The Space Race: America's Most Spectacular Act of National Will

On October 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1, a metal sphere about the size of a beach ball, into orbit around the Earth. It beeped. That was all it did. But the beep that Americans could hear on their radios as the satellite passed overhead was one of the most psychologically effective signals in the history of competition between nations.

The message was clear: the country that could put a satellite in orbit had the rocket technology to put a nuclear warhead anywhere on Earth. America's comfortable sense of technological superiority, always somewhat complacent, was shattered. Congress and the public demanded a response.

The Eisenhower administration, which had actually been developing satellite and rocket programs with less fanfare, responded with the creation of NASA in 1958 and a rapid acceleration of existing programs. But it was John F. Kennedy who transformed the space race into a national crusade. In May 1961, weeks after Soviet cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first human in space, Kennedy stood before Congress and committed the nation to landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth before the end of the decade.

At the time Kennedy made that commitment, the United States had put one man in space for fifteen minutes. The gap between that capability and lunar landing was immense. The commitment required solving problems that had never been solved before, developing technologies that did not exist, and accepting levels of risk that would be politically impossible today.

At its peak, the Apollo program employed 400,000 people and consumed four percent of the federal budget. It drove advances in computing, materials science, life support systems, and hundreds of other fields. The integrated circuit, which would eventually become the foundation of the digital economy, was developed partly under the pressure of NASA's need for lightweight, reliable electronics.

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong stepped onto the surface of the moon. The achievement was broadcast live to an estimated 600 million people — about a fifth of the world's population at the time. It was, as Armstrong said with characteristic understatement, a giant leap for mankind, but it was also an unmistakable demonstration of American capacity. A democratic nation, mobilizing its resources through public investment and private enterprise, had accomplished in eight years something that most experts had considered impossible.

The Apollo program ended in 1972, a victim of budget pressures and the shifting priorities of a country increasingly consumed by Vietnam and domestic conflict. Twelve men had walked on the moon. No human has returned since. But the program left a permanent mark on American scientific and engineering culture and on the world's image of what the United States was capable of when it decided to do something.