Author Topic: After Apollo?: Richard Nixon and the American Space Program (book)  (Read 21684 times)

Offline RanulfC

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Probably should take this one to the alt-history boards instead but I'd like some opinions :)

Here's one: I think you're using quotation marks when you generally mean to italicize.

Ya I noted I was doing that again, I'm going to try using that instead of quotes but we're all aware of how that goes :)

Randy
(At least with an onboard spellchecker I'm getting less complaints in that area... Note that's less which probably says something :) )
From The Amazing Catstronaut on the Black Arrow LV:
British physics, old chap. It's undignified to belch flames and effluvia all over the pad, what. A true gentlemen's orbital conveyance lifts itself into the air unostentatiously, with the minimum of spectacle and a modicum of grace. Not like our American cousins' launch vehicles, eh?

Offline Blackstar

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Good grammar is a key tenet of a civilized society.

Or something like that.


Offline Blackstar

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The business case for satellite delivery, (obviously) could be made and assuming that NASA is still tasked with some type of human spaceflight mission the question is could a similar business case be made for human space flight?

A crafty history grad student could write an interesting dissertation about the definition of "privatization" (or choose your own word--maybe "commercialization"?) in spaceflight over the decades. There have been numerous efforts to do this over many eras, and understanding it requires understanding the context and politics of the time period.

For example, in the early 1980s the Reagan administration looked into the idea of commercializing/privatizing Landsat. I believe that Comsat Corporation was interested, but only if the deal included the weather satellites, because they figured they could make real money selling weather satellite data. Congress balked at that, and the idea evaporated.

But wait, there's more!

Turns out that there have been quite a few proposals like this over the years, most of them forgotten:

-TDRSS in the 1970s (originally supposed to be a rental agreement, not government-owned)
-Navy Leasat, late 1970s/early 1980s
-the various variations of rocket launches, both before and after Challenger, as well as the 1990s
-Industrial Space Facility, 1989
-privatizing a single space shuttle, 1990s
-privatizing parts of ISS, 1990s

Lots and lots of examples of activities that were exclusively government where somebody proposed turning over portions of it to the private sector to run. Almost all of them collapsed early on, either for political reasons, or because no commercial customer could be found (or at least none with serious money and management).

Lots of case studies to be explored there. Probably some interesting lessons in what worked and did not work.
« Last Edit: 08/08/2016 09:23 pm by Blackstar »

Offline yg1968

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I've been working on space history for 25 years now. I was one of the editors on the first two "Exploring the Unknown" volumes mentioned up-thread. I worked for Logsdon as a grad student and I also helped edit his manuscript for "After Apollo?" So I've been steeped in a lot of these issues for many years. Yet I still found a number of things in "After Apollo?" to be surprises. In particular:

-the breadth and depth of animosity within the Nixon administration to continuing any further deep space exploration;
-the opposition within NASA itself to continuing lunar missions beyond the first six or so;
-the degree to which some Nixon administration officials wanted to get rid of NASA entirely, or at least human space flight.

For a long time I clung to the view that a lot of the blame for what happened after Apollo could be laid at the feet of NASA administrator Tom Paine and the Space Task Group. I thought that when Paine/STG proposed a Mars mission that it was so expensive, so ambitious, that it poisoned the well and no other options, such as continuing lunar missions, were possible. If only they had been more realistic in their proposal (like Nixon's own transition group for space), then maybe they could have kept the Apollo hardware and continued missions beyond low Earth orbit.

But as "After Apollo?" makes clear, this wasn't even an option. NOBODY wanted more lunar missions, not even NASA. And Mars was just too big and too expensive. But it wasn't even the case that more Skylab missions were under consideration. The Nixon administration was looking at various options that even included changing NASA's name and making it a technology agency, perhaps with no human spaceflight at all. They just did not see the point. And if the opposition had been weaker, it is possible that we could have ended human spaceflight in the early 1970s and maybe even stopped robotic space exploration as well. Maybe the Soviets would have then been the only ones doing this stuff.

Although I am not thrilled with the shuttle program that we got, considering that most of the other policy options were for far less, I think we were pretty lucky.

