Apollo Is Finally Over

I’ve had a lot of differences with John Logsdon over the years, but in this Space News piece (pointed out to me by Charles Lurio), he gets it pretty close to exactly right (i.e., we’re pretty much on the same page):

Yale University organizational sociologist Gary Brewer more than 20 years ago observed that NASA during the Apollo program came close to being “a perfect place” — the best organization that human beings could create to accomplish a particular goal. But, suggested Brewer, “perfect places do not last for long.” NASA was “no longer a perfect place.” The organization needed “new ways of thinking, new people, and new means.” He added “The innocent clarity of purpose, the relatively easy and economically painless public consent, and the technical confidence [of Apollo] … are gone and will probably never occur again. Trying to recreate those by-gone moments by sloganeering, frightening, or appealing to mankind’s mystical needs for exploration and conquest seems somehow futile considering all that has happened since Jack Kennedy set the nation on course to the Moon.”

Introducing “new ways of thinking, new people, and new means” into the NASA approach to human spaceflight has not happened in the two decades since Brewer made his observations. That was the conclusion of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board in 2003, and despite the positive steps taken since then to operate the shuttle as safely as possible, much of the Apollo-era human spaceflight culture remains intact. Trying to change that culture and thereby close out the half century of Apollo-style human spaceflight seems to me the essence of the new space strategy. There is no way of achieving that objective without wrenching dislocations; change is indeed hard. Gaining acceptance of that change will require more White House and congressional leadership and honesty about the consequences of the new strategy than has been evident to date.

Sadly, White House and congressional leadership and honesty have been in pretty short supply lately, on both this issue and others.

58 thoughts on “Apollo Is Finally Over”

  1. @Edward … “How does that make Logsdon’s statement “not true”? Don’t budget cutbacks show that it was unable to gain political support, just as Logsdon said?”

    First of all, his timeline was off. The budget cutbacks that killed off the planned moon bases was in the late ’60s not the early ’70s. His statement is a misdirection. He’s implying causation from correlation.

    By the ’70s, it was a done deal. NASA had failed to make the case that a permanent presence on the Moon was worth the costs before we had even landed on the Moon! Like I said, Johnson and Congress had to fund the war and the Great Society and those constituencies had a lot more support than did NASA.

    He also states, “Apollo was aimed at beating the Russians to the Moon; it was not propelled by a long-term vision of space exploration.” … Again, incorrect as I have outlined already.

    He states that Apollo’s impact were “on balance negative”. This is the revision that supporters of the new “flexible plan to nowhere” have taken up.

    The reality is that we have had about 40 years of the flexible plan to nowhere and that’s exactly where we’ve gone … nowhere.

    The Shuttle was and is a great feat of technology but what did it gain us? We had to create the ISS to really give the Shuttle a purpose.

    The ISS is another feat of technology, but again, what have we gained?

    So now we’re going to spend at least another 20 years on feats of technology that MIGHT take us somewhere … When the reality is that we had the technology to take us places we just chose not to go.

  2. Gemini came into existence AFTER the approval of the Apollo program as a intermediate step to develop,

    No, Jim Chamberlin had lunar missions in mind from the very beginning. You need to go to primary sources, not rely on the “official” histories.

    Now, could Gemini gone to the moon with a “bug” lander? Probably, but if you think Apollo was dangerous and risky, the proposed Gemini moon mission was downright scary.

    You know not what you speak of. How many astronauts burned to death in Gemini?

    As I outlined before, it became the centerpiece in planning for incremental an evolution to a permanent presence on the moon. But Johnson had to fund the war and the Great Society …

    Nonsense. Go read Kennedy’s original speech. His goal was to land *a* man on the Moon and return him safely to the Earth. One man. Period. There was never any intention to create a permanent presence on the Moon — and even if there had been, the hugely expensive Apollo hardware would have prevented it.

  3. The budget cutbacks that killed off the planned moon bases was in the late ’60s not the early ’70s

    No, there never was any funding for lunar bases. Forget whatever Von Braun and his colleagues wrote about it. They lied to themselves, and they lied to you.

    NASA had failed to make the case that a permanent presence on the Moon was worth the costs before we had even landed on the Moon! Like I said, Johnson and Congress had to fund the war

    The war had nothing to do with it. With or without the war, there was nothing an Apollo Moonshot could do that was worth the billions of dollars it cost.

    He also states, “Apollo was aimed at beating the Russians to the Moon; it was not propelled by a long-term vision of space exploration.” … Again, incorrect as I have outlined already.

    No, your outline is fantasy — a wish list of engineering studies that were never going to get funded. No more real than the nuclear-powered airplane or the Navy’s submersible aircraft carrier. You have to distinguish between what you want to be and what actually is.

