American History Hit - The First American in Space

Episode Date: February 2, 2023

In Spring 1961, the Space Race between the US and Soviet Union was well underway. Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first person in Space in April and the Americans knew his achievement had to be matched. Alan Shepard was chosen as the man for the job. Jay Gallentine tells Don how we went from satellites, to dogs, then humans in space; as the competition outside Earth's atmosphere intensified between the US and the USSR. Produced and mixed by Benjie Guy. Senior Producer: Charlotte Long. For more History Hit content, subscribe to our newsletters here.If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts, and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. It's 9.33 a.m. on the morning of May 5, 1961. At Cape Canaveral, Florida, Freedom 7 is moments away from liftoff.

Its mission? To carry the first American into space. Delays to the launch have left astronaut Alan Shepard lying on his back in the space capsule for three hours. The lengthy pause has already forced Shepard to urinate inside his spacesuit. For a flight scheduled to last only 20 minutes, NASA made no provision for that part of this human endeavor. One month earlier, Russian cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin had become the first man to reach space. Now, the United States is urgently seeking to gain lost ground. At 934, Freedom 7 successfully blasts off, watched by gawking crowds in attendance, and 45 million people on U.S. television.

More than 100 miles above Earth, the space capsule separates and Shepard takes manual control. 13 minutes later, he splashes down in the Atlantic, just off the Bahamas. The mission is a resounding success. The U.S. has caught up to the Soviet Union for the moment. But later that same year, President Kennedy ups the ante and announces his momentous challenge to the nation, that Americans shall be the first to walk on the moon. The space race is on. Hello and welcome to American History Hit.

I'm Don Wildman. Thanks for listening. The countless events of American history have, through the years, been broadly organized into eras, the colonial period, the Gilded Age, the New Deal. And this is, of course, necessary for educational purposes mostly, but it's often misleading to general, a forced narrative. But there is one era in the 20th century that utterly lives up to its billing and was exactly what we still call it today, the space race.

The years in the 1950s and 60s, when the United States and the Soviet Union went toe to toe in a contest for the ages over who could most successfully create and exploit the means to escape Earth's atmosphere and explore outer space. It was thrilling and terrifying and put human lives on the line, indeed more than once, tragically so,

all in the pursuit of human endeavor and discovery and international prestige. In large scheme of the Cold War, it was as much an ideological battle as it was a scientific one. Which of these two societies, One, a free republic, the other a communist dictatorship, would prove their systems of industry and governance could win the technological battle for the heavens. It's a massive story that needs an expert guide.

And thankfully ours today is the author Jay Gallantine, who, you may recall, joined us some time ago to talk through the earlier developments of the space race coming out of World War II when the idea of blasting off into space was just being embraced as a real objective. Hi, Jay, welcome back to American History Hit. Don, thanks so much for having me on. Jay, as I was saying, our last conversation, well, it concluded with Sputnik I, the Soviet satellite that launched into orbit in 1957, really sent shockwaves through American society. It's fair to say we were blindsided by this event.

I mean, we thought of the Russians as, you know, farmers in their fields with sickles, and they were actually cutting-edge space scientists and way ahead of us, technologically. But how real was this fear at the time? And how did America's view the challenge? Was it fear of a military attack? Absolutely it was.

I would completely agree with you in that most of American citizenry was shocked by this, certainly the general populace. There were those in their little clusters, the James Van Allen's of the world and whatnot, who sort of knew this was on the horizon. It was all part of this international geophysical. year, this big scientific endeavor, and the people who were paying attention knew that the Soviets were working on something. But absolutely, the vast majority of the American population was just shocked by it. I was talking with a friend of mine about this not too long ago, who is

older than me, and he remembers that era well. And his phrase was, we were afraid the Russians were going to sail up the Potomac River with machine guns. Yeah. And that's not only that, a fear of military attack. It was also that Americans had grown a little complacent at this point. I mean, we had one World War II. We were the reigning superpower in the world. And suddenly out of nowhere comes this challenge to that which is now precious to us, this technological pride that we have. And this was telling us that elsewhere in the world, there were huge challenges scientifically, never mind technologically. Absolutely. And the big problem is, of course, we don't really know what the Soviets are doing. We don't know what they're working on and they're not telling us about it until after it's flown and is up there. They had lots of failures, certainly as many as we did at least.