That's the impression that I got when I read the book. That's why I think that Logsdon is overly negative in his conclusion. As he makes the point in the book, Nixon based his decisions on opinion polls and an ambitious Mars program was not popular at the time. NASA was pushing for a Shuttle and a space station and that is essentially what they got (although the ISS came much later).

Offline Jim

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The business case for satellite delivery, (obviously) could be made and assuming that NASA is still tasked with some type of human spaceflight mission the question is could a similar business case be made for human space flight?

A crafty history grad student could write an interesting dissertation about the definition of "privatization" (or choose your own word--maybe "commercialization"?) in spaceflight over the decades. There have been numerous efforts to do this over many eras, and understanding it requires understanding the context and politics of the time period.

For example, in the early 1980s the Reagan administration looked into the idea of commercializing/privatizing Landsat. I believe that Comsat Corporation was interested, but only if the deal included the weather satellites, because they figured they could make real money selling weather satellite data. Congress balked at that, and the idea evaporated.

But wait, there's more!

Turns out that there have been quite a few proposals like this over the years, most of them forgotten:

-TDRSS in the 1970s (originally supposed to be a rental agreement, not government-owned)
-Navy Leasat, late 1970s/early 1980s
-the various variations of rocket launches, both before and after Challenger, as well as the 1990s
-Industrial Space Facility, 1989
-privatizing a single space shuttle, 1990s
-privatizing parts of ISS, 1990s

Lots and lots of examples of activities that were exclusively government where somebody proposed turning over portions of it to the private sector to run. Almost all of them collapsed early on, either for political reasons, or because no commercial customer could be found (or at least none with serious money and management).

Lots of case studies to be explored there. Probably some interesting lessons in what worked and did not work.

Spacehab

Offline Blackstar

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The business case for satellite delivery, (obviously) could be made and assuming that NASA is still tasked with some type of human spaceflight mission the question is could a similar business case be made for human space flight?

A crafty history grad student could write an interesting dissertation about the definition of "privatization" (or choose your own word--maybe "commercialization"?) in spaceflight over the decades. There have been numerous efforts to do this over many eras, and understanding it requires understanding the context and politics of the time period.

For example, in the early 1980s the Reagan administration looked into the idea of commercializing/privatizing Landsat. I believe that Comsat Corporation was interested, but only if the deal included the weather satellites, because they figured they could make real money selling weather satellite data. Congress balked at that, and the idea evaporated.

But wait, there's more!

Turns out that there have been quite a few proposals like this over the years, most of them forgotten:

-TDRSS in the 1970s (originally supposed to be a rental agreement, not government-owned)
-Navy Leasat, late 1970s/early 1980s
-the various variations of rocket launches, both before and after Challenger, as well as the 1990s
-Industrial Space Facility, 1989
-privatizing a single space shuttle, 1990s
-privatizing parts of ISS, 1990s

Lots and lots of examples of activities that were exclusively government where somebody proposed turning over portions of it to the private sector to run. Almost all of them collapsed early on, either for political reasons, or because no commercial customer could be found (or at least none with serious money and management).

Lots of case studies to be explored there. Probably some interesting lessons in what worked and did not work.

Spacehab

Yeah. I suspect there are half a dozen more that you could add from the 1960s-1999. Landsat came up several times, for example.

Offline the_other_Doug

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I have two comments I want to make on this thread, but they deal with different aspects of it, so I'm going to do it in two different posts.

This post relates to John Kennedy and Vietnam, which is key to a lot of the speculation on what would have happened had Kennedy not been assassinated.  While it's true that Kennedy might have had to toss Apollo to the dogs over a deepening quagmire in Vietnam, I have some reason to believe he would not have ended up in that quagmire.

It all centers around one event -- the deposition and execution of President Diem of Vietnam.  Kennedy had been told the coup was being planned, and that the U.S. could not intervene.  Kennedy, from what I have read, was not told that CIA was providing "black" funding to the coup plotters and actively encouraged, and helped plan, the coup.

