put NASA image management on the front foot. I'm not sure he was entirely successful.

In terms of the influence on Presidential decision making, it's fascinating to see the moves and jostling among Presidential advisors - and to see how quickly opinion changed as events over-ran the most solid of predictions from the 'experts'. Frnma Defense-mentality of no information on launches for instance to all kinds of agenda-fuelled lobbying, it's clear to see the President had more opinion than he could reasonably deal with in heading off the post-Sputnik outcry and putting America's efforts in space on a firm footing. Kennedy may get the credit, but he does largely seem to have stolen ike's clothes on this.

The next few days at Abilene will be pivotal in fixing my views on Eisenhower and his process of policy making - especially how the media influenced it, if at all (I still believe it did).

Finally a point on Gallaudet. For four days, I've felt totally a minority here. All the staff sign and many of the people I've met on the campus, from the breakfast waiting staff to people on the shuttle bus have little or no hearing. The common language of campus is ASL - and everybody here, hearing impaired or not, signs elegantly and eloquently. I don't. I have one word: 'thankyou' which I've used a lot. This is an impressive educational facility and has had a strong effect in shaking me out of my communication complacency over the past few days. I think that's a pretty good thing.

Sputnik Mania

2010-04-30T01:18:00.000-07:00

Finally got my hands on the film Sputnik Mania yesterday and watched it last night. While Hoffman does well to pull together the narrative strands around the story, I was slightly disappointed by his grasp of the history and glossing of some of the facts.

There's little of the battle that raged within the US armed forces as to which would send the first US satellite into space, and too much clever editing has constructed a narrative to fit the film rather than the facts in reference to exactly what happened when and as a consequence of what - Von Braun, for instance is pictured at the launch of the Jupiter/Redstone, when he was in Washington, and huis Disney programmes from the mid-50s areplayed out as if they were aired during the Sputnik Autumn.

While my thesis is that the media not Joe Public created the 'mania' the film's line suggested that the reaction to the launch was merely a reaction to the US loss of prestige. It missed some of the subtlty of the Democrat reaction as the likes of Johnson and Symington manoevered into a strong position for the fight for the 1960 Presidential Candidate nomination.

Though the film was fun to watch, it took an angle on the Sputnik story - good for a film maker: bad for hostorographical research.

Progress...slow progress

2010-04-06T01:17:00.000-07:00

Last week was a good week for the PhD work.

First, I heard I'd been awarded a $500 travel grant from the Eisenhower Foundation to help with my visit to Abilene. Then, I made contact with two of the key names on my research hit list.

First up was Walter Mondale - former US VP, but, for this work, most interesting as a vocal critic of the Apollo space program. We've been exchanging emails for a few weeks. And, while he initially found my line of questioning judgmental, he has now answered most of those questions - and raised a few further questions for me.

Second, I reached a guy called Brian O'Leary. Today, an authority on green issues, but at the end of the 60s, a NASA astronaut in training. O'Leary quit the program, frustrated by NASA, frustrated by the lack of opportunity for true science. His insight into NASA's purpose and image making will be revealing.

First corporate sponsorship recorded

2010-03-03T07:01:00.000-08:00

I'm off to Abilene.....or at least the planned trip is beginning to turn into reality.

Having got news at the end of last week that I'd won a BAAS travel award, I started this week with the great news that a company I've freelanced for over the past four years had agreed to sponsor part of my research. I banked the cheque this morning - thank you very much the fabulous CMS Cameron McKenna LLP.

I've also applied for funding direct to the Eisenhower Foundation who manage travel grant applications to visit the Eisenhower Presidential Library. If I'm lucky enough to receive an award, that will pretty much cover a 10-day 'smash and grab' trip to the NASA archive in DC and the Eisenhower facility. My plan is to get hold of as much primary source material as possible - and then analyse it and turn it into my opening chapter over the course of the rest of 2010.

I'm still working my way through Divine's book on the fallout from Sputnik, but planning ahead, have treated myself to a new book today - a repackaging of Mailer's writing around Apollo 11. My copy of 'Moonfire' should arrive in about a month.

My research seems to be sparking interest among a few of the key influencers that I want to reach - I even had an email from former US Vice President Mondale this afternoon offering to answer my questions. Man may not be going beyond earth orbit any time soon, but manned space exploration remains a subject of interest open to rigorous debate.

It's a good news day!

2010-02-24T06:06:00.001-08:00

I've just found out that I've secured my first research funding - a BAAS Postgraduate Short-Term Travel Award for 2010. It'll be in the £ hundreds not £ thousands - but seeing as I'm funding everything from net income at the moment, every little helps.

While I'm far from writing anything to do with the thesis, I'm beginning to think myself through what needs to happen much more clearly. It's progress: it's slow...but it's progress.

Anyway, with a bit of funding in place - and an application to the Eisenhower Foundation wining its way to the US, I can start planning this summer's research trip to the Eisenhower Presidential Library in Abilene, Kansas.

academia.edu

2010-02-10T07:22:00.000-08:00

I now have a page on academia.edu which you can find here.

Tumbling Constellations

2010-02-01T11:48:00.001-08:00

The request by President Obama for Congress to squash NASA's Constellation programme - the return to the moon by 2020 - comes as no surprise in these financially straitened times. Congress may, of course, deny the President's request, since around 30,000 jobs are tied to the programme. However, the likelihood is that it could be many decades before any American sets foot on the moon again.

This saddens me. While never universal, the spirit of hope, excitement and willingness to battle technological challenges that spurred America to the moon in the 60s was magical. it briefly united the world in awe and wonder. Equally rapidly, the optimism vanished into the mire of Vietnam, civil unrest, Nixon's Watergate folly and a global oil crisis. The quest for technological supremacy has long gone. Indeed, the unique crystallisation of public, political and media will, underpinned by technological white heat that delivered Apollo has gone for ever. Spurred by the Cold War contest, the alignment of political ambition with engineering advancement which delivered the State-technocracy of the space programme from Mercury through Gemini to Apollo will never be repeated.

Does NASA have a future? Probably, but not as the sometimes bellicose, often defensive and always byzantine keeper of the manned spaceflight flame. Hopefully it will emerge as the catalyst for a new era: a commercial space race. But one wonders if it has the ability or even appetite for such as change?

Strangely, this loss of the frontier spirit in America may spur on a new generation of lunar explorers - what are the chances of a Chinese expedition to the moon in the next decade?

It's getting brutal out there

2010-02-01T07:44:00.000-08:00

Not the greatest Monday so far.

I woke to two pieces of news on Radio Four's Today Programme: first, higher education spending is set to be slashed in the UK - never good news for a research student, especially one lacking in funding; and second, that in the US, President Obama aims to cut back NASA's budget to the point where its plans to revisit the moon must be in jeopardy. Neither piece of news was much good for my PhD - not least since part of the justification for the work was to provide an insight on how NASA/the Administration needs to act to ensure public support for a new moon race.

I suppose there are two ways to take such news: the first is to stick one's head in the sand and plough on as if nothing's happened. The second is to look at how I can raise the money to fund the next few years' necessary research trips. I've taken that second route.

I've started to mail out requests for sponsorship using my updated research outline to try and attract interest. I'm targeting firms that I've worked with in the past (rather than the supremely unsuccessful cold calls that have produced nothing to date).

I may hit another brick wall, but it at least feels that I'm doing something positive.

Anyway, staying on that positive note, I'm looking forward to speaking to NASA-turned-Smithsonian historian Roger Launius on Friday. He has the inside track that I've yet to reach and has been very generous in his time and interest in me to date. It'll be good to put a real person to the email contacts.

Space Politics - worth a read

2010-01-15T03:45:00.000-08:00

This Space Politics blog continues to be a very good read.

Latest reading

2010-01-14T06:53:00.000-08:00

I've now submitted a preliminary research bibliography for the PhD and think I've now completed my list of secondary source books.

The latest to land on the mat are: Chariots for Apollo - the NASA History of Manned Lunar Spaceflight to 1969 ; Sputnik: the shock of the century and Von Braun, Dreamer of Space - Engineer of War

Plenty of reading ahead.

2010-01-08T02:43:00.000-08:00

This is the introduction and first chapter of my Master's Dissertation which gained an 'A' as part of my overall MA with Distinction. All the material is copyright to Mark Shanahan, 2010. As it forms the basis for my PhD research, I would be grateful for any feedback and comment.

Introduction

The Space Race was a media construct from the outset. The prestige of the United States was materially damaged by its failure to put the first satellite in space, and while President Eisenhower was comfortable for the Soviets to be the first nation in space, and had no plans to create a 'race', public perception, fanned by radio broadcasts and printed media was very different, and worked against the US President and his chosen stance.

Through Sputnik, and the early Soviet manned spaceflight programmes, Khrushchev exploited America's slow start in rocket and satellite development, propagandising the Soviet space programme as a means of creating a false impression of the relative power of the Superpowers. In the US, Johnson, first through his position in Congress and then as VP to Kennedy following the end of Eisenhower’s presidency, grabbed the space mantle and politicised NASA's efforts as a weapon to fight back against the Soviet threat to US power. In so doing, he and, most publicly, the youthful, photogenic Kennedy, the master of political rhetoric, galvanised media support behind an ambitious rocket programme under the auspices of the new agency reluctantly created on Eisenhower’s watch: NASA. The US media cohort finally bought into this acceleration in the race only following the flight of a true ‘Right Stuff’ All-American hero, John Glenn.

As a means of fighting the Cold War on a very public front, using missiles without warheads, the Space Race provided a compelling vehicle for Eisenhower’s successor, John Kennedy. Through a carefully managed media campaign, supported by the Cold War typewriter warrior Luce and the Time/Life organisation, the Mercury Seven’s growing success came to epitomise all that was good about the Kennedy administration – and deflected the national security issues around unmanned space missions, notably the growing number of military reconnaissance satellites the US had in the sky. Indeed, by setting a goal that America could buy into, heightened, articulated and analysed by a hungry media, Kennedy’s administration created a righteous weapon to use in the fight against the perception of the growing threat of communism.

In the space of just three and a half years, the role and influence of the media changed significantly. Under Eisenhower’s watch, the US press and broadcasters surprised the President and prompted significant action beyond his wishes. By reacting to Khrushchev’s missile and space pronouncements, the media talked up a race that didn’t exist, and gave credence to the notion of the USSR as a technological superpower when the reality was that all the Soviets had was a launch rocket with significantly more thrust than any American equivalent. But whereas under Eisenhower, the tail may well have been wagging the dog, under Kennedy the role was reversed and, the new President was able to galvanise the power of the media behind his aim to overturn the perception of Soviet power by making the race to the moon a ‘safe’ battlefield for prosecuting the Cold War.

While there has been analysis of the space race as the culmination of the US frontier spirit – Murray and Bly Cox comes to mind here; as a triumph of technology coupled with the human spirit – any number of participant memoirs as well as the works of Launius, Cadbury, Seamans and Chaikin apply here; and the political distraction from the perceived missile gap, Bay of Pigs fiasco and social unrest within US borders, one looks to McDougall and Dallek as authorities; there has been little, if any significant analysis on the shaping role that the media – and its associated NASA/Governmental public affairs - played in the space race.Media memoirs recall the reporting of individuals, but comment little on the influence they brought to space policy as a subset of Governmental policy. And while this piece is limited in time scope to the first four and a half years of the space race, it will endeavour to provide a historian’s exploration into how influential the media was in creating and embedding an appetite for space exploration around the world.

