In the spring of 1961, the United States was behind in space, and the world could see it. On April 12, the Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin orbited the Earth. On May 5, Alan Shepard became the first American in space, on a 15-minute flight that never went into orbit.
On May 25, John F. Kennedy went before Congress with a sentence: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.”
He didn’t pretend it would be easy. No single space project of the period, he said, would be more impressive, “and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish.” He asked for 531 million dollars in the coming fiscal year and an estimated seven to nine billion more over five years. Congress gave NASA the money, and by NASA historian Roger Launius’s account, the debate was perfunctory.
Eighteen months later, on November 21, 1962, Kennedy met NASA’s leaders and his budget advisers in the Cabinet Room. The subject was a supplemental budget request of more than $400 million. The tape recorder, apparently switched on by Kennedy himself, started after the opening briefing.
Kennedy wanted one thing. “Everything that we do ought to really be tied into getting onto the Moon ahead of the Russians,” he said. NASA’s administrator, James Webb, pushed back, asking why it couldn’t be tied to “preeminence in space.” He worried that projects such as the Centaur upper stage would slip if all attention went to the landing. Kennedy held his ground, and a little later said: “otherwise we shouldn’t be spending this kind of money because I’m not that interested in space.”
He went on. The only justification for “these fantastic expenditures which wreck our budget and all these other domestic programs,” he said, was “because we hope to beat them.”
The money kept coming. NASA’s budget rose from $500 million in 1960 to $5.2 billion in 1965. On January 27, 1967, during a test on the launch pad, fire swept through an Apollo capsule. Gus Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chaffee died. It took the ground crew five minutes to open the hatch.
On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin landed on the Moon. On July 24 they splashed down in the Pacific. In Mission Control in Houston, Kennedy’s words went up on the big screen, followed by: “TASK ACCOMPLISHED, July 1969.”
By Launius’s count, the whole of Project Apollo cost $25.4 billion. Five more landing missions followed, about six months apart, through December 1972.