    The reality is that we have had about 40 years of the flexible plan to nowhere

    I guess it’s Friday night and you’ve been drinking. That might have happened in some parallel universe where Spock has a beard. It did not happen here. In the real world, NASA took the cost of a small war and flushed it down the same rathole you want to go down again. We didn’t get any lunar bases out of it, and even if we had, those bases would not have been worth the cost of maintaining them.

    So now we’re going to spend at least another 20 years on feats of technology that MIGHT take us somewhere…

    I’m sorry if you’re afraid of new technology and believe that NASA should go anywhere it hasn’t already been or try anything new. If you want historical reenactments, join the SCA or a Civil War group.

    When the reality is that we had the technology to take us places we just chose not to go.

    Ironically, you got that much right. We did have the technology to take us places — in programs like DynaSoar, the X-15, and Reusable Atlas, which were killed for the sake of the great god Apollo.

  4. If the point of NASA’s HSF program shouldn’t be to contribute to the goal of learning how to get to other worlds and learning how to live on them, what should it be?

    Learning how to get to other worlds and learning how to live on them are two different things. Did Lewis and Clark stop to build a hotel when they reached the Pacific Northwest?

    If NASA starts trying to build lunar settlements, mines, and oxygen plants — I won’t use the word “factories” because it upsets you — it will end up as a hotel keeper, miner, and plant operator. None of which are part of NASA’s skill set. NASA should concentrate on exploration and leave space settlement to others.

  5. Ed, we have to get past thinking about everything NASA does as “exploration”, or developing technology for “exploration”. And if your idea of exploration is Lewis And Clark then I can see why you’re so confused. Two key points about explorers spring to mind when I bother to think about them: they’re bygone relics of a different world, and most of them were funded privately.. just as anyone who dubiously claims that title today still still is. Now if you’re like to refer to NASA’s activities as surveying and map making then I guess you could come up with a reasonable analogy.

    That said, I can’t help but chuckle whenever someone like Mark Whittington starts talking about bringing Space Shuttle’s full of Helium-3 back from the Moon.. invoking visions of Spanish Galleons full of gold coming back from the new world.

  6. Trent, if all you want NASA to do is mapmaking, why do they need a lunar base for that?

    To quote a Spa e Frontier Foundation press release:

    “Government astronauts should not be driving trucks in Low Earth Orbit or on the Moon,” continued Tumlinson.  ”They should be the vanguard of solar-system exploration, constantly looking over the next horizon, in the tradition of great American explorers like Lewis and Clark or the inspirational heroes of fiction like James T. Kirk – with the rest of us following and creating new wealth and opportunity. Maybe now, after spending decades literally going around in circles, America can pursue its true destiny: To boldly go where no one has gone before.”

  7. Frediiiie,

    Excellent points and to-do list. A few observations by way of addendum and amplification:

    We are 40 years after Apollo and we still don’t know exactly how much gravity we really need. What is the point of putting people on the Moon or Mars if the lower gravity will kill them in 10-15 years.
    If that turns out to be the case what are the cures?
    Shouldn’t we finding this out now?

    We know humans are fine indefinitely in a 1-g field. We also know that they are not fine indefinitely in microgravity. We can colonize Mars orbit – not Mars surface – by building rotating 1-g habitats from IRSU materials mined from Phobos and Deimos. Finding out how little g-force the human mechanism can tolerate, long-term, is a project tailor-made for a colony that is already a going concern in 1-g habitats. Doing the research is simply a matter of getting volunteers who want to colonize Mars surface, if it can be shown to be a feasible undertaking, to live for a time in an orbital habitat that is slowly de-spun, in increments, to check for creeping metabolic pathologies. The process would be quite safe as it could always be reversed in short order before any deleterious effects uncovered become life-threatening. If, as I strongly suspect, the answer to how little long-term g-force the human body needs turns out to be > Lunar or Martian surface g, then the idea of colonizing the surface of either body can be safely abandoned. Note that this does not rule out short-term visitation for scientific or even – eventually – economically justifiable resource exploitation operations.

    What about radiation outside LEO. What shielding do we need? Does it have to be mass, or will magnetic shielding work?

    I think the long-term answer is both. First, we need magnetic shielding for the exploration and transport ships because it is too inefficient to use mass shielding for something that must accelerate and decelerate during much of its service life.

    Mass shielding makes more sense for rotating orbital habitats in Mars or Asteroid Belt orbits as reducing the continuous power draw requirements of said habitats will be a leading engineering consideration and mass is readily available. Few if any such habitats are likely to be moved significantly once built and spun up.

    Closed loop recycling for air, water and everything else for a long term mission in space. Not developed yet. (FY11 funds it.)

    Indeed. We need to get right on this for use on both deep-space ships and colony habitats. Neither are workable concepts without sustainable closed-cycle internal ecosystems that are both energy- and mass-efficient.

    Personally I’d rather go back to stay this time.

    With the single caveat of substituting the word “out” for “back,” I entirely agree.

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