Who killed the moon program?

Do you believe that President Obama has effectively shut down the space program and stopped the United States' return to the moon?

You may change your mind or at least have a more tempered opinion after you read what follows: our first in a series on the tortured history of U.S. attempts to restart exploration of deep space.

We first delve into the way it was, the program of record, circa 1964. Flip through this iconic issue of Life Magazine to get a feel for the vigor of the time.

A more robust time in the U.S. Space Program has never existed. This was the age of the Creation of the Space Infrastructure! Everything was being built -- Kennedy Space Center; the massive test stands for the rockets engines that would take us to the moon; the human spaceflight training facilities, including voluminous water tanks for full-scale Extravehicular Activity practice sessions. And of course, scientific and engineering firms and universities around the country were immersed in the task of getting a man on the moon.

A more robust system for space travel has not since been devised! The lunar transportation infrastructure may have been the response to a crash course in how to get to the moon, but the systems within that infrastructure had a multitude of spin-off application possibilities - and plans were produced for many practical, feasible continuation projects using the same lunar module, command/service module and Saturn V booster. What were the limits of such plans? They were surprisingly ambitious, by today's standards. For instance, a manned Mars mission was planned for 1975. All with the same infrastructure.

Economies of scale would kick in at some point. When, and to what extent, are subect to conjecture. We have found, with five decades of space exploration plans behind us, that any cost projection we make today will be different (and not cheaper!) tomorrow. I don't think anyone can claim that increasing the number of Saturn V's per year would bring down cost to the levels we see with an Atlas V or Delta IV.

But the capabilty may have proven to be worthwhile. It's a capability no one on earth has today. No single heavy lift booster in use today even approaches the low earth orbit payload capacity of the Saturn V.

Even if Ares V (the proposed Saturn V-class booster in the the current program of record, Project Constellation) was funded and produced, the first launch would likely miss the 2025 timeframe. That would be 50 years after the world lost the Saturn V. And what could we have done with such a machine over those decades....

So what happened? Where did all the possibilities go? Who really killed the moon program?

To begin with, let's look at the historical appropriations for NASA since its inception. Here's a graph that we will refer to from time to time:




You can see that the highest level of NASA funding occurred in 1964-1966 -- and that reflects the construction of the gargantuan lunar spaceflight infrastructure.

The steep downward slope that followed would result in the cancellation of three advanced Apollo lunar landings, beginning with the cancellation of Apollo 20 on January 4, 1970. Reshuffling of mission priorities as a reaction to the decimated budget also resulted in the cancellation of Skylab 2, which would have been the second giant U.S. space station. (The actual hardware sits near the main entrance of the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum today, and you can walk through it.)

Soon after President Richard M. Nixon took office, he appointed a Space Task Group, to be headed by Vice President Spiro T. Agnew. From NASA's history of the planning for a post-Apollo Space Program:

Besides being economy minded, the new administration was in no hurry to establish a position on space. Early in 1969 the new President appointed a Space Task Group to study the space program, calling for a report in six months on alternatives for the post-Apollo period. Predictably, the group's report, submitted on September 15, recommended a balanced program of manned and unmanned space activity. Its most radical suggestion was that NASA should adopt a new long-range goal, comparable to the Apollo goal that had sustained space exploration for eight years, to provide the impetus for new developments. For that goal they suggested manned exploration of the planets, specifically a manned landing on Mars by the end of the 20th century. Three options were proposed: an all-out effort, including a 50-man earth-orbiting space station and a lunar base, culminating with the Mars landing in the mid-1980s; a less ambitious program providing for evaluation of an unmanned Mars landing before setting a date for the manned mission; and a minimum program that would develop a space station and a shuttle vehicle but would defer the Mars landing to some unspecified time before the end of the century. Costs were estimated at between $8 billion and $10 billion per year by 1980 for the most ambitious option and from $4 billion to $5.7 billion annually by 1976 for the least.

You can read the Space Task Group's final report here in its entirity. We will explore this report in great detail in future posts.

Of the three major options presented, President Nixon gravitated toward the most minimal: the space station with an accompanying shuttle vehicle. With his final decision, he elilminated the space station. All that was left was the shuttle vehicle. Destination: low earth orbit.

Ten days after the decision to cut Apollo 20, NASA Administrator Thomas O. Paine announced a stop in Saturn V production, effectively ending the heavy launch capability the U.S. had built. The atmosphere in the country would not enable a continuation. A congressional historian of that era wrote:

By hindsight, it seems unlikely that even the strongest and most adept mobilization of the supporters of more manned flights to the Moon could have successfully overcome the adverse feeling in the country in the early 1970's. Congress and the Nation could be persuaded to support Skylab, the Space Shuttle, and a modest level of activity by NASA in many other areas. But . . . Von Braun's dream of a manned flight to Mars was not in the cards for the 20th century, at least.

So, who killed the moon program? If you must attach the name of a U.S. president, the answer is obvious. 'Twas Nixon. Who killed the Saturn V, the most powerful - and successful - space booster in history? 'Twas Nixon. And we have never been able to rejuvenate the lunar transportation infrastructure since.

Here's a taste of what you and I have missed all these years, courtesy of the fantastic blog, Beyond Apollo: wonderful projects that were largely ready to get started, and were going to take advantage of that enormous space infrastructure. These are not pie-in-the-sky concepts. Rather, they are serious proposals that were either in-work, or on the table for immediate consideration, when the carpet was pulled out from underneath the Space Program.

Peruse the long list of lost projects as you see fit, and be advised: there is much, much more. With a robust infrastructure, there are many possibilities.

The program of record, Constellation, was not on track to meet its objectives within a reasonable timeframe. We will discuss this at length, soon. And far from "Apollo on Steroids", its performance against its stated requirements was marginal, and had little room for growth, mainly due to booster limitations. Not so with the former Apollo infrastructure.

We (and I do mean "we" this time, as in "you and I here today") are trying to get it back. It is not a simple matter of having "been there, done that". We have lost our infrastructure, and we are working to scrap and scrape together some semblance of that great future Space Program, that we lost so long ago.

And you and your children can help. All we have to do, together, is learn about the Space Program, and support it in some way. We will discuss the various means of contribution in future posts.