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.
I missed my connection to LA, and am stuck in Chicago until I can find a flight some time tomorrow. It’s kind of late, and I don’t have much time for blogging, and many of you may have already seen it, but Glenn Reynolds has a piece on space exploration in the Journal tomorrow. And of course, Tuesday will be the 41st anniversary of the first steps on the moon. It’s not too late to plan a party to celebrate. I and the co-author, Bill Simon, will be on The Space Show that evening. We may even do a live version of the ceremony, though that’s still TBD.
An interesting bit of space history from Wayne Eleazer. I had forgotten about the wind shear on 51-L. As is often the case, disasters like that require several things going wrong, not a single one.
I’ve had a lot of differences with John Logsdon over the years, but in this Space News piece (pointed out to me by Charles Lurio), he gets it pretty close to exactly right (i.e., we’re pretty much on the same page):
Yale University organizational sociologist Gary Brewer more than 20 years ago 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, suggested Brewer, “perfect places do not last for long.” NASA was “no longer a perfect place.” The organization needed “new ways of thinking, new people, and new means.” 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.”
Introducing “new ways of thinking, new people, and new means” into the NASA approach to human spaceflight has not happened in the two decades since Brewer made his observations. That was the conclusion of the Columbia Accident Investigation Board in 2003, and despite the positive steps taken since then to operate the shuttle as safely as possible, much of the Apollo-era human spaceflight culture remains intact. Trying to change that culture and thereby close out the half century of Apollo-style human spaceflight seems to me the essence of the new space strategy. There is no way of achieving that objective without wrenching dislocations; change is indeed hard. Gaining acceptance of that change will require more White House and congressional leadership and honesty about the consequences of the new strategy than has been evident to date.
Sadly, White House and congressional leadership and honesty have been in pretty short supply lately, on both this issue and others.
Does anyone have a reference that describes the decision to reduce the size of the Shuttle fleet from seven to five during the Carter administration, and Mondale’s role?
[Update late evening]
Thanks for all the inputs from all the commenters. I’m a little surprised, because my recollection (from the time — see, I’m such a fogie that I actually claim to remember such things) was that Mondale had reduced the fleet size by two in the late seventies. I apparently have some reading to do to get it right.
Jeff Foust has a good roundup of the current state of play in industry/congressional skepticism about the ability of the new players to do the job.
And Tom Frieling describes an appallingly bad book on space history. This kind of thing is really inexcusable, and may feed ignorance for years. When I do my pieces for The New Atlantis, I circulate drafts among a lot of knowledgeable people, to make sure that I get it right. If I write a book, I’ll do the same thing. But I guess that kind of thing isn’t very important to some authors and publishers.
Stephen Smith has a post on NASA’s charter, and what it is and isn’t. It got waylaid by Apollo, but it’s time to restore things to what was originally envisioned. Though as I note in comments over there, space exploration wasn’t given to a civilian agency because of concerns over the military being a hide-bound bureaucracy.