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Apollo On Sleeping Pills

By Keith Cowing
NASA Watch
May 31, 2016
Filed under , , ,
Apollo On Sleeping Pills

Kennedy’s vision for NASA inspired greatness, then stagnation, Ars Technica
“Perhaps the best insight into Kennedy’s motives can be found in a recording of a November 21, 1962 meeting in the White House Cabinet Room. Kennedy had boasted of the lunar plan just a month earlier at Rice. The main participants that day were Kennedy and James Webb, administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. At issue was the true purpose of NASA and the Apollo program, and at the outset of the meeting Kennedy asked Webb, “Do you think this program is the top priority of the agency?” In hindsight, Webb’s answer was surprising: “No sir, I do not. I think it is one of the top priority programs, but I think it is very important to recognize here, that as you have found out what you could do with a rocket, as you find out how you could get out beyond the Earth’s atmosphere and into space to make measurements, several scientific disciplines that are very powerful have (begun) to converge on this area.” To this Kennedy responds that Apollo is the top priority. That ought to be very clear, he explained. “This is important for political reasons, for international political reasons,” Kennedy said. He told Webb he did not want to finish second to the Soviets in the “race” to the moon.”
Keith’s note: In other words had there been Twitter in 1960s we’d have heard nothing but #ManOnTheMoon on everything NASA PAO put out. In the case of Apollo in the 1960s NASA had a firm presidential mandate and a specific architecture in place in relatively short order – on a timeline what almost fit into a two-term Kennedy Administration. Flash forward: NASA is in no hurry to explain how it is going to send humans to Mars by a date that requires constant unwavering support from 4 to 5 presidential administrations – and a dozen Congresses. Most importantly, NASA now lacks that compelling reason to amass the requisite blood and treasure needed to mount an interplanetary project of geopolitical importance – because we’re now competing with everyone (internally and externally) – each of whom is on their own timetable – each for their own purposes. Add in a lame duck Administration which has been disinterested – at best – for the past 7 years. Anyone with a reasonable grasp of history and current politics would be wise to ponder whether NASA and the U.S. government are no even capable of supporting a human missions to Mars in the ways needed for it to actually happen.
Its time to stop listening to the old professors, reading old advisory reports, and trying to find old historical resonances to justify or inspire future efforts. The world is as it is. Other nations are now starting to do interesting things in space because they see that it confers importance upon their nation, inspires their people, and offers access to new technologies. They also have their own reasons that have little resonance with America’s. They learned both from our mistakes and successes and are now filling the vacuum created by our hesitance and lack of interest.
Others are seizing upon the opportunities presented by this American space malaise as well – and they are firmly established on American shores. The motivations may echo NASA’s interests but they include many things that would not fit well on a NASA Powerpoint chart. Lets watch as SpaceX sends technology to Mars that NASA is incapable and/or unwilling of doing. There may well be an American #JourneyToMars – but mission control may be in Hawthorne – not Houston. And will the Americans who step out of a future human-rated Red Dragon be any less American?

NASA Watch founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

39 responses to “Apollo On Sleeping Pills”

  1. Jeff2Space says:
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    It’s important to recognize that even though Kennedy was supportive of the Apollo/Saturn program and gave eloquent speeches to that effect in public, the “behind closed doors” environment was quite different. The motivation was the (then) current political, military, and economic environment during the Cold War. Manned space travel had become a proxy war between the two superpowers and the US was losing, badly. Apollo/Saturn was the program for the US to regain that lost lead and prove its dominance once again.

    That environment no longer exists, and is quite unlikely to ever be recreated. So everyone who wants NASA to have a “vision” again, that will be embraced and funded “blank check” style by Congress again is wishing for “rainbows and unicorns” that will never come.

    • Ben Russell-Gough says:
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      I’ve long thought that NASA’s best route in the current flat/declining budget era is mission and technology development.

      Put the requirements out and let other develop competing designs. Focus on objective, not means wherever technology already exists.

