Apollo’s Impact on the U. S. Space Program

By contrast, the impact of Apollo on the evolution of the U. S. space program has on balance been negative. Apollo turned out to be a dead end undertak­ing in terms of human travel beyond the immediate vicinity of this planet; no human has left Earth orbit since the last Apollo mission in December 1972. Writing in 1970, I suggested that the capabilities developed for Apollo would have “broad and significant impacts on human existence in the decades to come.” Like many others close to the space program, I was caught up in the excitement of the initial lunar landings, and could not conceive of the pos­sibility that having served its political purposes, Apollo and whatever human exploration efforts might follow it would so rapidly be brought to a close.

What happened, however, was that most of the Apollo hardware and asso­ciated capabilities, particularly the magnificent but very expensive Saturn V launcher, quickly became museum exhibits to remind us, soon after the fact, of what once was had been done. Commenting on this reality in 1989, Walter McDougall lamented the fate of Apollo: “a brilliant creation, carrying tremendous emotional baggage for the nation, achieved so quickly through such skilled and dedicated teamwork, only to be discarded, dismembered, or disinherited.” Columnist Charles Krauthammer at the time of the fortieth anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission in 2009 deplored the fact that humans have not returned to the Moon since the last Apollo mission: “On it are exactly 12 sets of human footprints—untouched, unchanged, abandoned. For the first time in history, the Moon is not just a mystery and a muse, but a nightly rebuke. A vigorous young president once summoned us to this new frontier, calling the voyage ‘the most hazardous and dangerous and greatest adventure on which man has ever embarked.’ And so we did it. We came. We saw. Then we retreated.”25

This rapid retreat should not have come as a surprise to careful observers. By being first to the Moon, the United States achieved the goal that had provided the sustainable momentum that powered Apollo; after Apollo 11, that momentum very rapidly dissipated, and there was no other compelling rationale to continue. In 1969 and 1970, even as the initial lunar landing

missions were taking place, the White House canceled the final three planned trips to the Moon. President Richard Nixon had no stomach for what NASA proposed—a major post-Apollo program aimed at building a large space sta­tion in preparation for eventual (in the 1980s!) human missions to Mars. Instead, Nixon decreed, “we must think of them [space activities] as part of a continuing process. . . and not as a series of separate leaps, each requiring a massive concentration of energy. Space expenditures must take their proper place within a rigorous system of national priorities. . . What we do in space from here on in must become a normal and regular part of our national life and must therefore be planned in conjunction with all of the other undertak­ings which are important to us.”26 Nixon’s policy view quickly reduced the post-Apollo space budget to less than $3.5 billion per year, a budget alloca­tion one-quarter of what it had been at the peak of Apollo. There were in the 1960s proposals, called the Apollo Applications Program, to use Apollo hardware for a variety of Earth orbit and deep space missions. Only one of those missions, the Skylab space station, ever came to fruition; its May 1973 launch was the last use of the Saturn V. The booster’s production line had been shut down in 1970. The 1975 Apollo-Soyuz Test Program mission was the last use of an Apollo spacecraft and the Saturn 1B launch vehicle. With the 1972 decision to begin the shuttle program, followed in 1984 with the related decision to develop a space station, the United States basically started over in human space flight, limiting itself to orbital activities in the near vicinity of Earth.

The policy and technical decisions not to build on the hardware devel­oped for Apollo for follow-on space activities were inextricably linked to the character of President John Kennedy’s deadline for getting to the Moon— “before this decade is out.” By setting a firm deadline for the first lunar landing, Kennedy put NASA in the position of finding a technical approach to Apollo that gave the best chance of meeting that deadline. This in turn led to the development of the Saturn V launcher, the choice of the lunar orbit rendezvous approach for getting to the Moon, and the design of the Apollo spacecraft optimized for landing on the Moon. Perceptive observer Richard Lewis in 1968 spoke of the “Kennedy effect,” noting that

the political decision to send men to the moon also led to unexpected results in the development of space technology. . . It has determined the priorities, the engineering designs, and the scientific objectives of the space program in this decade, and it is quite likely to control future space work for the remainder of this century. This unforeseen result might be called the Kennedy effect. While its intent at the beginning was to enlarge American competence in space, its implementation has built a Procrustean bed and the American space program has been severely mutilated to fit it.27

The consequences of selecting the lunar orbit approach to the Moon landing were of concern to Kennedy’s science adviser Jerome Wiesner as he opposed the LOR choice in 1962. President Kennedy in his determination to be first to the Moon overruled Wiesner, a decision, as Lewis noted, with profound consequences for the space program. NASA during the second half of the 1960s became what James Webb had feared, a one-program agency; given the budget constraints of the period, there was no money available for major new starts on alternative programs.

The “Kennedy effect” went well beyond rockets and spacecraft. The Apollo program created in NASA an organization oriented in the public and political eye toward human space flight and toward developing large-scale systems to achieving challenging goals. It created from Texas to Florida the institutional and facility base for such undertakings. With the White House rejection of ambitious post-Apollo space goals, NASA entered a four-decade identity crisis from which it has yet to emerge. Repetitive operation of the space shuttle and the extended process of developing an Earth-orbiting space station have not been satisfying substitutes for another Apollo-like under­taking. NASA has never totally adjusted to a lower priority in the overall scheme of national affairs; rather, as the Columbia Accident Investigation Board observed in its 2003 report, NASA became “an organization strain­ing to do too much with too little.”28 All of this is an unfortunate heritage of John Kennedy’s race to the Moon.

Yale University organizational sociologist Gary Brewer in 1989 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, suggests Brewer, “perfect places do not last for long.” NASA “perfected itself in the reality of Apollo, but that success is past and the lessons from it are now obsolete.” The NASA of 1989, according to Brewer, was “no longer a perfect place” and was “deeply troubled.” 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.

Brewer’s comments of more than two decades ago might usefully be applied to the twenty-first century NASA and its supportive space commu­nity, which still struggle to maintain the approach to human space flight developed during the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. It is well beyond the scope of this study to discuss the future of the U. S. space explo­ration program; the point to make here is that the conditions that made Apollo possible and the NASA of the 1960s a “perfect place” were unique and will not reoccur. I agree with Brewer’s conclusion that NASA needs “new ways of thinking, new people, and new means to come to terms and cope with social, economic, and political environments as challenging and harsh as deep space itself.”29