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General Discussion => Historical Spaceflight => Topic started by: Proponent on 07/12/2019 01:01 pm
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Arguments sometimes rage over which president was responsible for killing the Apollo program.
Attached is the Apollo flight schedule as it stood in October 1962. To my knowledge, this is the earliest official schedule, produced shortly after lunar orbit rendezvous had been selected. The missions with the objective of "lunar exploration" are A-509 through -515. That is to say that the number of landing attempts scheduled was seven -- which is exactly the number that ultimately occurred.
Apollo-Saturn production could have been extended. More missions could have been flown even without additional production. But there is a good case to be made that Apollo's end was inherent in its beginning.
EDIT: Made thread title more descriptive
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A case has been made that John Houbolt clever trick of LOR saved Apollo in the short term but killed it over the long term, as it turned it into a zero infrastructure project an anti-ISS. Hence as you said, Apollo was probably doomed in 1962.
Which doesn't mean the other options were any better: next best was EOR, with had the major unknown of LH2 (and LOX to a lesser extent) in orbit transfer. Von Braun had a "connecting mode" which had the name entailed was kind of docking plenty of Centaurs together until the stack reached S-IVB size.
Apollo was a fantastic achievement but came too early.
In the 50's sci-fi stories (Heinlein for you americans; Hergé, for us Europeans) the first lunar landing happened later, in the 70's, but the "lunar transportation system" was not a seven-expendable-chemical-stages monstrosity like Apollo - S-IC+S-II+S-IVB+SM+LM-descent+LM-ascent, just think about it.
The bottom line was
"Then one guy made a major propulsion breakthrough (nuclear, fairy dust, whatever) and this allowed him to create a "space DC-3" or "Space Boeing 707" that made travel to the Moon economical."
And boom, colonization of the Moon happened just like the Age of Discoveries had happened on Earth, America, Australia, Everest and Antarctica included.
The writers had guessed at least one thing right: no "space DC-3 / Boeing 707 to the Moon" = no economical trip to the Moon = one-shot trip, too expensive.
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Apollo was a fantastic achievement but came too early.
Maybe. I think we just needed to wind down Apollo more gradually.
A second or third iteration of Skylab supplied by a continuing run of Saturn Is would have done it IMO. This would have allowed a clean handover of human spaceflight to Shuttle while also providing an excellent destination right off the blocks.
NASA's inability to both sustain existing and develop future launch vehicles has been its achilles heel.
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In a real sense, the Apollo 1 fire killed Apollo.
It revealed the feet of clay beneath the heroic exterior of the US space program, and led directly to the gutting of AAP, which *was* the future of Apollo after the initial landings. We were lucky to even see the J Missions and Skylab.
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What do I see here? A thread about who killed Apollo, and Nixon hasn't been mentioned even once :P
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Arguments sometimes rage over which president was responsible for killing the Apollo program.
Attached is the Apollo flight schedule as it stood in October 1962. To my knowledge, this is the earliest official schedule, produced shortly after lunar orbit rendezvous had been selected. The missions with the objective of "lunar exploration" are A-509 through -515. That is to say that the number of landing attempts scheduled was seven -- which is exactly the number that ultimately occurred.
Apollo-Saturn production could have been extended. More missions could have been flown even without additional production. But there is a good case to be made that Apollo's end was inherent in its beginning.
That document is interesting - especially the references to LEO Apollo flights with a CSM and LM Ascent Stage, but no Descent Stage.
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In a real sense, the Apollo 1 fire killed Apollo.
It revealed the feet of clay beneath the heroic exterior of the US space program, and led directly to the gutting of AAP, which *was* the future of Apollo after the initial landings. We were lucky to even see the J Missions and Skylab.
That's a fascinating take. Is this based on other knowledge, or your personal impression?
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For my Part are one President a Vice President and General sectary responsibleness for killing Apollo
One: Lyndon B Johnson
He order the shutdown of Saturn V production and Destruktion of almost completed SA-516 and SA-517
Two: Spiro Agnew
who's "Space Task Group" recommend a future direction of the US manned space program the Wrong way
a. $500 billion US Space Programm im style of 2001, a Space Odyssey...
and as this is not chosen by Nixon, who had other problems, as the US future in Space for next 30 years.
b. the ambitious Space Transportation System program what became Space Shuttle
Three: Leonid Brezhnev
his lack support or better say ignorance for the need of Manned Lunar program.
let to down fall or Soviet Lunar program and it end in 1975
had Soviet manage to land a cosmonaut on Moon, it's very likely Nixon had reactivade and continue the Apollo program
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Kennedy killed it. The program (and frankly NASA as a whole) had a single goal with no real intention for sustainment or follow-up.
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Nixon needing votes for a second term from the space tech industry. NASA being greedy with huge unrealistic future programs (initial AAP, Mars ). Space industrial complex promising the cosmos with the shuttle. Cutting up a perfectly good space station when they knew it worked. ( S-lV ). Doing the same thing 8 times in a row ( Apollos 10 thru 17 ). Sensors in payload bay of service module in lunar polar orbit finds, what the hell is that at the poles ? Send only 2 astros with no landing plan slimmed down to reach polar from LC-39A. A reason for continuing to use the best space systems ever made. John Logsdon book.
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AAP was a complete mess of a program. By contrast there was that LESA study by Boeing - Lunar Exploration Systems for Apollo.
https://www.wired.com/2013/01/the-proper-course-for-lunar-exploration-1965/
This is what NASA should have pursued instead of the messy AAP or a Mars shot. A Moon base and nothing else - still with the major caveat that Apollo was not a very cheap and efficient transportation system to the Moon, particularly the Saturn V.
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Like most murder mysteries, there are many suspects, each with a motive.
My memories of the times (I was 13 when Apollo 11 landed) was the Johnson Administration needed money for the Vietnam debacle and social programs. The next President, Nixon, was happy to note the lack of public support for more moon missions and let his budget office cut as much as possible from Apollo.
The American public loved the USA winning the race. Americans love to win and move on to the next challenge. So, a vast number of Americans wanted to know 'why are we going back?'. But the same 'public' used the phrase, "If we can put a man on the moon, we can _____________ .
Reading histories of the truncated Kennedy Administration, I've seen even President Kennedy was concerned Apollo funding would limit his ability to do the other things he wanted to do.
bob
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In a different direction on this topic, even NASA started to worry about this 'giant leap'. Apollo 17 was a pretty clean mission. But what if Apollo 16's main engine gimbal had un-plugged (as Mattingly said he would have aborted the landing after he returned and was told more of the details) and left the crew unable to safely return? What if Apollo 14 failed to dock with the LM after TLI or the landing radar never worked and they crashed attempting a visual landing? What if Apollo 13's second stage center engine had failed catastrophically instead of being shutdown very early?
