AFTER APOLLO,
DEBATE RAGES ON WHAT COMES NEXT
When President John F. Kennedy famously issued his challenge to the American people on a sweaty Houston afternoon in 1962, he didn’t exactly give it to them straight. His speech at Rice Stadium was chock-full of fancy rhetoric and inspiring notions, with nary a word about politics — or to be precise, geopolitics.
Why the moon? Because it was
there. Like the big mountain, it challenged us to dig deep and find a way. The sales pitch failed to mention what Kennedy kept repeating to those in his government: It was a race. Period. Beating the Soviet Union was job one because it would show the ultimate superiority of the American system. That was the reason for the deadline.
And that was a problem. Once the deadline was met, what then?
Those who were dedicating their
“Exploration is really the essence of the human spirit, and I hope we will never forget that.”
Frank Borman, Apollo 8 commander, in 1969
lives to space exploration — from the high-profile astronauts in Houston down to the anonymous junior engineer in California — envisioned moon bases and future trips to Mars. Those devoted to politics had a different vision: an agency chopped back to size. NASA was useful and reasonably popular, but it was eating far too much of the federal budget.
That meant that lunar encampments and Mars missions would remain the province of dreamers. For the indefinite future, it would be back to Earth orbit and whatever a much smaller piece of the pie could pay for. Although the looming financial diet was obvious to everyone who was paying attention, the last man on the moon made a pitch for maintaining the momentum in his final words before starting the trip home.
“As I take man’s last steps from the surface, back home for some time to come, but we believe not too long into the future,” astronaut Gene Cernan said, his thoughts a bit disjointed with the emotion of the moment. “I believe history will record that America’s challenge of today has forged man’s destiny of tomorrow.”
Actually, not so much. With the final three Apollo missions canceled, the question of what next was a raging debate leading toward a troubled future. Clearly NASA could not be bled to death. The genius of the Apollo program was in spreading expenditures across numerous locations. It was hard for Congress to just say no. But in an era of growing détente with the Soviets, NASA’s role as political instrument was gone.
President Richard Nixon discussed how to proceed with aides in the Oval Office in November 1971, before the word Watergate had entered the national conversation. He wasn’t sure he even wanted to go through with Apollo 16 and 17, which so far had been spared from the budget ax. After the Apollo 13 nearcatastrophe, he wanted to wrap it up.
“NASA is saying you’ll find incredible things about the moon with those last two shots,” Nixon said, “and the American people say, ‘So what?’ Manned spaceflight becomes a stunt after a while.”
It was galling to those who had sat in the Apollo capsule and made that dangerous journey to hear such casual dismissal of a Herculean effort. It was so different from the national mood just a few years earlier. Frank Borman, hailed as a hero when Apollo 8 became the first human spacecraft to leave Earth’s orbit, understood the politics involved. But he chose to believe that Apollo was only the beginning of great missions to come.
“I’m convinced it’s no longer whether we’ll do these things,” Borman said before a joint meeting of Congress in early 1969. “It’s a question of how long it will take and how much we’ll spend. Exploration is really the essence of the human spirit, and I hope we will never forget that.”
But that was not the essence — not even particularly the interest — of the men and women sitting before him. For those so eager to criticize the sharp decline in spending, it must be pointed out that exploration was not the motivation of the president who set it all in motion. Apollo was born of a hunger for oneupmanship, not a lust for science.
“The need for an expression of our strength and determination as a nation has changed considerably,” the advisory Space Task Group stated in its report laying out future options. “A decision to phase out manned spaceflight operations, although painful, is the only way to achieve significant reductions in NASA budgets over the long term.”
To be sure, the advisory group was not recommending that course, only concluding it was the sole means of saving real money. Its preference was for a steady march toward a Mars mission by the end of the 20th century. In other words, incremental steps toward a single, major goal, based on appropriate but not Apollo-like funding levels.
The group’s report, while sensible, was mostly ignored. Arguments for and against human spaceflight went back and forth during Apollo’s final years. George Low, who had become acting NASA administrator when James Fletcher resigned in frustration over the reduced budgets, lobbied hard for a vigorous program. The Office of Management and Budget pushed back. Caspar Weinberger, a future secretary of defense who was then the OMB’s deputy director, was an ally. But in a letter to Low, he laid out the dilemma.
“The real reason for sharp reductions … is that NASA is in the 28 percent of the budget that is controllable,” Weinberger said. “We cut it because it is cuttable, not because it is doing a bad job or an unnecessary one.”
