Why America Conquered Space
A review of *Mercury Rising: John Glenn, John Kennedy, and the New Battleground of the Cold War*
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What percentage of Americans do you think supported the space race in the 1960s?
As with almost all statistics, it’s impossible to arrive at one conclusive answer, but I assumed the number would be high. Maybe 75%? Cold War rivalry ran deep, the story goes. Everyone took the losses to the USSR in space very seriously and wanted to pull ahead. But it turns out that isn’t so true. It turns out that public sentiment for space exploration is remarkably similar to what it was 60 years ago: it’s not worth the money. Throughout the 1960s, the majority of Americans did not support the outlay of funds to lunar exploration. The lone exception is when 53% supported it immediately after Neil Armstrong walked on the moon in 1969.
This was the major theme that stuck with me from Jeff Shesol’s new book, Mercury Rising: John Glenn, John Kennedy, and the New Battleground of the Cold War. These specifics weren’t mentioned within the book, but the tenor of the conversation around space exploration (both politically and popularly) seemed to be comprised of both optimism and skepticism. Several times, people question what is to be gained by “winning the space race”. A few explanations are given in retort, mainly the familiar screeds about driving broader scientific development and winning a symbolic victory in the Cold War. However, these only seemed convincing enough to keep the space program going, not to win supporters out of its detractors. According to Shesol’s narrative, John F. Kennedy himself seems to have used the early “losses” in space as a method of rhetorically crapping on the Eisenhower administration, and he did not seem particularly interested in the space program until his other avenues of domestic political strategy were blocked by Congress. There were, as always, the symbols present in both a “win” and a “loss” in the space race. Shesol writes:
(What) Ted Sorensen said of JFK — “he thought of space primarily in symbolic terms” — was true of most Americans, and since Sputnik there had been no symbol of space supremacy more powerful than the image of Gagarin (the first man in space), in his Soviet Air Force uniform, standing with Khrushchev atop…
