Sturmbannführer Wernher von Braun gave himself up to a startled American
soldier on a bicycle on May 2, 1945. It was a typically sensible, pragmatic
decision – he reckoned, probably rightly, that the Yankees would be
nicer to him than the advancing Russians.
Von Braun, a rocket scientist, developed the Aggregat 4 “V2” rockets that
rained down on London during the last year of the war, utilising – in a
wholly pragmatic and sensible manner – slave labour from the Buchenwald
concentration camp to do so. If he were alive today he would probably
explain to you, with some sadness, that his decision to join the Waffen SS
in 1932 and the Nazi party in 1937 was similarly pragmatic, if not quite
unavoidable. The soldier on the bike, who did not entirely believe the story
from the bedraggled German in front of him, handed von Braun over to his
superiors.
The USA thus acquired an extraordinarily fortuitous bonus from a war out of
which it had already done very well indeed, economically and geopolitically.
Von Braun later developed the Saturn V launch mechanism that powered the
Apollo space flights and became known affectionately, in his adoptive
homeland, as the father of the space programme. Well, not always
affectionately. The songwriter Tom Lehrer, appalled at the money being spent
on the US moon shot and at the rather dubious people involved in making it
happen, wrote: “Gather around while I sing you of Wernher von Braun/A man
whose allegiance/Is ruled by expedience/Call him a Nazi, he won’t even
frown/‘Ha, Nazi – Schmazi!’ Wernher von Braun.”
Lehrer was a man of the left, of course. We associate the early US space
programme primarily with two Democrat administrations – those of John F
Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson. Indeed, it was a Republican president,
Richard Nixon, who first seriously slashed the Nasa budget, despite having
originally promised near unlimited funding for space exploration. But
America’s frantic and obsessive drive towards the moon nonetheless came from
the right – militarily, politically and philosophically – and was viewed
with grave suspicion and sometimes outright hostility by the left.
Sturmbannführer von Braun, plucked from the Nazis “secret” rocket-research
facility at Peenemunde, and allegedly a good mate of Himmler’s, was a useful
symbol against which the left could coalesce.
There are still those who see Nasa as merely a deceptively glamorous appendage
of the US military-industrial complex; certainly, that’s how it began, in
1958, created by Eisenhower as a response to the Sputnik crisis of the
previous year. The notion that the commies, with their boxy, beeping little
satellite, were striding ahead technologically appalled pretty much all
Americans, but particularly those on the right. Rocket research developed
out of the ballistic V1 and V2 missile programme (headed by von Braun) and
the need to deliver weapons of mass destruction to as many Russian cities as was
humanly possible – something else the left was, traditionally, a
little snippy about. By 1958, both the Americans and, dispiritingly early,
the Russians, had the ability to compress plutonium in order to render vast
swaths of New Mexico (and, for that matter, Kazahkstan) uninhabitable: the
problem was the delivery system. How to get them there accurately and
quickly? Hence the extraordinary sums of money spent on rocket research:
initially, at least, the US was aiming not for the moon but, more
prosaically, at Moscow. The Russians, for their part, were directing their
attentions towards US military bases in nearby Turkey.
The right was also more prone to engage in perpetual one-upmanship against an
evil opponent simply for the sake of it; to show, definitively, that the
socialist economic system was inherently incompetent and could not possibly
compete against a Christian country with a free and open market. The fact
that the US space programme was every bit as centralised and state-funded as
its Soviet counterpart struck nobody, back then, as a paradox.
But there was a deeper, more atavistic impulse within the American right – it
is a peculiarly American thing – which persists to this day.
Outer space was to be colonised, terraformed, in much the same way as was the
old American West, “Red Indians” and all. It is no coincidence that the
immensely popular Star Trek, which slapped over the space race a veneer of
left-liberal Hollywood gloss, began each week with the words: “Space, the
final frontier…”
By the 1950s, America’s Wild West had been tamed by the white “technocrats” –
and now they were looking for a more challenging frontier, a little further
afield. Today, with the Soviet threat having dissolved, and the pressure to
discover ever more accurate and speedy missile-delivery systems having
eased, the romantic American right gazes with longing at the red-orange
mesas and canyons of Mars. To them, this is a new New Mexico waiting to be
similarly civilised. And the left, with its new, greenish concerns, pouts
and stamps about, demanding that the solar system be protected from man’s
imperialism and penchant for environmental destruction.
But back to the 1960s, for a while. It is impossible to overstate – but,
contrarily, difficult to remember – the extent of opposition to the vast
amount of money being spent by the US on its shot at the moon, the huge leap
in spending that took place at the beginning of the 1960s. Back in 1958, the
US government allocated $490m (in 1996 terms) to space research; by 1965
this had risen to $25 billion. In each of the years from 1964 through to
1968, the government spent more than the equivalent of $20 billion on its
Apollo programme, accounting for some 4% of the total federal budget.
This was a time of new economic prosperity in America – but also of localised,
crushing poverty, civil-rights marches and an increasingly expensive war in
southeast Asia; the left believed that the poor were being shunned and left
behind. At the time, Martin Luther King commented: “If our nation can spend
twenty billion dollars to put a man on the moon, it can spend billions of
dollars to put God’s children on their own two feet, right here on Earth.”
