How churlish, to think ill of this! Or might there really be something more behind it? Did the United States actually put its moon programme into the hands of Walt Disney? Or has Hollywood at least been playing a larger part in the affair than anyone has wanted to admit? Is this, perhaps, the source of von Braun’s inexplicable confidence that there would be a successful landing on the moon in the near future? Those around him were certainly puzzled by his confidence. What about the huge technical difficulties on the one hand and of course the political and financial problems on the other? When planning for the event began, humanity had not yet even succeeded in putting a satellite into orbit round the earth, nor had Gagarin set the alarm bells ringing in the United States. But there must have been something that made Wernher von Braun so sure that people would soon be landing on the moon. Was it, perhaps, his close collaboration with Walt Disney? ‘The uncertain future of the moon project was the source of many worries among adherents of the program,’ wrote Stuhlinger and Ordway:
But, surprisingly, not for von Braun. He never lost his serene mood and high spirits. To his co-workers, he described positive steps forward in exciting detail, and he reported the delaying tactics as if they were not really relevant. Years later, he confided to friends: ‘From about 1956 on, I was convinced that the moon-landing project would succeed, and after 1958, I had no doubt that it would be assigned to a civilian space agency, and that our team would play a major role in the project. All these ups and down were merely ripples on the surface’. 77
‘What was the source of this imperturbable belief?’ even Stuhlinger and Ordway ask themselves. What indeed? How could Wernher von Braun seriously assume that a project as Utopian as a landing on the moon would become reality within the foreseeable future? Only a few years earlier his V2 rockets had been staggering barely 100 kilometres across the English Channel with less rather than more certainty of reaching London. Now rockets were exploding regularly on the launching pads, and the United States had not even put a small satellite into orbit – let alone any ‘astronauts’. Yet von Braun was quite sure that in only a few years such astronauts would not only be flying in orbit but would depart from it and land safely on the moon some 384,000 kilometres away. What breathtaking optimism!
Although the United States had not yet even become committed officially to a moon programme, von Braun was already working from the end of the 1950s on new, large rocket engines for a ‘moon rocket’. Contrary to what we are told by the official version of history, it was not John F. Kennedy but people like Wernher von Braun and Walt Disney who were propounding the concept of a moon landing long before Kennedy gave his famous speech in 1961. As early as 1959, while the Soviets were sending their first capsules into space and possibly secretly experimenting with human cosmonauts, experts were at work in the United States on their decisive counter-attack. ‘Operating pretty much in a political vacuum in terms of policy guidance, NASA planners chose a lunar landing objective fully two years before President Kennedy announced his choice of the lunar landing as a national goal,’ wrote John M. Logsdon, Director of the Space Policy Institute. 78
This was an astonishing view into the future considering that the hour did not finally strike for those planners until 12 April 1961 when the Soviet Union presented Yuri Gagarin to the world as the first human being in space. Only then were all doors and all budgetary floodgates opened in the United States for a manned moon landing. On 20 April 1961 President Kennedy asked Vice-President Johnson where and how the Soviets could be beaten in the space race: ‘Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the moon, or by a rocket to land on the moon, or by a rocket to go to the moon and back with a man?’ As chance would have it, von Braun and his team already had plans for the moon landing in their desks: ‘We do not have a good chance of beating the Soviets to a manned “laboratory in space”,’ he wrote in a memo to Vice-President Johnson. But: ‘We have an excellent chance of beating the Soviets to the first landing of a crew on the moon (including return capability, of course).’ 79
How could he be so confident? Surely a manned laboratory in orbit would be an easier exercise than the complex journey to the moon? Until then he himself had always seen a space station as being, in addition to its military usefulness, a prerequisite for trips to other heavenly bodies. ‘From this base the flight to the moon will be a mere step compared with the distances we shall have to reckon with in space,’ he had written earlier. 80 Originally von Braun thought it necessary to take the step of having a base in space before travelling to other heavenly bodies. There, close to the earth, not only could equipment be assembled but also crews could gain experience of longer sojourns in space. Navigation and manoeuvring on a journey to the moon are much more complicated and subject to breakdown than a launch into orbit which they had only just learnt to carry out. And in case of astronauts suffering health problems they could be brought back to earth from a space base in a matter of hours. Yet all of a sudden something must have made him turn this logical conception on its head, putting the journey to the moon before the construction of a base in space.
A space station would also have been an easily attainable propaganda success, since one could have declared anything to be a space station, for example a continuously orbiting Gemini or Apollo capsule. Or they could simply have adapted one of the large, barrel-shaped rocket stages to function as a space station and launched that into orbit. This was in fact done, but not until after the landing on the moon.
In 1973, one year after the final moon landing, the USA put its Skylab into orbit, thus creating the prerequisite for what it had already supposedly achieved. The USA was behaving like a pianist practising his scales after giving a really great concert. In 1961, in the memo to Vice-President Johnson already mentioned, von Braun recommended that the US should seek its fortune in a completely unforeseeable adventure. Where scientists and bureaucrats normally prefer to cover themselves, von Braun leaned right out of the window. On 8 May 1961 NASA administrator James E. Webb and Defense Secretary McNamara sent a further memo to the Vice-President – to be passed on to Kennedy: ‘Dramatic successes in space symbolize the technological prowess and organizational capacity of a nation,’ it read. ‘Therefore great successes in space contribute to national prestige ... We suggest including a manned landing on the moon before the end of the decade in our national space program.’ 81
On 25 May 1961, six weeks after Gagarin’s flight, Kennedy only had to translate this into the impressive words already mentioned about a landing on the moon before the end of the decade. It was, he said, ‘time for this nation to take a clearly leading role in space achievement, which in many ways may hold the key to our future on earth...’ A leading role in space as the key to the future, possibly even to a leading role on earth – is that not rather an exaggeration? Not at all. On the contrary, the image of the American flag on the moon remains to this day an important symbol of American superiority. It is not for nothing, for example, that the cover of the German paperback version of Zbigniew Brzezinski’s book The Grand Chessboard sports a picture not of an American bomber or cargo plane, of the Pentagon or the White House, but of an astronaut saluting the American flag on the moon with the lunar module in the background. The subtitle of the book is: American Primacy and Its Geostrategic Imperatives.
ONE SMALL STEP?
THE GREAT MOON HOAX AND THE RACE
TO DOMINATE EARTH FROM SPACE
GERHARD WISNEWSKI
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