I spent Sunday morning enjoying a great cup of coffee, The Clash, the attention of my wife and baby daughter, and thinking about why we do not have a permanent research base on the moon. As a self-appointed critic of the United States space program, I feel compelled to investigate. Given my recent post on the hard realities of a manned mission to Mars, and knowing that several nations are directing their space programs to the moon, you would think that the moon would have been on NASA’s shortlist these last thirty years. I mean… WE’VE ALREADY BEEN THERE. A few times. The reality is, the moon has not been on the list at all, at least not in a meaningful and substantive way, and our last manned visit to the moon was December 7, 1972. That was the mission of Apollo 17, the last of the six manned Apollo missions (beginning with Apollo 11 in 1969) and the end of a nearly 10 year concerted effort to put American astronauts on the moon. We put American astronauts on the moon. In 1969.
There is movement to reactivate the moon program as, back in 2004, President Bush committed us to a lunar landing no later than 2020. There is also talk at NASA regarding the creation of a permanent moon base. Money for initiating the moon program was cut out of NASA’s budget in 2006, but there is still a drive. The fact that Russia, India and China all have active moon programs, and that Japan just recently launched its first moon probe successfully is re-motivating Washington to put the moon back on the docket. China is committed to having a moon presence by 2024, less than 17 years from now. History has a way of repeating itself, and this is no more true than in the U.S. space program. The working model for the potential American moon program (when it gets re-funded), and for the creation of the base, is our very own 1960’s moon program. The thinking, I suppose, is that if it worked back then it should work for us again. The only problem is that most of the scientists and researchers that made that moon program possible are dead. There is concern that we no longer have the knowledge and expertise necessary to get to the moon successfully and that technology alone cannot make up this deficiency. There is also concern that recreating that knowledge and research will be too expensive. The question begs asking… having already been to the moon several times, and being the first to get there, how do we find ourselves again in a race to the moon? This time the technological playing field is much more flat. That, and there is more than one economic superpower in the race.
During my investigation into the moon program I took the time to actually look at Google moon. They have the equivalent for Mars. There is something amazing about being able to explore the surface of the moon and Mars from the comfort of your living room. I cannot help but feel that tools like these will inspire a whole new generation of scientists, researchers and astronauts. After a thirty year hiatus from not really doing anything beyond repetitive low Earth orbital visits via the Space Shuttle, we need a whole new generation to kick our space program into gear.
Some moon facts to jog your memories of sixth grade solar system studies:
- - The moon is an average of 238,855 miles from Earth
- - A day on the moon lasts 27.3 Earth days
- - A lunar year also lasts 27.3 Earth days
- - That is because the orbital period is equal to the rotation period
- - Surface temperatures range from -387° F to 253° F, from the dark side to the light side
NASA’s plans for the next twenty years is to play out something like this:
- - 2008/9 complete the Orion next generation spacecraft
- - 2008/9 initiate robotic spacecraft missions to explore the moon
- - 2010 the International Space Station is completed
- - 2010 the Space Shuttle is finally retired, it will have been in service nearly 30 years
- - 2014 first manned moon mission by NASA since 1972 (42 years)
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September 18th, 2007 at 5:10 pm
Nice piece — but unfortunately, your research wasn’t quite complete.
The primary reason why it’s taken so long was the political climate of 1969 — which was already drawing down the Apollo program with the cancellation of Apollos 18, 19 & 20 even before Apollo 11 had landed. At the same time, the Space Task Group, headed up by Vice President Agnew called for plans to land on Mars by 1980, a space station and a space shuttle. What we got was the space shuttle.
FROM: “Space Shuttle Blues - How Post-Apollo Politics Clouded America’s Space Vision”
By Jim McDade
The final years of Apollo brought a change in leadership at the top of the agency as well as in the White House. Thomas O. Paine was the new NASA administrator who replaced the brilliant James Webb as the leader of America’s space program. Paine was a Democrat, appointed by Lyndon Johnson and retained by Richard Nixon when he assumed the Oval office.