[Wednesday night, I'm doing a talk about these and other issues that easily could have killed a crew (or at least prevented a moon landing) and the program - the failures that were an option. Conclusion: Flying to the moon is hard.
I figured everyone would have heard all the standard stories by now and by exploring the failures that didn't, but almost did, would be more interesting. I'll let you know how it goes.]
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[Wednesday night, I'm doing a talk about these and other issues that easily could have killed a crew (or at least prevented a moon landing) and the program - the failures that were an option. Conclusion: Flying to the moon is hard.
I figured everyone would have heard all the standard stories by now and by exploring the failures that didn't, but almost did, would be more interesting. I'll let you know how it goes.]
Will you record and stream/post this?
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In a real sense, the Apollo 1 fire killed Apollo.
It revealed the feet of clay beneath the heroic exterior of the US space program, and led directly to the gutting of AAP, which *was* the future of Apollo after the initial landings. We were lucky to even see the J Missions and Skylab.
Did the Apollo-1 fire have the same effect on the Apollo program, that STS-51-L Challenger incident had on the Shuttle program?
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A case has been made that John Houbolt clever trick of LOR saved Apollo in the short term but killed it over the long term, as it turned it into a zero infrastructure project an anti-ISS.
But neither EOR nor direct, as proposed in 1962, would have established any infrastructure either.
Go back further in time, of course, and it was common place to propose assembling a moonship in LEO -- The Army's (von Braun's) Project Horizon of 1960, for example. I think the problem was the rush to the moon ruled out the time-consuming process of establishing infrastructure.
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As I understand it, the Saturn V production line was shut down in August 1968, when Lyndon Johnson was President. At that time the plan was to fly lunar missions up to Apollo 20, which would have utilized all the Saturn V's assembled except for one allocated to Skylab.
Apollo 20 was cancelled in January 1970, and Apollo 18 and 19 cancelled in September 1970 during a realignment of missions that moved the Fra Mauro landing target from Apollo 13 to Apollo 14.
Having lived through that era, the Vietnam War was a major contributor to the cutbacks because more and more Federal money was going to the war effort. I recall that my Federal Tax Returns at the time had a tax surcharge that supported the war effort. No single administration, whether Kennedy, Johnson, or Nixon "killed" the program, so to speak. Keep in mind that Lyndon Johnson was the major driver for the expansion of the manned space program during the mid-1960's, but even for him the demands of the Vietnam War weighed heavily on him culminating in his announcement in Spring 1968 that he would not seek another term as President.
https://nssdc.gsfc.nasa.gov/planetary/lunar/apollo_18_20.html
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In a real sense, the Apollo 1 fire killed Apollo.
It revealed the feet of clay beneath the heroic exterior of the US space program, and led directly to the gutting of AAP, which *was* the future of Apollo after the initial landings. We were lucky to even see the J Missions and Skylab.
Did the Apollo-1 fire have the same effect on the Apollo program, that STS-51-L Challenger incident had on the Shuttle program?
I would say that it was similarly disheartening, yes. Proxmire & Co took the devastating Apollo 1 enquiry and ran with it. You can't even blame Nixon - the Democrats led the charge.
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Having lived through that era, the Vietnam War was a major contributor to the cutbacks because more and more Federal money was going to the war effort. I recall that my Federal Tax Returns at the time had a tax surcharge that supported the war effort. No single administration, whether Kennedy, Johnson, or Nixon "killed" the program, so to speak. Keep in mind that Lyndon Johnson was the major driver for the expansion of the manned space program during the mid-1960's, but even for him the demands of the Vietnam War weighed heavily on him culminating in his announcement in Spring 1968 that he would not seek another term as President.
Johnson to the generals in 'JFK': "Just get me elected, I'll give you the damn war."
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The program was effectively killed once President Kennedy's mandate was fulfilled with the successful splashdown of Apollo 11... "Task Accomplished July 1969"
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In a real sense, the Apollo 1 fire killed Apollo.
It revealed the feet of clay beneath the heroic exterior of the US space program, and led directly to the gutting of AAP, which *was* the future of Apollo after the initial landings. We were lucky to even see the J Missions and Skylab.
Did the Apollo-1 fire have the same effect on the Apollo program, that STS-51-L Challenger incident had on the Shuttle program?
I would say that it was similarly disheartening, yes. Proxmire & Co took the devastating Apollo 1 enquiry and ran with it. You can't even blame Nixon - the Democrats led the charge.
Actually, the Apollo 1 Fire saved the program. The Apollo capsule was a death trap because of testing in a 100% oxygen atmosphere coupled with the amount of flammable materials that allowed for the fire to propagate. Even Gus Grissom hung lemons in the spacecraft as a comment on quality and development problems. The investigation into the fire resulted in a vastly improved spacecraft, including a quick opening hatch and a change in procedures to pressurize the Command Module with Oxygen and Nitrogen while on the pad made for safer ground testing.
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The N1 rocket killed Apollo. Without any competition by the Soviets, there was little political will to continue. Had the Soviets chosen a better architecture with the intent of moon bases, the US political establishment wouldn't have been so willing to give up on Apollo and follow up programs.
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And, one mission-specific action. The TV camera NASA didn't even want to take to the Moon, given the very tight weight constraints on the LM.
The Apollo Lunar Surface Journal says it well.... "And, finally, Apollo 12 was particularly noteworthy in that Pete Conrad and Al Bean simply had a lot of fun. In large measure, the contrast with Apollo 11 was a matter of personalities. Neil Armstrong's quiet reserve versus Pete Conrad's joyful mirth. But, then too, Armstrong and Aldrin had to work in an atmosphere of intense public scrutiny, constantly aware of the attentions of a global audience and of history. Unfortunately, the relative formality of Apollo 11 created a lasting impression of lunar exploration for a great many people. Pete Conrad and Al Bean had no such weighty matters to restrain them and they hummed and sang and laughed their way from station to station. It is regrettable that the TV camera was damaged. The accident was understandable; but, no matter what the root cause, soon after the loss, the TV audience and the broadcast networks abandoned the mission. Shrinking audiences were probably inevitable after the drama of the first landing. The press of time forced the use of jargon and there were certainly long periods when the astronauts were doing little more than bagging yet another piece of rock. As entertainment, it could be pretty deadly at times. But, all in all, Apollo 12 was a lot of fun and a lot of it would have been well worth watching."