      Additionally the existence of organisations like Breakthrough Starshot and Golden Spike suggest that there are people who would be willing to take up technologies that are pre-developed and ready to use as development is a huge financial long pole.

      • Vladislaw says:
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        NASA is an animal of congressional space states now. As more and more commercial opportunities present themselves and are matured the more NON space state congressional members will be less likely to fund traditional space pork. NASA is in a transition from being operational to just another customer for fixed priced services.

    • Todd Austin says:
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      I disagree that the conditions that incubated Apollo will not obtain again. When China puts taikonauts on the Moon, the U.S will face the same political problem it faced with the USSR in the 1960s – appearing to be way behind the prime adversary, appearing to be the second-best choice of ally for less-developed resource-rich countries on Earth.

      In the 1960s, we chose a target sufficiently far away that we thought we could get there first – the Moon – and declared it the goal. The same might very well happen with Mars in the next decade.

      • Vladislaw says:
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        I don’t think the moon would do it… As the President said been there done that.

        If China was to seriously mount a mars mission, and what the chinese are funding today is not even close to what they would have to spend, that might shake congress.

        As far as Luna, American corporations are more likely to beat China there.

        • savuporo says:
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          Like Google Lunar X-Prize beat Yutu ?

          • Vladislaw says:
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            yutu rover formulated in 2000, funding started in 2002 and was completed in 2010 and landed in 2013. A total of 13 years.

            lunar x prize funded in 2007 as of 2016 there were still 16 teams working on it and

            moon express has a confirmed 2017 launch date. If they do land they will have did it in a total of 10 years, 3 years faster then china.

        • Jeff2Space says:
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          Agreed. The Chinese are moving slowly and when it comes to their space program. With their 3rd space station, they’re essentially getting ready to replicate Mir, which was launched in the late 1980s and ran for about 15 years.

      • duheagle says:
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        There are two factors you leave out of your calculus:

        1) The questionable durability of the current Chinese regime.

        2) The intervening activities of U.S.-based private-sector players.

        Your scenario assumes the current Chinese government will still control China indefinitely. That seems, to say the least, problematic. The Soviet Union, which we beat in the first Space Race, lasted 74 years. No other Marxist government that has stuck with Marxism has yet lasted as long, though North Korea may match it in 2019, assuming it, too, does not fall apart in the intervening three years. Right now I’d have to rate the chances of that happening as well above zero.

        The current regime in China will, assuming it still holds power then, celebrate its own 74th anniversary in 2023. China abandoned Marxist economics in 1976, but kept the state organs of political oppression in place. This makes it a case not entirely analogous to the late Soviet Union. Perhaps its system of Stalinist corporatism will prove more durable than unadulterated Stalinism proved to be in the Soviet Union, but that certainly remains to be demonstrated.

        China has had popular uprisings its central government could not initially control or control at all many times over its long history. These movements tend to spring up suddenly and grow like kudzu. The Boxer Rebellion was one such. The student uprisings of 1989 were another. The next such could come at any time.

        China recently announced its intent to land people on the Moon by 2036. With 20 years to do so, even NASA could probably beat China to the Moon again without the huge budgets of the 1960’s. SpaceX certainly can and very likely will – for some paying customer or customers – even though the Moon is not a specific corporate priority. By 2036 there may well be several U.S. private firms with personnel on the Moon and SpaceX may not be the only company offering regular cis-lunar transport service.

        • Daniel Woodard says:
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          Most people from China do not see themselves as part of a regeim that has lasted 67 years. With thousands of years of history as a coherent nation, Communism was just a brief interlude. China today owes nothing to Stalinism; maybe you should review just what Stalinism was: https://en.wikipedia.org/wi… . Finally, the Boxer rebellion was an uprising against the foriegn powers, including both Japan and the US, that had invaded and subjugated China by 1900. It was swiftly put down by an international force assembled by those foriegn powers, including both Japan and the US.

          • duheagle says:
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            Yes. No enemies on the Left. I get it. You’re a good little prog. You have signaled your virtue to others of your kind.

