Stephen Smith has a lengthy review of John Logsdon’s latest book.
As he notes, the dual myths of Kennedy as space visionary and Nixon as space villain don’t stand up to any sort of realistic historical scrutiny. In fact, with Apollo, Kennedy set us up for decades of failure, in terms of making spaceflight economically realistic.
“In fact, with Apollo, Kennedy set us up for decades of failure, in terms of making spaceflight economically realistic”
Yes but could he and did he know that? And could he have decided that the political goal was more important than the economic goal?
Did he or any of his advisors have any idea of the economic opportunities in space that, in ’61, hadn’t revealed themselves?
Not making excuses for JFK, but I do think 20-20 hindsight is much clearer.
“Yes but could he and did he know that?”
No, we barely knew how to get off the planet.
“Not making excuses for JFK, but I do think 20-20 hindsight is much clearer.”
Ya, and the same is true for the space shuttle, imo.
Going forward though, it would be great to take a more systematic game theory like approach to space development.
Yes but could he and did he know that?
There is no reason to think he cared. It wasn’t a goal.
Nixon hardly helped either. Especially with the dumbass policy that all satellite launches had to be done with the Space Shuttle.
Gregg
Because James Webb tried valiantly to tell Kennedy that the focus on the Moon was wrong and that there was a much larger reality to address. Kennedy ignored him.
President Nixon gets blamed for building the partially reusable Shuttle on-the-cheap instead of going with one of the fully reusable Booster-Orbiter pairings.
Suppose the Booster-Orbiter was built. Would that have worked out any better than the Shuttle?
The Booster was not some kind of Alley-Oop basketball play of tossing the stack to high altitude for the Orbiter to supply all the delta-V. The Booster was a full fledged rocket stage intended to achieve X-15 levels of altitude and velocity, but in something much larger and more massive than a 747 jet. Was/is such a thing even feasible without the design going (unexpectedly!) overweight and over cost?
The other Shuttle question I have regards the Max Faget “DC-3” straight-winged Booster and Orbiter. A lot is made of a straight wing being unstable in hypersonic flight, but I have the impression that people just “didn’t get” the thinking from the originator of the Mercury blunt-body reentry design.
The sense I get is that the straight wing design would reenter at a very high angle of attack. As Wile E Coyote would make coyote-shaped holes in mountain sides after trying out his Acme Rocket Pack, the straight wing design was supposed to pancake in during reentry, essentially taking a Wile E Coyote cookie cutter to the underside of an Apollo heat shield? And it would be controllable during reentry much as the Apollo with offset CG was a very low lift “lifting body”?
To talk about how Shuttle should have been designed is to miss the point, which is that it was a mistake to try to have the federal government design a single vehicle for all launch needs, and run a space line.
Exactly. Putting every launch in the Shuttle was one of the dumber ideas ever and it cost the US its lead in commercial space launch to Europe. Even the DoD had a lot of issues.
As for the Shuttle I think it was a bridge too far. It should have been done as a spiral program where you had subscale prototypes first. Something like the current X-37 would have made more sense than the Shuttle. The technology just wasn’t there. Probably still isn’t there.
The engine technology of the Shuttle was borderline (the SSME was a great accomplishment but it’s still not good enough) and as for the OMS and TPS? Just pitiful.
My comment at the other site…
I blame LBJ far more than I blame Nixon. Always left out of the discussion is the February 1967 Space Task Force report that was far more expansive about space than the one that Logsdon loves to talk about. It is a fact of history that LBJ simply ignored the 1967 Space Task Force report and had already begun the process of defunding NASA for his other priorities. Nixon’s policies echoed those of the post FY 1966 Johnson administration. Logsdon is never going to blame democrats for the problems that were already set in stone before Nixon entered office….
I have written about this here…
https://denniswingo.wordpress.com/2015/01/18/the-quagmire-of-the-apollo-space-program/
The LBJ video at the end, on the day of the launch of Apollo 11 when he and Walter Cronkite were talking says all you need to know about what LBJ thought about space. McDougall goes into this as well in the book “The Heavens and the Earth”.
Several minutes in LBJ gives what he wanted to do with the Apollo money…
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CdgV4o_KLpc
It’s always amazing how’s NASA’s budget can end poverty but spending a far greater amount from other sources nevers seems to do the trick. There must be something magic about NASA money, it got us to the Moon after all.
It is certainly an intriguing “what if” to consider what would have happened had Nixon pursued Bill Niskanen’s recommendation to develop the next generation of launchers through commercial space companies rather than NASA.
Instead, Nixon approved the Shuttle. And it has taken us an additional two generations to reach that point.
From Part 1 of Stephen C. Smith’s review:
Consistently throughout the 1960s a majority of Americans did not believe Apollo was worth the cost, with the one exception to this a poll taken at the time of the Apollo 11 lunar landing in July 1969. And consistently throughout the decade 45–60 percent of Americans believed that the government was spending too much on space, indicative of a lack of commitment to the spaceflight agenda.
Well, I wasn’t among the majority at the time. I count myself lucky to have grown up in the 60s, and become a space nut early on. I’ve maintained my interest to the present day.