Not fatal to the program's level of support, but the loss of the TV camera may have accelerated the slide.
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[Wednesday night, I'm doing a talk about these and other issues that easily could have killed a crew (or at least prevented a moon landing) and the program - the failures that were an option. Conclusion: Flying to the moon is hard.
I figured everyone would have heard all the standard stories by now and by exploring the failures that didn't, but almost did, would be more interesting. I'll let you know how it goes.]
Will you record and stream/post this?
Not planning to video the talk, but thanks for asking!
I'm trying to find a way to post the important parts with some discussion and links to the videos of the events, perhaps on my blog. Open to suggestions. PM me if this is getting us off topic. thanks, bob
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The N1 rocket killed Apollo. Without any competition by the Soviets, there was little political will to continue. Had the Soviets chosen a better architecture with the intent of moon bases, the US political establishment wouldn't have been so willing to give up on Apollo and follow up programs.
Good point. I do wonder how much of a difference, if any, 2 or 3 successful Soviet human Moon landings using N1 would have made? What sort of "one-upmanship" would have occurred during these Moon missions? Longest duration EVA's, furthest distance from landing site, first chess game during a lunar EVA???
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A case has been made that John Houbolt clever trick of LOR saved Apollo in the short term but killed it over the long term, as it turned it into a zero infrastructure project an anti-ISS.
But neither EOR nor direct, as proposed in 1962, would have established any infrastructure either.
Go back further in time, of course, and it was common place to propose assembling a moonship in LEO -- The Army's (von Braun's) Project Horizon of 1960, for example. I think the problem was the rush to the moon ruled out the time-consuming process of establishing infrastructure.
EOR might (might) have left some kind of permanent orbital propellant depot and a minimal space station could have been build nearby...
As for the Soviet moonshot, there was a real, great missed opportunity... between 1972 and 1974, extending to 1976-78.
Basically Mishin reworked the hopeless L3 into the massive L3M, while the fifth N-1 to be launched in August 1974 would have been the (hopefully) better N-1F.
Far from being a daydream / paper project only, the L3M had strong support from the soviet government, even after Nixon endorsed the Shuttle on January 5, 1972. Only when Mishin was sacked and Glushko took over in May 1974, did the L3M died... only to be imediately reborn by Glushko as the LEK, using his own Vulkan / RLA / future Energiya booster. Even after Buran started in February 1976, the project languished until 1978, spent one decade into hibernation before Glushko brought it back once Mir / Energiya / Buran were done... and then he died.
Glushko (and most of the Soviets) really hated the Shuttle and dragged their feets to build Buran until 1976, four entire years. Glushko really wanted a Moon base instead, but Brezhnev, Cold War, and the "space nuclear bomber panic " (Keldysh) decided otherwise. Glushko had to build Buran to get Energiya, really.
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What do I see here? A thread about who killed Apollo, and Nixon hasn't been mentioned even once :P
He didn't killed it. It was already mortally wounded when he took office.
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(https://memegenerator.net/img/images/14952362.jpg)
"what a McGovern I've been!
ROTFL
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Lyndon B Johnson
He order[d] the shutdown of Saturn V production and Destru[c]tion of almost completed SA-516 and SA-517
As I understand it, the Saturn V production line was shut down in August 1968, when Lyndon Johnson was President.
In July 1967, long-lead-time items for Saturns SA-516 and -517 were ordered (https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=30125.msg969644#msg969644),
In August 1968, NASA Administrator Webb turned down a request to spend money on long-lead-time items for SA-516 and -517 (see the 1st attachment). Webb noted that "This decision, in effect, limits at this time the production effort on Saturn through vehicle 515" (emphasis added). Neither SA-516 nor -517 was almost completed: work had not even begun. The decision did mean that there would at the least be an interruption in Saturn deliveries and that expenses would be incurred in reconstituting some elements of the supply chain, but it did not mean that no more Saturns could be produced.
Webb likely did not want to lumber his successor with the expense of further Saturns when their future application had not been established. This was much the same courtesy that his predecessor, T. Keith Glennan had afforded him. At the very end of his own tenure as NASA's first administrator, Glennan had written a letter (2nd attachment, or, since the quality of the reproduction is poor, see the 3rd attachment, which is my transcription) to his as yet undetermined successor explaining that while he, Glennan, was enthusiastic about the Saturn C-2, he had deliberately not authorized expenditure on it for fear of binding his successor. Ironically, perhaps, Webb did authorize funding for the C-2, only to reverse course when the man-moon-decade objective was promulgated and the C-2 became undersized in a budget-rich environment. So it's understandable that Webb would have wanted to leave decisions about the Saturn 5's future to his successor.
In late 1969, the report of the Space Task Group recommended on-going production. Saturns continued to roll off the production line into 1971, and NASA continued to study 33-foot-diameter Saturn 5-launched space stations for some time. NASA retained the tooling to build Saturns into 1972 (see the latter part of the 1st attachment).
EDIT: "expenditure" -> "expenditure on it" in penultimate paragraph, and "roll of" -> "roll off" in final paragraph. Clarified nature of what was ordered in 1967. Added mention of Space Task Group.
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I had always assumed that the last Saturn IB ever (partially) build was number 214, and was surprised to learn that vehicles 215 and 216 were partially build, too, although only some bits here and there. So there was more Saturn IB than Saturn V, which stopped at 515.
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I had always assumed that the last Saturn IB ever (partially) build was number 214, and was surprised to learn that vehicles 215 and 216 were partially build, too, although only some bits here and there. So there was more Saturn IB than Saturn V, which stopped at 515.
SA-212 was really the last complete Saturn IB - at least briefly until its S-IVB stage was reassigned to become Skylab. No S-IVB stages were built for SA-213 or 214. First stage hardware for SA-213 and 214 was built and eventually assembled, but the stages were never tested and were eventually scrapped with the H-1 engines reassigned to the Delta program.
- Ed Kyle
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Attached is the Apollo flight schedule as it stood in October 1962. To my knowledge, this is the earliest official schedule, produced shortly after lunar orbit rendezvous had been selected.
This is a bit of an aside, but I've come across an earlier LOR flight schedule, in a pre-mode-decision study dating from April 1962 (attached). Refer to the final two pages. Interestingly, it shows the Little Joe II being used not only for tests of the LES but also of the CM, SM and LM. I suppose the CM test basically did happen, since CM-002 flew on the third Little Joe II (A-003), and I'd previously read about a proposed LM test (https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=39850.msg1832789#msg1832789), but the SM test is news to me.