But they were just never reported. It was that simple. Let's take the conversation first to that Russian side. I mean, Sputnik happens in 1957. Very important year in Russian history. This is the 40th anniversary of the October Revolution, which happens in 1917. And so, Christch, who is the premier at this time, he wants. wants to make an even bigger splash than Sputnik 1 was.

He means to take this to a whole other level. They've already been sending up dogs. They've sent up almost a dozen dogs throughout the previous years, trying to find out what happens to them. Sad things happen to these poor little animals. But he still wants to make a big statement with the next one that goes up. And this is Laika, now a famous dog with statues everywhere in Russia. Tell me what happens with that mission.

It's absolutely true that Khrushchev very quickly. realize the political significance of having this perceived dominance in space. That was huge. And the engineering team behind Sputnik won. They had only returned from this vacation after Sputnik. And they got word from Khrushchev. Hey, that was pretty cool. Now what can you do?

And so if you can imagine, Sergei Korya Koryov, who's sort of the chief of the Soviet space infrastructure, the chief engineer, the chief designer. He's on the phone with Khrushchev. Khrushchev is saying, that was really cool, but what can you do now? And Krolyov very quickly went to the dogs, because you're absolutely right. They had been launching a lot of dogs on these ballistic flights, basically. Dog goes up. They've got instrumentation on it. Dog comes down, usually, and they're able to find out all sorts of things about how a live being exists up there. And so they had all this infrastructure in place for the dogs already. They knew which breeds worked best. They knew which types of animals were more agreeable. They had the little kennels that had flown already.

And indeed, when Lyca flu, that was a secondhand kennel. That enclosure for the dog had been used already on a previous flight. I read where they were using dogs, specifically dogs found on the streets of Moscow, because they knew that these were particularly hardy dogs that were used to the cold and could deal with trauma, I guess. Yeah, and just that that was kind of cheap and easy, to be brutally honest. You know, they weren't looking for AKC purebreds here, anything like that. They needed dogs, and the dogs were readily available on the street. So that's what really pushed the dog decision. Dogs had been used before. And so Sputnik 2 went up basically as a repeat of Sputnik 1. I mean, immediately adjacent to Lika's little kennel was another

Sputnik-type ball with the same types of batteries and radio systems in it and everything. What was the Russian expertise? Where did that come from? We know that on our side, there was Operation Paperclip, which sort of seized up the Verna von Braun, that whole Nazi crew that came over and they were the future of rocketry in America. Where did that same level of expertise come for the Russians? In Germany, which produced a lot of the paperclip Germans, there had been these youth rocketry clubs, basically, these groups of enthusiasts who were getting together. They were mixing their own fuels. They were building their own rockets. Von Braun came basically directly from one of those types of groups.

And in the Soviet Union, it was the same kind of thing. And these groups went back to the 30s, at least. And Sergei Korolev had been a member of one of these groups where they're hobbyists, essentially. They're getting together. They're sharing what they've learned in their own individual experiments, and they're improving their own fuels and their own rockets.

And it kind of went from there. So it's homegrown. It is totally homegrown, and it was a similar kind of thing with the radio systems that were used on spacecraft. You know, we forget just how cool radio was back in that time. You know, this mysterious voice from the heavens, basically, coming to you. And so the Soviet Union was filled with all sorts of radio hobbyists. There were multiple magazines for people who were like into building their own radios from their own designs. And these are the types of people who became the experts on the radio systems for

Soviet spaceships. I suppose so much of their society really was based on proving that that society works. You know, it was a new experiment in the 20th century, really, that sort of a socialistic world over there. Space had to have been one of those greater examples of how great we can be. I suppose that was their reasoning. Definitely. And the Soviet interest in space goes way back to pre-Soviet times into Russian times. Sealkovsky is just revered by Soviet space enthusiasts. You know, here was a person who back in the 1800s was predicting staged rockets and methods of reaching space.

