I think the demonstration of our capability of landing on the moon was a strong demonstration to the Soviets of the vigor of our leadership and the strength of our society that certainly must have given them pause. When the Soviet leaders [ask themselves] the question “How belligerent can we safely get against the United States[?]” [—]I think America’s space successes must give them pause when their people say “Well hell, we can do everything the Americans can do and do it better.” Well by God, you can’t go to the Moon, and I think it has been a stabilizing and sobering force.3
Paine saw the accomplishment in still larger terms. He affirmed that while the Moon Race dramatically revealed the difference between two competing, ideologically opposed societal systems and their national values, its true significance was always about how far the United States could push itself. “What the landing on the Moon demonstrates is that American space technology has matured, has come of age. It demonstrates that we can do the thing we set out to do. … That’s the real meaning of the accomplishment, not that we beat Russia in a Moon Race.”4
Only ten short months remained to Kennedy’s deadline when the US Senate confirmed Paine as the administrator of NASA in March of 1969. The timing of his appointment was important and, for him, incredibly fortuitous. The three highest-profile missions of the moon program (Apollo 8 was the first to orbit the moon; Apollo 11 was the first to land on the moon; and Apollo 13 was the only failed attempt to land on the moon) all flew on his watch. Those epochal missions that sent human beings away to explore another place in outer space have not been attempted since the final Apollo flight splashed down in the Central Pacific in December of 1972.
The timing of the lunar program was strikingly compelling. The 1960s was a restless time in America. Social activism, generational distrust, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War defined the decade. A weary public openly questioned what the country was doing in space when the cities were in chaos and young men and women were dying in the faraway jungles of Southeast Asia. The young, especially, questioned authority, the government, and what the American way of life stood for.
Going to the moon became a way to inspire, challenge, and bring the contentious generations together. It suddenly became very important to the nation’s psyche and sense of security that the United States reach the moon first. Paine believed that the space program could accomplish something special, something unique for America and even for the human race. The moon landings proved that a country working together could do something remarkable. As World War II had shown, a challenged nation could bring great power and wealth to transform the world—NASA did the same.5
Paine was able to influence the space program at a very high level, and he certainly wanted it all when it came to space. National leaders listened to him. Critics who found him too ambitious and his ideas too untenable listened nevertheless. He made his mark as the administrator of NASA when mankind went to the moon, but his articulate championing of a strong human presence in space in the final decades of the twentieth century may, upon revisiting, turn out to be his greatest contribution and legacy.
In the mid-1980s, the Reagan White House asked Paine what America should do next in space. He responded by championing a plan for how human beings, in the span of one generation, could settle the inner solar system. After the pioneering flights of Project Apollo had faded into the pages of history, he remained vigilant and called for the United States to pick up where it had left off: return to the moon and go on to Mars. Now, one score and five years after his passing, those decisions and imprints can still steer the space program as the US considers charting a way back into outer space beyond the horizon of low-Earth orbit.
A renowned fellow presidential commissioner fondly recalled Paine as a man who was “a wonderful human being who was very shrewd but never gave the impression [of] being shrewd. He … came across as being just kind of an ordinary guy, but he was quite extraordinary.”6 To see how Tom Paine came to be a central figure in the US space program, we must open not with the moon and Project Apollo, nor the romance of the high plains of Mars that he hoped human beings would one day settle, nor the saga onboard a US submarine as it perilously fought the Japanese, but in the colonies of the New World at the time of the birth of America. This was a time when visionaries of another kind journeyed across the breadth of an ocean to conquer their dreams.
If there must be trouble, let it be in my day, that my child may have peace. —Thomas Paine, 1776
Freetown, Massachusetts, is on record as being one of the very first settlements in the Plymouth Colony and one of the earliest towns in the New World of North America. As one of the first parishes in the New England territory, it was home to some of America’s earliest patriots. Most were direct descendants of the Pilgrims who had arrived on the forested banks of the winding Assonet River around the year 1660. There, they began building new lives, befriended the local Wampanoag Indians, and bought parcels of land from them. The settlers engaged in the trade of furs and textiles and cultivated the rich agricultural resources of the area, producing an abundance of grist, in particular, that they profited from by selling to neighboring communities. By 1685, the township had grown large enough that it was incorporated into the governance of the much larger community of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.
An early town census recorded a grand juryman by the name of Ralph Pain living in the township around the turn of the seventeenth century, when the area was growing rapidly in population and importance. It mentions that he served at one time as a constable of Bristol County, Massachusetts. His lineage would remain in the pastoral community through the better part of the century leading up to the American Revolutionary War.1
Before 1776, the quiet settlement was known as a Tory stronghold, friendly to loyalists of the British Crown. “God, King, and Country” controlled the politics of the town hall and the rules of the parish. Despite this, by that year, quite a number of the townspeople had become well engaged in the rapidly growing separatist movement. There is evidence to suggest that Job Paine, one of Ralph Pain’s grandsons and a direct ancestor of Tom Paine, was proscribed by townsmen as a well-known Tory.2 On May 25, 1778, a British ship had sailed conspicuously into lower Freetown, its true intentions still a topic of debate to this day. Most historians are of the opinion that it was done to openly provoke the separatists. If so, they did not have to wait long, as a skirmish broke out when a few local minutemen opened fire. Some one dozen commoners armed with muskets then fought off over 150 British marines before the ship retreated a few days later to loud cheers of “Huzza!” from the victors.
In the same well-established Plymouth Colony was one George Soule, an indentured servant who came to the New World on the Mayflower. Soule would go on to sign the Mayflower Compact, the first governing document of the colony. According to Tom Paine’s grandfather, their family ancestry included Soule, along with the Thomas Paine—the consequential pamphleteer of the American War of Independence.3
For a century and a half, from about 1692 to 1847, four generations of Paine’s family toiled, married, and died in Massachusetts. From there, the family picked up and moved south to nearby Rhode Island. There, his paternal great-grandfather settled and put down roots for the family. In Providence, his grandfather, Frank Eugene Paine, had some influence for a while as a popular state senator. In 1893, his wife Jemima bore their second child in the town of Warwick, the second largest community in the state, and by chance the site of the first shots fired in the Revolutionary War.
George Thomas Paine, father to Thomas Otten Paine, was known to be a high achiever from an early age. He studied civil engineering at nearby Brown University. Nearly half a century earlier, in the year 1847, the seventh oldest college in