The day before the Apollo 11 mission, representatives from a whole bunch of
leftish campaigning organisations, including the Poor People’s Campaign, met
Thomas Paine, the boss of Nasa, to protest at the sheer scale of his budget,
at the lack of a sense of priority. Paine told them: “If we could solve the
problems of poverty by not pushing that button to launch men to the moon
tomorrow, then we would not push that button.”
And the debate continues, right now. President George W Bush has announced his
intention to send men back to the moon and to explore outer space. That
prickly rabble-rouser the Rev Al Sharpton commented that the president would
be better off exploring low- income areas of Washington, DC. “I mean,” he
said, “it wouldn’t cost as much and it would be just as enlightening for
him.”
But popular opinion has always swung behind the glamour of space exploration –
so long as it is done with chutzpah and ambition: astronauts playing golf on
the moon, rather than boring space stations or young women being incinerated
in space shuttles.
For the Soviets, under that astute but excitable prole Nikita Khrushchev,
space exploration was almost entirely a case of one-upmanship and bravado,
allied to a paranoiac fear of attack from the West, and therefore a
commitment to ever-increasing levels of military expenditure. The Soviet
Union had much less money than the US, to be sure – but the totalitarian
nature of the society meant that it was rather less hampered than its rivals
by what we might call, uh, health-and-safety issues, and still less by
ecological concerns. Partly for this reason too, the
poverty-versus-space-race argument did not have much of a forum for debate.
Cute little doggies called Laika, human cosmonauts, the standard of living and
indeed Kazakhstan could be happily sacrificed for the greater good of the
country and its international reputation as the standard-bearer of
socialism. And to be fair, the experience of the second world war, of
enormous personal sacrifice with over 20m people dead, of collective
strength triumphing against overwhelming adversity, meant that counter-
arguments were never likely to carry much weight among the proud and
long-suffering public. And at the back of all this was Marxism; an emphasis
on man imposing his will upon the untamed natural world – which meant the
moon, as much as Siberia – and Marx’s oft-cited and maybe overstated
“Prometheanism” that, put crudely, meant rapid, continual
industrialisation at all costs.
The Russians had their own version of Wernher von Braun, except that he was
home-grown rather than acquired from the Nazis. Or at least sort of
home-grown, being – like so many of the USSR’s prominent scientists and
engineers – Ukrainian by birth. Sergei Pavlovich Korolyov, who had been
banished to a gulag by Stalin in 1938, out-thought and out-fought not only
his American rivals but also his own duplicitous and sinister Russian
colleagues, who expended a lot of energy grassing him up to the authorities
for real or imagined transgressions. Korolyov, an agreeably baleful and
pessimistic character, provided his government with both the Vostok and
Sputnik systems before dying, unexpectedly, in 1966; there is a plaque
commemorating his achievements on the wall of the Kremlin – and some grey,
godforsaken town, formerly Kaliningrad, was renamed after him. The Ukrainian
had joined the Communist party in 1952 – much as von Braun had joined the
Nazis, for sensible pragmatic reasons.
The 1970s brought Leonid Brezhnev and détente and the first US premier in 15
years to cut Nasa’s funding: Richard Nixon. Having won the race and walked
on the moon, the US was now happy simply to float about in space, a few
hundred or so miles above the Earth’s surface. There was tentative and
awkward collaboration with the communists, who were themselves feeling the
first financial constrictions of a military race that would lead them,
pretty soon, to bankruptcy and extinction. Today, US expenditure on space
exploration is, in real terms, much less than half of what it was during the
1960s; although rather more than what it was before Nixon was, as he
somewhat disingenuously put it, self-impeached. And more of us are in on the
act: the European Union, India, China. And if you wonder how India can
afford to spend those hard-earned rupees exploring outer space, remember
that the romantic dream of walking on distant planets has never been the
sole preserve of superpowers. Back in the 1960s, Zambia got in on the act.
Under the guidance of the singularly eccentric Edward Mukaka Nkoloso, head of
the, um, Zambia National Academy of Space Research, Zambia pursued its own
dream of sending “afronauts” into the distant ether by means of
a very large catapult and some oil drums hastily welded together. The
“afronauts” trained for the hazards of weightlessness by being
rolled down a hill at great speed in another oil drum – which replicated
precisely, according to Mukaka, the conditions found beyond the Earth’s
atmosphere. Mr Mukaka applied to the United Nations for several hundred
million dollars’ funding for his scheme, and very nearly got it. Not quite
as stupid as he seemed. These days the Zambian government acts all
embarrassed and denies that it was ever really serious about its space
programme.
History suggests that the vast amounts of money needed for space exploration
are forthcoming only when two conditions are met: firstly, that the
technology used is either a spin-off from the arms race, or might later be
used by the military as a means of annihilating ever-greater numbers of
people more cheaply and expediently, or defending its own people. Hence the
shift from manned space flights to orbiting space stations, just as the US
was working on its “star wars” strategic defence initiative. And
secondly, that the US needs a superpower rival to spur it on to ever-greater
technological achievements, largely, if not exclusively, for the sake of
one-upmanship. Contrary to what history has shown us, it might also be the
case that the US needs a right-of-centre government for Nasa to get the dosh
to fund the sort of programmes it wishes to pursue. Right now, even with
George W Bush in the White House, the money being spent on space exploration
would, by the standards of the 1960s heyday, count as nickels and dimes.
That will change only when the Iranians announce their manned mission to
Mars.