            Many on my side of the ideological fence say the Left have no patriotism. I tell them that’s foolish. The Left are brimming over with patriotism. True, none of the “patrias” they’re hot for happen to be the United States, but, hey… Cuba, Vietnam, China, the old Soviet Union, Sweden, Denmark, France, Venezuela, Nicaragua, Cold War-era Albania, North Korea… loads of American-born fans of each and every one.

            I get why the Chinese like to think of themselves as belonging to a millennia-old culture of stature and grandeur. It is even a fact-based belief to some extent. But the Chinese make the British – no slouches themselves – look like pikers when it comes to a lengthy history of external and internecine warfare and successive dynasties and their overthrows.

            Chinese history is kinda fractal; the closer you get to it the more edges appear. And they appear at the expense of what you thought were the edges from further away.

            The U.S. has had a continuous ruling regime in place for 224 years. It has survived foreign invasion and domestic civil war. Since the founding of the first Imperial Chinese dynasty in 221 BC, I haven’t found any intervals of stability in Chinese governance that exceed 224 years and damned few that even come close. Maybe the Ming Dynasty. Maybe.

            Wikipedia shows the Ming Dynasty as being 276 years long and its successor, the Qing Dynasty, as lasting 267. But the first 30 or 40 years of the Ming Dynasty appear to have seen a lot of warfare and short-lived pretenders. The Ming-to-Qing transition was similarly choppy and took more like 50 years to settle down.

            The “official” end of the Qing Dynasty is given as 1911 when the child-emperor Pu-Yi was deposed. But China had been under European imperial control since the loss of the Opium War to the Brits in 1842.

            So, despite its callow youth, relative to the United States, the incumbent People’s Republic of China government, at 67 years of age, is actually doing pretty well, longevity-wise, when viewed against the long and formidably turbulent prior history of Chinese governance.

            So perhaps you can now also appreciate that that same long and turbulent history makes indulging conventional-wisdom assumptions of Chinese regime immortality a bit much to take. History is with me on this. S**t happens. Particularly in China.

            The Boxer Rebellion was, indeed, a grass-roots uprising by native Chinese incensed at the depredations of European imperialists. They were probably even more patriotic about China than you are! But, being authentically grass-roots, also meant the puppet Empress had no real control over the revolt and the Imperial Army had barely more. The failure of the revolt doomed the revolutionaries, the Qing Dynasty and the Imperial Army – or at least it’s officer corps – alike.

            What this episode illustrates is that China was perfectly capable of having a popular revolt even during a time when the normative Chinese was an illiterate peasant manual agriculturalist. Imagine what might prove possible if China’s current population – hugely better educated and more urban than that of 1900 – start to feel their oats.

            The PRC regime doesn’t have to imagine. It is fear of just such an uprising – against them – that I think now motivates much of China’s current bellicosity. They’re borrowing a page from the interwar Japanese; whipping up resentment against “foreign devils” and staking out an aggressive defense perimeter in the Pacific. None of this argues very well for much confidence on the part of the PRC in its own survival absent an external “threat” with which to misdirect the proles.

            As to the appropriateness of my “Stalinism” descriptor, the Chinese still ruthlessly suppress any internal political discussion that isn’t Commie Catechism. They also aggressively monitor both internal and external communications, filter Web access and, in general deploy a press and news control protocol that would have been the envy of Joseph Goebbels.

            They also have an extensive network of informers and secret police. People in China still fear the door knock in the night and sudden disappearance. They should. It still happens.

            China still shoots political prisoners, harvests their corpses for salable organs and charges their families for the ammunition used to execute them. If this be not Stalinism, it’s a very convincing facsimile.

            Actual, as opposed to rhetorical, Communism was, indeed, a passing fad – albeit one that killed tens of millions in the 27 years it held sway. But the accompanying Stalinism has never gone away. In all likelihood, it won’t until either China’s hash is settled by its own citizens or by us if the regime seeks to save itself by ginning up a nice nasty little war.

