When the Soviets beat the Americans in the race to launch an Earth-orbiting satellite, Senator Lyndon Johnson said that the Eisenhower administration had made one of the largest political and foreign-policy blunders in the history of the nation. Sputnik, Johnson reminded America, represented mastery of the heavens. And while perhaps that was all right with others in the government, he for one didn't care to go to bed under the light of a Communist moon.
Following the post-Sputnik panic and the wave of suggestions for how to best launch a cold war counterattack in space, President Dwight D. Eisenhower tried to jump-start American investigation of "the final frontier" with the creation of the President's Scientific Committee and the Advanced Research Projects Agency. But his greatest contribution to the space effort came on July 19, 1958, when he signed the Space Act which created the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
Although NASA was a strategic political move and demonstrated Eisenhower's desire for his country to succeed in the space race, his deeper support of the American space program was questionable. Eisenhower only reluctantly approved the Mercury Program, NASA's first series of manned missions into space, and, while he pushed NASA in January of 1960 to accelerate its Saturn rocket program, by December he was unwilling to commit funds to the Apollo Program, which eventually, under President John F. Kennedy, put the first man on the Moon.