One might argue that the most effective media influence on the space programme came towards the end of the Apollo period when, moon landing completed, the news agencies and broadcasting companies cut their coverage significantly and cast around for ‘new news’ stories. Suddenly the visceral sore of the last stages of the war in Vietnam and the actions of Senator Edward Kennedy at Chappaquiddick, had pushed Apollo off the front pages and relegated the moon landings well down the broadcast news agenda – only for the fire to be rekindled, briefly, by the heroism of failure with Apollo 13. However, this dissertation focuses on the early years of the Space Race, primarily from the launch of Sputnik 1 in October 1957, to the completion of John Glenn’s first American orbital mission in 1962. It will assess how a national security issue became one of prestige as each side aimed to use its achievements to enhance their relative status, and how the US media finally found alignment with the US governing executive and its fledgling space agency to add the power of imagery and dialogue to the race to the moon.

How space became a race

Following the launch of the world’s first artificial satellite on October 4 1957, the Chicago Daily News declared that if the Soviets “could deliver a 184-pound ‘moon' into a predetermined pattern 560 miles out into space, the day is not far distant when they could deliver a death-dealing warhead onto a predetermined target almost anywhere on the earth's surface.” The intense surprise at the Soviets’ action was global. A day later, in the UK the Manchester Guardian ran an editorial titled ‘Next Stop Mars. The columnist wrote: “The achievement is immense. It demands a psychological adjustment on our part towards Soviet society [and] Soviet military capabilities.....the Russians can now build ballistic missiles capable of hitting any chosen target anywhere in the world.....Clearly they have established a great lead in missile technology.”

The US was simply not used to coming second in any technological endeavours and the USSR’s success was hard to stomach. In its editorial, The Nation, entitled Red Moon over the US, the October 14th issue of the news weekly Time stated that Sputnik 1 opened “a bright new chapter in mankind’s conquest of the natural environment and a grim new chapter in the Cold War......Russia’s victory in the satellite race proved that the US had not tried hard enough.”

This chapter discusses the elements that came together: media speculation, public fear, secret intelligence, Presidential misreading of the public and an opportunistic Soviet leader to make space such a high profile issue for the last years of Eisenhower’s Presidency.

The popular impact of Sputnik 1’s launch went far beyond its scientific value. It was not seen nor reported simply as a scientific triumph (other than by the TASS news agency in Pravda and on Radio Moscow ), but as a direct threat to the USA’s national security and by implication, the security of the non-communist world. “Death dealing warhead” and “capable of hitting any chosen target anywhere in the world” shows a level of language that was intent – consciously or not – on sowing fear in a society that had only recently come to terms with the Soviets as an H-bomb power. Yet one must question whether Sputnik 1 was a thought-out aspect of Khrushchev’s great plan for systematic revolution – or more a case of happenstance.

It may be argued that the Soviet leader simply benefited from an engineer’s vision to conquer space, and US fear of a ‘missile gap’. However, Sputnik 1’s success was largely down to Khrushchev’s growing understanding of the potency of symbolic gestures in the Cold War climate of tension. It also relied on a US President fettered by the knowledge of the real relative missile strengths of the Superpowers, and the inability to share that knowledge without compromising a significant intelligence advantage. So while elements of the media reacted hysterically to Sputnik 1, for security reasons Eisenhower was unable to respond in a way that could diffuse the situation.

It’s notable that the media was already reporting a ‘race into space’ and a ‘race for satellites’ in the immediate wake of Sputnik 1’s launch. Eisenhower never wanted a Space Race but was harried into a response to Khrushchev’s actions by a media both obsessed with space, and seemingly unable to differentiate between rockets without warheads – focused on manned and unmanned space exploration - and those carrying nuclear warheads offering both offensive and defensive security capability. The US media had been obsessed with space since the early days of rocketry though they often confused scientific fact and science fiction. This confusion was amplified in the public, as evidenced along the East Coast in October 1938, when a radio adaptation of HG Wells’ War of the Worlds tapped into significant public gullibility. While thousands were panicked by the fear of invasion from Mars, the lure of space and space travel was already a staple of film, notably through Fritz Lang’s 1929 classic Frau im Mond, as well as the fiction of HG Wells and Jules Verne.

On both sides of the Atlantic, comic books glamorised space adventure. In the UK, The Eagle led each week with the Dan Dare, pilot of the future - while his stories were also voiced each night on Radio Luxembourg in a popular radio series. In the US, Buck Rogers ruled the airwaves and the syndicated comic strips. More serious science fiction was flourishing with iconic titles such Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles and Isaac Asimov’s I, Robot, capturing the public imagination. But the 1950s also saw the rise of popular science on television and at the fore was the inventor of the V2 rocket, and SS Major, Werner Von Braun.

By the mid 50s, he was a US citizen and had been working for the US Army for almost a decade. The first half of that spell had seen little advance in rocketry in the US as Truman’s policies had focused on an aircraft-based nuclear strike force. And Von Braun’s media activities were focused as much on his bosses as the American public as the rocket scientist lobbied for more funding and status for missile – and by implication space rocket – research. An opportunity to work with Walt Disney on national television network ABC did much to raise Von Braun’s profile while cementing the potential of spaceflight as an aspiration for America.

The growth of TV as the mass media of choice, especially in America was phenomenal in the 1950s and early ‘60s. In 1950 fewer than 8% of American families owned TV sets. By 1954, more than half had televisions. By 1957, 78% of families were set owners, and by 1964, almost everyone - 92% of families had become TV viewers. New channels demanded factual content to balance the family entertainment of Lassie, Father Knows Best, and I Love Lucy. News broadcasting changed from newsmen simply reading the news to shows with taped pictures of events from around the world, and then to more and more live broadcasts of events happening at the time of viewing. In the late 1950s, the battle between print and television as the prime medium was at its height. By the mid 1960s, television would be dominant. Sensing the rising influence of the media, Von Braun, frustrated by a lack of support for his team’s rocket development, turned to both magazines and television to wake up the world to the possibilities of space travel. He did not use comic strips or science fiction, but spelled out what could be possible if only government would support his efforts.

In a bid to reinforce the promotion of his new theme park, Walt Disney linked up with ABC to launch a new TV show – Disneyland – in 1954. The format varied each week, ranging from animations to science instruction programmes. By 1955 it was ranked by TV pollsters Nielsen as the fourth most popular show across the nation. Disney had read Von Braun’s series of articles in Collier’s Magazine, where the rocket engineer had sought to spread the space exploration gospel. The articles prompted two spin-off books, Across the Space Frontier in 1952 and Conquest of the Moon a year later. Von Braun was being seen and heard at many more space-related events. His biographer, Bob Ward, notes that he hit the speechmaking trail in the early 1950s, and would accept invitations from “any semi-respectable group that would invite him.” With his charm, quirky German accent, opinion on everything and mission to explain, he became an obvious choice for Disney. Disney was not being altruistic: he was looking for a scientist to ally with his soon-to-be-opened ‘Tomorrowland’ at his California theme park. Von Braun opened with a documentary Man in Space, following with Man and the Moon and Mars and beyond. All three programmes received excellent viewing figures in the US and were significant in building the momentum to educate Americans in the wonders of the coming space age.

Von Braun was convinced he had the technology and capability to put the first object into space, and appeared to have the opportunity to do as a response to Eisenhower’s 1954 announcement of the International Geophysical Year, planned to run not for a year, but from July 1 1957 to December 1 1958 . This was Eisenhower’s effort to differentiate a science-(and civilian) based space exploration effort from the missile race he was at pains to avoid. The President encapsulated his attitude in 1960.Responding to a press question asking whether he felt any sense of urgency to catch-up the Russians’ missile development and entry into space, he said: “I am always a little bit amazed at this business of catching up. What you want is enough, a thing that is adequate. A deterrent has no added power, once it has become completely adequate, for compelling the respect of your opponent for your deterrent and, therefore, to make him act prudently.”

Eisenhower’s attitude towards a missile race – and the new forum for Cold War competition that space offered - was a stolid resistance to the demands made often in the media and among his opponents on Capitol Hill to embark on very public, very visible and potentially highly expensive crash programs to compete with the Soviet Union. His economic view on defence spending was close to the parsimony of post-war Truman. Callahan and Greenstein describe it as ‘conservatism along with a strategic doctrine that rejected overkill’. He saw economic peril in every budget increase and was less concerned than many of his contemporaries about the Soviet threat. He was also seemingly unconcerned by ‘prestige’ and the prospective damage to national prestige that being beaten into space by the Soviets might deliver.

His apparent lack of concern came from CIA intelligence reports; not least analysis of the pictures captured by U2 spy plane over-flights of Soviet territory that showed clearly that the Soviets had few ballistic missiles and few, if any, aircraft capable of posing a nuclear threat to the US. So with hindsight, his reaction to the launch of Sputnik 1 is entirely understandable. But Democratic politicians on Capitol Hill did not have that access to intelligence. What they did have was access to the Washington reporters and to every local newspaper and radio station in their locale. And how the likes of Symington, Johnson and even, to an extent, Nixon, chose to fill their days after Sputnik’s beep-beep-beep was first heard - across the world’s radio networks - was by talking to journalists and fanning the flames of a non-existent missile crisis.
It is ironic to note that even in Moscow, the initial media interest in the launch of Sputnik 1 did not capture the significance of the launch and was distinctly low-key. The Soviet public first learned of the “scientific experiment conducted at such a high altitude” through a down-page article on the front of Pravda. The issue that day was led by Marshall Zhukov’s visit to Yugoslavia, and the Sputnik announcement was initially made with no hype, little triumphalism and, under just the terse banner ‘TASS announcement’.

The article stressed the peaceful and scientific nature of the mission and the authorities clearly had not yet seen the propaganda possibilities that the launch offered. It is worth noting that the authorisation to proceed with a Soviet satellite project had come from the Praesidium of the Academy of Sciences on August 30, 1955 . As the proposal was not for a major weapon project, it received lower priority status and this didn’t require approval from the party leadership.

While the Soviets had stated more than a month before that they were ready to launch a satellite , specific details were shrouded in secrecy, with appearing only when Sputnik was safely in orbit broadcasting to the world.

As much is unsaid as said in the article – clearly Sputnik 1 didn’t deliver much in the way of ‘scientific research’. This was merely a step to beat the America into orbit. The Soviets’ chief rocket designer, Korolev had planned to launch Sputnik 1 on October 6th, but learned that the Americans were to present an IGY paper in Washington that night entitled ‘Satellite In Orbit’ . Assuming that this implied a US launch on or just before October 6th, he brought Sputnik’s launch two days forward. However, while this was a simple, stripped down satellite containing little more than a radio transmitter, Korolev launched it into retrograde orbit – travelling east to west. Given that this required a significantly greater thrust to achieve orbit, this was clearly was intended to show the Americans that the Soviet launch vehicle (essentially their ICBM launch vehicle) was more powerful than anything the Americans had or planned.

Pravda’s text is notable in that none of the key figures in the development of the R7 launch vehicle or Sputnik satellite is named – Korolev and his team were deemed to be at risk of kidnap or death by western agents and therefore they were never, in life, given publicity. But most significantly, while the report closes with a generic socialist homily, there is no specific political statement – no message from Khrushchev. This supports the assertion that neither he nor the Politburo saw the political and propaganda significance of this scientific achievement at this stage. According to his son Sergei’ , Khrushchev was in Kiev when he learned of the launch and was certainly not waiting expectantly for any pre-planned outcome.

