Mass Funding for the Space Race… Why Did We Invest?
“That’s one step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” This phrase is a famous quote spoken by the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, during the time of the Space Race. The Space Race was a huge competition between the Soviet Union and the United States during the time of the Cold War.
At the time both the United States and the Soviet Union were trying to develop and launch spaceships and other cool, futuristic space technologies, such as satellites, probes, and even human flight.
The Soviet Union was the first to reach space, launching Sputnik I in October of 1957. After persistent pushing from John F. Kennedy to advance space technologies, NASA and other scientists turned his dreams into reality and finally landed a man on the moon.
The race to the moon was a fierce competition because both the Soviet Union and the United States wanted to claim both physical and symbolic dominance over the moon. The cost of this great adventure, however, was something that some were unsure of.
Although the Space Race was interesting to many of the American people, a lot of people had questions about the funding of the adventure to the unknown. Funding for space programs such as NASA and experiments on spacecraft was going to cost the country a lot, and John F. Kennedy knew this.
In John F. Kennedy’s Moon Speech, JFK stated that “This year’s space budget is three times what it was in January 1961, and it is greater than the space budget of the previous eight years combined. That budget now stands at $5,400 million a year — a staggering sum, though somewhat less than we pay for cigarettes and cigars every year.”
Even though this cost was astronomical (pun intended,) JFK was confident that the cost of the great galaxy adventures would pay off.
Americans were not crazy about the idea of this cost. Although most were perplexed at the idea of flying to space and discovering little green people that lived on Mars, they had other concerns for funding in America.
There were other areas that needed attention, such as American homes, education, civil rights, pollution, and urban renewal. This is understandable.
Why would citizens want to invest in something that did not directly affect their lives? Going to the moon would be a big accomplishment to Americans, but they felt that the funding for the Space Race was pretty much pointless.
It’s obvious that the Space Race was creeping into the media as well because Saturday morning cartoons like “Marvin the Martian” and “The Jetsons” were watched a lot in homes around America. With the popularity of the Space Race making its way into the media, a lot of American people started to get a little nervous. Since “Space” was a brand new concept to most, they were scared of the capabilities of the Soviet Union in space.
Some citizens even theorized that the USSR could use space to their military advantage and begin a nuclear war in a place that America could not defend itself. New York Times newspaper article author Harry Schwartz in 1965 writes that “The Soviet program has always aimed at maximum military space capability, and [that] the United States has been delinquent in delaying its own response so long.”
I don’t know about you, but phrases such as “maximum military space capability” is enough to send me running for the hills.
This idea of nuclear war from space obviously did not settle well with most, and John F. Kennedy did not do much to calm these fears. In JFK’s Moon Speech, Kennedy was discussing patriotism and how he wanted America to represent and reach the moon first, and he claimed that he wanted “not see it governed by a hostile flag of conquest, but by a banner of freedom and peace.”
Words like “hostile flag of conquest” did not ease most American’s minds, but maybe there is a reason he phrased his speech like that.
Many sources claim that there was nothing to fear in the Space Race, and that it was simply a scientific competition. So why would governmental figures have scared citizens with the idea of military conquest from the Soviet Union? The answer is easy: it’s possible that the government played up these fears to make American citizens more comfortable with the insane amount of funding for the Space Race.
As mentioned before in JFK’s Moon Speech, “This year¹s space budget is three times what it was in January 1961,” and seeing that this speech was given in 1962, this is a crazy increase! In just one year, space funding tripled!
With all of the other financial issues in America, citizens would not have been comfortable with this funding if they were not motivated by the fear of the mass destruction of the US from space.
Seeing that Americans got to the moon before the Soviet Union, it’s pretty clear that this strategy worked. The space-craze of the sixties is what kept the space funding alive even today, as we are still sending astronauts into space.