Opportunities:. The Cancelled. Missions

There were originally twenty Apollo missions scheduled to fly in the initial Apollo plan, with nine Moon landings. Three missions were cancelled due to the geopoliti­cal success of Apollo and the decision of President Nixon and Congress to reallo­cate the U. S. Federal Budget to support other national objectives. Apollo 20 was cancelled in January 1970. Two more flights were cancelled in September, 1970, with the remaining missions renumbered 15 through 17.

The original list of planned missions following Apollo 12 were:

• H-2 (Apollo 13) Fra Mauro

• H-3 (Apollo 14) Littrow

• H-4 (Apollo 15) Censorinus

• J-1 (Apollo 16) Descartes

• J-2 (Apollo 17) Marius Hills

• J-3 (Apollo 18) Copernicus

• J-4 (Apollo 19) Hadley

• J-5 (Apollo 20) Tycho

After the failure of Apollo 13, Apollo 14 was rescheduled for Fra Mauro. After the cancellations, the remaining missions were changed to:

• J-1 (Apollo 15) Hadley Rille

• J-2 (Apollo 16) Descartes

• J-3 (Apollo 17) Taurus-Littrow

J. L. Chen, How to Find the Apollo Landing Sites,

The Patrick Moore Practical Astronomy Series, DOI 10.1007/978-3-319-06456-7_13, © Springer International Publishing Switzerland 2014

The lost Apollo missions at Censorinus, Marius Hills, Copernicus Crater, and Tycho Crater were missed opportunities for greater exploration and scientific discovery of the Moon.

Apollo 18 became the U. S. portion of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project.

After the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in 1975, the United States did not return to manned spaceflight until 1981 with the launch of the Space Shuttle Columbia.

The three missions were canceled for multiple reasons. Tighter budgets, imposed by Congress and the Nixon administration, were a major factor. The public’s interest in the program had also waned after the excitement of Apollo 11. The drama of Apollo 13 reminded the public of the dangers and risks of spaceflight. The cost for the Apollo Program peaked in the mid-1960s, with the labor force of federal work­ers and contractors in the neighborhood of 400,000. By January 1970, the workforce had shrunk to 190,000, with another 50,000 jobs lost following the final Apollo flight. Many skilled engineers and technicians found themselves without jobs.

Ironically, the Saturn V launch vehicles and other mission hardware already had been procured and delivered at the time of the cancellations. The only budgetary savings realized were the operational expenses of executing an actual mission. The remaining hardware has been placed on display, and can be seen at various sites in the U. S., as listed in Appendix 5.

The cancellations also reflected competition among NASA priorities, as orbital projects vied with the moon program for money and hardware. Skylab and the future re-useable launch vehicle program that became the Space Shuttle had begun diverting attention at the agency.

The lost Apollo missions missed the opportunity to collect additional scientific information about other areas of the Moon. An early proposed landing site in the Tsiolkovsky crater on the far side of the Moon would have yielded a unique sam­pling that differed from the Earth-facing side where all the Apollo missions occurred. A far side lunar mission never made it to the planning stage, as it was perceived as too costly and risky. One of the Tsiolkovsky crater requirements was the additional cost for a communication satellite beyond the moon to maintain a radio link with Earth.

Located near the southeastern zone of the Sea of Tranquility is the crater Censorinus. The proposed landing site was the ejecta blanket in the northwest sec­tion of the Censorinus crater, with the hope of sampling both highland material and fresh impact crater material. The original scheduling would have made this mission the last of the H-series missions, with the astronauts investigating the 2.5 mile diameter crater entirely on foot.

Marius Hills is a region of domes and cones near the crater Marius in the center of the Ocean of Storms. Photographs of the region suggested formations similar to Earth’s shield volcanoes, with scientists believing the area was subject to intense and prolonged volcanic activity. As originally scheduled, the mission to Marius Hills would have been the debut of the lunar rover.

The two major craters Copernicus and Tycho were also proposed landing sites. Both craters featured central peaks that were thrust upward at the time of the meteor impact. These impacts caused material from deep within the lunar crust to rebound to the surface to form the central peaks. Samples from these crater peaks would have provided a record of the Moon’s, and possibly the Solar System’s, early history. This early history information is unavailable on Earth because of the destructive processes caused by plate tectonics, erosion and other natural occurrences.

A technical missed opportunity from the Apollo cancellations was the termination of the Saturn V program, and the loss of “corporate” knowledge and technical exper­tise on building large launch vehicles. The Saturn launch vehicles had reached a level of technological maturity by the early 1970s, and the continued manufacture of Saturn would have enabled a variety of deep space or heavy lift missions. An argu­ment can be made that the Space Shuttle missions, from deep space launches to ISS assembly, could have been easily and more efficiently accomplished using the Saturn. Deep space probes launched from the Space Shuttle relied on the finesse of gravity assists from planets to accomplish their missions, with many deep spacecraft taking years to reach their goals. The powerful Saturn V lift capability could have allowed for more direct routes for timelier missions, and possibly allowed the probe designs to carry additional sensors and experiments.

Ironically, the current NASA effort to develop the Space Launch System, con­sisting of the Ares 1 and Ares 5 launch vehicles, strongly resembles the Saturn 1 and Saturn V rockets of the Apollo era. In fact, the proposed Orion manned space­craft can best be described as an Apollo CM on steroids. The current design for Orion features an Apollo command module shape, carries a crew of up to six, and will return to ocean landings.