Paine was willing to compromise and deal with the new President to save as many of those endangered NASA jobs as he could. Nixon’s Vice-President, Spiro Agnew came across as an enthusiastic supporter of NASA. Nixon himself, grabbed as much Apollo glory and afterglow as he could by telephoning the Apollo moonwalkers while they were walking on the moon and later greeting the astronauts when their spacecraft returned to earth. It certainly appeared that Nixon admired, even adored America’s space pioneers.
Paine had no inkling of how devious Nixon was when it came to his “space vision”. Nixon actually wanted to end the entire U.S. human spaceflight program before he left office. To be fair to Republicans, Nixon had some strong allies in the Democrat party. NASA eventually found a way to “buy off” two of those Democrat naysayers, William Proxmire (D-Wisconsin) and Walter Mondale (D-Minnesota) by awarding lucrative contracts to businesses in the Senator’s home states. Nixon could not be bought.
President Nixon appointed Vice-President Spiro Agnew to head his Space Task Group (STG). NASA Administrator Paine, Air Force Secretary Robert C. Seamans and presidential Science Advisor Lee A. Dubridge also served in the STG. The group was assigned the mission of investigating the future possibilities for America’s space efforts and to present president Nixon with a list of possible future courses for action.
The final recommendations that were submitted to the President by the STG gave Nixon some rather dramatic, if not extreme options:
OPTION A- An expensive and comprehensive space effort that included a manned mission to Mars, orbiting space stations around the earth and the moon and a robust space shuttle.
OPTION B- Terminate NASA manned spaceflight operations by 1974 and place NASA on a subsistence budget of just three billion dollars annually for future development. This level of funding was spartan for an agency the size and scope of NASA. Option B would essentially mean the end of NASA as America had come to know it.
OPTION C- Institute moderate levels of funding for NASA that would allow the agency to build a makeshift space station from leftover Apollo hardware and fly a few earth orbit missions while initiating development of a ten billion dollar space shuttle.
Nixon shocked the Space task group by choosing OPTION B! Paine felt that the President had deceived him. Agnew probably felt even more foolish as he had previously gone on TV promising Americans that Nixon was going to give his stamp of approval to a Mars landing mission. Rumors soon began to spread that Nixon actually despised the space program since many people associated space exploration with his late nemesis, John F. Kennedy. NASA had finally and totally lost the support from the top that it previously enjoyed during the Kennedy and Johnson administrations.
NASA has been on it’s own during the budget battles ever since. NASA quickly discovered that it had to compete with the Pentagon and other federal agencies for every single dollar of funding. The agency began looking for new alliances to help keep the agency funded. Unfortunately, NASA sought the wrong ally to help sustain funding for the space shuttle.
Administrator Paine had vainly hoped that Nixon would come around and fully support the development of a new space transportation system after he had offered up a savings of six billion dollars by canceling the last four Apollo missions to the moon. After all, Nixon’s Vice-President was a tremendous space enthusiast. Paine was banking on the possibility that Nixon would agree to apply some or all of the six billion dollars to the proposed space shuttle. He could not have been more wrong.
Nixon and Vice-President Agnew had extremely different views about the future of America’s space program. United States Senate historian Mark O. Hatfield documented those differences:
“After Agnew publicly advocated a space shot to Mars, Nixon’s chief domestic advisor, John Ehrlichman, tried to explain to him the facts of fiscal life:
Look, Mr. Vice President, we have to be practical. There is no money for a Mars trip. The President has already decided that. So the President does not want such a trip in the [Space Council's] recommendations. It’s your job . . . to make absolutely certain that the Mars trip is not in there (in the Space Task Group recommendations).”
Paine’s miscalculation of Nixon had devastating results. NASA had voluntarily sacrificed the final phase of its Apollo lunar exploration program in the vain hope that Washington would back the development of a cost-efficient, safe and reliable space shuttle. As events developed, the loss of the Apollo-Saturn program left NASA with no “real” place to go for decades.
Feeling like an outsider in the Nixon government, Thomas Paine resigned his administrator’s post on September 15, 1970. Engineer George M. Low was appointed as acting NASA administrator. Low loved NASA and space exploration, but he was unable to stop the transformation of NASA from an earnest, cutting-edge scientific/engineering agency, into a typical, politically-directed bureaucracy. Low, inexperienced in the ways of Washington politics, agreed to a dangerously low Space Shuttle development budget.
