A question for Apollo veterans Armstrong, Cernan, and Lovell: Can you look at yourself in the mirror and say, without reservation, that the Apollo program, as it unfolded in history, held the key to our future on Earth? To our generation for the most part Apollo was a technical success but a policy failure – if that policy was, as Kennedy stated, that Apollo would be the key to our “future on Earth”.
I stood before many of you as a young student over 20 years ago questioning why we had not made any progress in making space the key to our future on the Earth. Today, after being a part of the unfolding of the failures to make progress since then, the answer is clear. We have not made progress because we have failed to embrace the awful truth that Kennedy saw through a glass darkly, which is that economic development of space is the key to our future on the Earth.
In 1969, the United States was at the height of its economic and political power and we turned away from space; today we are broke and the challenges that face our nation are daunting in the extreme. Without a powerful economic incentive, space is simply not worth the expenditure. It is within our financial and technical power to do this as a nation, but not through the brute force method of an “Apollo on steroids” architecture (as cited by Mike Griffin) and certainly not with further flags and footprints.
The day that Werner von Braun, sitting at his desk in Huntsville, caved to the inevitability of the Lunar Orbit Rendezvous method of getting to the Moon. he warned his Huntsville staff that his greatest fear was that Apollo would lead to a “Kilroy Was Here” mentality that would allow our political leaders to kill the program after the first success was had. The ESAS/Constellation architecture of an “Apollo on steroids” program, even if somehow successful, is molded in the same vein, and with our economic difficulties today, would be similarly shut down after the initial goal reached.
There are architectures out there – many of them – that will enable the economic development of the solar system and the harvesting of the resources that are out there, wealth that will transform our world for the better, for the good of all humankind, in keeping with the Kennedy vision and legacy. NASA is making moves in that direction today with a focus on the use of commercial space solutions for cargo and human spaceflight, contracts for fuel depots, and other innovative systems. However, the rump ESAS/Constellation program in the form of the SLS vehicle is not one of them.
Fortunately, it’s not likely to survive more than another year or two at most.