Leaving Orbit (20 page)

It’s hard to imagine what it was like for the crew of Apollo 17 to splash down, board the aircraft carrier, strip off their space suits, and write up their reports. They had spent their adult lives preparing for this adventure, they had accomplished it, and no one was planning to go back again. The moon rocks they brought back, including the one I have touched in the Air and Space Museum, would be the last to come back for generations. No one has gone to the moon since, and it would be nearly as difficult for us to try to re-create their trip now as it was to accomplish it then.

The space shuttle is a far more advanced vehicle than was Apollo/Saturn, but because it lacked the pure thrust to get any farther than low Earth orbit, it felt like a step backward to many Americans. The next vehicle should go
farther
than the previous one, it seemed obvious. After discovering the New World, Columbus did not take a renewed interest in the area around the Mediterranean. Yet the public had tired of the expense of Apollo even before the missions to the moon had gotten started. After a brief resurgence in interest caused by the drama on Apollo 13, Americans went back to caring less and less about Apollo, saying in larger numbers that it was pointless and too expensive. A scaled-back space vehicle funded partly for its ability to get military and commercial satellites into orbit—a reusable shuttle with a large payload bay—was the only one that had a chance of gaining the approval of Congress. As it was, the shuttle’s funding was the subject of constant wrangling and severe cuts over the years of its development, and it was in danger of being axed altogether multiple times.

Unlike average Americans, though, rocket engineers saw the space shuttle concept as a huge step forward. If they could build a spaceship the way they wanted to, not with the Soviets breathing down their necks but with the time to build it properly from the ground up, what would that spaceship look like? It would look more like a space plane. It would look
elegant.
It would be capable of carrying different types of payloads, not only human beings. And it would be reusable. “When I was a kid reading
Buck Rogers
, the spacecraft all looked like bullets or saucers, with sweeping fins and fancy tail skids,” said astronaut Michael Collins. “We are beginning to see Buck’s dream emerge in the squat but elegant space shuttle.”

The concept of reusability had been a fantasy of engineers from the beginning—rather than building expendable rockets that would be abandoned in space or burned up in the atmosphere, NASA wanted a vehicle that could launch like a rocket, fly in space, and land like an airplane on a runway. “There’s no way that you can make a railroad cost-effective,” explained a NASA representative, “if you throw away the locomotive every time.” After some maintenance on the ground, a reusable spacecraft could be loaded with new cargo and a new crew of astronauts, to be launched again. An ideal (and, it turns out, entirely unrealistic) turnaround time on the ground was two weeks. The urgency of Apollo, the before-the-decade-is-out deadline, had ruled out anything but the quick-and-dirty approach of attaching hastily designed capsules to rockets of the type that had been developed as weapons. Now that that deadline had been met, rocket engineers had time to go back to their childhood fantasies of spaceflight, their science fiction dreams.

Most people don’t realize that since the time of Apollo we’ve been in a feedback loop: as a nation, we elect representatives who thwart NASA, and then we blame NASA for its lack of vision. There is a simple and frustratingly predictable pattern: first NASA comes up with an exciting and ambitious long-term plan for getting to Mars, or for getting back to the moon, or for building a space station, or for traveling to an asteroid. Once there is a plan on the table, it is scrutinized and called too ambitious, redundant, unrealistic, or ridiculous. Always it’s called too expensive. One instance of such a vision was Wernher von Braun’s plan for an expedition to Mars, presented to the Senate Space Committee in 1969. He impressed the committee by announcing that on precisely November 12, 1981, two spacecraft would leave Earth for Mars simultaneously. The plan was serious, well thought out, technically sound, and incredibly expensive. It went nowhere. Another example was the Vision for Space Exploration endorsed by George W. Bush in 2004, which called for an extended human presence on the moon. Mostly these long-term plans are rejected by Congress altogether, but once a generation a plan is approved.

In that rare instance when a plan is approved, it’s always in a scaled-back way, always a compromise of the original lofty vision. Most importantly, it’s always structured in such a way that a future Congress will have to put up the majority of the money, making the whole thing feel precarious at best. Why will a future Congress and president make political sacrifices to fund a project they won’t get credit for in the minds of the public? Congress is a group of ever-changing politicians who answer to constituents of the present, not a fantasy for the far-off future.