The reaction in the West over the coming days delighted him; highlighted the significance of the successful launch; and gave him a fantastic propaganda tool for foreign policy. The western world woke up to being over-flown by a Soviet satellite. For Khrushchev, from this night on, the space programme was never about space exploration. It was a bold display of military might meant to match – and indeed top – America’s own frequent displays of firepower.

In response to the launch, US Senate Majority Leader, Lyndon Johnson wrote: “Now, 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 achieve technological superiority over this great country of ours.” Around the world, despite Eisenhower’s apparent calmness, the media response – and public shock - was intense. General James Gavin, a member of the US ICBM development team described it as ‘a technological Pearl Harbour’ – though it of course provided a great lever to swiftly put the US IBCM programme into over-drive. The western media focus was on the possibility of sending not a rocket into space, but a nuclear warhead from Moscow to the west.’ The New York Times screamed with a rarely-used three deck headline: “Soviet Fires Earth Satellite Into Space: It Is Circling The Globe at 18,000mph: Sphere Tracked In 4 Crossings Over US.” When Pravda realised the significance of the launch, it chose not to laud the Soviet achievement directly, but to reproduce stories and headlines from the Western media together with congratulatory messages from the world’s major leaders.

Eisenhower understood better than most the real situation the Soviets were in, but could reveal little of this without undermining US surveillance efforts. He did not comment officially on the launch until October 9th when he issued a statement prior to his White House news conference, congratulating the Soviets for their achievement. But, his composure concealed an ulterior motive. Eisenhower and the U.S. intelligence community had been evaluating proposals for an orbiting military reconnaissance satellite, but had been grappling with the political ramifications of Soviet reaction to over-flights of its territory. The launch of Sputnik effectively ended those concerns, allowing the United States to pursue a policy of space as an ‘open platform,’ establishing that national boundaries did not extend into space. Donald Quarles, Eisenhower's assistant Secretary of Defence, commented to the President on October 7th that the Soviets: “have, in fact, done us a good turn, unintentionally, in establishing the concept of freedom of international space”, a principle which the Soviets could not now refute.

It is worth remarking that Eisenhower waited a full five days after Sputnik 1’s launch to respond to the media and he was taken aback by their hostility at his news conference on October 9th. His belief was that the early hysteria of ill-informed press responses such as the Chicago Tribune’s lead would dissipate once he provided the calm reassurance that had previously been readily accepted by the Washington press corps. Indeed, the President had been used to an easy ride from the press corps. He was still revered as the great war leader and the man who had brought an end to the war in Korea within six months of assuming the presidency. While financially conservative, he had presided over a period of strong economic growth and his approval ratings remained high. As Ambrose said: “Trust Ike was the watchword.” But now he faced journalists ready to ask tough questions and, seemingly, unwilling to believe the administration’s view that Sputnik was just “a silly bauble”.

Ambrose describes the news conference as the most “hostile” Eisenhower faced in his career. And while the transcript clearly shows the 1950s politeness and deference the press was used to operating by, there are some sharp questions that Eisenhower did not deal with particularly effectively. United Press International Reporter Merriman Smith, noting the satellite launch and the Soviet claim to have successfully launched an ICBM – both ahead of the US -challenged the President as to what he was going to do about it. Robert Clark of Associated Press echoed his colleague, asking if the Russians were now ahead of the Americans. ‘Miss May’ Craig, Washington Correspondent for the Portland Marine asked Eisenhower if the satellite gave the Russians the ability to launch missiles from platforms in space, while NBC’s Hazel Markel nailed the country’s concerns, asking: “Are you saying at this time, with the Russian satellite whirling about the world, you are not more concerned or overly concerned about our nation’s security?”

Eisenhower’s response was measured and downplayed – as had been his responses to the previous questions. He had denied the link between the satellite and ICBMs; he had downplayed the Soviet satellite advantage, though he acknowledged it as a psychological success. He had allayed Miss Craig’s fears stating that the satellite was most certainly not a nuclear missile platform, and now sought to allay those of the whole nation. He said: “I see nothing at this moment, at this stage of development that is significant in that development as far as security is concerned.” Indeed, he felt that the Soviets had done little more than ”put one small ball in the air. ”

This set the tone for Eisenhower in the coming weeks as he faced down demands for nuclear shelters, for bombers and more and better bombs, for more missiles and for a sea of dollars to get an American satellite into space even more quickly. For Ambrose it was “one of his finest hours.” Regarding Sputnik coolly, he saw no increased threat. Indeed, at this stage, pouring money into a catch-up satellite programme seemed only an opportunity to build a huge budget deficit in what was likely to be a year of recession anyway. However, the media was rolling Sputnik and a perceived deficit in the missile race into one issue, something Eisenhower would not do. Eisenhower saw military missile development as something entirely separate from a contest in space, and knew that American technology outstripped Russian equivalents in all areas other than a heavy lift ballistic booster. But the public mood was simply not on the same wavelength as the President, and the launch of Sputnik 2 to coincide with the celebration of the 40th anniversary of the October Revolution caused Eisenhower to modify his response and set the scene for the space race proper .

Sputnik 2 was another propaganda coup for Khrushchev, putting the dog Laika into orbit just a month after Sputnik 1’s launch. Behind the scenes, Eisenhower had been manoeuvring to educate the public beyond the media’s speculation. He still saw no substantiation that the Soviets actually had a workable, accurate and reliable ICBM, and urged both Nixon and Dulles to stress these points. Nixon used this argument in a public speech in San Francisco on October 15th, and Dulles in a meeting with the press a day later. But the facts seemed to refute the administration’s thinking: Sputnik 2 carried a 1,121lb payload, which underscored the strength of the Soviet rockets. The fact its payload was a dog implied the Soviets were focused on manned space flight. Near-hysteria followed in the popular press. Time noted: “The Soviet rocket generated a total thrust more than enough to power an atomic bomb to the moon, more than enough to power a missile around the earth.....In such an apocalyptic week, communism's new coalition of dazzling technology and cutthroat politics represented an epochal threat to the free world.”

Internationally, even sober journals such as Spaceflight, the journal of the British Interplanetary Society, added warnings to the President on the apparent power of the Soviet rockets. “It is… logical to assume that at least in the early development stage (the rocket) was a military project, having as its goal the delivery of an H-bomb warhead over perhaps 5,000 miles.”

Rather than repeat his almost passive response to Sputnik 1, Eisenhower chose to address the nation via television on November 7th. He addressed the fear in people’s minds about national security. In seeking to soothe nation, he said: “We are well ahead of the Soviets in the nuclear field both in quantity and quality. We intend to stay ahead.” In fact, perhaps the greatest consequence of Sputnik’s launch was a redoubling of US efforts to build ICBMs and other nuclear strike forces. The perceived missile gap in favour of Moscow was swiftly replaced by an actual gap in Washington’s favour. Yet even this was not so much an action of Eisenhower, but of a Congressional team led by Johnson looking for a lever to enhance his own standing on the Democratic ticket for the 1960 election, and to ensure the Democrats caught the popular will to beat the Soviets. Following Sputnik 2’s launch, Johnson used the Preparedness Sub-Committee within Congress to “ask the people in charge to tell us...how we can regain the leadership.” Over the next two months, Johnson played the subtle partisan, exposing the Administration’s flaws in developing a credible missile and space programme and enabling him to present himself as the country’s leading advocate for space exploration. This initial investigation led to Johnson’s prime role in 1958 as the architect of the legislation that enabled the creation of NASA.

As owner of a number of TV and radio stations across Texas through Texas Broadcasting (later the LBJ Company) Johnson was certainly the most media-savvy politician at the time. Now he also had an issue to use as his personal battering ram towards the Democratic Presidential nomination. Time reported his addressing the 1958 Democratic Caucus saying: "Our national potential exceeds our national performance. Our science and technology has been, for some time, capable of many of the achievements displayed thus far by Soviet science. That the Soviet achievements are tangible and visible, while ours are not, is a result of policy decisions made within the governments of the respective nations. the evaluation of the importance of the control of outer space made by us has not been based primarily on the judgment of men most qualified to make such an appraisal. Our decisions... have been made within the framework of the Government's annual budget. This control has, again and again, appeared and reappeared as the prime limitation upon our scientific advancement . . . What should be our goal? If, out in space, there is the ultimate position—from which total control of the earth may be exercised—then our national goal and the goal of all free men must be to win and hold that position."

The tone of the Time piece was very favourable towards the Texan Democrat.
Towards the end of 1957, Eisenhower’s approval ratings had fallen from 79% to 57% - by far the lowest rating of his presidency. For once the media appeared to hold the high ground, with the influential weeklies lined up against a perceived slow-moving presidency. Indeed, Time crowned Khrushchev its man of the year for his Sputnik successes. American prestige dropped further with the first test of America’s Vanguard rocket. This was to be launched from Cape Canaveral in a blaze of publicity – literally. For the scientists, this was an merely a staging point on the way to perfecting the Vanguard rocket, but to a public and media stung by America’s second-best status, this ‘launch’ was all about catching up the Soviet space lead – albeit with a 6.5lb satellite. But the US space effort was to be humiliated further when ‘Test Vehicle 3’ exploded four feet off the pad. Thanks to live TV coverage, enabled by the Eisenhower’s demand that International Geophysical Activities be entirely open to public scrutiny, millions watched the unfolding debacle in amazement. The humiliation of the spectacle was global: in London, the Daily Express led next day with the headline: ‘US calls it Kaputnik’. The Daily Herald was no less scathing with: ‘Oh what a flopnik!’ The French were ‘obscure’ with Paris-Journal’s “It seems there is a worm in the grapefruit”, while the US regional dailies could be summed up by the Louisville Courier-Journal which reported: “A shot may be heard around the world, but there are times when a dud is even louder.” At the United Nations, the tongue-in-cheek Soviets asked their American counterparts if the US might wish to receive assistance under the Soviet programme of foreign aid for technical assistance to backward nations.

While America finally lurched into space with Explorer 1 on Von Braun’s Redstone in January 1958, public opinion believed that the US still lagged behind the Soviets. Lyndon Johnson, the Senate majority leader summed up the critical thinking around the public fear of Soviet domination in space. “There is something more important than the ultimate weapon,” Johnson declared. “That is the ultimate position – the position of total control over Earth that lies in outer space.”

While Eisenhower had been willing to let his three armed services compete to develop both satellites and missiles in the hope that competition would bring forth rapid technological advance, the effect had not been what he hoped for. Instead, the administration appeared weak for the first time. Eisenhower looked to have no cohesive space policy; to have lost the lead in the arms race and to have hindered progress in putting the US ahead in space by the very fact he had allowed the US air Force Army and Navy to compete on missile development. Public opinion, fuelled by a critical media, insisted he now had to act decisively to bring coherence to the space programme and a clear separation from what would be seen by the Soviets as aggressive military spending. Eisenhower had already named MIT’s James Killian as Head of the President’s Scientific Advisory Council, bringing all the rival services together under one missile czar. Now, on July 29th 1958 he formally established NASA, building on the existing National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) to add “Importantly to our knowledge of the Earth, the Solar System and the Universe.” NASA’s role was to ensure the USA’s leadership in space science, but it would come to life for the American public – and thus be deserving of the necessary federal dollars - only by putting a man in space and, after the Sputnik humiliation, getting there first.