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Thanks again, Proponent!
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The N1 rocket killed Apollo. Without any competition by the Soviets, there was little political will to continue. Had the Soviets chosen a better architecture with the intent of moon bases, the US political establishment wouldn't have been so willing to give up on Apollo and follow up programs.
Good point. I do wonder how much of a difference, if any, 2 or 3 successful Soviet human Moon landings using N1 would have made? What sort of "one-upmanship" would have occurred during these Moon missions? Longest duration EVA's, furthest distance from landing site, first chess game during a lunar EVA???
The N1 had nothing to do with the end of the Apollo program. Even if all N1 launches subsequent to the failed first launch had been successful, this wouldn't have changed the fact that upcoming Apollo 11 mission made the US the paramount winner in the Cold War superpowers' lunar space race. The Apollo 18 and Apollo 19 missions were canceled after the Apollo 13 incident and further budget cuts, while Apollo 20 was canceled to enable Skylab to launch as a "dry workshop".
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Conclusion: Flying to the moon is hard.
I figured everyone would have heard all the standard stories by now and by exploring the failures that didn't, but almost did, would be more interesting.
In retrospect Apollo wasn't a very "safe" system. Two catastrophic failures (1 and 13) in 12 missions (16 if you count Skylab and Soyuz). The maligned safety of the Shuttle had 2 catastrophic failures in > 100 missions.
Apollo was cancelled to the expense of the thing. And there seems to be an underpinning of concern over an eventual crew loss. NASA saw the writing on the wall with the increasing criticism of these expensive trips to the moon and shifted its narrative to cheap access to space via the Shuttle.
Jim McDivitt may have seen this. In his oral history he says he declined to command Apollo 13 as he would have wanted to be the first man on the moon but not the 5th. Perhaps he was willing to put his life on the line to be first but not fifth? Also in his contribution to "Friday Pilots" he said he had a few career options as Apollo was winding down. He says the was offered the job of Shuttle Project Manager but turned it down as he felt the Shuttle was "grossly over promised and underfunded"
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Apollo was a fantastic achievement, there is no question about it. But it pushed chemical rocketry to its extreme limits. This inevitably impacted safety and cost. A good case could be make it was not a PRACTICAL lunar transportation system. Practical in the sense of: cheap, reusable and safe enough to carry a lot of passengers ((ordinary citizens) profitably to the Moon. Technology wasn't up to that task.
Takes airliner evolution for the sake of comparison.
There were five major steps along the way to mass air transportation
1-Ju-52 - safe enough, but can't earn enough money to make airlines viable.
2-DC-3 - safe enough, airlines start to make money, still can't cross the Atlantic
3-Constellation - there, can cross the Atlantic but not safe nor fast enough
4-Boeing 707 - better Atlantic crossings, start earning money there
5-Boeing 747- the final, definite step: air transportation for the masses
As far as lunar transportation was concerned, Apollo was at Ju-52 level. Not even DC-3.
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"Who" killed Apollo? Apollo killed Apollo, specifically once NASA had to transform itself to being a single-goal,highly focused agency that could not survive without being the center of attention and having wide and deep support. (At least in the opinion of the post-Apollo NASA that is :) )
The Lunar Goal support was rapidly waning after it was announced, even with Kennedy himself before he was killed. That act in and of itself gave the program a very much needed shot in the arm as it became a "legacy" program for a "martyred" President. Overall it set an unsupportable and unsustainable precedent for support and funding (along with totally unrealistic expectations for the majority of space advocates and supporters :) ) that echos to this day.
In the late 50s Von Braun was predicting the Moon by the early 80s and Mars by the middle of the next century... And most space advocates and supporters considered him wildly optimistic :)
Landing a man on the Moon didn't 'explode' general interest in "space" so why people continue to assume that landing someone on Mars will do so is beyond me. It helped a lot to make the idea of space exploration "popular" but it's always been a really shallow if sometime broad kind of support and more so the more expensive and "out-of-reach" it looks to the average person. Moreso since most people have no real 'stake' in every going or even wanting to go for any reason.
It's taken about half a century to get to a point where there is enough political and public "will" to go back to the Moon let alone anything more and even then the general "price" is going to have to still drop a LOT to make it mildly interesting to the majority of the public and private sector. We've barely gotten a general interest in orbital space work at this point and the price for access is still generally too high. We're getting closer and once that price comes down we can start building the infrastructure and capability to a point where we can make space actually pay, but we're very much not at that point yet.
(I am NOT a "believer" in Starship btw)
We certainly were not there with Apollo, nor was it likely to be usable for such expansion without major re-working.
(Being a Saturn 1/1B fan I have opinions on they way we 'should' have gone of course :) )
Randy
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It's taken about half a century to get to a point where there is enough political and public "will" to go back to the Moon let alone anything more and even then the general "price" is going to have to still drop a LOT to make it mildly interesting to the majority of the public and private sector.
To quote (from memory so possibly not exact) Arthur C Clarke sometime in the 70s:
"The moon, like Antarctica, was reached 50 years too early"
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It's obvious, not only did the money run out - not least because of the Viet Nam war - but the whole point of proving superiority of the capitalist west over Soviet communism was accomplished.
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Before the Saturn V production was shut down, there were plans to go to Mars with flags and footprints using about 6-8 Saturn V launches to assemble a Mars bound craft in orbit with a small lander, and be at Mars by 1986. One plan was to use a nuclear engine to push the stack to TMI.
There also were plans to put a heat shield on Saturn V's first stage to parachute in the ocean for reuse.
There were plans to upgrade the F1 engines to 1.8 million lbs of thrust as well as the J2's to 250,000 lbs thrust.
There was a plan to use J2 turbines to make a single plug nozzle engine for the 3rd stage and use it for a heat shield for reuse or it could be a single stage to orbit. This would have proved out the plug nozzle concept for future larger plug nozzle stages.
One concept was to put a shuttle type space plane on top of the first two stages for a reusable shuttle.
There were plans to modify the Apollo capsule to hold 5-6 crew.
There were plans to make a single F1 booster to replace Apollo IB booster for a simpler more cost effective way to launch an Apollo capsule.
There were a lot of plans to keep Apollo equipment in production, but no will by a president or congress as Vietnam and social programs were taking a lot of money.
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There was no end of plans during the euphoria but my previous comment was reality.
