20 thoughts on “The Quagmire Of Apollo”

  1. Dennis falls into the cargo cult trap suggesting one more polar mission would have been the tipping point. No, just as it was over determined that Apollo start, it was over determined that it end.

    We’ll see if a decentralized profit-motivated private conquest of the heavens can eclipse Apollo the way container ships now eclipse treasure fleets. Hopefully, it won’t take as many centuries.

  2. Sam, if that is what you got out of this, you missed the entire point. There was never any chance of the political space program turning into the American space program. What I said and will say is that it would have made a difference going forward, especially for the “other” space program.

    Even after Clementine and Lunar Prospector the consensus in science was that there was little chance of water. It took the overwhelming evidence of Lunar Recon Orbiter, LCROSS, and Chandrayaan to shift the scientific consensus. We would have saved 40 years of denial of what Jim Arnold determined analytically decades ago.

    So lighten up on the snarky comments, they don’t help anything.

    1. Dennis, I applaud you for fighting the good fight. It was interesting to see in print the conversations that I knew must have taken place. Please don’t take a quibble with the wording of one sentence to suggest that the scholarship you’ve put together is not awesome.

      However, knowing how NASA became what it is today doesn’t necessarily mean that it can be changed into what we might prefer. There are more Department of Agriculture employees than there are farms. I might be preaching that SpaceX’s 1st stage experiment with a used first stage on its way down from delivery is a big deal even as it was a few percent of the cost of the delivery of stuff to the space station. My daughter, though, is getting indoctrinated at school watching NASA celebrate the Orion test. She has been inoculated. But others?

      Times are interesting.

      1. …However, knowing how NASA became what it is today doesn’t necessarily mean that it can be changed into what we might prefer….
        ________________________________________________________________________________

        I don’t expect or even necessarily want it to be….

        The U.S. government works best when it is executing on a well scoped technical project. This is whether it works through contractors, such as with the Central Pacific and Union Pacific railroads (the UP had terrible corruption issues anyway), the Panama Canal, Hoover Dam, or the Interstate highway system.

        We could have done space in that manner in the early sixties (read my missive about Ralph Cordiner), but instead the new men of Kennedy as McDougall called them, those people who were company commanders, thought that they were smarter than the generals (read Eisenhower) that won the war.

        Apollo was used as a stalking horse for the transformation of government as profound as what our current president is attempting. This is what Ronald Reagan was talking about in his 1964 Republican Convention speech.

        This is why I push the Zero G Zero Tax legislation, because it promotes the private economic development of the solar system. Too bad some of those who originally promoted that have now become those that advocate for their own slice of the pork.

        There are ways that the federal government can assist those that seek to go farther in space, and NASA can be a crucial part of that. The problem is to continue the process of deconstructing the state uber allies space program.

        1. Zero Gee Zero Tax is a nice idea, but America’s tax system needs to be more fundamentally overhauled. I suggest repeal of the 16th Amendment, letting each state set up its own tax collection, and then the states each fund the federal government according to percentage of population – but only for a legally passed federal budget.

          I had never considered the NASA-as-stalking-horse angle before, and it makes a lot of sense.

          3. Not saying it will happen, Dennis, but it needs to. I am not sanguine about the future of the Republic.

      1. When I can get to it, hopefully soon. It takes a lot of time to research and put these articles together. Thanks for your interest though!

  3. Great quote of a quote from Wingo’s article:

    What Constantine’s conversion did to the Christian Church,
    Apollo did to spaceflight: It linked it to Caesar.

  5. As kind of a related thought, NASA was created as a civilian agency, as distinguished from our Army, Navy, and Air Force efforts. But when you look at most of the key players like von Braun (SS uniform and all), they were still thinking in terms of how space could help advance mankind, as if such an endeavor must of course serve the state – which is the embodiment of the people. In such a view, profit is something that subcontractors hope to make by selling rocket parts to the government. Making a ton of money off the space program isn’t the same as trying to make a ton of money off space.

    1. Before von Braun joined the SS to get funding to develop rockets during WWII he was an amateur rocket launch enthusiast studying under Oberth. Had the war never happened he would still be working on rockets.

  6. Another element of this was the nuclear-thermal NERVA/RIFT. The S-N Saturn upper stage and all of that. I read a book on the subject that I gave to my brother-in-law — the one with JFK in sunglasses and Glenn Seaborg and other brass taking a walk “somewhere in Nevada” on the cover.

    Apparently this program was making great progress and was much farther along then contemporaneous press reports seemed to indicate — the last press article I read on the subject suggested that the nuclear reactor would be powered up, use up the hydrogen propellant, and then melt down, whereas this book indicated that the program was doing tests of “power cycles” of the type of multiple-start capability needed for a Mars mission.

    In giving the history, the book explained that the nuclear-thermal rocket had its origins in the Cold War ballistic missle program, where both the Russians and us didn’t know whether a Navajo-style cruise missile was the answer (there was a nuclear ramjet version of that) or a pure ballistic missile and whether intercontinental range was even possible, especially for something like Ivy Mike, was it called, with chemical rockets.

    On one hand, a program like this originating in a Cold War defense project could take on a life of its own. On the other hand, whatever Ted Sorensen said publically in Kennedy’s speeches and whatever the President thought privately that it was just for show, there was this enormous next-big-thing in the nuclear rocket program. We may never start that up again, especially if we could do tanking on orbit of chemical fuels, but there was a lot more going on behind the scenes than the Armstrong-Aldrin-Collins flight that also went away.

    1. The flight test NERVA stage was built. It sat at the U.S. Space & Rocket Center for years and is now back out at NASA MSFC.

      It could have flown on Apollo 20.

  7. AES with dual launch Saturn-V, LM converted to lunar base habitat, nuclear upper stage to 98 tons., lunar polar mission. Fascinating stuff. The road not taken. Thanks Dennis Wingo! Looking forward to your next piece.

    Apollo as the prototype to technocracy. Back in the day of top-down designs, this was the ultimate paradigm.

    Dave

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