See, Kennedy was in a really bad position here, because Diem was being deposed primarily because he was Roman Catholic, and was causing widespread dissent within Vietnam by giving the Catholic Vietnamese minority better jobs and more opportunities, while generally oppressing the rest of the population.  Kennedy liked Diem personally, but if he had stepped in and tried to prevent the coup, he knew he would be accused of using the power of the Presidency to preserve a foreign leader in power just because he was also a Roman Catholic.  So, he felt he couldn't take any kind of official stand.

However, it seems that while Kennedy was aware that a coup was going to occur, he was also under the impression that Diem would be exiled.  I have read an account of the morning when he was informed of Diem's summary execution, and he reportedly became extremely upset.  "They just f***ing killed him, right there on the runway at the airport.  Just shot him to death.  Barbarians."  Things along those lines.

That was the point where Kennedy was reported to have decided that he was now free to use the power of the Presidency in re Vietnam, and he planned to do as little as he possibly could to help and support the people who had murdered someone he personally liked.  While apprehending the world political situation, and knowing the U.S. would have to maintain a presence in Southeast Asia, I just don't believe he would have sent a half million American troops over to defend a government he detested, founded by the very people who murdered Diem.

But, of course, Kennedy himself was dead a month later, so we'll never know...
-Doug  (With my shield, not yet upon it)

Offline the_other_Doug

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Now, to comment on why no one at NASA seemed interested in extending Apollo, or using the Apollo infrastructure to continue lunar exploration.

I think a lot of it comes down to Bob Gilruth.  Gilruth himself stated that when he heard Kennedy announce he was asking Congress to support landing a man on the Moon by the end of the decade, he was aghast.

Go to the Moon, yes -- after we've developed the technology, proved it all out in Earth orbit, when we're ready.  Not now, not like this.  Not in this risky go-for-broke manner.

But, no matter how he felt about it, it was his job to do it, so he dug in and organized his forces to accomplish the goal.

But... once the goal was achieved, Gilruth started to make it clear he supported bringing the Apollo program to an end at an earlier, rather than later, date.  After Apollo 13, he became more definite about it.

Apollo was risky.  It put the crews at greater risk than Gilruth wanted or was comfortable with.  There were thousands of ways those crews could have been killed, and to an extent we're lucky no one was ever killed in flight during Apollo.

But, Gilruth and MSC had to be prepared to repeat any of the flight profiles once or twice on the road to the first lunar landing, so they had to have crews and spacecraft and boosters in the pipeline to support flights out through at least Apollo 14, and as of early 1969, they had just that.  By great parts skill and some parts luck, none of the mission profiles (the A through G missions) had to be repeated, and the G mission happened on the most optimistic possible schedule, during the fifth manned Apollo flight.

But there were Saturn V's in the pipeline to support flights through Apollo 19 plus launching a dry Skylab workshop, CSMs and LMs were still being built, and hardware modifications had already been started to support the new J missions being planned for later landings.  There was too much momentum going right after Apollo 11 for anyone to realistically suggest "Hey, we did it, let's stop now before someone gets hurt."

So, Gilruth went along with playing out the Apollo program through a modest series of scientific exploration missions, but did continue to express his discomfort with it.  By the time Apollos 18 and 19 hit the chopping block, Gilruth was just as happy to see them go, I think, and so didn't push for them.  He even, I recall, made the point that since 18 and 19 would fly more than two years after Apollo 17, with Skylab flying in between, he was concerned that completing all the spacecraft and boosters and putting them in storage created a reliability issue -- no one knew what sitting in storage would do to these spacecraft, and he didn't want to use Apollos 18 and 19 to find out.

So, without strong support from the MSC Director, it was hard for NASA HQ to sell continuing Apollo flights to the President and Congress.  And as we all know, while Nixon enjoyed having some American heroes in the world news, he wasn't a strong supporter of NASA or the space program.  For a lot of reasons, some good, some bad...
-Doug  (With my shield, not yet upon it)

Offline Archibald

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First, thanks all for the Amazon tip. Some book prices are indeed way out in the blue.

...

