Nothing has happened since the fortieth anniversary to change my opinions in the long essay I wrote last summer.
Four decades have passed since the first small step on the dusty surface of our nearest neighbor in the solar system in 1969. It has been almost that long since the last man to walk on the Moon did so in late 1972. The Apollo missions were a stunning technological achievement and a significant Cold War victory for the United States. However, despite the hope of observers at the time—and despite the nostalgia and mythology that now cloud our memory—Apollo was not the first step into a grand human future in space. From the perspective of forty years, Apollo, for all its glory, can now be seen as a detour away from a sustainable human presence in space. By and large, the NASA programs that succeeded Apollo have kept us heading down that wrong path: Toward more bureaucracy. Toward higher costs. And away from innovation, from risk-taking, and from any concept of space as a useful place.
As I wrote, Apollo was a magnificent technological achievement, but in terms of opening up space, it was not only a failure, but the false lessons learned from it have held us back ever since.
There is no doubt that Apollo was a false dawn in human space flight. That thought brings to mind some interesting questions. What if Sputnik had never happened, and space fight had progressed the way Von Braun (and every other rocket ranger at that time) thought it would back in 1950? Would such a gradual, infrastructure based system have even been possible? Would the cost have been too much for any one administration to take on? Where do you think we’d be by now?
Apollo was never designed to open up space. It was designed to go to the Moon and get back. Which it did magnificently. It was truly a technological triumph. However, the whole system was purpose designed for the task of going to the moon and only that. A one trick pony with little thought to the follow-on stuff.
Exactly Andy. The technology did what it was supposed to do. We (those of us who witnessed it) just didn’t understand the fact that the technology was limited to it’s very narrow mandate.
The planned evolution was to take the basic Apollo hardware forward to the Apollo Extension Systems. Next would have been the Apollo Logistics Support System and then to the Lunar Exploration System for Apollo. The end result would have been continuously expanding permanent stations on the moon.
There was a plan and Apollo was part of that plan. But Johnson had a war to fight and Nixon wasn’t interested.
So here we are in July, 2010 … 41 years later of a “flexible plan” to nowhere … and not even as close as were were then .
Lobo, those plans were made on assumptions that were not politically feasible. No administration is going to spend lots of money and political capital to fund a previous administration’s dreams. That is the nature of the beast, and that is why government funded space flight is limited.