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Comparison of Apollo to Nasa’a new project

At NASA it is back to the future - half a century back. The very hardware that took us to the moon now has to be totally reengineered and developed at a $200 billion cost just to get us where we were in 1968 as we embarked on Project Apollo.

That’s because President Nixon was so nuts/angry about the Kennedy lunar landing success he ordered the entire Saturn/Apollo capability scrapped. The inferiority complex President cancelled Kennedy’s last half dozen lunar landings. That meant that the 36- story tall Saturn boosters were taken out of controlled storage and allowed to be ruined so they could never fly again. The blueprints and castings for the big booster engines were deliberately destroyed. Nixon then ordered NASA to basically design a space plane to military specifications. His management and budget director (George Schultz) made the budget so tight that the safe version of the shuttle could not be built and the train wreck of shuttle that has killed 14 astronauts is what NASA’s wimpy leaders ended up with. You already know that sad story.

NASA’s latest pooch of an Administrator, Michael Griffin has given the people at the Pentagon everything they want – total victory for the black space program. They get the new technology. You can bet if there are going to be men in space they will be military men. The Pentagon has been trying to kill civilian space flight for fifty years and now they have. Prior to the formation of NASA, in 1958 the Pentagon and contractors actually conspired to kill the legislation to create a civilian agency for space. Lyndon Johnson, the Senate Majority Leader, and President Eisenhower, increasingly nervous about the military industrial complex, won the day in Congress.

Why are the contractors happy? Don’t they just love all the business they can handle?

Not NASA business. Like President Bush the contractors believe in faith based technology. You build it as cheaply as you can to increase profit and pray it works. I call it divine design. When NASA was created the Air Force’s incompetent quality control inspectors were replaced by much more demanding civilian NASA inspectors. The contractors hated it. The proof of their wisdom was that while the military rockets used before Apollo blew up at a mind-boggling rate after NASA took over inspections, the Atlas, Titans and the first all civilian big rocket Saturn all began to work flawlessly. This allowed President Kennedy to proceed with Apollo. His own polling showed that he had almost no support for the big program when he announced it to the world. Kennedy thought of it as a peaceful competition with the Soviets it was the perfect tool for moving the entire nation ahead technologically and politically. He decided to ignore his advisers and go for it. He did it because he thought it was good for the country. He turned out to be right. Apollo moved every element of American technology ahead.

The great old NASA made mistakes, but they also fixed them. After the awful 1967 Apollo I fire, the then NASA Administrator, James Webb, ordered the head of Rockwell International into his office at NASA headquarters. On a table in a conference room Webb had his staff assemble new contracts for the Apollo capsule to be sent out for bid to rebuild the capsule that had killed three astronauts in a needless fire. Webb told the head of Rockwell that either he sign a new contract that allowed NASA inspectors to live in the Apollo plant 24/7 or he would give the job to another company. The executive agreed. Webb left his office that day to go to Arlington to attend the funeral of the astronauts who were killed knowing he did what he should have.

Those stories illustrate how important space was to our country. Contrast to the tone death approach NASA took in this idiotic announcement of its replacement for the shuttle. At the moment the nation is trying to figure out how we are going to rebuild New Orleans and the Gulf Coast the hapless administrator of NASA announces a $200 billion program: A program that will create a new space vehicle out of the most dangerous element of the space shuttle - the infamous solid rockets. The rest of the design is Eisenhower era technology. To entice the imagination of the country we are going to spend this money for a repeat of a Kennedy era mission.

This comes on the heels of crashing a shuttle over Texas and then rebuilding the program for the second time and launching a shuttle without solving the foam insulation problem that doomed Columbia and her crew. Assured that everything was fine the Administrator launches this summer and lo and behold we also lost another shuttle for the very same reasons Columbia was lost. Nothing got fixed. Now NASA is so confidence challenged that the only thing these folks will attempt is something that worked 40 years ago.

So Mr. Administrator tells us let’s forget about space planes, hypersonic flight, the planets and instead our mission will be to do just what we did four decades ago – except it will cost way more. The sheer genius at NASA that keeps killing astronauts and the spirit of tens of millions who support manned flight have helped the administration put to bed the idea that civilians will dominate spaceflight. While the Bush Administration has poured billions in a top secret Pentagon space program it has just about put the nail in the coffin of the one government agency that made a generation of Americans more than proud.

The Peoples Republic of China is now militarizing space because we are. It is too bad we don’t have a President who has the imagination to challenge our country to compete in the open so the whole world can see how a free society works. But doing anything in the open seems to be the last thing this administration thinks about.

Joe Trento covered Apollo and the Shuttle programs and authored several books on the space program.