NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Robert Channing Seamans, Jr., Deputy Administrator at NASA and Professor at MIT, part 1 of 3

In the old NACA days, I call it NACA by some, back in the NACA days, some call it NACA. I was involved peripherally and I was on one of the subcommittees, so called the Stability and Control. And some of us felt that there could be some interesting things done with ballistic missiles by projecting something into space, and we were told not in any circumstances to get involved in any discussion of our meeting of the possibility of space travel. Somewhat later in time, we had Sputnik and President Eisenhower did a very wise thing. He got Jim Killingen, President Killingen of MIT, to come down as his science advisor, and they tried to figure out what this country should do and looked at the old NACA and felt that that would be ideal as a centerpiece for a whole new administration, which became NASA.

And the thought then was that this would be a fairly modest program, there was already some work going on, what was called Vanguard, which was a Navy project, and Vanguard had the misfortune to be launched right after Sputnik, and it was very unsuccessful, it could be readily seen by all the failures that occurred. And that group was actually a very capable group, small Navy group, and it was incorporated in along with the NACA, and then later Huntsville and JPL and so on were folded in. Eisenhower's view, I happen to attend a cabinet meeting right at the end of Eisenhower's administration, where there was a discussion by Kistia Kowsky, who was his science advisor of the possibility of going to the moon. And this came after a very short briefing on the Eisenhower budget for space, his last budget.

That's the reason I was there with Keith Glenn and the administrator. In Eisenhower, listen intently, as Kistia Kowsky went through his discussion of what would be involved and so on, and going to the moon, and it came out, it was going to cost between 20 and 40 billion dollars. And everybody at the cabinet are on their side, you know, think of that. And somebody said, if we give those scientists 20 to 40 billion to go to the moon, the next thing you know, they're going to want to go to Mars. And then Eisenhower sort of brought it short a little bit, and he said, I just wish somebody could tell me what is a sensible, what is a good program for space that costs a billion dollars or less. And I don't know if it's generally known or not, but when Eisenhower's last message to the Congress is being put together, he really wanted to put in there that there should be nothing beyond Mercury until Mercury was all over and all the results assessed. And Keith Glennon deserves a lot of credit for getting him to delete that passage.

Good. That's terrific. Yeah. You want it to drink a water? It may seem strange today that there was a taboo against discussion of space possibilities, these travel possibilities during the days of the NACA. The NACA was set up for aeronautics, and it was very great concern that if the emphasis shifted away at all from aeronautics that would hurt our aviation developments in this country and hence it was felt that the NACA, the NACA, should stick to its knitting and keep the work going in aeronautics, but not shift over into space activity. Great. Cut. Good. Terrific. How much of a space cadet was, John F. Kennedy? Well, in the end of Reagan between the election and the inaugural, there was a lot of ferment in Washington concerning what was going to happen to the NACA and what was going to happen

in the space program, and the president's ultimate science adviser, Jerry Weasner, was chairman of that group. We in NACA didn't really know the details of what was going on, but we were pretty sure that it was not all complimentary to NACA, that we were, some of us will look at that as all fogies and not running an imagined enough program at the same time. There was no result of that committee work that said we ought to go to the moon. That was not on the agenda. The NACA did not have an administrator for about six weeks after the election, I'm after the inauguration. There was enough concern floating around in Washington that some people, when they were asked to consider being the administrator, felt as best not to take the job because maybe NACA wasn't going to exist in the future. Maybe it was going to be absorbed into the air force or something of that sort, at least

that was the kind of thinking that was going on in our own minds in NACA. Jim Webb came in as the administrator, and one of the first jobs that he had was to recommend to the president whether or not there should be any additions to or changes in the Eisenhower program. These were recommended, a lot of the changes had been recommended to Eisenhower, and he turned them down. We went back to Dave Bell, he was then the director of the budget, and recommended that Moore should be done on the Saturn, that Moore should be done on what was even then called Apollo. He Dave Bell said, well, this is all very interesting, and the president will want to address this in connection with next year's budget, but he has too much on his plate right today to give it any thought. So we said, well, that's not satisfactory, and a meeting was held with President Kennedy in which these options were discussed.

He did add to the Saturn booster program, but he did not add to the Apollo program at that time. What's he enthusiastic about space or really didn't know much about it? What was your assessment of him when he first came to office? Well, my assessment was that he was a good learner, but that he had not really been exposed to the possibilities of a space program, then he great extent. He was anxious to discuss the pros and cons, and he did this in a very intelligent way, and it was a great fun to meet with him and see how he reacted to these ideas. But I don't blame him, he's neophytes who hadn't even flown in space yet, except in a very modest way, recommending that we study the possibility of going to the moon, and that's quite a stretch, you know, and he obviously wanted a little time to think about it. Now, Jerry Wiesner, what did he say? What was Jerome Wiesner's attitude towards all of this stuff?

Well, I would have to say that Jerry was fully in support of scientific activity, and he could see that there's going to be a lot of effort that you really couldn't call a science that would be involved in going to the moon, and so he was not for it. He felt that we could achieve more scientifically by going in other directions, right here on Earth. And even when it was finally approved, when Kennedy finally agreed to recommend to the Congress that we should go to the moon, Jerry made it very clear to President Kennedy that he shouldn't call it a scientific mission. The decision he kept saying was not made on scientific grounds, and that's true. Good, cut, terrific, footage.

As background, it should be realized that a lot of people at NASA had thought quite a bit about going to the moon, as well as going into orbit around the Earth, as well as flying around the moon, so-called circumlunar, and during the, I call the interregnum between the election and the inauguration, we thought we had better be prepared for whatever might come, and we carried out a number of special studies on what it would take, really take, to go to the moon. And we kept these studies going, even though we realized that President Kennedy was not yet prepared to consider the possibility in any detail. And lo and behold, Gagarin went into orbit, and that changed feelings around the town of Washington considerably.

There was a very dramatic meeting that was held by the house in the caucus room, with Jim Webb and Dr. Dryden, the deputy administrator, really on the mat. Why weren't we doing more? Why were we letting the Russians continue to stay ahead of us, and to even pull ahead of us further, and why wasn't over time and so on, and Mr. Webb was in a way very plight, but in a way very incisive, pointing out that the Congress had not provided the funds for any such effort, or hadn't even considered such an effort. And President Kennedy was exasperated by what had happened, and wrote a memorandum, which is, I saw this today here in the Kennedy Library, that Lyndon Johnson, who was the space czar, you could say, head of the space council, should come in with recommendations as to what this country might do, at least to come up even with a Soviets, or possibly to go ahead.

And he listed a number of options in this, well, half a page memorandum. And Lyndon Johnson, first off, held a couple of meetings on his own, he invited quite a disparate group of people to come in and chat with him, a newspaper people, and scientists, and Jim Webb and Werner von Braun and Rick Over and all kinds of people. Let me cap your words anyway, fridge.