And so it's this culture that has just continued to evolve over the decades. Late 1950s Eisenhower as president, Sputna goes up, there's a giant call, especially from Congress, that we are far behind. We need to catch up. We need to create the means administratively, at least, to manage a new effort in space. So Eisenhower is called upon to create a new agency called NASA. Tell me where NASA comes from and how did that evolve. Before NASA, there were airplanes.

You have airplanes, and then you have the American government who's going to want some sort of body to look over this and see what's going on. and make recommendations and make it better. Classic bureaucracy called the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics. People at research centers that already existed that were studying wing shapes and nozzle inlets and propeller designs and all these things. And over time, that basically evolved into, okay, well, now since we're going into space, We are going to need a similar sort of governing body for that. We're going to rebrand the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics,

essentially into the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. It was also to create a civilian agency as opposed to a military one, correct? That's absolutely right. So there were all these tricky issues at the beginning of the space race about airspace, about how high your sovereign territory extends. and is it okay to fly over another country when you're in orbit? Because it's certainly not okay if you do it at 50,000 feet. It's fair to compare this to the early days of age of discovery.

I mean, we are basically crossing the Atlantic for the first time, but up and trying to figure out how to do it and what's going to happen when we get to the other side of the atmosphere, just like we got to the other side of the ocean once, and all the implications that that carries. I mean, really, they're thinking about that on all. kinds of levels? Absolutely, and the tricky part is you can go to Antarctica and plant a flag or to the new world and plant a flag, start a society, but you can't really do that in space. And so once you're

up there, you have to do new things to assert your dominance. You have to orbit more times, have a spacecraft up there for longer, have multiple spacecraft up there, start sending living beings, start sending living beings for longer periods of time, having multiple living beings. And it's a race where the finish line keeps moving. NASA basically inherits the administrative duties of what was going on under the previous leadership. All that right stuff stuff, you know, the Chuck Yeager years, Supersonic Experimental flights, the X-15, all this stuff that was happening out there at Edwards Air Force Base and out in the desert, all these hot shot pilots doing everything. This had been

happening since the early 50s. And it starts to acquire all the different facilities that are involved in this world, to mention one, JPL, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which had been started by Caltech. Later on, you're going to find out we get to Cape Canaveral and Houston and all that sort of comes later on with the manned missions. Tell me how NASA plans the future American space programs. It couldn't have been in the same panic state that the public was feeling. I mean, it's one thing to be freaking out in the newspapers about the Russians are coming, the Russians are coming, but we're doing something on a massive scale. And so this requires a cool head and a calm, collected mentality. I suppose, I hope that would have been NASA at the time.

It would have been NASA. And NASA, even to this day, relies on the advice of others. The joke that I make sometimes is NASA's job is to ask everybody else what they should do. And that is a grand oversimplification. But there were a fairly well-organized collection of advisory bodies, space task groups, some of them involving the White House saying, look, we need to be thinking about what's coming, what's going to be the next thing. And were they thinking of manned missions right from the get-go? Oh, yeah, absolutely. and there were some ridiculous ideas, I would call them today. At the time that the Mercury program was announced,

there were three branches of the U.S. military that were working on programs to put people in space. The Army had something called Project Adam, and that was audacious in that they were going to take a ballistic missile and they were going to rip everything out of the nose cone and put a chair in there with a seat. belt and strap a person in and launch them on these ballistic flights. That didn't make the cut.

The Navy had this scheme called manned earth reconnaissance that never took off literally or figuratively that was going to put a person in orbit really to spy. I mean, let's call it for what it was. It was to spy on other countries, most noticeably, of course, the Soviet Union. But then there was the Air Force, and the Air Force was furthest. along compared to the other branches in terms of choosing people, training people, anticipating the conditions, the basic medical research. They were so much further ahead than the other branches.

