At the dawn of the Space Age it looked like the United States was losing the Space Race — and soundly. The Soviet Union had launched the first artificial satellite in 1957. In response the Vanguard rocket blew up on the pad.

Both nations then began to work on putting a human into space. The American Project Mercury was projected to put a man in orbit by late 1960, but delay after delay — sometimes out of caution and sometimes out of concerns for safety because the rockets continued to blow up, allowed the Soviets to put a man into orbit in April of 1961. The best the Americans could do, a month later, was to send astronaut Alan Shepherd on a fifteen-minute suborbital flight.

Yet on the basis of that suborbital flight, while American morale was low, President John F. Kennedy, at a Joint S…