Even as a 10-year-old, I knew we were losing the space race. My parents rarely talked about world events at our dinner table, but in April 1961, they were stunned when the news broke that a Soviet, Yuri Gagarin, had become the first human to orbit the earth. They talked about it in front of us kids, expressing a grudging admiration for what the Soviets had accomplished, but also a real sense of anxiety about what it said about the U.S. Did it mean we were losing the Cold War?
I didn’t know what the Cold War was, but I knew the Soviets were the bad guys. Everyone knew that.
Still, you could certainly make an argument in the early 1960s that there was no particular reason to conquer space other than scientific curiosity. Some people did make that argument. But President John F. Kennedy understood that it was more than that.
On the one hand, he knew that a serious space program was meaningful for our competition with the Soviet Union. “With East and West competing to convince the new and undecided nations which way to turn . . . ,” wrote Kennedy adviser and speechwriter Theodore Sorensen in his biography of Kennedy, “the dramatic Soviet achievements . . . were helping to build a dangerous impression of unchallenged world leadership generally and scientific preeminence particularly.”