And so this goes for the Russians as well. They have the same idea. It's just a kind of a crazy notion that two nations barely in touch in those days, maybe diplomatically, of course, would be also working on parallel programs to do this nutty thing about throwing mankind into the heavens. It almost seems too coincidental. It's ridiculously coincidental because the Mercury program and what we call today Vostok, which was the Soviets' first launches of individual people in space capsules, those both kicked off in January of 1959. Both countries were working on this at almost the exact same time,

but the Americans, they honed in on pretty early that really we need to be looking at test pilots. Mostly military, but certainly civilian, because there's a lot of flight testing that goes on with civilian aircraft. The Soviets were looking at other vocations as well. They were looking at race car drivers, for example. Nothing was really off the table in the beginning. And very quickly, they narrowed it down to, okay, you know what, we really should be looking at. at test pilots as well. Well, you're queuing up the next question, which is about the Mercury program, the famous Mercury 7, those seven astronauts who were picked mostly from the test pilot world

to become the first astronauts. The word astronaut didn't even exist before this began. That's right. And there had to be some meetings to determine what we were going to call these people. And I'm not familiar with the exact mechanism of how that decision was made, but you're right on. it was not an instant thing. It's like, we need to pick our astronauts. It's like, we need to pick these people who are going to fly in space. And what do you think we should call them? I don't know.

Let's have a meeting about it. I think they called them aeronauts to start with. And then someone came up with astronauts because, to be fair, and I know there's a listener screaming out there, it was a science fiction term. It had dated back before in the early 20th century, I believe it had been in science fiction, which indeed might have been the reason that there were these coincidental programs in both the United States and Russia, because You know, the people who are dreaming up these ideas are the ones who were reading those books when they were kids.

I mean, this has always been a dream of so many to shoot somebody to the moon. And I suppose they were growing up to do just that. Yuri Gagarin and the American Space Program, all of this happens in the same time frame. So let's talk about the Mercury 7. Let me name the names. Wally Shira, Gus Grissom, Deke Slayton, John Glenn, Gordon Cooper, Scott Carpenter, and Alan Shepard. Those seven guys, all from different kind of walks of life, but all of them test pilots. What brought them together?

How did they choose these guys? Oh, boy, there have been entire books written on the selection process. And it was pretty fascinating. The Mercury program was announced, and the pilots who were paying attention knew that they could get a letter. So it's not like some of these folks were summoned and, oh, what in the world could this be about? I have two days to get to Washington or whatever. I would venture to say that most, if not all of them, knew that they could be in line for this. There was a large pool that was winnowed down to, I believe, 32 initial finalists. And that determination was made just on the

basis of records. You know, there weren't any meetings or medical evaluations or anything like that. I'll be back with more from Jay after this short break. At the same time as the Americans are sort of organizing their Mercury 7 and choosing Alan Shepard as the first, the Russians are in the same process, but they're ahead of the game. And Yuri Gagarin is their man. He goes up in April, 1961. He is the first human being to fly in space. And so the goal of Gagarin's flight, this Vostok won. and Vostok means east, which is fitting because the spacecraft launched to the east to take advantage of Earth's rotation.

So the goal was put him up in space, do one orbit, come back down safely. And he did that triumphantly. He did. Yeah, the mission went very well. It lasted just over 100 minutes. Gagarin made a complete orbit of the Earth and came back down and was actually catapulted from the capsule planned via an ejection seat and came down separately from the capsule on a parachute. He is worshipped in Moscow. He is taken to the Kremlin walls. He stands on the Kremlin walls with Khrushchev. He's the Krem de la Krem of that country for a long time to come,

as a matter of fact. The Americans see this from a far away, and they know they need to match this. At this time, in America, a certain John F. Kennedy has been elected president in the fall of 1960. The early months of Kennedy's presidency are fraught with problematic challenges, not the least of which is the Bay of Pigs fiasco, which happens right in the same month. Right in the middle of April, we get the Bay of Pigs fiasco, which was a whole operation that Kennedy inherited from Eisenhower and then unwisely greenlit. It all happened in a big failure. And so when Gagarin has gone up at around the same time, it seems to trigger off in Kennedy's mind an opportunity politically to sort of take the focus away from the Bay of Pigs and put it into a more

positive direction. Jay, when we first started talking about doing this episode, you sent to me something I'd never seen before, a White House memorandum from John Kennedy to his vice president Lyndon B. Johnson. It's dated April 20th, 1961. Can you take me through this memo? Brand new stuff for me. Absolutely. And so just to put it in perspective, this memo was put out by Kennedy eight days after Gagarin's flight. So clearly the Kennedy White House is kind of reeling from what happened. And every time I reread this memo, which is less than a page long, I'm just struck by kind of the desperation in Kennedy's tone, I have to tell you. So he was talking specifically about what could we do to win? And you keep hearing that in this memo and winning is never really defined beyond us doing it first. Jay, let me read some of this

memo here. It literally says memorandum for vice president. In accordance with our conversation, I would like, or you as chairman of the Space Council, to be in charge of making an overall survey of where we need to stand in space. One, then he has a list of points. 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. Is there any other space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win? Two, how much additional would it cost? Three, are we working 24 hours a day on existing programs? If not, why not? You're absolutely right. There is a very urgent tone here. Right.

