Carolyn Porco: Nixon's mistake to abandon Apollo
[Carolyn Porco is a planetary scientist, the leader of the Imaging Science Team on the Cassini mission and director of the Cassini Imaging Central Laboratory for Operations.]
AFTER years of spending our nation’s space budget building an orbiting space station of questionable utility, serviced by an operationally expensive space shuttle of unsafe design, NASA has set a new direction for the future of human spaceflight. Once again, we have our sights on the Moon ... and beyond. We are finally, bodily, going to make our way into space, this time to stay.
It is an opinion long and widely held within the space-exploration community that the Nixon administration’s termination of the program that built the Saturn V Moon rocket was a gargantuan mistake.
One of the biggest challenges in exploring space is propulsion — that is, getting from point A to B efficiently, safely and quickly. And when the cargo is human, the challenges are even greater. One of our crowning technological achievements during the 1960s was the Apollo program and, in particular, the development of the Saturn V rocket. The Saturn V was the largest, most powerful vehicle the United States had ever built. It had a launching capacity more than five times greater, a developmental cost 25 percent lower and a build-and-operate cost less than half of that of today’s space shuttle.
In those early days, the possibilities for human space travel were intoxicating. Back then, NASA plans called for an aggressive integrated human flight program that would expand on the developments of Apollo: the establishment of a 50-person lunar base, a 100-person Earth-orbiting space station and human landfall on Mars, all by the mid-1980s. Those plans also included a 50-person semi-permanent Martian base by the end of the 20th century. Instead, we went nowhere.
Why? Because, largely for political reasons, we renounced the Moon, abandoned Apollo and the Saturn V and retreated to low Earth orbit, where we’ve spent the last 25 years going around in circles.
The cost to the nation of this misstep was enormous. For starters, we lost an investment, adjusted for inflation to 2007 dollars, of $160 billion. That was the cost to get to, land on, walk on, drive on and otherwise explore the Moon. (Of that amount, $29 billion, in inflation-adjusted dollars, was the approximate cost of the Saturn V.)
What’s more, the production facilities for the Saturn V and the other lunar exploration components, like the command and lunar modules, were all closed. At that point, we lost both the technological means for human deep space exploration and the collective knowledge of tens of thousands of engineers and scientists trained in human spaceflight.
Equally troubling is what we put in place of Apollo. The $38 billion developmental cost of the shuttle has gotten us nowhere in the solar system fast. And the International Space Station could have been built with only half a dozen Saturn V launchings instead of the more than two dozen shuttle trips that will be required to finish it. The bottom line: a colossal misuse of funds and a disheartening lack of progress and loss of time....
Read entire article at NYT
AFTER years of spending our nation’s space budget building an orbiting space station of questionable utility, serviced by an operationally expensive space shuttle of unsafe design, NASA has set a new direction for the future of human spaceflight. Once again, we have our sights on the Moon ... and beyond. We are finally, bodily, going to make our way into space, this time to stay.
It is an opinion long and widely held within the space-exploration community that the Nixon administration’s termination of the program that built the Saturn V Moon rocket was a gargantuan mistake.
One of the biggest challenges in exploring space is propulsion — that is, getting from point A to B efficiently, safely and quickly. And when the cargo is human, the challenges are even greater. One of our crowning technological achievements during the 1960s was the Apollo program and, in particular, the development of the Saturn V rocket. The Saturn V was the largest, most powerful vehicle the United States had ever built. It had a launching capacity more than five times greater, a developmental cost 25 percent lower and a build-and-operate cost less than half of that of today’s space shuttle.
In those early days, the possibilities for human space travel were intoxicating. Back then, NASA plans called for an aggressive integrated human flight program that would expand on the developments of Apollo: the establishment of a 50-person lunar base, a 100-person Earth-orbiting space station and human landfall on Mars, all by the mid-1980s. Those plans also included a 50-person semi-permanent Martian base by the end of the 20th century. Instead, we went nowhere.
Why? Because, largely for political reasons, we renounced the Moon, abandoned Apollo and the Saturn V and retreated to low Earth orbit, where we’ve spent the last 25 years going around in circles.
The cost to the nation of this misstep was enormous. For starters, we lost an investment, adjusted for inflation to 2007 dollars, of $160 billion. That was the cost to get to, land on, walk on, drive on and otherwise explore the Moon. (Of that amount, $29 billion, in inflation-adjusted dollars, was the approximate cost of the Saturn V.)
What’s more, the production facilities for the Saturn V and the other lunar exploration components, like the command and lunar modules, were all closed. At that point, we lost both the technological means for human deep space exploration and the collective knowledge of tens of thousands of engineers and scientists trained in human spaceflight.
Equally troubling is what we put in place of Apollo. The $38 billion developmental cost of the shuttle has gotten us nowhere in the solar system fast. And the International Space Station could have been built with only half a dozen Saturn V launchings instead of the more than two dozen shuttle trips that will be required to finish it. The bottom line: a colossal misuse of funds and a disheartening lack of progress and loss of time....