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This answer to this question is multi-faceted. All of these would need resolution in order for Apollo to survive:
1. Kennedy's challenge, while incredibly bold in its premise, was very limited in its scope. "...before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and return him safely to Earth." Period. Once that goal had been accomplished (Apollo 11) public and political support for anything further in space vanished. Now, if Kennedy had said something to the effect of "... before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon as the first step in establishing a permanent scientific laboratory on the moon and in orbit around the Earth..." we might have gotten somewhere.
2. The Vietnam War. We would have to somehow sidestep this bottomless drain on national resources and the deadening effect on the public morale. There can be little doubt that the war had a deleterious effect on NASA funding, on public perception of big government spending, and the perceived quasi-military nature of NASA organization.
3. The liberalization of American society. Yes, I know this is a controversial subject, and I don't intend this to be a discourse on liberal vs conservative politics. But I see the move to the left in American social issues in the 1960's as causing a generalized loss of interest in overtly patriotic nature of the Apollo goal.
4. Richard Nixon. As I understand it, he heavily despised Kennedy and anything that had to do with him. I don't see Nixon, even if he was handed a fully funded and fully functional Apollo by Johnson, continuing a program that had Kennedy's personality and legacy all over it. He would want a Nixon themed program, i.e. the space shuttle.
Getting around all of this would have been virtually impossible. Apollo's end in the early 1970's was assured, despite all of its great accomplishments.
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There were a lot of plans to keep Apollo equipment in production, but no will by a president or congress as Vietnam and social programs were taking a lot of money.
I would not call any of these "plans." I think they are better understood as "concepts" or "proposals." A plan implies that you have actually decided to do something, and all those things like the Mars mission studies were never accepted at a high level, so there was never anybody who realistically expected that they could be pursued.
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Our general impression is, that public interest in space and financial support for space waned after the Landing. It is a false impression. There was never public support, or politicall will to spend so much money (relaitive to the US GDP of the time) on space exploration. This amount of money was spent only because of superpower rivalry. THAT goal was important enough. Apollo was much cheeper than a real war.
Of course, the Landing was a huge thing from many other point of view. It will be remembered in the far future, when most of the people will not know whether the Soviet Union existed before, or after the Landing. But this hugness was not the reason for spending that money. Space fans and emplyees deceived themselves into assuming that it was a financing for space and space was THAT important. Of course, the financing waned, when its justification disappeared.
I was 13 during the Landing. Grandpa, who had seen Bleriot flying when he was young, was very-very excited and infected me with space-fanship. I knew everything about Apollo. I was sure about the historic importance of the onset of spaceflight. I saw it as an huge leap in science, technology and human development. Grandpa told me also, that this was about superpower rivalry. I remember clearly that I preferred not to think about this detail.
So, there is a question that interest me badly. How would spaceflight have developed if there was no Cold War?
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So, there is a question that interest me badly. How would spaceflight have developed if there was no Cold War?
The answer is easy: it would not have developed at all. Big government, big money projects historically have needed a forcing function. And war is the biggest forcing function (at least man-made) there is for a government. All spaceflight technology was largely developed for military purposes, starting with von Braun and his associates in 1930s Germany. The USA-USSR Cold War accelerated this development, relying on many of those same German rocket scientists they split up between them. The great irony of the Apollo program was that we did a centrally planned, government-funded Soviet-style program better than the Soviets did. That legacy continues at NASA today, and with the exception of the unmanned deep space exploration programs, has been a colossal drag on further spaceflight technology development. The poster above who said the demise of Apollo was because of Apollo was exactly right. We only just had enough technology in propulsion and digital computers to do the job then (and had to invent it at that). We’re finally unleashing the free market to build the infrastructure and try out some high reward, high risk ideas that will allow a sustainable, affordable, and ultimately profitable future to be realized in space.
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Richard Nixon had to cancel the Apollo program to save money for the Space Shuttle and a few other spaceflight programs. His Office of Management and Budget Deputy Director, Caspar Weinberger, had opposed Nixon's proposal to cancel all remaining lunar landings, but recommended winding down the Apollo program "on the ground that Apollo 15 was so successful in gathering needed data that we can now shift, sooner than previously expected, to the Space Shuttle, Grand Tour, NERVA, etc".
Link:
https://space.nss.org/the-space-shuttle-decision-chapter-9/
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Richard Nixon had to cancel the Apollo program to save money for the Space Shuttle and a few other spaceflight programs.
Keep in mind though that all this did was end the Apollo program sooner. All the hardware had been built already, and the production lines shut down. The only question was which flight would be the last mission.
The Apollo program was created to do one thing:
"the US "should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.""
We did that with Apollo 11. After that it was just a matter of consuming the rest of the built Apollo hardware as quickly as possible before Congress decided to pull the plug.
So the end was preordained, not a surprise. The only unknown was which flight of already built hardware would be the last, but the production lines were no longer around to build more.
Why are we rehashing this? ::)
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Richard Nixon had to cancel the Apollo program to save money for the Space Shuttle and a few other spaceflight programs.
Keep in mind though that all this did was end the Apollo program sooner. All the hardware had been built already, and the production lines shut down. The only question was which flight would be the last mission.
The Apollo program was created to do one thing:
"the US "should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth.""
We did that with Apollo 11. After that it was just a matter of consuming the rest of the built Apollo hardware as quickly as possible before Congress decided to pull the plug.
So the end was preordained, not a surprise. The only unknown was which flight of already built hardware would be the last, but the production lines were no longer around to build more.
Why are we rehashing this? ::)
The aftermath of the Apollo 13 mission creating a feeling that NASA risked having its entire manned space program cancelled if a crew was lost on another Apollo mission, and it combined with US taxpayers' expenditures on domestic programs and the Vietnam War led to the Apollo 18, 19, and 20 missions to be canceled, even though the Apollo 16 and 17 were allowed to take place thanks to Caspar Weinberger's advice. So, I agree with you, congressional budget cuts ensured that Apollo 17 would be the last Apollo moon mission to take place.
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I support the idea that President Johnson started the halt and President Nixon discovered he could not be reelected without a manned space program. The STS was developed to ensure reelection
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I support the idea that President Johnson started the halt and President Nixon discovered he could not be reelected without a manned space program. The STS was developed to ensure reelection
Apollo 8 LMP MGen William Anders has spoken many times about how the decision for the Shuttle was driven by reelection politics:
But Anders had foreseen Apollo’s end even before the moon landing, realizing that public allure — and the funding that came with it — would be limited. In 1969, he accepted President Nixon’s appointment to serve as executive secretary of the National Aeronautics and Space Council, charged with determining America’s post-Apollo role. Anders went along with the consensus that the space program should be “brought back down to Earth” to focus on weather, communications and military satellites. The question was whether to go whole hog on a large shuttle or build a smaller craft to test the waters and judge NASA’s claim that a shuttle would slash the cost of space delivery tenfold.