Jesco von Puttkamer (hopefully I got the spelling right) famously said
http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4308/ch9.htm

Quote
The reason some of us wanted EOR was not just to go to the moon but to have something afterwards: orbital operations, a space station, a springboard. LOR was a one-shot deal, very limited, very inflexible.

Which bring us back to 1961 and JFK deadline that had to be done at any cost, including mortgaging NASA future

When you think about it, the whole Apollo stack was made of no less than seven stages, none of which could be recovered to try and lower the cost of the thing
- S-IC
- S-II
- S-IVB
- Apollo Service Module
- Apollo Command Module
- LM descent stage
- LM ascent stage

Which made it mostly different from good old 50's sci-fi books with the Single-Stage-To-Lunar-Surface airliner-like spaceships.

Back in 1959 NASA long range plan had a circumlunar flight staged from a LEO space station. Landings were (vaguely) planned to happen "in the 70's"

Quote
Probably should take this one to the alt-history boards instead but I'd like some opinions :)

Quote
Nothing in history is inevitable. There are lots of ways that simple random chance can have major impacts on outcomes.

The alternate history where NASA stuck with EOR remains to be done. Something must happens to John Houbolt. Well, the monography Enchanted rendezvous provides an interesting "point of divergence"

Quote
The summer of 1961 was the busiest in the lives of many NASA
engineers, certainly in John Houbolt's. "I was living half the time in Washington, half the time on
the road, dashing back and forth."

 In mid-July, he was to be in Washington again, to give a talk
at the NASA
-Industry Apollo Technical Conference. This important meeting was to include about
300  potential  Project  Apollo  contractors.  It  was  so  important  that  Langley  management,  in
association  with  the  STG,  in  the  tradition
of  the  NACA
-NASA  annual  inspections,  was  holding  a
formal rehearsal of all its presentations prior to the conference.
Houbolt  was  to  give  his  talk  at  the  end  of  the  day  of  rehearsals  because  he had  another NASA
meeting earlier that day in Washington. "I was to rush out to the airport at Washington National,
get on the airplane, they were to pick me up here and then bring me to where they were having
the rehearsals." However, when he arrived breathless at the airport, the airplane could not take
off. In refueling the aircraft, the ground crew had spilled fuel on one of the tires, and the Federal
Aviation  Administration  would  not  let  the  plane  take  off  until  the  tire  had  been  changed.  That
made Houbolt a little late


and the STG member waiting for him a little
impatient. "They dashed
me back to the conference room, and with all of the other rehearsals finished, "everybody was
sort of twiddling their thumbs," complaining "where the hell is Houbolt?"

I don't like killing people (even in fiction !) but had Houbolt plane caught fire and exploded, LOR would have lost his major proponent. Perhaps NASA would have stuck with EOR
Then God knows if they would have been able to achieve the landing within JFK deadline.
They already realized that on-orbit liquid hydrogen transfer would be a major PITA, so tankers would only carry LOX.
 The fact is one ton of hydrogen needs six to seven tons of liquid oxygen to burn. Looking at the S-IVB, mass of hydrogen wasn't that big, perhaps small enough for a single launch of an augmented Saturn IB. The main difficulty would be liquid oxygen transfer fast enough so that the waiting liquid hydrogen doesn't boils away entirely within hours or days.
Or just launch the liquid hydrogen last, after all these LOX tankers.  :)

As for a the Flax committee changing the shuttle decision - just follow Ranulf steps and go reading my signature (blatant and assumed self-promotion)

Quote
The book mentions that there were a couple members with a "Libertarian" bent, (no names given) who suggested in the initial meeting that space access be "privatized" and operated by private industry which was roundly ignored and IIRC the member left and never came back.

This was probably linked to the late 70s/early 80s idea that the Libertarian's were all for selling the US space program to the highest bidder and junking the Space Program but with hindsight sounds more like a very early concept of Commercial Crew/Cargo. Though it has to be recalled that at the time there was no "destination" for such and each flight would in effect be an orbital delivery of a satellite with little or no commercial incentive for manned flights...