Waning attention
By 1971, NASA and pretty much everyone else had concluded that the obvious next big project — assuming manned operations were to continue — was a reusable spacecraft. It had become known as the space shuttle. Anti-space liberals and conservative budget hawks hated the idea — and that included Weinberger’s own department. Nixon was split. He didn’t want to be the president who killed human spaceflight right after its greatest achievement. Yet he saw no need for another heroic objective, such as a moon base or a trip to Mars.
Tipping the scales was the fact that some of NASA’s large contractors were in Nixon’s home state, California, which he wanted to win in the upcoming election. He liked the idea of backing a sensible project that would sustain the agency and its contractors. It was a political calculation, if nothing else.
“We are going to be positive on space,” Nixon told his aides. “Nobody is going to be against us if we go forward in space, and a few will be for us because we do.”
So the space shuttle was a go. All manner of designs and options were looked at, but whatever the final choice, development was not going to be a national priority like Apollo. Its budget would be adequate, though ever shrinking as a percentage of the overall federal budget. There was no deadline per se.
The shuttle was sold as a versatile and economical way to reach Earth’s orbit, which turned out to be half-right. Its best argument was to help build and serve a future space station, even if no such project was on the horizon. In the meantime it would keep human spaceflight alive and contractors employed.
In retrospect, there may have been no real alternative. Public attention had begun to wane. And there was no strong political support for another bold effort to build on Apollo’s success. The “Nixon Doctrine” became America’s space policy by default — for the next halfcentury.
NASA remained alive and healthy, but there would be no money for anything beyond Earth’s orbit. The program that led to the Apollo moon landings had cost more than $25 billion ($112 billion in 2018 dollars). The inevitable retrenchment changed not just the yearly federal outlay but the way NASA would be thought about in the future.
“Space expenditures must take their proper place within a rigorous system of national priorities,” Nixon said in a formal statement about the future of the program. “What we do in space from here on must become a normal and regular part of our national life.”
Moon or Mars?
The question, of course, was whether it would ever be “normal and regular” to go back to the moon or to Mars, or whether it would even be possible without a sense of urgency.
Of course, there still was a bit of Apollo left to go before all eyes turned to designing the new spaceship. With men on the moon now a done deal, the immediate task was less inspiring, though by no means easy. NASA had years earlier begun work on a small space station that would use Apollo hardware. It was called Skylab.
Formally, Skylab was part of the Apollo Applications Program, an ambitious series of follow-up projects, most of them on the moon. Only two survived the budget cuts that brought Apollo to an end, one a lastminute addition in the form of a docking mission between Soviet and American spacecraft, and the other the Skylab space station.
Creating Skylab involved taking a Saturn I-VB rocket segment (approximately 60 feet long) and repurposing it into an orbiting laboratory, outfitted with a number of scientific instruments. It was launched atop one of the big Saturn V leftovers from the canceled moon missions.
About five months after Apollo 17 brought the moon program to a close, the unmanned Skylab roared into orbit. Right off the bat things didn’t go well. Skylab sustained damage during launch and deployment that left it useless. Repairs would have to be made to save it. The first of three manned missions, launched only 11 days later, did exactly that.
The three-man crew arrived with materials and a plan. First, they used an improvised parasol sunshade to serve in place of a ruined micrometeorite shield, which also provided essential protection from the sun. Next, they managed to free a jammed solar array. Half of the solar panels had been ripped away during launch. Without full extension of the other half, the array could not supply enough power to do the experiments planned for coming months. It took a lot of tugging and a couple of spacewalks to accomplish it.
The crew stayed for almost a month, doing more repairs and 392 hours of experiments. The second team arrived in late July and remained for 59 days. After installing a larger sunshade, they began a comprehensive series of medical tests, a feature of each Skylab session. They also conducted the first tests on the effect of microgravity on other living creatures.
The final mission, Skylab 4, brought the crew aboard on Nov. 16 after getting off to a rough start because of a bout of space sickness and overwork. Because of the limited time frame, there was a long list of tasks to be done, some of which were added just before the launch and had not been thoroughly planned. The increasingly fatigued crew began to complain, reminding controllers of the quarrelsome experience with Apollo 7. Eventually, after a conference with Mission Control, the weary astronauts got some relief on the schedule and tensions eased.
In addition to more medical testing on the crew, the mission included copious solar observations. About 75,000 telescopic images of the sun were taken, some in the Xray and ultraviolet spectrum, and the crew was able to film the eruption of a solar flare for the first time from space. Numerous images of Earth also were recorded. The crew stayed for close to three months, leaving after 1,214 orbits.