Anders, still mulling both approaches, vividly recalls a call from H.R. “Bob” Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, bluntly asking which option would provide more aerospace jobs in California. When he gave the obvious answer — the big shuttle — that was it. Click, decision made.
https://www.seattletimes.com/pacific-nw-magazine/with-a-view-from-beyond-the-moon-an-astronaut-talks-religion-politics-and-possibilities/ (https://www.seattletimes.com/pacific-nw-magazine/with-a-view-from-beyond-the-moon-an-astronaut-talks-religion-politics-and-possibilities/)
Nixon needed votes from Cali to be reelected. Votes come from jobs, not dreams.
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The aftermath of the Apollo 13 mission creating a feeling that NASA risked having its entire manned space program cancelled if a crew was lost on another Apollo mission, and it combined with US taxpayers' expenditures on domestic programs and the Vietnam War led to the Apollo 18, 19, and 20 missions to be canceled
Two-thirds right, at best. Apollo 20 was cancelled before Apollo 13, when the Skylab "dry-lab" decision required a Saturn V be re-assigned from Apollo 20 to Skylab.
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My personal opinion is that the death of JFK in Dallas on 22 November 1963 was the reason that the Apollo program was successful in landing an astronaut on the Moon before the end of 1969. At the same time, that was also the reason the Apollo lunar program ended with Apollo 17, with leftover bits that had already been built being used for Skylab program and the Apollo-Soyuz mission.
Other factors that contributed to Apollo's demise, include the USSR not having a lunar landing program with visible accomplishments and the costs of the US involvement in Vietnam.
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The aftermath of the Apollo 13 mission creating a feeling that NASA risked having its entire manned space program cancelled if a crew was lost on another Apollo mission, and it combined with US taxpayers' expenditures on domestic programs and the Vietnam War led to the Apollo 18, 19, and 20 missions to be canceled
Two-thirds right, at best. Apollo 20 was cancelled before Apollo 13, when the Skylab "dry-lab" decision required a Saturn V be re-assigned from Apollo 20 to Skylab.
Apollo 20 was canceled in Jan 1970 due to Skylab dry workshop decision and 19 and 15 were cancel in Sep 1970. The remaining missions were renumbered.
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Richard Nixon had to cancel the Apollo program to save money for the Space Shuttle
No, Apollo was cancelled in 1970. Shuttle decision wasn't until 1972.
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Richard Nixon had to cancel the Apollo program to save money for the Space Shuttle and a few other spaceflight programs.
e.
Why are we rehashing this? ::)
Because Vahe231991 has a habit of needlessly resurrecting dead threads
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Richard Nixon had to cancel the Apollo program to save money for the Space Shuttle and a few other spaceflight programs.
e.
Why are we rehashing this? ::)
Because Vahe231991 has a habit of needlessly resurrecting dead threads
I feel I should say that, not having been around this site since its earliest days, some of those zombie threads have interested me. And this one is an example.
It's an extremely well covered subject, sure, and anyone who actually wants a factual, clearly reasoned, and well researched, answer to the OP's question can read John Logsdon's After Apollo, https://www.google.co.uk/books/edition/After_Apollo/YsW_BwAAQBAJ?hl=en [includes 40 page preview],
which certainly helped me to lay that specific question to rest in my own mind. A recent interview with him that touches on Apollo is here https://www.aei.org/economics/looking-back-on-the-space-race-my-long-read-qa-with-john-logsdon/
But the fact that this topic generates such heat, and endlessly circling discussion, especially among people of a certain age who saw it happen (I was 6 when Apollo 8 went round the moon) means that what-to borrow a line from Beyond the Fringe-we might call the aftermyth of Apollo is also interesting in other ways that aren't purely historical. I think it's pretty obvious that this is why books like Baxter's Voyage have such resonance for people. Indeed in my case Voyage helped me to realise that I am glad I don't live in his alternative reality-I am not sure he wanted to either, I felt he wrote the book to find out. But counterfactuals have their own threads here, I know, and I am not that interested in them.
However I was particularly interested in geza's post, about how he saw Apollo from Hungary. I can't answer his last question, and won't try, but I may write a response to his post, about my own path to being reconciled with history. If it seems worth reading when I read it back, I'll post here, but even if it doesn't I am glad that Vahe231991 revived this slumbering thread, and that geza responded to it. I would note that the topic of the two-edged appeal of the past is very well explored in a recent prize winning book by a writer from Bulgaria, Georgi Gospodinov. This is the FT reporting last month on the book, Time Shelter:
Time Shelter centres on a mysterious protagonist named Gaustine who opens a “clinic for the past” that provides sanctuary for Alzheimer’s sufferers by reproducing periods of time when they felt content. Before long, however, healthy people are seeking refuge from the stress and tumult of contemporary life, and the “time shelter” develops into an all-consuming project.
The novel also explores themes of dementia, memory and the importance of individual experience. “I am from the generation which was paid with the cheque of the bright future,” Gospodinov told an audience at London’s Southbank Centre last week. “Everyone during the communist time promised us a bright future. Now, thirty years later, the populists are trying to sell me the pay cheque of the past. Don’t believe anyone who tries to sell you the past or future, the cheques are empty.”
Your mileage, of course, may vary ...
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Arguments sometimes rage over which president was responsible for killing the Apollo program.
Attached is the Apollo flight schedule as it stood in October 1962. To my knowledge, this is the earliest official schedule, produced shortly after lunar orbit rendezvous had been selected. The missions with the objective of "lunar exploration" are A-509 through -515. That is to say that the number of landing attempts scheduled was seven -- which is exactly the number that ultimately occurred.
Apollo-Saturn production could have been extended. More missions could have been flown even without additional production. But there is a good case to be made that Apollo's end was inherent in its beginning.
EDIT: Made thread title more descriptive
The debate surrounding the responsibility for ending the Apollo program often revolves around different presidential administrations. However, it's worth noting that the earliest official Apollo flight schedule, dating back to October 1962, already outlined seven planned landing attempts for lunar exploration. While it's true that Apollo-Saturn production could have been extended and additional missions were flown, some argue that the program's ultimate conclusion was rooted in its initial design
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Arguments sometimes rage over which president was responsible for killing the Apollo program.