          • Daniel Woodard says:
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            The highest priorities of the Chinese government are political stability and economic growth. America is China’s largest trading partner; that the regime would seek to “save itself” by attacking its largest customer is pure fantasy.

            Moreover, to characterize a nation of over a billion people as though it had a single simplistic viewpoint, devious and hostile to everything we hold dear, is not patriotism. It is xenophobia.

      • Jeff2Space says:
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        A Chinese taikonaut on the moon would prove that China has accomplished something that the US accomplished in 1969 (the year I was born).

        As for Mars, it’s hard to see any country sending people to Mars anytime soon. So not much of a race there either.

      • TheBrett says:
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        I think the US reaction would be very different. We’d probably try to get China to join a joint-US-Russian-EU program to operate a “lunar village” for research and ISRU on the Moon, rather than having a country-vs-country competition again.

      • Jeff Havens says:
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        The US is currently the only nation to have citizens who have gone to the Moon. I think the questions that should be asked are:

        Do we care anymore about that statement?

        Will it bother the US if that changes?

        Will it push the US to go to the next step of “The US is the only nation to have citizens who have gone to Mars.”?

        Is it truly worth it in this day and age to have that sort of bragging right?

    • mfwright says:
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      >”behind closed doors” environment was quite different.

      Add to that in 1963 Kennedy was having doubts about the Apollo program along with its rising costs. He even suggested a joint US/USSR lunar program, there is the Bill Mauldin cartoon of Kennedy and Khrushchev in a capsule heading to the Moon, Nikita says, “I was afraid something like this might happen if you kept talking about it.” http://www.overcast.pwp.blu

      Jeff you are right, the environment no longer exists. Apollo was very impressive. So was Manhattan Project and Operation Overlord, but these were specific for the task. Once the task was accomplished (really, that what was displayed in MOCR after Apollo 11 crew were on USS Hornet), then highly unlikely this task will be repeated.

      • jamesmuncy says:
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        That cartoon is fascinating. It’s almost as if he’s saying “if the politicians want to spend all this money on a moon race, let’s send them to the moon”. Pretty biting satire if I read it correctly.

  2. dusty rhodes says:
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    add the list of major innovations that are still in use today thanks to nasa in the sixties. incl. this pc i am bloviating on. without the evil gubbermint, we wouldn’t have the iphone or gps. but no, we have to deal with low info, low educated calling the shots in DC now. and we wonder why the usa is finished…

    • Paul F. Dietz says:
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      Alt history is a problematic game, but we’d likely have all of those, in some form, even if NASA had never existed. NASA’s played a role in the introduction of ICs, but it’s hard to argue it was an essential role.

      • Daniel Woodard says:
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        If NASA is to justify its budget on the basis of practical research and development, then commercially useful R&D should be its primary mission, not an inadvertent byproduct of a race to send Americans to Mars.

        • duheagle says:
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          Nice idea in principle, but NASA researchers aren’t business people. You’d get more economically useful research by either cutting NASA back to its NACA roots and establishing an advisory council of aerospace professionals from the commercial world to guide the research undertaken, or even by abolishing NASA entirely and letting its most capable people be snapped up by private industry.

          • Daniel Woodard says:
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            I agree. Industry should be telling NASA what to do, as it did in the NACA days, not vice versa. Industry does fine when it has a customer and an immediate return on investment. But industry needs government to finance long-lead basic research and highly speculative prototypes. NACA was created because even in 1915 America was losing the space race to countries that recognized the value of aviation and were putting tax dollars into research and development.

      • duheagle says:
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        Quite. The ICBM programs were what really drove microelectronics. They were mass production deals. The Apollo program, in contrast, was pretty much an artisanal effort. NASA used chips developed for missiles and mainframe computers developed for the Fortune 500.