Skylab remained in orbit until 1979. Even though there was air, water and food left, plans to reuse it came to nothing. The Saturn V and its less-powerful brothers had been
retired. The new space shuttle was lagging behind schedule.
Skylab fell to Earth above the Indian Ocean and Western Australia on July 11, having orbited the planet close to 35,000 times. NASA worked hard to maneuver the beast so that it would not land over populated areas, but that didn’t keep the agency from becoming the butt of endless jokes from its lack of foresight. Saturday Night Live featured a skit with John Belushi cowering in his basement wearing an Army helmet.
A thaw in relations
The other holdover from Apollo was the plan to dock a Command/ Service Module with a Soyuz spacecraft. The unusual mission reflected a thaw in relations between the U.S. and the Soviet Union after the end of American involvement in Vietnam. It was formalized in 1972 when the two countries signed an agreement on the cooperative use of outer space for peaceful purposes.
The mission has been all but forgotten, a symbolic gesture of little relevance. At the time, it was controversial, with some members of Congress balking at the idea of a softer stance toward the longstanding arch foe. But eventually the funds were obtained, and the two craft were launched on July 15, 1975, about seven and a half hours apart.
Docking was tricky because the two spaceships were not designed with mating in mind. A special module was built to accomplish the task, and it was never used again. The two vessels came together on July 17 and remained attached for two days.
The five men — three astronauts and two cosmonauts — spent most of their time together casually. There were a few brief and minor science experiments, and a few more when the two ships undocked and stayed in orbit for a few days. The Apollo command module returned to Earth on July 24, its Pacific Ocean splashdown marking the end of the program and the end of Americans in space for seven years.
That hiatus was ended by the launch of the space shuttle in 1981. A new era had begun, one much less reliant on geopolitics and national ego. The shuttle didn’t turn out to be quite as robust and certainly not as economical as had been hoped. Nevertheless, it did much of what it was supposed to and flew 135 missions.
Some of the shuttle’s anticipated tasks faded away. With each launch averaging out to approximately $450 million, it turned out to be cheaper to launch most satellites on expendable rockets. And it was nothing like an airplane, as first envisioned. Typically it would take three months to get the orbiter ready for its next flight.
The truly impressive missions, such as launching the Hubble Space Telescope and later repairing it, were few and far between. But there was one job for which it was essential, one that had been on people’s minds for more than a generation. If the shuttle were to last, it had to have a greater raison d’etre than the mere ability to get to Earth’s orbit.
A new mission
The idea of a space station had been around since Wernher von Braun had collaborated with Collier’s Magazine for a series of articles about the coming era of space exploration.
An orbiting space station was a key part of the enterprise, and even if the reasons for it and the technology it would employ changed radically over the years, the idea remained central.
Once the space shuttle, with its large payload capacity, became operational, talk turned to what it should be doing. In a December 1981 meeting with President Ronald Reagan in the White House Cabinet Room, NASA Administrator James Beggs said the next step was clear.
“Today the space shuttle makes us the leading nation in space,” Beggs told Reagan and a half-dozen other key figures. “What’s needed now, what was originally envisioned, is a place to shuttle to.”
Despite the opposition of many within his administration, most vocally his budget director, Reagan had agreed to the idea of a space station within days after hearing Begg’s presentation. He announced it at the State of the Union address two months later. Echoing Kennedy, he directed NASA to build a permanent station and do it within 10 years.
Unlike Apollo, the deadline was not met. The first section was not taken aloft until 1998. But the purpose Reagan gave for building it was straightforward and legit. He spoke of working in space for “economic and scientific gain,” of the research that could be done there in the company of scientists from many companies.
Over time, the International Space Station became the largest structure ever put in space. It serves as a laboratory, observatory and factory. Its pressurized compartments, if put together, would be as big as the cabin of a Boeing 747. More than 200 scientists from 16 countries have spent time there.
While arguments now rage over the next big step — back to the moon or on to Mars — the role of the new private companies such as SpaceX or Blue Origin also has become a variable that has to be considered. Could they do things cheaper? The question is crucial because the cost per launch of NASA’s Space Launch System, still under development, may leave little money for actual exploring.
Meanwhile, the space station keeps orbiting Earth, more than 15 times a day. How long it will do so is another variable in the NASA equation. It takes a big chunk of the space agency’s budget to keep it working. If the government keeps supporting it, the post-Apollo dream of a new bold enterprise may forever remain future tense.