President Nixon next appointed a new NASA administrator, James C. Fletcher, in the spring of 1971. The space agency needed a powerful new political partner to help push the shuttle program in Washington. NASA did not have to look very far for a partner. There was another powerful entity that dreamed about having its own space stations and shuttles. The United States Air Force was waiting in the wings.
The top minds at NASA originally proposed a completely reusable, efficient and reliable shuttle concept based on the original vision from the 1950s. The hoped for space shuttle would be initially expensive to build but very cheap to operate since it would be able to fly repeatedly with a minimum of maintenance and reconfiguration. They proposed a shuttle booster powered by conventional liquid fuel rocket engines and air-breathing jet engines. The booster would lift the airliner sized shuttle orbiter to high altitude where the shuttle would separate from the booster and climb into orbit under the power of its own liquid rocket engines. This shuttle would return to earth and would fly back to the launch site powered by jet engines. The logic behind this well thought out concept was solid.
Nixon and the Congress did not care if the shuttle concept was a sound and logical concept. The president balked at the proposed ten billion dollar budget for the project.
The stated goal was to build a fully reusable spaceship that would operate in a manner very similar to a commercial airliner. The space shuttle was supposed to eventually put huge payloads into orbit for a cost of just five-dollars a pound and launch every couple of weeks. The small Space Shuttle development budget ($8 billion) guaranteed that the NASA Space Shuttle concepts of economic reusability and a high priority for crew safety would be unattainable. What looked like a bargain for the taxpayers in the beginning would actually turn out to be a source of continuing frustration, disappointments and national tragedy.
NASA was created in 1958 with the intent of consolidating and coordinating a number of widely geographically distributed centers that were previously under civilian or military control. Many of those early NASA project people had worked in highly successful and efficient programs that helped give America unprecedented global prestige and almost impervious self-confidence. It was a merging of diverse cultures and management styles that wrought many great successes.
The changing environment of the 1960-1970 saw the end of NASA’s “Golden Age of Space Exploration” and the beginning of a long series of disappointments and faulty starts from NASA and other under-funded federal programs. The Golden Age of Space Exploration was over and the blossoms of spectacular achievements withered in the minds of the public and the media. The devotees of space exploration still look back on that golden past and somberly wonder what went wrong. Where is that bright future that glorious Apollo pointed us toward back in 1969?
Is the shuttle safer now after more than twenty years of flying? NASA says that it really is. The space shuttle support team at Kennedy Space Center works tirelessly to keep the shuttle flying safely. Those technicians, mechanics, electricians and engineers are miracle workers. Each successful launch of the shuttle is a tribute to their dedication and hard work.
Several years ago, the epitome of an “All-American Hero,” John Glenn retuned to space aboard the space shuttle after a 36-year layoff from spaceflight. In 1962, President John F. Kennedy discouraged NASA from “risking” the life of America’s greatest space icon, Glenn, by giving him another space mission following his groundbreaking orbital flight on February 20, 1962. Glenn finally flew another space mission on October 29, 1998 when he went back into orbit aboard U.S. space shuttle Discovery.
Glenn may have come closer to death than he ever did in his old one-man Mercury spacecraft when Discovery drogue parachute hatch fell off of the spacecraft and barely missed the engine exhaust bells of the space shuttle main engines. Fortunately, Discovery was not consumed in a huge explosion that could have happened if that loose hatch had struck and penetrated one of the liquid hydrogen cooling lines on the engine assembly.
The shuttle fleet is much younger than John Glenn but it is showing the wear and tear of years much more than Glenn was showing in 1998. It is past time to take the hard-earned lessons from the space shuttle program and build a better space transportation system.
America cannot shy away from its space challenge. The United States cannot retain a position of global leadership if it relies on other nations to carry the human quest beyond the earthly cradle. People must lead our journey into the Final Frontier, not robots and unmanned probes. We also cannot depend on remote machines to do our work for us.
