Challenge president John F. Kennedy in Houston on Sept. 12, 1962, a year after he issued a challenge to the Soviet post-Sputnik command of space. More Photos By john noble wilford published: May 23, 2011 It was the spring of 1961

Bob Gomel/Time & Life Pictures, via Getty Images

By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Published: May 23, 2011

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Mission to the Moon

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On the 12th, Yuri Gagarin became the first human to orbit Earth — one more space triumph for the Soviet Union. Though the flight was not unexpected, it was nonetheless deflating; it would be more than a month before Alan Shepard became the first American in space, and that was on a 15-minute suborbital flight. On the 17th, a force of anti-Castro exiles, trained by the C.I.A., invaded communist Cuba at the Bay of Pigs — a fiasco within 36 hours. Mr. Kennedy’s close aide Theodore Sorensen described him on the 19th as “anguished and fatigued” and “in the most emotional, self-critical state I had ever seen him.”

At one meeting, his brother Robert F. Kennedy, the attorney general, “turned on everybody,” it was reported, saying: “All you bright fellows. You got the president into this. We’ve got to do something to show the Russians we are not paper tigers.” At another, the president pleaded: “If somebody can, just tell me how to catch up. Let’s find somebody — anybody. I don’t care if it’s the janitor over there.” Heading back to the Oval Office, he told Mr. Sorensen, “There’s nothing more important.”

So, 50 years ago, on May 25, 1961, President Kennedy addressed a joint session of Congress and a national television audience, declaring: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.”

There it was, the challenge flung before an adversary and to a nation on edge in an unconventional war, the beginning of Project Apollo.

Echoes of this time lift off the pages of “John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon” (Palgrave Macmillan), a new book by John M. Logsdon, a political scientist and longtime space policy specialist at George Washington University. He has drawn on new research in archives, oral histories and memoirs available in recent years to shed new light on the moon race.

The famous speech came after five weeks of hand wringing, back-channel memos and closed-door conferences, often overseen by Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson. In those meetings NASA and Pentagon officials, scientists and engineers, budget analysts and others decided that sending astronauts to the Moon by the end of the sixties was the country’s best shot at overcoming the Soviet post-Sputnik command of the orbital front in the cold war.

But, Dr. Logsdon said in an interview last week, the new material highlighted some recurring themes that had been overlooked, like Mr. Kennedy’s return, time and again, to the idea of engaging the Russians in a cooperative venture, his continuing support of the project through a time of doubt, and how little was known then of Soviet capabilities and intentions.

Most of all, Dr. Logsdon said, hindsight had made him aware of his blindness to Apollo’s implications for the long run. He said he had been wrong, in a 1970 book on the subject, to think that the lunar decision “can be generalized to tell us how to proceed toward other “great new American enterprises.”

And like many others who for years lived and breathed the project, he finally had to recognize that the “impact of Apollo on the space program has on balance been negative.” It was, he explained, not the beginning of human voyages to Mars and lunar bases but “a dead-end undertaking in terms of human travel beyond the immediate vicinity of this planet.”

Of course, it takes two to have a race. The American president could not be sure the Russians had a lunar-landing program. There was no evidence that the Russians were building facilities for a booster capable of launching people to the Moon. Was the president just double-dog-daring them to come out in the schoolyard and show their stuff?

An intelligence report in 1962 had nothing to add, short of speculating that “the chances are better than even that a lunar landing is a Soviet objective.” Only in 1964 did intelligence agents detect signs that there was indeed someone to make it a race.

Initially, NASA set its sights on late 1967 for the landing attempt. As spending escalated, Apollo ran into its first sharp criticism in Congress, the science establishment and the news media in 1963. “Even some of the Kennedy advisers were eager to slip the end-of-decade date and relieve the pressure, mainly to save money,” Dr. Logsdon said. These “winds of change,” as he put it, may have motivated Kennedy’s renewed invitation in a United Nations address in September to the Russians to join in a cooperative mission. He had proposed this informally to the Soviet leader, Nikita Khrushchev, at a meeting in Vienna shortly after his 1961 address to Congress. It was rejected out of hand. Russian accounts after the cold war have linked the rejection to a fear of exposing the technological shortcomings of the country’s program.

Walter A. McDougall, the historian who wrote “The Heavens and the Earth: A Political History of the Space Age,” has suggested that Kennedy’s periodic messages on space cooperation “were just exercises in image-building.” Dr. McDougall took a more skeptical view of spaceflight’s bearing on geopolitics, more in line with President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell address on the spreading influence of the military-industrial complex in national affairs.

Dr. Logsdon countered that the American achievements had by 1963 progressed to the point, as Mr. Sorensen said, that there was “a very real chance that we were even with the Soviets.” And since the Cuban missile crisis the year before, it was noted, Soviet-American relations had improved.

McGeorge Bundy, the national security adviser, talked tactics with the president. Either press for cooperation with the Russians, he suggested, or continue to use their space effort as “a spur to our own.” In a memorandum, Mr. Bundy said that “if we cooperate, the pressure comes off” regarding the decade goal, and “we can easily argue that it was our crash effort in ’61 and ’62 which made the Soviets ready to cooperate.”

In the year of criticism, Kennedy wavered but never backed away from his lunar commitment. Visiting Cape Canaveral on Nov. 16, 1963, he seemed to enjoy seeing preparations for the next astronaut flights. Days later, on Nov. 22, in the speech Kennedy never lived to give in Dallas, he intended to say “the United States of America has no intention of finishing second in space.”

The goal was reached on July 20, 1969, when Neil Armstrong and then Buzz Aldrin stepped on the gray surface of the Sea of Tranquillity. Since the last of six landings, in 1972, no one has been back.