Without the media reaction to Sputnik, it is impossible to think that Eisenhower would have increased US investment in space as quickly or to the extent that he did before his presidency ended. While he was held in huge esteem as a successful war leader, he was the last of the old-school warriors who had fought a war with manpower and aircraft. He was not of the rocket age. It is clear too that much of the action and activity to bring the US into the Space Race was not of Eisenhower’s doing. As Sputnik 1 was followed by the heavier and more complex Sputniks 2 and 3, he was continually urged to respond to the apparent shows of Soviet space might. In setting up NASA as a civilian organisation, he was responding to a suggestion from Vice President Nixon to convert the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics into the civilian and space-science orientated National Aeronautics and Space Administration. Congress supported Nixon’s suggestion and in fact the 1958 Space Bill was drafted and introduced to Congress by the Democrat Senator and Majority Leader, Lyndon B Johnson. With a Presidential election looming in 1960, it is clear that both Nixon and Johnson assessed that space, and closing the rocket and missile gap, would be a leading issue in the debate. As the next chapter will show, both were manoeuvring to be in a strong position to use the space race issue in the fight for the White House.

Yet one should not underrate Eisenhower’s contribution to NASA’s foundation. Nor should one disregard his influence on attempting to win the next lap of the space race, namely putting a man in space. On October 1st 1958, the President removed the task of developing a man in space project from the military and gave it to the fledgling NASA. In less than a year, a sceptical President had created a funded, Congressionally-supported, non-military agency to manage the US’ scientific space efforts. This immediately put clear space between the peaceful exploration of space and military defence – where a parallel missile programme continued largely beyond the reach of the media and immediate interest of the public.

The newly-emerging US space programme was building on four foundations defined by the President’s Space Advisory Committee, namely: man’s thrust of curiosity; national defence; national prestige and scientific growth. Each was to play a strong role in Johnson and Nixon’s presidential aspirations, but found their true articulation with Kennedy. Meanwhile, the harsh military undertones of stockpiling ballistic missiles and developing ever-more refined launchers was seen as very different from NASA’s activities – despite the fact that they shared the same core technologies, research programmes and even launch sites. Yet while the nation was to back Kennedy in his drive to remove the perceived ‘missile gap’, it also saw an urgency not to win the Cold War with warheads, but through the prestige of winning the race to put man in space. With Congressional support, Eisenhower had provided the means to achieve this. Yet it was the media which provided the catalyst for him to act in the first place.

Apollo 8 - the mission that really captured the world's attention

2009-12-21T07:31:00.001-08:00

1968 was a horrible year for the US - riots, assassinations and a sense of almost total despair over Vietnam. But one decision 'saved' the year: the decision by NASA's George Low to make Apollo 8 a moon mission. It was a high risk strategy - man hadn't yet left earth's orbit, and the crew of Borman, Lovell and Anders would be heading for lunar orbit without any kind of lifeboat in space since the lunar module was not yet ready for space.

Apollo 8 took off 41 years ago today. The world really woke up to the final stages of the US race for the moon when the crew sent back their first pictures of the earth - a small shining bauble hanging in the vast blackness of space.

And in a way that simply wouldn't be countenanced in today's PC world, the three crew members struck exactly the right note of awe and wonder as they read the opening verses of the Bible's Book of Genesis in a Christmas Eve Broadcast as they orbited the moon.

The television broadcast gained, at the time, the highest global viewing figure in TV history. The space race was finally a global event: a world united in wonder.

Posting on poster posting

2009-12-11T02:53:00.000-08:00

So yesterday was our first internal poster conference: a chance to present our research - or plan for research - to our peers and some of the academics in Brunel's school of social science. My supervisor dropped by and laughed: he then came back with my second supervisor and they had a giggle together...about my poster, about my colleague who's researching American dynastic politics' poster and about the whole session in general. Their general view was that this was a most odd way of presenting a political/historical topic. Oh well.

Meanwhile a psychologist and an 'unknown' academic assessed my poster (one section of it is up above) and the feedback was reasonable. The one thing missing was some academic references grounding my work - I'll know for next time.

The other students were interested - even if what I'm doing is seen as a bit niche and geeky - and I was interested to check out both how other people presented their work and the subjects they are researching. We're an eclectic bunch with everything from post-civil-war Sierra Leone through the economics of the Gulf to the politics of the Native American nation.

On the downside, the room was too small, too hot and too crowded - PhD stuff was all mixed up with MRes posters and for a while, confusion reigned. Still, it was quite fun to do.

Do we become PhDs in spite of the system or because of it?

2009-12-04T05:33:00.000-08:00

I'm two months into my PhD, and now beginning to get some focus in what I'm doing. My research questions are beginning to solidify; I'm beginning to get around some of the best secondary sources, and have a better handle on the primary source people and material I'd like to explore.

I'm writing this from my shared research office at Brunel - where I'm sat on my own having popped in between work engagements this Friday lunchtime. The office is in portakabin building. it has four desks, four PCs, one phone, some lockers and a bookcase. It's basic, even spartan, but actually does the job. Six of us are assigned to this four-person space, but only three of us seem to use it with any regularity. So far, so good.

But, coming into this new venture with 20 years + work experience behind me, I'm finding there are a number of frustrations in the way that the School of Social Science is set up to 'welcome' and support PhD students.

For one thing, had I not asked about this office, I wouldn't have known of its existence. I've also had to ask about printing, about security and getting the room's access code changed (after some source material went missing from my desk) about access hours, pigeon holes and a plethora of other little details that I would have missed had i not been a bit nosy, a bit bolshie and perhaps more aware of what we should be getting than my younger or international colleagues.

What's apparent is that the School runs to the tune of the technicians - the academics are scared of them and the service ethic to students and staff alike is virtually non-existent. We have a byzantine printing process that means it costs far too much to print anything here - and the turnaround service is three days! They're also the masters of 'elf and safety' and managed to turn my missing personal papers into a fire risk issue - madness.

The other unexpected issue this term has been a Research Skills module that has taken up one evening each week so far. In theory it is a really good idea, and in practice has brought together an esoteric blend of researchers who have probably gained most from the informal networking that goes on outside the class. We range from Economics & Finance through Anthropology, Social communications and Psychology to Politics and History. As a historian, I feel like an outrider, cut away from the school's mainstream. however, I've really felt for the course leader, a really nice guy who has struggled to meet out wide-ranging and very varied needs. Frankly, the module has failed to satisfy anyone.

Inside, we've had a few half-hearted lectures on time management, poster conferences, critical analysis and quantitative techniques, but each MRes and PhD class member has also had to present their own research - or planned research in most cases. A few have been great - interesting topics well presented. But the majority have been droning voices, reading slides crammed with far too much information. The quality of presentation has been poor, and the tutor has done little to stop speakers droning on and on to the point of half the class walking out.

Anyway, next week sees the final class - an internal Poster Conference. I'm quite looking forward to it - but am also looking forward to parking the taught element and getting on with my research proper.

The best thing to come out of the last eight weeks? Meeting and making friends with some of my fellow PhD researchers - they're a really nice and scarily bright bunch. There'll be no slacking here if i even hope to keep up.

I'm still swallowing books whole by the way - the latest being Michael Allen's 'Live From the Moon' - not the best academic history book I've read, but an accessible narrative of the Cold War Sputnik-Apollo space programmes. I was worried at first that it would fill the space where my research sits. But it's complementary, and I'll certainly use elements of it.

A Distinct improvement

2009-11-27T03:13:00.000-08:00

I haven't blogged much recently as I've been trying to get my head round the step up from MA to PhD level - I have some thoughts on that, but will share them later.

However, yesterday was a pretty momentous day. It was my daughter's 16th birthday, a busy working day and I was also sending Thanksgiving greetings to a number of American friends and colleagues. I'd forgotten that my MA result was due, and only realised when I got an email from my course administrator advising me to look at Brunel's online student portal.

I logged on and found out I'd got my MA - with Distinction. It's the highest award and was actually far better than I steeled myself to expect. I must say that I shouted out loud and punched the air, and was buzzing through my later meetings and my evening research seminar at Brunel.

My supervisor brought me back to earth: 'a distinction at MA is worth nothing to the PhD assessors', he said. 'No time to rest on your laurels,' added my research office roomie.

Today, a bottle of champagne later, my head's thumping a bit. But my grin's still wide.

This week's reading

2009-10-26T05:43:00.000-07:00

Still in that funny period where my Masters dissertation is being marked...which puts a bit of a brake on the PhD work since one of the markers is my PhD tutor. So our current contact is minimal...err, non-existent.

However, there's plenty I can be getting on with and much of that concerns reading. I'm fascinated by Eisenhower at the moment and am having a proper read of Stephen Ambrose's biography. So far I'm still in WW2 and the read is entertaining rather than overly enlightening. Ambrose is at his best when on 'Band of Brothers' territory. The first 50 years of Ike's life has been covered in a rapid gloss and I'm somehow missing the analysis of how an extremely competent staff officer morphed into Supreme Commander in two years - and was to be President just a decade later. Anyway, still 300 pages to go!

Alongside Eisenhower, I'm also reading the rest of Murray & Bly Cox's: Apollo: The Race to the Moon.

Mission Control's Sy Liebergot told me that this was his peers' favourite account of the US space programme and I can understand why. It's an energetic account that focuses on the engineers and specialists who delivered the programme rather than the up-front astronaut tale. It's an excellent back-office account and is filling in a number of gaps in my understanding of the programme. Still a couple of hundred pages to go on this one too!

Day by day it's becoming more real

2009-10-21T08:30:00.001-07:00

So I'm now officially a PhD research student and those carefree days of slaving over a Masters dissertation are nought but a memory. Still, I'm not exactly progressing the new research at a rate of knots.

The first few weeks have been all about making the transition from taught student to research student. I now have a shared office at Brunel with a desk, bookshelves and a quarter share in a phone. I've just been on a two-day Early Stage Research Module, and have given my first presentation on my work to fellow PhD students as part of a research skills module that's compulsory for newbies like me.

That was quite an experience: I was the only historian in the room, faced by economists, political scientists, psychologists and a scary number of social anthropologists. I'm not sure they 'get' my research any more than I get what they're up to. Still, it was a fun half-hour.

I've had a meeting with my secondary supervisor but not my main one: I think we're avoiding each other until he has finished marking my Masters disso. Until then, I'm scoping and trying to build a network of researchers interested in the conjunction of the media and the space race since this year's planned work builds directly on what I started with the Masters. Already I feel that I only scratched the surface with that piece - but I have no indication yet whether it was a good or bad scratch. Certainly every day since the disso went in I've uncovered something new. I'm kicking myself that so many things didn't make the final draft, and feeling that I got too hung up on the superficial. Anyway, time will tell.

It's all in the little details....

2009-09-28T04:02:00.000-07:00

I went up to Staples first thing this morning to get the disso printed and bound - it all came out well and looks good.....apart from the fact I've put the wrong student number on the front. One digit's wrong and I've had to correct it with a big fat pen. Stupid I know, but with 16000+ words to worry about, I simply had a mindblock about my student id number....and managed to get it wrong.

Anyway, I'm off to Brunel over lunch to get the darned thing delivered.....two days inside the deadline!

It's done

2009-09-25T07:59:00.000-07:00

All 57 pages, 16,214 words plus abstract and bibliography....

Time for a read-through this weekend, just to make sure, printing on Monday and then delivery to Brunel on Tuesday. It's definitely a weight off my shoulders. And I get all of a week's break before it's PhD induction day!

Disso nearly done

2009-09-21T09:56:00.000-07:00

Just two tasks still to do on the main body of the disso - add in some 'colour' from Life's coverage of John Glenn's Friendship 7 flight, and then cut about 750 words from the whole piece. It all has come together, and now I've just got to be brutal on the editing, cutting out all the nice to know rather than necessary to know stuff. There's a week to go on this, then a week off, and then straight into my new PhD work.