Attached is the Apollo flight schedule as it stood in October 1962. To my knowledge, this is the earliest official schedule, produced shortly after lunar orbit rendezvous had been selected. The missions with the objective of "lunar exploration" are A-509 through -515. That is to say that the number of landing attempts scheduled was seven -- which is exactly the number that ultimately occurred.
Apollo-Saturn production could have been extended. More missions could have been flown even without additional production. But there is a good case to be made that Apollo's end was inherent in its beginning.
EDIT: Made thread title more descriptive
The debate surrounding the responsibility for ending the Apollo program often revolves around different presidential administrations. However, it's worth noting that the earliest official Apollo flight schedule, dating back to October 1962, already outlined seven planned landing attempts for lunar exploration. While it's true that Apollo-Saturn production could have been extended and additional missions were flown, some argue that the program's ultimate conclusion was rooted in its initial design
A post that reads uncannily as the OP's OP would, if summarised by an experimental AI ;-)
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JFK's call to rush to the moon before the end of the decade led to the amazing adventure that was Apollo, but it didn't create a sustainable space architecture and the victory was so absolute, it was like winning a football game 75-3.
The Soviet space program was aimless even as Gagarin shocked the world. Khrushchev had little interest beyond Vostok, and only wanted a space spectacular with each flight. Voskhod was a crudely adapted Vostok where they didn't even change the orientation of the control panel when the seats were shifted from the Vostok design, there was no LES, and Voskhod 2 was a near disaster. The technological gap between the Soviets and the Americans continued to widen and with the exception of Venus, the Americans planetary probes continuously out-shown their Soviet vacuum tubed counterparts despite being a quarter of their weight.
No further manned flights took place for two years until the Soyuz 1 disaster. Return to flight was no better when Soyuz 3 failed to dock with unmanned Soyuz 2, Soyuz 4 and 5 finally gave them success but that nearly ended in disaster during Soyuz's 5 reentry. The troika flight of Soyuz 6,7,8 failed to dock, Soyuz 9 finally showed some success, then Soyuz 10 failed to dock to Salyut. Soyuz 11's crew perished, then the Soviets lost their next three Salyuts until Salyut 3 but only achieved a single, paltry 14 day stay, when the next flight failed to dock. The Soviet space program was a disaster throughout the mid sixties and early seventies and their moon program suffered from poor design, insufficient funding, and even if they had landed, their LK lander was so puny it could offer no meaningful follow-up missions. Success only really started in 1975 with Salyut 4 and the ASTP mission.
The Soviets were never in the game, and I can only wonder what kind of intel JFK had that led to a Pearl Harbor reaction and force a moon landing so early that it killed the program. Had he had known how poorly the Soviet space program was faring, I'm not so sure he would have committed the nation to land on the moon before the end of the decade, and instead, would choose a slower but steadier program that wouldn't have been euthanized.
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The Soviets were never in the game, and I can only wonder what kind of intel JFK had that led to a Pearl Harbor reaction and force a moon landing so early that it killed the program. Had he had known how poorly the Soviet space program was faring, I'm not so sure he would have committed the nation to land on the moon before the end of the decade, and instead, would choose a slower but steadier program that wouldn't have been euthanized.
He did sort of backpedal and tried to do it jointly with the soviets, but they reneged. It was Johnson that kept it going
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JFK's call to rush to the moon before the end of the decade led to the amazing adventure that was Apollo, but it didn't create a sustainable space architecture and the victory was so absolute, it was like winning a football game 75-3.
The biggest part of the victory from that rush wasn't the Moon landing. The massive spending on technology in the sixties turned Silicon Valley and other tech centers around the country into the powerhouses they are now. By the mid to late sixties the Apollo program was purchasing 60 percent of everything produced by Silicon Valley companies. This rush to develop technology pumped up the small VC industry and created the mindset of high speed technology development. Regardless of whether or not Apollo continued, this rush was worth it in my opinion.
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The Soviets were never in the game, and I can only wonder what kind of intel JFK had that led to a Pearl Harbor reaction and force a moon landing so early that it killed the program. Had he had known how poorly the Soviet space program was faring, I'm not so sure he would have committed the nation to land on the moon before the end of the decade, and instead, would choose a slower but steadier program that wouldn't have been euthanized.
If space was actually the main value, as seen by JFK and advisors. If however the perceived value was as described by Willis (son of Harlow) Shapley https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willis_Shapley in an interview [*] done for Young, Silcock and Dunn's book in 1969ish, then a disproportionate response would perhaps be seen as a feature, not a bug.
First, who he was:
In 1942, Shapley began federal government service with the Bureau of the Budget (now the Office of Management and Budget) where he worked as an examiner.[1] In that role, he reviewed federal funding, including that for the Manhattan Project, which developed the first nuclear weapons.[1] He ultimately rose to the position of Deputy Chief of the Bureau's Military Division.[5][6]
Shapley's first involvement in the space program was in helping to craft the March 1958 memo that led to the creation of NASA.[1] Later, after the Soviet Union successfully launched the first man into space, he was part of the committee that drafted a memo advocating for NASA's crewed space program, which served as the starting point for President John F. Kennedy's Special Message to the Congress on Urgent National Needs on May 25, 1961, calling for the U.S. to land a man on the moon and return him safely to earth.[1]
In 1965, Shapley joined NASA as associate deputy administrator, replacing George L. Simpson, Jr.[3] His responsibilities included the space agency's budget, public and legislative affairs, Department of Defense and other interagency affairs, and international relations.[1][4]
In the interview Shapley noted that all the main ICBM/SLBM programmes were starting to peak and Apollo kept the people employed (and, importantly, ready to be redeployed) without fuelling the arms race.
On pp 118-119 of Young et al, Shapley is quoted as describing a time, 1961, when
With Atlas, Minuteman, Polaris and Titan, the four main elements of American strategic power, all moving towards completion, industry too, was, anticipating harder times. There was, Shapley says, great concern about this: "Could we afford the consequences of such a decline in defence procurement?"
[...]
Shapley pithily describes the logic:
People realized that space was the answer. It was a way of keeping up the aerospace economy and responding to the demand for more missiles without escalating the arms race. The moon programme would produce the booster in the fastest possible time. By keeping the missile-makers busy on space boosters you were also keeping up their ability to return to military missiles if necessary. You were maintaining preparedness without overarming the country.
To a space buff, especially with 20-20 hindsight, that may seem a bad call. In the early 60s cold war context it might not seem a bad call at all.
[* It would actually be interesting to know whether the complete interviews for this book were preserved-a few like Schriever, sound really quite interesting.]