The man was William Niskanen (thanks google books !)
Mind you, he even has a Wikipedia entry
 (which says a lot about the man - one of these guys pretty obessed with privatizing everything but the kitchen sink)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_A._Niskanen
« Last Edit: 08/09/2016 09:07 am by Archibald »
Han shot first and Gwynne Shotwell !

Offline Archibald

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Spacehab

Bob Citron and Walter Kistler Spacehab was a success, but even then, their next venture was a fiasco and a quagmire - the Kistler K-1 debacle that lasted nearly two decades (1993 - 2011)
Morale: space is hard. A success doesn't mean the next step works (sigh)
« Last Edit: 08/09/2016 09:01 am by Archibald »
Han shot first and Gwynne Shotwell !

Offline Jim

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Spacehab

Bob Citron and Walter Kistler Spacehab was a success,

Not really.  It isn't really a commercial venture if your only customer is the USG. 

Offline RanulfC

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Jesco von Puttkamer (hopefully I got the spelling right) famously said
http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4308/ch9.htm

Quote
The reason some of us wanted EOR was not just to go to the moon but to have something afterwards: orbital operations, a space station, a springboard. LOR was a one-shot deal, very limited, very inflexible.

Ahh the opening to my favorite chapter, "Skipping "The Next Logical Step""

Quote
Which bring us back to 1961 and JFK deadline that had to be done at any cost, including mortgaging NASA future

Which was the actual problem really as the imposed time limit itself was what drove the mode discussion which in turn drove the mission/technology design. John Houbolt was correct and WVB saw this when Houbolt asked the main question of did we actually want to land before 1970 or not? EOR and LOR were in fact not competing mission modes outside the context of the imposed time factor and would have been complimenting without the rush.

With it your options are highly limited. So having said that let me skip around a bit:
Quote
The alternate history where NASA stuck with EOR remains to be done. Something must happens to John Houbolt. Well, the monograph Enchanted rendezvous provides an interesting "point of divergence"

Well I don't think that's likely as the idea that EOR was not going to meet the deadline was already out there at this point so knocking off Houbolt won't do much good. (So you don't have to kill him :) ) So the decision would have come down to EOR or Direct Ascent and EOR still looses if Houbolt isn't there to champion LOR because Direct Ascent is going to be faster if more expensive to develop. Given the needed lifting power though it would probably come down to a combination of Direct Ascent with added propellant tanks. or a stage rendezvous in LEO. (Dual launch Saturn-Vs) In the end I'm pretty sure as long as the time-limit is there then some form of LOR, in the use of a smaller separate lander and return rendezvous in Lunar orbit is going to be proposed and used.

It's a variation of the Chicken-or-Egg situation in that without the time pressure it's not likely that the US would have given the lunar landing the priority and support it was given, (along with the possibility that we might end up STILL not having landed on the Moon in 2016!) but with the time pressure the only way to achieve the set goal is to use the most direct and cheapest method possible.

In the very end, no time pressure, fairly limited budget and general support and Earth orbital operations working towards an EOR system and space station means with all else being equal, (and that in itself is hard given the nature of the Sputnik Panic and subsequent flight of Gagarin since Kennedy's whole reason for choosing the Moon AND a tight time-table was the fear that anything less would allow the Russian's to beat or at least keep even with the US) NASA would not have been organized the way it is in OTL nor would they have the "Apollo" mindset which still is an issue culturally. They would already have been "another agency" competing for part of the budget with no inherent expectations of unlimited funding and support when Nixon took office and I don't think there would have been the disappointment, wrenching changes, or loss of direction that happened OTL.

I would suspect that under those circumstances the US and Soviet/Russian space programs would look very similar to what the Soviet/Russian space program was like OTL without the time and political pressure of OTL.

Randy
From The Amazing Catstronaut on the Black Arrow LV:
British physics, old chap. It's undignified to belch flames and effluvia all over the pad, what. A true gentlemen's orbital conveyance lifts itself into the air unostentatiously, with the minimum of spectacle and a modicum of grace. Not like our American cousins' launch vehicles, eh?