Germany enters the space race

2009-09-07T05:53:00.000-07:00

Very clever....

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newsvideo/?bcpid=4464161001&bctid=37694908001

Off to the Cape

2009-08-19T07:35:00.001-07:00

Well, still no funding for the PhD, and a significant rewrite to be done on the disso, but I'm feeling positive!

I've decided to take up the PhD place and beg, steal and borrow my way through year 1 with the aim of attracting at least enough funding to cover my research trips. Hopefully i can write around the PhD commercially, and while it won't pull in much money, it may open a few doors that otherwise might remain closed. Anyway, that's the plan.

On the disso front, today was a bit of an epiphany and I'm moving from chronicler to prosecutor - presenting my thesis more of an evidenced case than the holistic story of 57-62. The premise remains the same: Eisenhower was bullied into a space race with the Soviets by an unexpectedly antagonistic media. Khrushchev exploited public/media unease and consistently raised the stakes as a means to enhance his personal prestige and that of the USSR in the eyes of the world. When forced into action, Eisenhower made a shrewd move, establishing NASA as a civilian agency beyond the control of any of the armed services. The turnaround in the media's perception of Eisenhower as a space race warrior was marked. In '57, Khrushchev was Newsweek's Man of the Year. In '59, it was Ike. Kennedy fought his way into the White House playing the missile gap card, but was actually ambivalent towards any race in space. Expediency, particularly the need to react to both the Bay of Pigs and Gagarin, underpinned the May 1961 'pledge' which still didn't really set the public on fire until John Glenn's Friendship Seven successfully put the United States in manned orbit. That public fire was stoked by a pincer movement of Washington rhetoric and NASA-endorsed Life whitewash which jointly created the 'Right Stuff' heroes that continued the Lewis and Clark frontier narrative into the technological white heat of the 1960s. From being the spiky prompter of US space action, the media became the drum-beater for the New Frontier, sadly lacking in sufficiently tough questioning around NASA's aims and startlingly limited goal.

Anyway, I'm off to the US and should hit Cape Canaveral next week, setting foot on the old Mercury stamping ground for the first time since 1979. I've been to the Kennedy Space Center since, but not out to the old military ranges and launch areas since my very first trip to Florida. I'm looking forward to making the reacquaintance.

Uncomfortably numb

2009-08-06T06:29:00.000-07:00

Okay, about 28 hours ago, the bottom dropped out of my academic world...or so it seemed.

Checking in to see how my scholarship application was progressing, I found out that I'd made the first cut - from 200+ applications to 87 nominated by the various Brunel Academic Schools...but hadn't made the final 30 granted awards. Frankly, I was gutted.

I have a PhD place open to me, but currently no funding to enable me to pay the fees or carry out the research. And, because mine was a late application, I also won't be able to apply for any external funding from the mainstream sources until Spring 2010.

So, I've got the option of funding myself this year - something that will be very tough, or deferring for a year...which I really don't want to do.

I'd almost certainly invested too much hope in the scholarship application (only 1 in 6 are successful), and Brunel are still very keen for me to start in September. But yesterday i was utterly crestfallen. To just get started, I need to raise £3.5k by next month - not easy in the current recession. I'm at a bit of a loss at the moment, but am just starting out thinking how I can make this happen.

Refining...and still fingers crossed

2009-07-24T06:08:00.000-07:00

Finished the first draft of the disso at the start of the week. At 16798 words, it's 5-10% too long - and a bit rough in the middle. I've had feedback on one key chapter though, and it was reasonably positive - though apparently my concluding statements were a bit too abrupt. So, focus for the next week - work permitting - will be to trim the opening piece and beef up the end.

Still waiting for news on my scholarship - it could still be three weeks before anything definitive. Still, now editing on the disso rather than new research, so it should be a quicker process.

40 Years Ago Today

2009-07-16T08:15:00.000-07:00

Buzz Aldrin's all over the media, Mike C and Neil A are nowhere to be seen...pretty much summing up the respective chosen profiles of the three Apollo X1 Astronauts on the 40th anniversary of their launch from Cape Canaveral. No doubt all three will feature in a few days' time as the actual moon landing is celebrated - and then I'm sure that Collins and Armstrong will fade swiftly out of the limelight again.

Meanwhile, the disso draft has passed 11,000 words - with great input from Jim Baughman , Reg Turnill and Kris Stoever. I hope to have a draft completed by the other side of the weekend. Somehow the timing seems fitting. But for now, it's back to McDougall for me and the events of summer 1958...

Ike unspun was closer to the truth. But JFK had a better finger on the pulse

2009-07-07T09:11:00.000-07:00

More than 8,000 words into the disso now, and what's emerging is a distinct difference in Ike and JFK's approach to the media over space.

When Sputnik launched, Ike was calmness itself - dismissive of the media's rabble-rousing since he knew that Khrushchev's propaganda attack was largely smoke and mirrors. But he misjudged the near-hysteria the satellite caused, and was forced to react to head off a media baying for massive defence spending.

JFK was pro-active in his use of the media, using his gift for rhetoric to fight back from the Bay of Pigs and Gagarin's flight with a big message built on little substance. JFK provided the content whereas Ike had failed to fill the vacuum. Back in 1957, the media had kicked off a space race that need never have existed. By 1961, Kennedy was using that race as a cornerstone of his foreign policy: driving hard at a new frontier beyond earth's atmosphere.

A very classy brush off

2009-06-29T01:00:00.001-07:00

With my PhD place confirmed but funding not yet in place, I'm still in the phony war where I'm doing the work, but not yet assured the money will be there to see it through the full three years.

This early stage of research is all about approaching people who were a part of the space race and seeing if they'll be willing to share their side of the story. A couple of weeks ago I approached Senator John Glenn and received this very elegant response. Not really what I wanted to hear...but a very classy brush-off none the less.

Good news...

2009-06-22T07:12:00.000-07:00

...on the Masters front. Confirmation of my module grades - 4 As, a B and a C mean I'm just about there for my MA. What the final grade will be is still dependent on the disso - and this week's focus is John Glenn's Friendship 7 flight - to my analysis, the point where Kennedy's rhetoric, NASA's expectation and public opinion finally aligned behind the US Manned Spaceflight program to reach the moon.

Picture sourced from the NASA library

And today's reading list includes....

2009-06-15T02:12:00.000-07:00

There have been a few thumps on the hall mat in the last couple of days as Ambrose's biography of Nixon (part 1), Dallek's work on Kennedy and 'Dr. Space' - a biography of Werner Von Braun have all arrived from their respective second hand book sellers.

The political biogs will yield some useful reference material, and my plan's to 'dip into' them as necessary. But I've decided to read the Von Braun book in its entirely this week - and am now about 20% of the way through. It's not that long, but uses a VERY small typeface which makes it more daunting than it might appear.

I also had a great email from Scott Carpenter's daughter, Kris Stoever, over the weekend. She's a writer and editor who co-wrote her father's autobiography a few years ago. It's really nice to be challenged on parts of my hypothesis by someone steeped in both the myth and reality of the space race. I hope to be able to correspond more with Ms. Stoever in the future.

Changes, progress, focus

2009-06-11T07:22:00.000-07:00

About 2,500 words of the disso have now been committed to paper in a week that has seen the scaling down of one project and the scaling up of another.

It's only when you get cracking on a project that the size of the elephant really becomes clear - that's been the case with the disso. Trying to find a way to analyse the impact of the media on the race to the moon in 15,000 words without it being so shallow as to be valueless has proved a problem but one that, with my tutor, I've overcome by scaling back the time period of the disso.

Now I'm focusing the disso on the media's role as both catalyst and fuel to the beginnings of the space race really from the pre-Sputnik period to Kennedy's 1961 speech to Congress. My dissertation epiphany occureed last Friday afternoon in a tutorial at Brunel where I was explaining how I was struggling to find a structure to compress the wealth of material I wanted to cover into an MA disso structure. My tutor cut through my floundering by suggesting I focus on just one bite of the elephant for the MA, and segue straight into a PhD to properly cover the project in full.

Now I've planned on doing the PhD for about a year, but actually had planned on getting the MA over and done with and then applying to start on the PhD in 2010. My tutor's comment: 'Why wait? All the people you need to see will be a year nearer death if you don't start work for another 15 months.'..... Good logic.

So, after a frantic weekend of turning many discussions into a formal research proposal, I've actually taken my original Masters disso thoughts and expanded them slightly to fulfil the criteria for an application for formal, funded, PhD research. It feels like a big step forward, and certainly helped get my brain in gear this morning as I pulled the first one sixth of my disso draft together.

Paul Haney RIP

2009-05-31T03:40:00.000-07:00

How strange that I should think about Paul Haney and how to get in touch with him on the day he died.

I knew he was fighting cancer and had assumed that was the reason he hadn't got back to me after our initial telephone call. I didn't realise he was quite so ill.

So, the Apollo circle gets a little smaller still. I'm sad I never got to conclude my conversation properly Paul and properly revisit his time working with ITN. Anyway, I wish him well on his next journey.

Paul Haney

2009-05-28T01:58:00.001-07:00

Looking at who's clicked through to the site, I noticed it came up in a search for NASA's Public Affairs launch announcer, Paul Haney. I approached Paul via his local space museum in Mew Mexico and initially got a positive response, but haven't yet been able to pin down a second conversation with him.

In fact, I now have a few outstanding enquiries that need following up - so that's the plan for the next few days - I'll be bumping those e-mails sent to Lola Morrow (and, I hope Jay Barbree), Paul Haney and Reg Turnhill - all of whom will add significant insight to the piece.

It's good to be writing about the Apollo era as the 40th anniversary approaches since interest levels are high. But that has a flip-side too in that many involved are in great demand.

This week's reading...

2009-05-26T03:05:00.000-07:00

...is an intriguing account of an astronaut who wasn't. Brian O'Leary joined the program in the late '60s as a scientist astronaut, but as Apollo wound down and the follow-ups: Skylab and the long-off Shuttle slowly hove into view, he decided he didn't need NASA, and perhaps the space Administration didn't need him.

The book was written in the early 70s, so I'm looking forward to picking up this near contemporary perspective.

My Apollo position

2009-05-21T06:29:00.000-07:00

Having stated my disso hypothesis, I've had some feedback that in stating that the space race was a media construct, it makes it look as though I'm dissing or downgrading the efforts of all those who took part in getting America to the moon. Far from it. I believe the decade from 1961 was probably the most productive in American life in the way it melded the efforts of industry, research and academia to deliver the century's iconic event.

The Apollo programme - at least after the Apollo 1 tragedy - was an unparalleled triumph in engineering, technological and human endeavour. It essentially created today's project management systems and delivered huge technological advances that are still being felt 40 years later.

The astronauts showed immense bravery, skill and alpha + achievement, and so did so many of the 400,000 people whose work fulfilled Kennedy's aspiration.

However, there was a huge failure in the programme for me and that was that it was so focused on an event. The moon landing should have been a milestone in a far greater process. Instead it became an end in itself, not a means to opening up the heavens. The media is much to blame in defining that 'end'.

Happy Monday

2009-05-18T05:31:00.000-07:00

Hypothesis has gone down well - though it may take a full PhD project to work through it properly. So for the disso I need to decide whether to look at one element - how the space race became a race for instance, or, my preference, how to tackle the whole elephant in pieces that won't be so bite-sized as to be meaningless. So, I need to work on the structure this week.

