Not in 1967, but in doubt that year
The Moon landing did not happen in 1967. It took place on 20 July 1969, when Apollo 11 put Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin on the surface. What 1967 did was put the date in serious doubt. The year opened with the death of three astronauts and ended with American crewed flights still on hold, and many people inside and outside the programme wondered whether the goal would be met in time.
The goal Kennedy set
In May 1961, President John F. Kennedy told Congress that the United States should commit itself to landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth before the decade was out. The speech came weeks after Yuri Gagarin’s flight and the Bay of Pigs failure, and it made the Moon the centrepiece of the space race. Kennedy was assassinated in November 1963, and from then on the goal also carried the weight of a memorial commitment, which President Lyndon Johnson, who had long been a supporter of the space programme, continued to uphold.
By late 1966 the programme looked to be on track. Gemini had finished with a series of successful missions, and the first crewed Apollo flight was planned for early 1967. Some officials hoped for a landing as early as 1968, though there was never a firm promise of that.
January 1967: the schedule breaks
The Apollo 1 fire on 27 January 1967 ended that optimism. Because the spacecraft needed to be reworked, the first crewed flight would not happen for a long time. NASA’s investigation soon showed serious problems with design, materials and workmanship. The delay was open-ended at first, since nobody knew how long the redesign would take.
The question for the rest of the year was whether the decade deadline could still be met. The end of 1969 was the formal limit, so the programme had about three years to do what had been planned in a shorter period. The hardware was not the only issue: crews had to be trained, a lunar module had to be proven and the huge Saturn V had to work.
Congress, money and the mood of 1967
The fire also hit during a difficult political period. The Vietnam War escalation was absorbing growing sums, and Johnson was trying to fund the Great Society at the same time. Spending on the Moon programme had been very large, and some critics questioned whether it should continue at that level, especially after a disaster. Hearings in Congress examined NASA’s handling of the contractor and the safety of the spacecraft. Senators asked pointed questions of NASA’s leadership, and the agency’s reputation took a blow.
At the same time, many in Congress and in the public still supported the goal. The fire did not turn opinion decisively against the Moon programme, and Congress continued to fund it, though the pressure on NASA to show that it could finish the job was high. One argument often made was that stopping would waste what had already been spent and leave the field to the Soviet Union.
The Soviet factor
The Soviet Union was seen as a rival capable of surprising everyone, and several Western observers suspected it was working on a circumlunar flight. The death of cosmonaut Vladimir Komarov in April 1967 showed that its programme had trouble too, but the worry did not vanish. Soviet uncrewed spacecraft in the Zond series later flew around the Moon in 1968, which added to the sense of competition when American plans were being reconsidered.
Recovery through testing
For the rest of 1967, NASA concentrated on rebuilding. The first Saturn V flight, Apollo 4, took place on 9 November 1967 and went well, which was an important morale boost. The year also saw successful uncrewed lunar probes. These were reassurances, but they did not solve the main difficulty, which was the crewed spacecraft.
Crewed flights resumed with Apollo 7 in October 1968, after about 20 months without an American crew in space. After that the programme moved quickly and, by some accounts, boldly. Apollo 8 was sent around the Moon in December 1968, a decision taken partly because the lunar module was not yet ready, and partly because of the wish to keep the schedule alive. Reports of Soviet progress are often cited as an additional reason for the choice, though historians weigh the factors differently.
The deadline met
When Apollo 11 landed in July 1969, the goal Kennedy had set eight years earlier was fulfilled, with about five months left in the decade. The landing was therefore not a straight line from 1961 but a deferred achievement, delayed by a disaster and then recovered through careful testing and some risk-taking. Seen from 1967, the outcome was far from certain, and the people involved at the time were more aware of that than later retellings suggest.