Offline RanulfC

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The man was William Niskanen (thanks google books !)
Mind you, he even has a Wikipedia entry
 (which says a lot about the man - one of these guys pretty obessed with privatizing everything but the kitchen sink)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_A._Niskanen

Ok so nothing like current ideas, which begs the question of what exactly would have been the point at the time? There was no 'real' government systems which to privatize per-se at the time and having a private company design, build and operate a shuttle wouldn't make sense with no place for it to service or missions to perform.

Jim's not really correct that "It isn't really a commercial venture if your only customer is the USG" since there was a time, (around the period we're talking till the mid-80s) where contractors were in fact trying to sustain themselves by having the USG as their sole customer. And specifically to human space flight it's only been recently that government service (crew/cargo) wasn't the only game in town.

So the idea of pushing development and operations of a 'shuttle' onto the private sector doesn't appear to make sense in the context given. Especially as NASA/USG still has to built a space station and then serve it until the "commercial" system is ready. Again you've got the satellite market available but the requirements between that and crew/cargo to a space station are highly different.

Randy
From The Amazing Catstronaut on the Black Arrow LV:
British physics, old chap. It's undignified to belch flames and effluvia all over the pad, what. A true gentlemen's orbital conveyance lifts itself into the air unostentatiously, with the minimum of spectacle and a modicum of grace. Not like our American cousins' launch vehicles, eh?

Offline Archibald

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Quote
Ok so nothing like current ideas, which begs the question of what exactly would have been the point at the time? There was no 'real' government systems which to privatize per-se at the time and having a private company design, build and operate a shuttle wouldn't make sense with no place for it to service or missions to perform.


The late Klaus Heiss of Mathematica (infamous) shuttle economic study did tried to gather private funding for that fifth orbiter Carter refused to fund in 1978. It did not went very far with the proposal, however. Until the end of his life that man was still very bitter about all the flak he took (it's all fault of Mathematica - he couldn't stood that fact...)
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Peter_Heiss
« Last Edit: 08/10/2016 04:38 pm by Archibald »
Han shot first and Gwynne Shotwell !

Offline Jim

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Jim's not really correct that "It isn't really a commercial venture if your only customer is the USG" since there was a time, (around the period we're talking till the mid-80s) where contractors were in fact trying to sustain themselves by having the USG as their sole customer.

No, the hype was that they were going commercial and were looking for customers other than the USG

Offline Kansan52

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Never considered there would be no footprints on the Moon without Apollo. Hmmmm.

Offline RanulfC

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Quote
Ok so nothing like current ideas, which begs the question of what exactly would have been the point at the time? There was no 'real' government systems which to privatize per-se at the time and having a private company design, build and operate a shuttle wouldn't make sense with no place for it to service or missions to perform.


The late Klaus Heiss of Mathematica (infamous) shuttle economic study did tried to gather private funding for that fifth orbiter Carter refused to fund in 1978. It did not went very far with the proposal, however. Until the end of his life that man was still very bitter about all the flak he took (it's all fault of Mathematica - he couldn't stood that fact...)
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Klaus_Peter_Heiss

Well as we keep seeing it's never ALL "fill-in-the-blank" fault and given the assumptions inherent in the study, (and what NASA was looking for, which as we all know is quite often not what they THINK they are looking for :) ) the results were perfectly valid... Just not for the Shuttle that got built or the way it was actually operated.

The Shuttle was considered and sold as an operational system when it really was a first generation proto-type and the Mathematica study built on the former assumptions instead of the latter reality. He took a lot of flak which wasn't really fair as the math was actually spot-on but the assumptions and application that were its basis weren't something that anyone was ready to build at that point in time. Change any of the parameters to fit the actual Shuttle and the outcome would have been very, very different.

Randy
From The Amazing Catstronaut on the Black Arrow LV:
British physics, old chap. It's undignified to belch flames and effluvia all over the pad, what. A true gentlemen's orbital conveyance lifts itself into the air unostentatiously, with the minimum of spectacle and a modicum of grace. Not like our American cousins' launch vehicles, eh?

Offline RanulfC

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Never considered there would be no footprints on the Moon without Apollo. Hmmmm.