The other good part of this morning is to hear back from Lola Morrow, 'Den Mother' to the astronauts from 62-69. I'm very much looking forward to her insight into life at the Cape. I've pinched this picture from CollectSpace.com where she's pictured with Gene Cernan and Bill Anders

Grounding my hypothesis

2009-05-15T05:33:00.000-07:00

The scales are just about beginning to fall away from my eyes in terms of what a disso is all about. I've spent the last couple of weeks thinking about the structure and form of the piece - approaching it, unsurprisingly, in a rather journalistic way, rather than engaging with what my hypothesis actually is.

So, while I've always had said hypothesis running around my head, my tutor has advised getting it down on paper...and the structure's more likely to run from the conclusion backwards than to flow from the germ of an idea forwards.

So, here's where I stand:

The Space Race was a media construct. The prestige of the United States was materially damaged by the failure to put the first satellite in space. While Eisenhower was comfortable for the Soviets to be the first nation in space, and had no plans to create a 'race', public perception, fanned by radio broadcasts and printed media was very different, and worked against Eisenhower and his chosen stance.

Khrushchev exploited America's slow start in rocket and satellite development, propagandising the Soviet space programme as a means of creating a false impression of the relative power of the Superpowers. In the US, Johnson, first through his position in Congress and then as VP to Kennedy grabbed the space mantle and politicised NASA's efforts as a weapon to fight back against he Soviet threat to US power. He, through lobbying from Werner Von Braun, prompted Kennedy's '61 speech to Congress which put the moon landing as the centre piece (and perception-wise, end point) to the space race, since even in '61, there was sufficient evidence to suggest the was a race that only the US could win.

While NASA was the enabler for Armstrong et al to reach the moon, it was also the victim of an implicit political/media alliance that was focused solely on beating the Soviets by reaching the moon and thus ensuring US prestige was restored. This was an end-game, and further space exploration was not in the reckoning. So, NASA’s campaign to market the Apollo program as a world endeavour ('for all mankind') focused on uniting science and technology in the pursuit of discovery paradoxically created a dynamic that brought the premature termination of the program. Laudable in its aims, its actual efforts were focused on creating a means to land a man on the moon and return him safely to earth, and that was the expectation created through NASA's own communication machine and fanned by a compliant media. The goal was limited. Only far too late in the day (when governmental money was being diverted elsewhere) did NASA wake up to the fact that their goal was tactical, and that there was no grand strategy for opening the heavens (as Von Braun had envisaged), and no saleable vision to engage a sceptical media and increasingly disinterested public.

This mistake was a consequence of tunnel vision that could not see beyond a moon landing and a failure in NASA's own communication that saw it excellent in its ability to respond to the needs of the media, which grew increasingly news-hungry through the '60s, but abject in its ability to set the agenda for true space exploration. This was largely down to:

A limited appetite for space exploration from 1966 onwards resulting in lukewarm support among the political classes

A single-objective program that was an end in itself rather than a means to a greater end

A media increasingly focused on the new and the different (not on repeats of what had been done before)

Weak leadership in NASA (especially post-Webb)

A communication culture that was inward looking, focused on engineering achievement rather than presenting an inspiring vision

Risk-averse, unchallenging and skill-limited communications personnel within NASA.

The result was a cul de sac - from which NASA has never truly escaped subsequently. The media created the race, then ultimately turned upon itself and ate the edifice it had created.

That's where I am now, but likely more thoughts as I ponder on this in days to come.

Back down to earth

2009-05-14T01:29:00.000-07:00

....And after 8 straight A grades...a C on my last Masters essay. Well that's brought me back down to earth, though the overall module grade is a B. Still, serves me right for getting cocky - I've achieved nothing yet.

Finding focus

2009-05-12T01:47:00.001-07:00

Bit of a change of tack on the disso. Following feedback from my supervisor, I'm changing from what's basically a chronological structure to a thematic structure.....probably essential to get all I want to say down into 15,000 words with the right analytical vigour.

Still nailing down the 'themes' to group the analysis around, but it'll be something like:

prestige (beating the Soviets)
adventure (romanticism/frontier spirit)
discovery (engineering v science)
....and there's something around politics/expediency and possibly legacy that I haven't quite bottomed out yet.

In all cases I still want to analyse the impact of NASA's manipulation of the media...and indeed the media's independent response to NASA and whether the tail in fact began to wag the dog even before the moon goal was reached.

I really want to nail the structure this week and start drafting (even skeleton drafting) over the next fortnight.

Today's reading...and viewing

2009-05-01T08:58:00.000-07:00

The disso challenge is to read and/or view relevant material for an hour a day, with a view to having at least one chapter - and possibly two - drafted by the end of the month.

The outline for the disso - as it stands and subject to revision - is:

Introduction – Before this decade is out

• The context for Kennedy’s speech, briefly covering the early space race
history and how the media had largely been responsible for creating a ‘space
race’ where Eisenhower clearly believed one did not, nor need not, exist.
• Media and the heroic myth – how the likes of ‘Life Magazine’ created an all
new breed of American superhero before any American rocket had cleared the
tower
• How and why Kennedy reached for the moon - Johnson’s role in envisaging
Apollo, and how Khrushchev, Korolev and Gagarin upped the stakes

Superpower aspirations – God speed John Glenn, and Leonov’s expanding suit

• Why the space race mattered
• How Johnson countered Khrushchev’s smoke and mirrors
• The polls and reaction at home
• The press and reaction abroad

Deviations on the road – Apollo 1 and the Soyuz disasters

• NASA and Public Affairs
• Coping with disaster
• Open v closed communication

Space in the televisual age – We come in peace for all mankind

• How television brought the moon closer
• Creating global wonder
• Projecting soft power through scientific logic and soothing words

Budgets, battles and pork belly politics – why the Moon fell out of favour

• The Vietnam effect and the domestic perils of ‘68
• Falling polls
• Apollo 13 and the uniting effect of disaster
• America v the media – the differing impact post Apollo 11 around the world.

Conclusions - only in America, only at this time

• Why the Apollo effect dissipated so quickly
• The dislocation of power – NASA and a mature media
• Could it ever happen again?

It makes sense to start at the beginning, so at 8am today I was watching 'Ordinary Supermen' from Discovery's NASA's Greatest Missions - When we left Earth series, and I've also been reading the opening chapters of Robert Divine's The Sputnik Challenge which is a pretty good read for what's essentially an academic history.

Charlie Duke: what a nice guy

2009-04-20T09:43:00.001-07:00

So, yesterday evening saw me in Birmingham at about 6pm, and for the first, and very possibly only, time in my life, I got to sink a pint with a man who has walked on the moon.

Charlie Duke looked fairly fatigued after two days of autograph signing and posing for pictures with collectors, traders and fans and admitted to having had very little sleep over the previous two days.

But, instead of winding down after his pretty relentless personal appearances, he gave up a whole hour to me once the show had ended to talk about the politics and media interest that surrounded not just his Apollo 16 flight, but the whole programme. He was charming, friendly and ever so patient, since I hardly think my line of questioning was revolutionary and it definitely took me a while to get into my stride, though our pints of Stella Artois certainly helped. He was even prepared to talk on long after my recording device was full (ironically I was using 80s technology to talk to a man in his 70s about events that spanned the 60s!).

Did much new emerge? Probably not (certainly not for him!) Do I have ammunition to use in the disso? Definitely - some great quotes and one or two unexpected opinions. Was it worth the 150 mile round-trip on a Sunday evening. Most definitely. Did I miss out not going to the autograph show? No, No, No.

...And did I get an autograph? Well, it was most certainly not appropriate to whip out a camera or open my many Apollo books for the Duke pen. But I thought it was the right thing to ask Charlie to initial my email trail to authenticate our meeting. But he's a really nice guy and went further than that (see above) writing: 'To Mark - All the best on your thesis. Aim high, Charlie Duke.

Today, I'm aiming higher!

Good news - but the going's getting tough

2009-04-17T03:04:00.000-07:00

Good news on several fronts this week. First, my penultimate Masters essay gained an A grade. But what really had me smiling all day yesterday was a note from Apollo 16's Charlie Duke saying he's happy to meet up over the weekend to answert my research questions.

We haven't quite pinned down when and where yet - and I know his autograph show commitments will have to come first - so I won't be fully happy until we actually sit down over a coffee and discuss the impact the media had on his NASA career. Anyway, it was great to hear from him. The PhD dream is now beginning to solidify just a little bit more.

However, there are many hurdles to traverse before there's anything concrete about that, and the hard work's now really emerging, using the Masrters Disso as the basis of my research plan. There's considerable cross-over, but I can't dilute either part of my summer's work, as focusing too much on PhD prep will could have a negative impact on the Masters disso and vice versa.

I suppose it's all a question of balance.

Turning to face the moon

2009-04-15T09:22:00.000-07:00

Once my PC comes back from hospital where it's in the midst of a processor and mother board transplant - having fried the present incumbents - I'll be bashing out my last ever Brunel essay before the disso research really kicks in.

My research outline is now complete although it's not due 'til May. And before then i hope to get at least one or two more interviews in the bag and also relink in with some of the guys who were really helpful last summer - the likes of Asif Siddiqi and Roger Launius.

I'm hoping, probably against hope, that I can catch up, at least by phone with Apollo 16's Charlie Duke who's in the UK for an autograph show this weekend. I'm sure these shows please a lot of people, but they're hopeless for anyone planning a research conversation and the organisers are seemingly less than willing to help anyone - however legitimate their request - unless we're prepared to part with the readies.....readies I haven't got.

Oh well, here's hoping.

Edging forward - and to what?

2009-03-11T04:21:00.000-07:00

Okay - I'm blowing my own trumpet. I've had 7 A grades in a row for my MA assignments and I'm feeling pretty good.

At the moment, they mean nothing - or at least they mean three A graded modules - but I've got a C as well, and I'm still two essays and an exam from completing the other two.

However, if I even get reasonable marks in my last three pieces of course/exam work it'll set the bar even higher for the disso. So the pressure's on - but that's good.

2009-02-23T08:59:00.000-08:00

My interview with Walt Cunningham features in the March 2009 issue of Spaceflight published by the British Interplanetary Society.

Serious stuff...

2009-02-11T08:16:00.000-08:00

The disso's on hold at the moment as the sharp end of this term's taught modules kicks in. In the coming six weeks or so, I have to produce:

1 x 1000 word article review (already drafted)

1 x 20 minute presentation (to be delivered this Friday)

1 x 5000 word research essay (drafted)

1 x 2000 word primary source review (China's 2006 space manifesto White paper)

1 x 3000 word essay on an aspect of China in the World

.....And then I've got an exam on WW2!

To be honest, I'm loving every moment of it, but regretting that I'm doing it alongside pretty-much a full-time job. Still, maybe I'll be able to turn the academic research into the job in a year or three!

Interesting, very interesting - documentary due on television coverage of the moon landings.

2009-01-29T08:03:00.000-08:00

There's an interesting story today on Space.com about a new documentary charting television's coverage of the moon landings. Live from the Moon debuts next month in the US - and is set for a UK release to coincide with the 40th anniversary of the Apollo X1 moon landing in July.

I'm going to track down the production team to see if there's any way I can get a sneak preview....It could well be worth reviewing for Spaceflight - and including in the disso.

Good news/bad news

2009-01-07T07:53:00.000-08:00

The Christmas break has provided some opportunity to do a bit more work on the disso - ordering a few more books; trying to get some research funding and/or finding other ways to support the proposed US trip.

A piece of good news today is that one of my pieces is set to be published in Spaceflight, with the issue due out about a month from now. Less good news yesterday was my department's announcement that it has no money to fund MA research projects....in fact it seemingly doesn't have any money at all at present! I'm still trying to get a few quid out of the grad school, but who knows if that will bear any fruit.