But then of course the scaled-back, cheaper vision is opened up for national ridicule.
Why doesn’t NASA dream bigger?
Americans complain.
Why aren’t they pushing out farther? They’re playing it safe, they’ve lost their vision, lost their way.
Once we’re done criticizing the plan, we will start to love it, because spaceflight is fun, and because this is all we’ve got. But then (in the case of shuttle) some of the technical compromises Congress demanded in order to save money will lead to accidents, and NASA will be blamed again, this time for its lack of attention to safety.

There are four warring interests in spaceflight: ambitiousness of vision, urgency of timetable, reduction of cost, and safety to astronauts. These can never be entirely reconciled. In the sixties, urgency and ambitiousness were the driving factors, and because this was understood and accepted, the massive cost and risk were accepted as well. We now seem to be at a moment when reduction of cost is paramount, with safety coming in a very close second. This being the case, we should not be surprised that ambitiousness and urgency have had to be set aside altogether. But it’s ludicrous to claim, as I often hear people do, that “NASA has lost its vision.” NASA has lost support, not vision.

Wernher von Braun’s plan for Mars was complex. Getting astronauts to a planet 140 million miles away is even more difficult than getting them to the moon; to travel that far, one would have to construct a much larger space vehicle than could be built on Earth. The best way to assemble such a large vehicle would be to do so in low Earth orbit, using an orbiting space station as a base of operations. And in order to construct a space station, one needs a smaller launch vehicle—ideally a reusable shuttle—to haul the pieces of the station, and then later pieces of the Mars transport, up to Earth orbit. NASA’s plan was for a reusable shuttle with which to construct an orbiting space station with which to construct a large interplanetary spacecraft. As enthusiasm waned toward the end of Apollo, funding became scarce, and most politicians found it expedient to set themselves apart from the expense of spaceflight without going so far as to close down any NASA sites or major contractors, many of which were located in the states and districts of important members of Congress. So NASA got only the budget for the shuttle. By all accounts, it was lucky to get that much. Apollo 17 was the last mission to the moon, launched in December 1972. Meanwhile, Apollo 18, 19, and 20 were unceremoniously canceled, their crews left earthbound until the space shuttle would be ready to fly. Soon NASA’s budget was only one-third what it had been at its peak.

When President Nixon approved the plan for the space shuttle in 1972, he released a statement:

If you get the chance to talk with a modern-day NASA engineer or manager, don’t mention that one-tenth figure unless you want to see her beverage come out of her nose. It’s not NASA’s fault that the projection never came true—with the generous resources of the Apollo era, they probably could have done it.

Students of space policy might wonder why in the seventies, with the goals of Apollo accomplished, the government didn’t simply shut NASA down entirely. The agency had been created to accomplish a very specific task and had accomplished it. But Caspar Weinberger, who was then deputy director of the Office of Management and Budget, warned Nixon that ending NASA would lead to claims that “our best years are behind us.” He said, “America should be able to afford something besides increased welfare, programs to repair our cities, or Appalachian relief and the like.” This is another great example of the ways in which spaceflight can be made to seem a paragon of, or negation of, any political ideology. But Weinberger’s argument won: Nixon did not want to be remembered as the president who shut down a source of national pride, the president who canceled the future. No president does.

As historian Howard McCurdy puts it, Nixon’s “need to maintain political support in aerospace states such as California and Texas contributed to his decision to maintain the human space flight effort, but so did his sense that NASA oversaw one of the few remaining technologies of optimism at that time.”

The Apollo project had put Nixon in an impossible position—everyone knew the vision had been Kennedy’s, and so the credit would go to his memory regardless of what president was in office at the time the goal was accomplished. Yet Nixon had no choice but to continue support for Apollo, as canceling the program would mean making the billions that had already been spent wasted money, not to mention disappointing everyone.

Writes historian Michael Neufeld:

Neufeld points out that NASA saved the last Apollo mission from being canceled “by cutting a secret political deal with the White House to postpone it until after the November 1972 presidential election.” Presumably, this last launch would be the cause of some hand-wringing and soul-searching about the end of spaceflight and the shortsightedness of politicians, just as we are seeing in this present moment, and Nixon did not want those lamentations to become part of his opponent’s campaign.

This starts to clarify why a person like Buzz Aldrin would praise President Obama’s cancellation of Constellation as a courageous move. It’s easy to let a plan limp along, slowly starving to death via budget erosion; it takes some boldness to declare the project dead, thereby accepting the ire of people who support the project, or any spaceflight project.