More correctly there probably would have been no footprints on the Moon by 1970 without the Apollo Lunar Program per OTL. Apollo however was already a working concept by 1962 but was mainly aimed at advanced Earth orbital operations with the ability to go to the moon at some point.

The problem was that according to the same "plan" at the start NASA wasn't actually going to fly anything between the end of the Mercury program and the first Apollo manned flight which would have front loaded a LOT of the preliminary work that ended up being done during Gemini and considering how much of what was learned there went into the Apollo itself I don't see that having worked. (More-so since during that time the Soviets would probably still be flying which would make the US look even worse despite technically having more capability in the end. Gemini actually significantly showed the US equaling and then pulling ahead in the Space Race)

Apollo, (pretty much without the Saturn-V, though probably a upgraded version of the Saturn-1  if the EOR route was used) envisioned as being operational sometime in the mid-to-late 60s with an around-the-moon flight penciled in sometime in the mid-70s. (I put my money on 1976 for obvious reasons :) ) Meanwhile we'd be building up orbital rendezvous, assembly, and general orbital/space experience with a couple of prototype "space-stations" in there and long term (weeks) on-orbit stays building towards an eventual lunar landing, probably by the mid-80s. Pretty much everything we ended up doing with Gemini but delayed 5 to 10 years.

Thing was it was pretty clear even before Mercury flew that it was far to much a 'minimum' system to do more than answer some very basic questions about manned space flight. (Which makes sense since that's all it was designed to do since no was really sure that a man could operate with the stress of space flight) Which is why they began looking at a Mercury MkII almost immediately and that led to Gemini, but the original plan was to go from "man-in-a-can" (literally the original concept of Mercury where the man was nothing but payload/passenger) straight to a 3-man, fully controlled and functional orbital spacecraft with the built in capability to possibly go to lunar orbit...

While the original plan may have been a little TOO conservative, (as well as a bit optimistic conversely :) ) it at least aimed at being specifically capability orientated rather than goal driven which would have presented future leaders with more options I believe.

Randy
From The Amazing Catstronaut on the Black Arrow LV:
British physics, old chap. It's undignified to belch flames and effluvia all over the pad, what. A true gentlemen's orbital conveyance lifts itself into the air unostentatiously, with the minimum of spectacle and a modicum of grace. Not like our American cousins' launch vehicles, eh?

Offline Blackstar

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Jim's not really correct that "It isn't really a commercial venture if your only customer is the USG" since there was a time, (around the period we're talking till the mid-80s) where contractors were in fact trying to sustain themselves by having the USG as their sole customer.

No, the hype was that they were going commercial and were looking for customers other than the USG

If somebody were to go and do a detailed historical study of all these prior efforts to develop "commercial space," they would highlight several patterns. You see a lot of this stuff happen again and again. One of the common themes is that somebody comes along with a great new project/proposal/technology and they claim it will be a big commercial success. At least initially they may boast that their thing is better than NASA, and we don't really need the NASA thing. Then, after they fail to find investors, they try to get NASA as an anchor customer, or even the only customer.

These things usually have not worked for a lot of reasons. A common reason is that they were never as good an idea as the proponents claim. But also they may have poisoned the well by ticking off NASA officials who they later approach for funding. The Industrial Space Facility followed that arc. There were other examples too.

It is worth understanding this theme when looking at new things, because it helps to filter out the hype. When somebody claims that their new thing is "better than NASA," it helps to ask what exactly they mean, and if their badmouthing NASA will ultimately hurt them later on.

Offline Michel Van

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I agree with much of your post, but ....
Quote
Had Soviets land on Moon a cosmonaut, Nixon had continue the Apollo program !
Restart the Saturn V production (the production line were mothballed until 1974 then destroy)
they had even potentially study (before 1974) how to reactivate the Apollo program during Shuttle program.

That is very interesting.  Do you have a reference for the study?

I search my space archive to find it
but i got around 10000 files in there and that take some time
sadly if found several dammage PDF, let's hope that the one is not of them...

I finish searching my PDF archive, sadly that PDF is lost.

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