My alternative route is to make the research trip a working trip too and try and get a commission or two for travel writing - not easy in this economically tight market. Still, I'll keep plugging away.

I got some good feedback from a professor at the University of Texas on my application for research funding to visit the LBJ presidential library. Having been knocked back in October, I'm now much clearer on their requirements - and what lights their candle - and will probably reapply for the March/April round of grant-in-aid applications.

I've now been offered two dates for completing the disso - September 2009 for a December grading or March 2010 for a June grading. Both would still enable me to complete the Masters in time for a July 2010 graduation, but the later date offers no fall-back time if the disso goes wrong and needs to be resubmitted. I sincerely hope that won't happen, but am aiming to get the work completed by the end of this September as planned - giving me a better chance of landing some PhD funding for a late 2010 start.

General Musings

2008-11-18T08:05:00.000-08:00

I'm feeling rather more upbeat about the dissertation - and its possibility of it evolving into a book further down the line.

Weirdly, that feeling was boosted by an event I attended at the British interplanetary Society at the beginning of the month following the fortunes of women in space. The audience was older, knowledgeable and eager for information - but neither the presenter or his colleague who facilitated the Q&A were that great.... I've always been a bit daunted that my understanding and enthusiasm for the history of the Space Race might be a bit noddy when placed alongside those who make a living writing about it. And while my detailed grasp of the minutiae may pale beside those who spend their lives in the more geeky aspects of space research, I've actually found that the knowledge I have of the period and the politics around the space programme is actually pretty good - and the perspective I bring as one born during the Gemini programme gives me a slightly different outlook to those who were adults already when the Cold War dawned.

I was furthe bouyed up by a good old dose of Apollo TV over the weekend when I caught up on Discovery's NASA's greatest missions. Now I've seen more or less all of the original foorage in other packages before, but these were good programmes, well researched - and it's always good to see the likes of Kranz, Aldrin, Armstrong (a rarity!), Duke and Cernan enthusing about the missions.

My final bouancy device is to find there's a possibility that my own university may part-fund next Spring's research trip to Washington and Austin. It'll be a great relief to secure even partial funding and while confirmation is far from certain, things are looking a tad more hopeful.

Feeling glum

2008-10-28T04:28:00.000-07:00

Things aren't going so well on the research front at the moment. I'm heavily tied up in two taught MA modules at the moment, so the dissertation has been on the back burner, but a letter received today plus the lack of response from potential interviewees has left me a bit down in the dumps.

I've had my application for funding to research at the LBJ Library in Austin, Texas next Spring rejected. No specific reason has been given so I've asked for some more detailed feedback. Obviously failing to secure travel/accommodation money is a blow, but not insurmountable. This was my first application, and hopefully I'll be able to find funding elsewhere.

Meanwhile, I've yet to hear from Paul Haney - a key NASA public affairs spokesman in Gemini/early Apollo times, and latterly ITN's expert on the moon landings. A guy at the New Mexico Museum of Space History put me in touch with Mr Haney - but he hasn't yet got back to me.

Perhaps rather less surprisingly, those Apollo astronauts scheduled to be in the UK this weekend for an autograph show - Lovell, Scott and Brand among them - haven't responded to my requests for interview. Somehow I think it's sad that their appearances are now rationed to money-making zoo shows - and I doubt it's what they or NASA had planned 30 years ago. it's tempting to shell out a tenner and join the queues anyway....but I really don't want a three second hello and an expensive autograph, I want to run through a set of research questions with them that will add first-person experience to a piece of academic research. I'm rapidly getting the impression though that I'm a bit naive and over-optimistic!

Anyway, I'm realising I really don't rate on the academic historian scale at all yet. I recently submitted an article to a magazine and got no response at all - nothing, not even a two word 'no thanks'.

When the targeted magazine came out, they'd covered the subject using a piece I'd already seen in a US publication. That certainly put me in my place!

I can live with rejections - they're a part of my working life in corporate communications. But it's doubly galling to hear nothing at all. That builds up false hope, even a false sense that things are going well.

Anyway, rant over. It's up to me now to get things back on track.

Happy Birthday BiS

2008-10-13T07:50:00.000-07:00

Happy birthday to the British Interplanetary Society (of which I am a member!) - 75 today, making it the second oldest organisation in support of space exploration in the world.

The Flight of the Phoenix - 40 years on

2008-10-08T07:05:00.000-07:00

As part of my MA research, I recently had the chance to interview Apollo 7's Walt Cunningham. This article covers his Apollo 7 mission - the 'forgotten' Apollo that got NASA back on its horse and well set for a moonshot.

Copyright on the content resides with Mark Shanahan and none of the interview below can be reproduced without permission.

The Flight of the 'Phoenix' - 40 years on

“You’re prompt!”

There’s nothing more unnerving than an unexpected phone greeting. So Walt Cunningham’s way of answering my phone call threw me a bit when I rang him, as planned, at his Houston, Texas home.

Cunningham is the last surviving crew member of Apollo 7, the phoenix that rose from the flames of the Apollo 1 fire and put the US manned space programme back on track in 1968.

October 11th marks the 40th anniversary of the flight of the ‘Phoenix’ – a near-perfect shakedown of the Apollo Command and Service Modules, although it’s probably best remembered now for Mission Commander Wally Schirra’s head cold and general irascibility.

Ironically, Cunningham, the one Apollo 7 crewman who didn’t suffer from a cold in space was recovering from a bad one when we spoke. He’s not one to spend much time recollecting his past, though he has grown more comfortable speaking about his eight years with NASA as the years since Apollo have progressed.

“When I was in business, I kind of resented the fact that all anyone wanted to know about was my 11 days in space. It used to be a barrier to getting to the real meat of the conversation. My flight was more than half a lifetime ago, and there’s a lot more to me than that one mission. But I’m more relaxed about it today and understand that people are curious about the steps that led up to the Moon landing which remains the defining event of the 20th Century.”

Cunningham rates Apollo 7 as the third most important Apollo mission, headed only by Apollo 11’s moon landing, and Apollo 8’s circum-lunar flight. “An awful lot of people think the Apollo programme started with Apollo 8, the earthrise pictures and the readings from scripture. Perhaps because we tested the CSM in earth orbit we tend to be forgotten. However, this was a crucial mission for NASA.

“After the disaster of the Apollo 1 fire, we were very aware that another failed mission would put the whole Apollo Programme at risk. While NASA was fully committed to the moon landing on Kennedy’s terms, it was clear that the political will in Washington wasn’t as strong as it had been. Our budgets were being pared back and the escalation of the war in Vietnam and Johnson’s Great Society Programmes were putting the squeeze on available dollars.

“NASA needed Apollo 7 to be a success, Johnson wanted to get ahead of the Soviets again in the race to the moon and the whole country really needed a lift after a bad year.”

So did that put extra pressure on Cunningham, Eisele and Schirra? “Personally, I don’t think this was different from any other mission,” Cunningham responded. “We had been together for three years, training first for the Apollo 2 mission until that was scrapped; then as back-up to Grissom, White and Chaffee and then, following their deaths, as the prime crew for what became Apollo 7.

“We’d had 21 months since the fire to work with North American on a much safer, much improved capsule and had all rehearsed our own roles and those of the other crew members hundreds and thousands of times over. I had no thoughts about the fire; I didn’t feel we were taking any unnecessary risks and I fully believe we were aimed at perfection, regardless of whatever was going on beyond our circumstances.

“After we came back, Wally claimed he had felt that he was carrying an extra load of pressure beyond his Mercury and Gemini flight experience. I never saw anything about him at the time that would justify this claim and, with 20:20 hindsight, suspect it was aimed at excusing his irritable behaviour on the mission.

“Leading up to the mission we were totally focused on making it a success and that’s what we achieved. The result of our successful outcome was that we gave management the opportunity to insert Apollo 8 into the schedule as a circum-lunar flight, orbiting the moon just two months after we’d returned to earth. We had six days of intensive debrief after we landed and our experience with the Apollo hardware and software made it a lot easier for George Low and Sam Phillips to press their case to send Apollo 8 to the moon rather than conducting another low earth orbit shakedown.”

Asked for his comments on Schirra’s mood and behaviour on the flight – which ended Cunningham and Eisele’s hopes of another Apollo mission, Walt said: “Wally was a great friend until his death last year – but I do hold his actions on the flight against him. In the end, he had different motives for flying than Donn and I. He’d already been in space twice and had made it clear that he intended to move on once this mission was complete.

“Aside from his cold, he was ticking the mission days off right from the start. He was the kind of character who got in, got the job done and wanted to get out again – and he thought about himself first and his crew second.

“He did start showing cold symptoms from day two, and Donn followed suit with a bit of a sniffle later in the flight. I’m sure it was horrible – in zero-g it’s very difficult to clear your head. Blowing your nose hard is the only way, and that really hurts your ears. But when it came down to it, if Wally had a cold, everyone had a cold.

“His attitude and run-ins with Mission Control were a somewhat different issue, stemming more from the fact that he wasn’t a detail-guy. Wally painted with a broad-brush and hadn’t gotten too involved in the minutiae of the flight plan which was pretty crowded – especially in the early days of the flight. So, given that he was feeling bad, he was less than pleased to see anything added to the plan.

“Unfortunately, we were all tarred with the same brush by Chris Kraft back at Houston which meant that Donn and I were grounded. Looking back, Wally should have been more of a mentor. . Other Commanders worked with their crews to help them into seats on later missions.

“Perhaps I should have spoken up more at the time, and I regret I didn’t, but my role on Apollo 7 was an unusual one for me. I’m normally pretty blunt, but I found myself in the peacemaker’s role, sometimes between Wally and Donn and sometimes between the pair of them and Houston. However, things were never as bad as they were reported afterwards. We got along pretty well – in the end, the mission came first and it was probably the best test flight of a new craft that NASA ever had.”

General Sam Phillips, Apollo Programme Manager at NASA HQ in Washington described the mission as 101% successful, yet reading Cunningham’s book The All American Boys, there’s a sense it could have been even more productive.

“The mission was front-loaded,” he explained, “with about 75% of our core activities packed into the first four or five days. Frankly, Donn and I were a little worried that Wally might try to bring us home early. What that meant is that we weren’t exactly overloaded with stuff to do in the later days of the mission. That meant it actually got a little boring towards the end. The food was bland; the craft was a little noisy and Wally’s focus was clearly fixed on getting back to terra firma. He had a wrist calendar and used to tick the days off one by one. By the second half of the mission, he was ticking them off after breakfast!”

My assumption from reading the book was that Walt didn’t rate Donn Eisele too highly in terms of performance, noting that he once fell asleep on watch . “No, actually Donn did rather well,” he countered. “He was a rookie too and felt he had to perform well. If that meant taking his lead from the Commander, so be it. Donn’s natural style was to be a joiner. And, as Wally had an ego big enough for all three of us, Donn usually took his cue from him.”

One thing I’d never understood, and was eager to question Cunningham on was what the designated Lunar Module pilot did on missions where there was no LM? He laughed, replying: “Actually, my role was to be the systems expert on the spacecraft. Together with Jack Swigert, I’d spent months developing and refining the systems malfunction procedures. I had to know every one of the dozen systems throughout the spacecraft and was responsible for solving any problems that might occur in flight.

“We didn’t have many, just enough to keep things interesting. We got some high temperatures on a fuel cell, and the two AC buses dropped out momentarily once when the cryogenic oxygen tank heaters were cycling. We were able to overcome any issues very quickly. The whole purpose of the mission was to test the spacecraft and the systems , and it came through with flying colours.