  3. JadedObs says:
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    While I agree with those who point out that Apollo was a race against the Soviets within the context of the Cold War, the bigger picture should also be remembered; in 1960, Francis Gary Powers had been shot down over the USSR and the US government had been caught putting forth a weak cover story as it did again in 1961 when, under JFK, the Bay of Pigs invasionby Cuban exiles and the CIA had failed. Recall also that the conversation with Webb and JFK was just a month after the Cuban Missile crisis and that Gagarin was orbited in April 1961. Meanwhile new nations were coming into being in Africa and Asia (Nigeria, Congo, Tanganyika, Somalia, etc.) Not only was there a competition in space – there was also a competition for the hearts and minds of newly decolonized resource rich nations – and the US risked looking like a failing world power just when its desire to have global allies aligned against the Soviets was greatest.
    Even if China were to go to Mars, it does not create the same situation then facing the US in the 1960s; we need more than just a desire by space advocates to go to Mars, we need a compelling geopolitical context if we are going to spend hundreds of billions of dollars – its just not there & its hard to see what could create such a mandate. Even if aging baby boomers want it to happen in their lifetimes, the slow, gradual approach to expanding our presence in space is probably the best we can expect. Hopefully, it will at least lead to a more sustainable result; Apollo’s lunar landings were all done within 41 months.

    • jamesmuncy says:
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      This is very well said. I would also argue that the impact of Sputnik and Gagarin’s flight were much greater because of the newness of space. Space was indeed a brand new technological frontier, and the Soviet stunts were a bracing slap in the face. It’s not clear to me that ANY space achievement would be so politically meaningful today, especially when America’s space status is muddled among NASA, the Air Force, and a broad range of private efforts, some of them very high profile.

      • Michael Spencer says:
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        “Stunts”? Hardly.

        Soviet achievements in space in the late 50’s and early 60’s were in fact groundbreaking. At a time that we were lashing together solids and calling it Little Joe, the Soviets were actually building spaceships. First to orbit. first Space Dog Laika, RIP. First Woman. First space station. The USSR wa a quite worth adversary up until the mid-70’s when the story becomes much more complex.

        It is true that as the 60’s wore on the Soviet effort became such a mess that a massive re-organization was undertaken by order of the impatient Politburo (and as I think about it, something very similar has just happened in Russia).

        We had nothing to match Semyorka, for instance; we had no intercontinental missiles (yes, later the gap was later misconstrued, but early-on the Soviets were clear leaders. Korolev et. al. developed Zenit and Vostok, among other achievements.

        And lest we forget, in the 60’s there were more than one space development centers in the USSR– Chelomei comes to mind, if I’m spelling the name correctly.

        • jamesmuncy says:
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          Point taken. Yes, they were major space achievements. But my point was different… since space itself was new and different, any space achievement had outsized political impact.

          Now space is much more commonplace, and complex (lots of countries, lots of companies, lots of different things going on). Ironically, Rogozin’s latest “gaffe” admitting that Falcon 9 reuse and other U.S. progress puts Russia “nine times behind America” in space may be a better indicator of our capacities than our own self-perception.

    • Michael Spencer says:
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      You sound like a guy who lived through those exciting times, as I did. Very nice run down of history so easy to forget.

  4. Boardman says:
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    Two things:

    “And will the Americans who step out of a future human-rated Red Dragon be any less American?”

    No. In my mind they’ll be even more emblematic of our great country and what we can do.

    And secondly for those pining for a new Cold War so we can get to Mars. Give me a break. You must not have been alive during the last one? I was born in 1961 and grew up KNOWING I’d see all I loved and called home just go up in a big white flash one day. It was, I think, the biggest boogey man in my life. No new Cold War please.

    • duheagle says:
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      I was born in 1951 and lived, until age 18, in a town less than 60 miles from a major SAC base. The Cold War was, indeed, not a lot of laughs.

  5. James Stanton says:
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    Until NASA can step out from under Presidential decree it will be very difficult for it to move forward. As you say the past 7 years have been luke warm at best. If the next President is the opposite and NASA is able to move beyond LEO all it needs is the following President to have a different mandate and NASA is “grounded” yet again.
    Make NASA the same as other Govt agencies sans Presidential decree and it will do wonderful thing.s

    • Vladislaw says:
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      It is under congressional decree, not the President. Congress controls the checkbook. The President didn’t want heavy lift, congress funded it anyway.. A simple look at “The Vision for Space Exploration” is a case in point. Bush said no new rockets, and then his administrator is gone congress votes in a new one, the 60 day study pronounces we need not one but TWO new rockets and congress gets its way.