Four, in building large boosters should we put out emphasis on nuclear chemical or liquid fuel or a combination of these. Five. Most importantly, are we making maximum efforts? Are we achieving necessary results? This is a president. This is not a rocket scientist. This is the president pretty much putting right in the front of his programs, getting this nation to the moon already.

And this is April 1961. Yeah, he was thinking big. And then down at the bottom, he's clearly spreading the nets on who needs to be in the loop with this. He's got the head of NASA. he's got his White House Science Advisor, and he's got the Secretary of Defense. It's like, look, I don't care who we have to bring into this. We need to get ahead of the Soviets because a week ago, they sent a person into orbit and got him back safely, and we haven't sent to anybody yet. I would appreciate a report on this at the earliest possible moment, says John Kennedy to Lyndon Johnson.

On May 5th, Alan Shepard goes up. So a couple weeks after that note, on a mission, by the way, that had been planned. And for a number of months before that, they'd had all sorts of holdups and delays and so forth. It must have been driving Kennedy crazy, especially with the Bay of Pigs and all that stuff going on. So now it's May 5th. Alan Shepard goes up. What was his mission? It was very simple. His mission was basically to prove that the system would work.

It was not an orbital mission. It was suborbital. That was planned. His rocket didn't have the oomph to get him into orbit. and his mission lasted just over 15 minutes. So basically a ballistic trajectory where we go up, we are suborbital, we're in space, we kind of kiss it for a few minutes, and then we start coming back down. Maybe it's a bit of propaganda, but there was a difference between Gagarin's flight and Shepard's flight in that they claim Shepard had manual control. He could move this thing independently, I suppose, right?

That's right. That's an interesting detail because when the Soviets launched, they had manual controls, but they were actually locked with a combination. And the combination would have to be provided from the ground in order to unlock the controls to use them. And that was touted at the time by the Vostok engineers as sort of proving the superiority of the system. Our stuff is so good. that we don't need anybody to step in and take the wheel. It can run just by itself. This is a key moment, and I think really we can hang this episode on this time period here, the April, May of 1961, because you have Gagarin, you have Bay of Pigs as sort of an engine politically speaking, but you also have Shepard coming a few weeks afterwards. And now we see through this memo that you've given me that there's a real thought process in Kennedy's mind about specifically a moon mission.

So it should come as no surprise to anyone that on May 25, 1961, before a joint session of Congress, Kennedy stands up and says the famous words that I see within the next 10 years a man mission going to the moon to deliver a man there and bring him back safely. This is the defining moment of at least our part in the space race. This is where the stake is in the ground and now everything moves from this place. That's right. It's interesting to read his vice president's response to that original Kennedy memo because there was speculation that they could put someone on the moon and they could do it as early as 1967. And that was changed. You know what, guys, we should probably give ourselves some room to breathe here. And so it was moved to the end of the decade. And this challenge, this famous Kennedy challenge was not really. rooted in exploration or scientific discovery, wanting to understand the composition of the moon, its chemistry, or anything like that. It was purely political. It was in place as something to beat the Russians and to sort of definitively win the space race.

Did Kennedy have intelligence that this could be achieved before the Russians? or was he genuinely fearful of losing this race? I think he was genuinely fearful of losing the race. He certainly had the best engineers and researchers in the world behind the decision. He had the Vaughn Browns of the U.S. telling him that, yes, this is something that would be possible. We move onward to John Glenn. This is the more famous of the Mercury flights. There are three in total.