Sending an unmanned probe to Mars can be compared to shipping your camcorder to Hawaii with instructions for someone there to tape the sights for you. It’s not the same thing as going on a real Hawaiian vacation. We must take the small steps and the giant leaps.
September 18th, 2007 at 7:23 pm
Thanks for providing the excerpted content from Jim McDade’s book. It definitely made for some compelling and complimentary content to my post.
It would seem that Jim McDade and I are very much in agreement.
September 19th, 2007 at 10:19 am
My colleague Jim McDade, you and I are not the only ones. . .
You might also want to read the following Air University (Maxwell AFB, AL) paper by USAF Lt Col Mark Erickson: “Into the Unknown Together: The DoD, NASA and Early Spaceflight”
http://aupress.au.af.mil/Books/Erickson/erickson.pdf
September 19th, 2007 at 10:46 am
There is clearly much more to this story than I have begun to address. Thanks for offering up more information and additional perspective. It is much appreciated. I am pleased that you found this post at schneiderism and felt compelled to comment and create a dialog. I will review the Mark Erickson piece and follow up with an additional post.
September 25th, 2007 at 11:23 am
It certainly has been rough going for our friends at NASA these last few decades. Sad. Political circumstances are certainly at the heart of all of it, but NASA has squandered endless opportunities as well.
I wasn’t born until shortly after Gene Cernan left the surface of the moon, but the early NASA space programs have provided me with endless inspiration since I was old enough to read. There is rarely an event in my life, be it professional or personal, that I can’t relate back to the Apollo program in some way — “You know how Max Faget would have solved that…”, “Here’s what Gene Kranz would have to say about that…”, etc…
The interesting thing for my generation, and those after mine, is that we have to work so hard to benefit from the amazing stories and accomplishments of NASA’s early (and current) successes. The inspiration is endless, but also inaccessible.
Here’s my point: NASA completely sucks at both marketing and communications. Now, I know NASA has bigger problems than that — including the fact that the Cold War is over. However, improving their ability to market their own successes is sooooo easy and it would accomplish sooooo much. Why not do it?
If I turn on the television I can instantly learn how to be a chef, a super model, a nanny, an interior decorator, an alligator wrestler, an ice road trucker, a survivor, whatever. Am I going to do any of those? No. I’m pretty sure I’m not going to be an astronaut either, but wouldn’t it be cool to see what that’s like? If I turn on the television I can also instantly learn how to build a motorcycle, a hot rod, bridge, a house, or a skyscraper. Why not a rocket?
I can’t imagine the stress, drama and decisions that go into building the infrastructure required for human spaceflight. I think Americans would devour it. Just don’t make them work for it. Most aren’t as nerdy and willing as I am to sit down and read book after book about it.
Everyone says that by Apollo 13 spaceflight was routine and Americans lost interest. That’s insane. NASA just did an awful job of communicating with the American public. If my mother doesn’t get bored watching 15 episodes of ‘Cold Case’ each week then how could she possibly be bored with the pinnacle of human adventure! NASA just needs to give us all something to talk about other than tragedies and diaper-wearing insane-ronauts. It shouldn’t be that hard…
(John, apologies for all the TV references.)
September 25th, 2007 at 11:27 am
I really enjoyed the following articles in the New York Times today. Very relevant to the conversation…
With Fear and Wonder in Its Wake, Sputnik Lifted Us Into the Future
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/science/space/25sput.html?ref=space
One Giant Leap, Followed by Decades of Baby Steps
http://www.nytimes.com/2007/09/25/science/space/25cosm.html
September 25th, 2007 at 5:56 pm
As a child I remember accidentally coming across a television program on PBS by NASA about the space program at the time. This would have been the the late 1970’s. I was transfixed, and that program was enough to get me to write a letter to the first shuttle astronauts. They wrote back. I still have the autographed crew photograph.
Outside of my incredibly dated experience I cannot remember another encounter with NASA that made any type of impression. You are right, they have missed a tremendous opportunity to rally the public around their efforts, connect us to the importance of the space program, and engage us in a consistent and meaningful way.
Thanks for pointing us to the articles in the NY Times. I was planning a post on Sputnik in honor of the anniversary.