Cold War Space Policy

The United States has had a vastly changing national space policy during the cold war. The early cold war presidents such as Eisenhower, Kennedy, Johnson and Nixon had a very active and well-funded space policy compared to later cold war presidents. What caused each president to have a different policy and what shaped their views on space policy during the height of the cold war? What were the goals and outcomes of their policies? In the summer of 1958, through the singing of the National Aeronautics and Space Act, NASA came into existence. President Eisenhower, was skeptical but the Senate Majority leader and future President Lyndon Johnson, persuaded the President to support this bill. When first elected Eisenhower didn’t have much of
In fact as an US Senator he was opposed to the Apollo program. But once again, now Vice-President Lyndon Johnson, stepped in. With the advice of the Vice-President, Kennedy had down a complete turn around from the time he was a senator to his first state of the union speech. In that speech he urged for international cooperation to sharing the new technology and knowledge, “Where nature makes natural allies of us all, we can demonstrate that beneficial relations are possible even with those with whom we most deeply disagree-and this must someday be the basis of world peace and world law.” This would be the theme of the Kennedy space policy, a peaceful program, with the US taking the lead internationally. A year later, President Kennedy perhaps gave the most famous speech in regards to space exploration. In September 1962 he said, “We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too”, in a speech in Rice Stadium in
Even after Apollo 1, the president’s support for manned missions and getting to the moon never wavered. The war also, caused the administration to cancel projects beyond the Apollo program. According to author John M. Logson, “ NASA budget during the final years of his presidency began a precipitous downward slide…By the time he left office in January 1969, NASA was on the brink of accomplishing the goal set out for it almost eight years earlier, but the agency had no sense of what it would be asked to do once it had taken Americans to the moon.” It is very ironic that the person who was the biggest supporter of space missions from the beginning ended up starting the beginning of the end for big NASA budgets and a space policy that pushed for space exploration. And a little over a year after he left the White House, NASA landed on the moon in 1969 fulfilling JFK’s