Almost no one talks about the third one, unfortunately. We were already on to the Gemini missions at that point in everyone's mind. But John Glenn's the famous one because he orbits the Earth. That's right. And he does it a year almost after Gagarin has already orbited. So Glenn is the first American to orbit. He goes up in February of 62. He's got a flight that lasts considerably longer than Gagarin, certainly last four hours

and 55 minutes. Glenn's flight, but before that, the Soviets had already flown German Tidov on a 25-hour flight. So they beat them on that count, too. Exactly, yeah. And the rationale behind German Tadov's 25-hour flight was political as well. I mean, certainly there were some technological aspects to it. If German T-Diedov orbits for a full 24 hours, we can bring him down in the most desirable location. you know, because the planet is sort of going to walk underneath him in a certain direction.

And we want to bring him back down on Soviet territory. We want to bring him back down during the daytime, these kinds of things. But there was definitely a political component to that as well. These pesky Americans, they've only flown 15 minutes. We are going to show them how it's done. We're going to stay up for a whole day. And they had that crazy way of returning to the Earth. remember my National Geographic diagram when I was a kid looking at that. They land on solid

earth. That's insane. Everybody knows you drop yourself into the ocean. Why would you do that? It's a great question. The Soviet Union is so big that it's easy to find a landing spot where you're sort of out in the middle of nowhere. You also have the design constraints of having to plan for a water landing, which just introduces this new angle to how we have to design the spacecraft. The spacecraft was a sphere. Okay, if this thing comes down in the water, how are we going to make right side up or whatever to extricate the cosmonaut? And the escape system was an ejection seat,

which, funny enough, was added after they had designed the spacecraft, was like, oh, you know what? Maybe we need to have a way to get out of this if things go bad. But the ejection seat could very safely eject the cosmonaut from the spacecraft and come down traditionally on a parachute. And that was the safest, best understood way of bringing a person back to TerraFerma. I just want to back up for a moment to the technology involved in lifting off from the Earth. In the early days of the American program, they were basically taking, as you mentioned, ballistic missiles, sticking a capsule on the top of it.

And that was the way to, you know, send men into orbit. But that evolves as the realization becomes, we need to go further. We need to carry a lot more payload, et cetera, et cetera. Take me through the rockets in general how that works. Well, it's interesting both on the American and the Soviet side because our first piloted launch vehicles were both derivatives of the V2, the German V2.

So both on the American side with the Redstone and on the Soviet side with the R1, those were both direct descendants of the V2. And the idea of using ballistic missiles extended much longer in America. So we went from using the Redstone to launch people to the Atlas Intercontinental Ballistic Missile to launch people, to the Titan. intercontinental ballistic missile to launch people. You know, these are launch vehicles that were made to send nuclear weapons to the other side of the globe. And we took the nuclear warhead off the top and put on a space capsule, and then we could put people in there.

There's a famous failed launch at Canaveral a little bit later where one of those rockets lifts off about four inches, doesn't make it any further than collapses back to the earth. There were lots of failures, lots of explosions, as they tried to figure out. how to do this. Yeah, and the rocket that lifted off only a few inches and then collapsed back onto itself, that was the vanguard, which was being created by the Naval Research Labs. And that was an entirely new rocket. It was America's attempt to create a so-called civilian rocket, which is ludicrous if you think about it. It's like people saying that it had no military

capability whatsoever. Well, of course it did. They all. have a military capability. The Saturn rocket comes to pass because of the realization that we're going to go to the moon. That's the beginning of that moon program. We need to build a much bigger rocket that will send people off, I guess, a lot faster, eventually to carry out, you know, the lunar module and all the rest of it that's going to have to go up there. That's that classic, you know, Apollo rocket comes to pass because of that new mission.

Absolutely, yeah. So we got as far as we could with the ballistic missile. And then when Apollo was on the drawing boards instantly becomes clear, of course, that we are going to need much larger rockets. And that's when these massive contracts start going out to North American aviation and some of these other aerospace giants in the U.S. to build the individual stages for the Saturn launcher. It's very interesting to me. It always has been that the mythological names are chosen. You've got Mercury, Gemini, which is the time.

the correct pronunciation, by the way, for everybody that thinks I'm saying it wrong. And then you've got Apollo. And all of these gods are meaningful in various ways. But the idea was to brand this mission to the stars by using the names, I suppose, of constellations and so forth. But it really brought some poetry to the whole thing. We just sort of took it for granted back in the day. Apollo became as familiar as saying your mom's name. You know, it was really quite part of the vernacular after a bit of time.