      • James Stanton says:
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        You are incorrect. This is the first time Congress has stepped in to wave off Presidential decree. Please check your facts.

      • jamesmuncy says:
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        The two new rockets weren’t voted by Congress until Mike Griffin sold them to Congress. Now, Mike would argue that those new rockets (and those particular designs) were required in order to turn off the Shuttle, otherwise Congress would have kept *it* alive, despite Bush43’s decision to terminate at ISS assembly complete. And perhaps Mike was right. We’ll never know.

      • James Stanton says:
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        And yet this farce still continues where Presidents do one thing and Congress another. Talk about top heavy beauracray. It takes time causes delay and miss direction. Its time for NASA to have a clear and uncluttered view of where it can go. A key way of doing this is remove Kennedys legacy where Presidents get to have a say on what and where NASA should be doing.

  6. Michael Spencer says:
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    But Webb stood his ground, and he threatened to quit if the scientific and aeronautical budgets were raided for #maninthemoon. He went on to be one of the most effective Administrators, showing that NASA can make and eat cake at the same time.

  7. Daniel Woodard says:
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    In 1961 the world hung balanced on the brink of annihilation. The conflict between the US and the USSR had become focused on a perilous race in nuclear arms. Americans held air raid drills, knowing that at any moment someone might push the button. President John F. Kennedy believed one way to improve our chance for survival lay in diverting the conflict away from war and toward a symbolic contest that would not destroy the world. But this required a goal so spectacular that neither side could ignore it, and so difficult it would require all the resources of each.

    The Soviets had launched Sputnik, and then Gargarin, when Kennedy sent a famous memo to Werner von Braun. He did not ask how America could gain military advantage in space, or explore, or advance science. Rather he asked what dramatic goal the US could announce publicly, and yet achieve before the Soviets. Von Braun replied that with their existing rockets, the Soviets could achieve any short-term goal first. But to land a man on the moon would require a new, much larger rocket, giving America time to leap ahead.

    On May 25, 1961, Kennedy addressed a joint session of Congress, saying “…if we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all, as did the Sputnik in 1957, the impact of this adventure on the minds of men everywhere, who are attempting to make a determination of which road they should take.” He discussed many different strategies, but concluded: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.”

    History unfolded just as Kennedy and von Braun had anticipated. The USSR spent enormous resources on the race to the Moon, but their giant rocket failed. Apollo 11 landed in 1969 and the world recognized American technological supremacy. But with the end of the Moon Race, public and Congressional support rapidly declined. Nixon finally canceled the program in 1974. To many space enthusiasts, this looms even today as a sign that America “doesn’t get it”.

    But in reality the geopolitical rationale that justified the high cost of Apollo was gone. The goal of the program had, in a sense, been exactly as Kennedy had stated: a single safe trip to the moon and back. The Apollo lunar missions were much too expensive to continue for more mundane purposes like science and tourism. For human spaceflight to be sustainable, as much as we might wish it otherwise, the cost of placing people in space must be lower than the practical value of the work they can do there, or the amount they are willing to pay.

    • jamesmuncy says:
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      YES YES A THOUSAND TIMES YES!

    • Jeff2Space says:
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      In private, on a taped meeting with James Webb, then NASA Administrator, JFK said this:

      “Everything that we do should be tied into getting on to the moon ahead of the Russians. We ought to get it really clear that the policy ought to be that this is the top priority program of the agency and one… of the top priorities of the United States government. Otherwise we shouldn’t be spending this kind of money, because I am not that interested in space. I think it’s good. I think we ought to know about it. But we’re talking about fantastic expenditures. We’ve wrecked our budget, and all these other domestic programs, and the only justification for it, in my opinion, is to do it in the time element I am asking.” JFK – November 21, 1962