Moon Landing Due to Cold War?

I came across a very timely article to Neil Armstrong's passing. A young boy asked a Harvard professor if the moon landing would have occurred had there been no cold war. Its a very interesting question and certainly gave me some food for thought. 

Here is the professor's response.

Robert Frosch, a former NASA Administrator who is now a scholar and teacher at Harvard University, sent the following response (links are added for context) to a question posed to Dot Earth blogger Andy Revkin by his 14-year-old son, Jack.

After flipping through “Paper Astronaut: The Paper Spacecraft Mission Manual,” Jack asked: “Would we have gone to the Moon if there hadn’t been a cold war?” (From 8/25 post on the passing of Astronaut Neil Armstrong)

I thought it sensible to do a little thinking over the weekend before I tried to answer your son’s very interesting question.

I’m skeptical of the possibility of tying a particular event or sequence in history to a definite cause. History seems to me so contingent, chaotic, and noisy that it is probably not true that even when one sees a cause that it means much. It appears that evolution is the same: there are big pieces of chance and chaos in the system.

Keeping that in mind, I do think the cold war competition was a very important push to have going-to-the-Moon happen. However, it is also important to think about the Werner von Braun effect, along with the other imported Germans, and the push for ballistic missiles, as a logical weapons follow-on to the von Braun work during World War II. In addition, there is the effect of the immediately previous era of science fiction, including the movie “Destination Moon,” which more or less followed the plot of Robert Heinlein’s rather Ayn Rand-ish novel “The Man Who Sold the Moon.” (I was the right age to have been an avid reader of that kind of physics- and engineering-based science fiction, which was popular at the time, possibly because of the World War II developments in science and technology.)

It was strongly rumored that Jerome Wiesner of M.I.T., who was Kennedy’s science adviser at the time, was opposed to the whole Moon business, because it was (only?) engineering, not science.

I suppose my point is that there were a lot of potentiating pieces in place, many of them familiar to the general public, particularly the youngish public. Put these all together with a young, new president looking for something to give the country a push, at a time of obvious external competition, and they spell: Moon. I’m not sure the idea would have gone anywhere if the other pieces had not been in place, or if the opposition had been somewhat stronger.

Bottom line: I think the Cold War competition and Sputnik came together with the other pieces that were in place to push possibility into reality. The Cold War competition was a catalyst, but perhaps another catalyst might have come along.

The original NASA was ARPA, which was set up in the Department of Defense as a response to Sputnik (as I was told the history when I was in ARPA). It was later decided that a space effort should be civil, and not tied directly to military interests.

I met and talked with Jim Webb during my nomination period for Administrator of NASA. He was a very canny and careful financial and management guy, with no technical background, but likely to take a broad view of anything he took on. As far as I can tell, Webb’s response to his own lack of technological knowledge was to link up with Bob Seamans, and hire him. I suspect Webb was advising the president that any Moon push should be part of a move to learn about and use space possibilities in a broader way.

The Space Act of 1958, as originally written, certainly took a broad view, and set out the complete menu for NASA in a very succinct way. I think that was the doing of Hugh Dryden (of NACA), or President Eisenhower’s Science Advisor at the time, James Killian of M.I.T., but I don’t really know the history, and am certainly fuzzy on the details. I suppose there is an official NASA history, and many details must be available through the NASA history office, but I never got around to looking at that in detail. When I started with NASA, I just made it my business to know the Space Act of 1958 -- a remarkable document.

One other piece: From my own observation when I came to ARPA in the fall of 1963, Vice President Lyndon Johnson had taken up the role of spokesman for space, but I don’t know whether that was cause or consequence. The biographies probably say.

-- Bob Frosch, 8/27/2012

I am inclined to agree with Prof. Frosch although I do think that the landing would have been deferred several years had there been no Cold War; which was perhaps the biggest catalyst.