This is a huge story that we're going to take in chapters. Let's conclude this conversation today, Jay, by talking about the transition from Mercury to Gemini. Gemini, as I understand it, was really the beginning of Apollo. It was kind of the precursor to everything that would happen after that. It's true. And like everything, the history of it gets a little complicated because what we know today as Gemini was under discussion even before America's Mercury 7 astronauts were announced. even before the press conference of America's Mercury astronauts, and they're all the pictures, and they start showing up in Life magazine,

even before that was public, there were already these space task group discussions about what are we going to do after Mercury. And the first ideas were, well, we could just make a bigger Mercury, and people were already thinking about space stations. maybe we could make a mercury that we can sort of turn into a space station. And there was one kind of silly idea where we're going to have a mercury capsule and then we're going to have these tethers that extend out into space to this big cylinder. And this whole thing is going to spin around in space and create artificial gravity.

And this is going to be our space station. And as time went on, kind of the requirements solidify. It was like, okay, well, what's everything that a mercury can? can't do that we are going to need to be able to do. Number one, we're going to need to be able to stay in space for approximately two weeks because that's about how long a flight to the moon and back will take. We're going to need different sources of power from batteries, and so the development of fuel cells could be tested on a next generation spacecraft. The mercury couldn't change its orbit. It could change its attitude,

space, which is kind of like driving down the highway and changing lanes. You know, you've changed your position, but you're still going in the same direction. You couldn't use a Mercury spacecraft to rendezvous and dock with another spacecraft. That's a skill that we are definitely going to need to get a handle on if we are going to do something like fly to the moon. They also need multiple members of the crew. So you need to go from a one-man crew to a two-man crew, and that's a lot of what Gemini is about. I want to end the way we began. I want to talk about the Russians at this point. So we keep them in the crosshairs of all this.

It's a race, after all. We have not spoken about Sergei Koryeuf enough. I want to understand his importance to the Russian space program because what happens to him in the 60s is fundamentally important to the way this race plays out. Yeah, he really was the driving force. And I would probably be in the camp that says that one of the reasons that we didn't see the Soviet Union land on the moon in the 60s or 70s is because Korolev died in 1966.

He had a tumor. He went under surgery. It did not go well. And he sort of died on the table. He was not only proficient with the engineering. He was proficient with the management of such a giant task as sending people to the moon or even into space. And he was also very savvy when it came to the political implications of it. I mean, arguably, the reason that Sputnik, the original Sputnik, got approved, is because Koryl Jav had Khrushchev out for a little tour of the facilities, and in a quiet moment, took him aside and said, hey, there's this other thing that we've got going on, besides just creating ballistic missiles. We think we could send something into space, and we think it would be a great thing to demonstrate how powerful our country is.

And he sort of had Khrushchev on the hook slightly with that. But once the object started flying, it was obvious how important this is. And Kourliev, he had all of those skills in one. And in the wake of his death, there was never anyone else who emerged, who possessed that perfect blend of abilities. We'll come back to that in the next episode with you, Jay. But suffice to say at this point, at the beginning of Gemini, the Russians are kind of still neck and neck in this thing. That changes very quickly, but that's where we are out at this point.

Jay, I want to tell people about the books that they can find of yours out there. Jay, what are you working on these days? These days, I'm working on my third book, which is going to look at the giant flagship missions of the U.S. in the 70s and 80s and 90s, where we sent spacecraft out to orbit Jupiter and Saturn, and how that transitioned into kind of a different way of doing space when we started creating rovers for Mars. Wow, cool. Jay, the books I love, your other two ambassadors from Earth and Infinity Beckoned,

I encourage listeners to look those books up. Jay Galentine, thank you very much for joining me on American History Hit. We'll see you again. Thanks for having me on, Don. This is great. Thanks for listening to this episode of American History Hit. I hope you enjoyed it. Please don't forget to like, review, and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. I'll see you next time.

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