“The mission was far more important than the crew, and it encompassed thousands of people across NASA and its contractors. When you compare Apollo to what the Soviets were attempting, it’s clear to see why we were moving into the lead. The Russian centralized command and control system produced relatively simple hardware that constrained them to relatively simple missions.

“By comparison, we produced complex spacecraft and outsiders may still not understand how so many different contractors could come together to fashion such staggering success. But the programme was too big for any single company, and our triumph was in systems management. The American way enabled us to produce a complex spacecraft with a far greater chance of success with complex missions.”

Demonstrating that success, the crew made eight firings of the Service Propulsion System – the engine that would place later Apollo craft in and out of lunar orbit, and brought firsts such as a daily TV show to the curious public back on earth some 200 miles below.

Apollo 7 splashed down on October 22 just a third of a mile from its planned landing point, bringing to a close a flight that vindicated the continuance of Apollo.

Next, I asked Cunningham for his thoughts on the mission’s legacy. “Its legacy is threefold,” he commented. “First, it got the programme back on track after the loss of Apollo 1 and its crew. Second, it gave management the collateral to change the programme and speed our progress to the moon with Apollo 8. Third, in so doing, it was an essential step towards Neil and Buzz stepping onto the lunar surface.”

So, I concluded, how does Cunningham feel about NASA’s stated aim of returning to the moon and then heading for Mars. “I find it hard to get excited about,” he concluded. “Apollo was a one off from days when America showed real leadership and wasn’t afraid to take risks. Everything about the future missions seems too woolly and lacking in direction. In this risk-averse society, I can’t honestly see the kind of decisive action and collective will necessary to turn the plans into reality. The Cold War provided the edge we needed to demonstrate the superiority of one ideology over another. The world has moved on now and I fail to see that necessary edge.”

Walt Cunningham remains busy with writing and speaking engagements. You can find out more about him and Apollo 7 at www.waltercunningham.com. Mark Shanahan is a freelance writer based in the UK and is currently studying for an MA in international Relations at Brunel University focusing on Superpower politics in the Cold War.

It took a fire to put man on the moon

2008-10-05T08:50:00.000-07:00

Previously published on my work blog - this actually is more appropriate here, and timely as we approach the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 7 flight.

Apollo 204: how a fatal fire put a man on the moon

“We’ve got a fire in the cockpit! We’ve got a bad fire....get us out. We’re burning up....”On January 27, 1967 the crew of the first planned Apollo mission was in Command Module (CSM) 012 on Pad 34 at the Kennedy Space Centre in Florida, running through a standard ‘plugs out test’ . With a month still to their launch date, Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee faced a routine rehearsal for their Apollo ‘shake down’ mission. But as testing neared its conclusion, an electrical arc caused a flash fire in the capsule. Within seconds, the astronauts were dead.

North American Aviation technician Steve Clemmons had been monitoring the oxygen feed into the spacecraft from the Clean Room on the top floor of the gantry tower. “The astronauts had been in the capsule for over five hours and tempers were a little frayed. There had been problems all through the test. Testing was on hold and we could tell by Grissom’s scuffling inside the craft that he was agitated.

“The final test called for the Astronauts to declare an emergency, so we weren’t surprised when we heard: ‘Fire, we’ve got a fire in here.’ I looked over toward a colleague, Jim Gleaves. He could see that this wasn’t a test. Shocked, he yelled: ‘Let’s get the men out’ as he and Don Babbitt, the pad leader, followed by Jerry Hawkins, rushed out on the swing arm that led to the White Room surrounding the entrance hatch of the capsule.“I looked up at the nearest capsule window. It had turned bright orange. Then I realised that we had a real fire on our hands.

The Spacecraft ruptured several seconds later and secondary fires broke out on both levels.”

Frantic fight

Clemmons and his colleagues fought frantically through flames and acrid smoke to get to the CSM’s hatches and get them open, using the only two fire extinguishers on Level 8 (there was none in the CSM itself). By this time some of their clothes were burned off and Gleaves and Babbit had been overcome by smoke and heat.

“It took us four minutes and fifteen seconds to get the cover and hatches off. But the Astronauts were dead, killed within 18 seconds after the first explosion.”

Space race lost?

The US needed Apollo to be a success. For the past decade they’d been playing space catch-up with the Soviets who had put the first artificial satellite in space, swiftly followed by the first man (and woman). Now, NASA believed the Soviets were at least neck and neck in the race to put a man on the moon.

Following the successes of Mercury when NASA had launched the first American astronauts – including Grissom – into space, and Gemini, during which Ed White became the first American to walk in space, NASA was on the verge of the first Apollo launch – until the fatal fire struck..Now the government’s $22 billion investment in Apollo was in jeopardy, and President Kennedy’s 1961 pledge to land a man on the moon and bring him back safely before the end of the decade looked like words without substance.

Trouble

Apollo 204 had been trouble from the start. The simulators didn’t work and NAA – new to the space race – had endured serious problems during the capsule’s manufacture. It was way behind schedule and shipped to the Cape with a hundreds of faults outstanding. Change in the CSM was a daily occurrence – and many of the changes weren’t being properly recorded or managed.

NASA and its contractors alike were suffering, according to Steve Clemmons, from ‘Moon fever’. “There was an attitude at Kennedy of ‘do everything, even if it’s wrong’ to get us to the moon.“We were working at top speed to get the craft ready for launch. All-too-regular VIP visits inside the capsule, plus the huge amount of work being undertaken by engineers and technicians, were bound to affect the craft. There were miles of exposed wire, aluminium tubing, valves and electrical devices. Velcro strips with an extremely flammable backing were installed on all the open wall areas, and nylon netting was suspended below the seats.

“Then, the test itself was planned in a pure oxygen environment. In such an environment, even steel burns. Hindsight provides wonderful 20:20, but this was an accident waiting to happen.”

Explosive

“Such an obvious thing and yet we hadn’t considered it,” commented Apollo 11 astronaut, Michael Collins. Writing in Carrying the fire, he said: “We put three guys inside an untried spacecraft, strapped them into couches, locked two cumbersome hatches behind them and left them no way of escaping a fire.......With all those oxygen molecules packed in there at that pressure (16psi) any material generally considered combustible would be almost explosive.”

Investigation

Following the accident, US space flight was put on hold. Shock gripped NASA and the nation. James Webb, NASA Administrator, told the media: "We've always known that something like this was going to happen soon or later. . . . who would have thought that the first tragedy would be on the ground?"But as the nation mourned, Webb acted to save Apollo. He asked President Johnson for NASA to be allowed to handle the accident investigation and direct the recovery from the accident. He promised to be truthful in assessing blame and pledged to assign it to himself and NASA management as appropriate. Johnson agreed.Webb appointed an eight member investigation board, chaired by longtime NASA official and director of the Langley Research Centere, Floyd L. Thompson. It set out to discover the details of the tragedy: what happened, why it happened, could it happen again, what was at fault, and how could NASA recover?

The very fact that the fire had occurred on the launch pad rather than in space probably saved Apollo. Thompson had all the evidence in front of him to assess the cause of the fire – and more so, what needed to be done to get Apollo back in the race.

Scrutiny

The burnt out capsule was taken to Langley, and over the following weeks, a team of almost 2000 investigators took the charred capsule apart. Every piece was examined thoroughly, with intense scrutiny of the miles of wiring that had snaked through the craft.While the fire investigations singled out no specific source – NASA’s report states ‘an electrical fire of undetermined origins’, it’s generally accepted that the fire began just below Grissom’s seat on the left side of the capsule. In the pure oxygen atmosphere, it spread with frightening rapidity.

The Thompson investigation was swiftly followed by congressional hearings by both the Senate and the House of Representatives. Manned Apollo space flight was grounded until Apollo 7 launched on October 11 1968. Webb managed to deflect the criticism from Thompson’s team and the subsequent Congressional hearings away from individuals within both NASA and the CSM contractor, North American Aviation. He subsequently resigned from NASA in October 1968.

Meanwhile, Grissom and Chaffee had been buried at Arlington and White at West Point, all with full military honours, and a nation mourned its lost heroes. Some months later, the flight that never happened was given the official title Apollo 1.

Out of the fire

Yet fellow astronaut Walt Cunningham, a member of the back-up crew who subsequently served on the Apollo 204 investigation isn’t comfortable with viewing the three as heroes. He told me: “The crew was simply performing a routine test. Unfortunately there was an accident and they lost their lives. Nothing heroic was involved other than their being astronauts – a risky job.”

The biggest impact of the fire was that it gave NASA the necessary pause for breath to get the programme back on track to fulfil Kennedy’s pledge. “Apollo 1 was a vital step to the moon,” Cunningham continued, “because it reminded management that spacecraft were dangerous and bought the time necessary to fix deficiencies.”

Just whether NASA’s ‘fixes’ were enough was put to the test in October 1968 when Cunningham finally took to the skies alongside Wally Schirra and Donn Eisele aboard Apollo 7. The mission was a resounding technical success. A chastened organisation was finally in fit shape to put a man on the moon.The Apollo1 fire marked the loss of NASA’s innocence. Yet the catastrophe paved the way for a new regime that revolutionised mission planning and safety. By learning its lessons so painfully on the launch pad, NASA enabled Neil Armstrong to set foot on the moon in July 1969.

Useful web resources:

NASA history http://history.nasa.gov/history.html
Kennedy Space Centre www.nasa.gov/centers/kennedy/home/index.html
USAF Space and Missile Museum http://www.patrick.af.mil
Apollo 1 Memorial Foundation http://www.apollo1.org/

Books:· A Man on the Moon – Andrew Chaikin, Penguin ISBN: 0140272011· Space Race – Deborah Cadbury, Harper Perennial ISBN: 13 978 000 720994 1· Carrying the Fire – Michael Collins, Cooper Square Press ISBN: 081541028X· The All-American Boys – Walter Cunningham, ibooks ISBN: 0743486676Post:

(These are a couple of blog entries carried over from my previous blog)

Earthrise

We're coming up to the 40th anniversary of the manned element of the Apollo programme. I recently interviewed Walt Cunningham about his recollections of his Apollo 7 flight, and am now looking into Apollo 8 - and one particular element - the Earthrise photo that adorns this blog.

Apollo 8 marked the point where the world really switched on to the programme. Approval ratings soured and the world's media began its countdown to the moon landing to follow in July 1969. Bill Anders has always been credited with the Earthrise shot, though both mission commander Frank Borman and the third crew member, Jim Lovell have also made claims for it. It seems that there were a number of shots taken - both colour and black and white and the cameras were used by all three astronauts - so all have some title to the iconic shot.

Austrailan Broadcasting have an interesting take on the astronauts' perception of the shot - how Borman shot it with the moon's surface horizontal while anders uses the relativity of the CSM to the moon to capture a more 'real' angle with the moon as a vertical horizon - although the image is almost never reproduced in that way.

Why the US sent men to the moon - James Burke's view

A few weeks ago, I spent a very entertaining hour on the phone to James Burke, he of Connections, Tomorrow's World and, of course, the BBC's coverage of the Apollo missions.
I asked him why he thought the US chose to send men to the moon and he responded: "This was a fantastic exercise in political PR. At a time when the US was immensely rich and politically powerful, the Apollo programme provided a giant diversion from the failures at home and in Vietnam. NASA fed the comic book image of adventure, excitement and danger......but the $24billion was actually less than American women spent on lipstick across the same period."