[above expands a bit on my post to the 1968 mars mission thread https://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=54238.msg2435316#msg2435316 ]
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The biggest part of the victory from that rush wasn't the Moon landing. The massive spending on technology in the sixties turned Silicon Valley and other tech centers around the country into the powerhouses they are now. By the mid to late sixties the Apollo program was purchasing 60 percent of everything produced by Silicon Valley companies. This rush to develop technology pumped up the small VC industry and created the mindset of high speed technology development. Regardless of whether or not Apollo continued, this rush was worth it in my opinion.
It was actually the Minuteman program
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The biggest part of the victory from that rush wasn't the Moon landing. The massive spending on technology in the sixties turned Silicon Valley and other tech centers around the country into the powerhouses they are now. By the mid to late sixties the Apollo program was purchasing 60 percent of everything produced by Silicon Valley companies. This rush to develop technology pumped up the small VC industry and created the mindset of high speed technology development. Regardless of whether or not Apollo continued, this rush was worth it in my opinion.
It was actually the Minuteman program
I think MM gets credit in terms of numbers of transistors. But there was a lot of DoD money going into other Silicon Valley projects as well, such as tape recorders and processing systems. Just look at all the companies that provided payloads for the Program 989 satellites as well as the Program 770 signals intelligence satellites. We could ask what was more important--mass production of single units, or lots of different small contracts for unique payloads and capabilities?
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Fairchild semiconductors. Build the LM guidance computer, later spun off Intel, in 1968. Intel also kickstarted the 4004 and 8008 chips. They were created at Datapoint by engineers that once worked on the space program.
And Neil Armstrong in its last job for NASA at Headquarters (1970-71) helped transfering a few LM digital computers to a Dryden team working on a FBW Crusader.
This is Apollo legacy to the microchip and PC revolutions... among a few others.
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I would say a lack of nerve, exacerbated by Apollo 13, and the fact they might lose a crew sooner or later.
Pretty much what killed the shuttle after Columbia.
Bad enough to lose a crew on Earth but far worse to lose a crew on the lunar surface or have a dead crew permanently in some sort of orbit around the Earth as a constant reminder.
Keith
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This is Apollo legacy to the microchip and PC revolutions... among a few others.
No, that is the ICBM program legacy
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The biggest part of the victory from that rush wasn't the Moon landing. The massive spending on technology in the sixties turned Silicon Valley and other tech centers around the country into the powerhouses they are now. By the mid to late sixties the Apollo program was purchasing 60 percent of everything produced by Silicon Valley companies. This rush to develop technology pumped up the small VC industry and created the mindset of high speed technology development. Regardless of whether or not Apollo continued, this rush was worth it in my opinion.
It was actually the Minuteman program
The Minuteman I was deployed in 1962 and the Minuteman II by 1965. The initials development of chip lithography was paid for and developed by the Minuteman program in the 1950s and very early 1960s. According to the 2013 documentary "Silicon Valley" as part of the PBS show American Experience, the Apollo program was the biggest customer of Silicon Valley by the mid 1960s as the VCs started to flourish. A link to the documentary is here:
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/silicon/ (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/films/silicon/)
Edit - From the timeline of key events in Silicon Valley:
By 1964, Fairchild Semiconductor produces more than 100,000 integrated circuits for the Apollo space program.
By 1964, the Apollo program was the biggest customer of the biggest company in Silicon Valley. A 100,000 integrated circuits was massive in 1964. There were lots of other companies in Silicon Valley producing lots of specialty products for Apollo. It's been ten years since I watched this documentary, but I think it is either late in the first hour or early in the second hour when they mention that Apollo was buying 60 percent of everything being produced by 1966 or 1967 from Silicon Valley companies.
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Can I respectfully suggest that Eric and Jim may in some sense both be right. As Blackstar observes, there is an interesting difference between the results of building >1000 units in total of of the different generations of the Minuteman inertial guidance system https://airandspace.si.edu/collection-objects/minuteman-guidance-system/nasm_A19770995000 , which I know has featured in some interesting discussions in another thread, and the more bespoke requirements of Apollo.
And as he also notes, and others have also emphasised here, there was a multiscale industrial infrastructure based around Stanford that interacted with the nascent NRO-the most famous example being Bill Perry's ESL, described by Steve Blank as "the most important company you've never heard of" (though I realise many of you have): https://steveblank.com/2009/04/06/story-behind-%E2%80%9Cthe-secret-history%E2%80%9D-part-iii-the-most-important-company-you-never-heard-of/
I'd love to see a TV series based on Blank's "secret history of Silicon Valley", actually. I liked the quote from Bob Naka in an online history talk a year or two ago that in the 60s "we [i.e. NRO] rode the flywheel of Moore's law" --- I need to check this but that was the sense of it.
Granted that, human nature being what it is, success always has a thousand parents, to me what is most important is the synergy of all this. A good example is the story of how the B58 Hustler helped to create the first HP scientific calculator (and of course thence on to the pocket HP65) https://www.hpmemoryproject.org/timeline/john_minck/inside_hp_04.htm
The first HP desktop computer was introduced in 1968. Barney Oliver credits three people with the combined idea. Tom Osborne, designed a floating point calculator, while with his Logic Design Co, in Atlanta, GA, and brought the idea to HP. Malcolm McMillan had invented a mathematical algorithm and calculator for transcendental functions. Paul Stoft, and his group in HP Labs, saw the future of such a combined machine for engineering and other uses. In that era, we should remember, that clickety-clack teletype terminals were the accepted human interface, for time-share computers.
The HP 2100 mini-computer had been recently launched, with the purpose of controlling one instrument for each of 14 slide-in interface boards on the bottom cardcage. The new industry applications software language was called BASIC. Engineers were just beginning to anticipate the power of distributed computing, using small computers rather than a central big-daddy IBM mainframe. So the world was waiting for a scientific desktop machine.
Al Bagley and Dave Cochran shared with me some insights on the initial history of how HP got into the desktop calculator (HP 9100) business. Al was approached first because his Frequency & Time Division was the only one with substantial digital work going on. He decided that calculators didn't fit his product charter, so he asked Bob Grimm, manager of the Dymec Division, who also declined due to their business overload. All agreed that HP Labs would be the right place, which is where Dave got involved. "1) Tom Osborne talked to Barney, with his balsa wood, floating-point calculator; and some neat logic, like switching the power to turn on a function, but it was only four-function. 2) About the same time Malcolm McMillan spoke to Hewlett about a spin-off of the navigation computer in the B-58 Hustler bomber that could do transcendental functions, but was only fixed point. It was derived from a paper on pseudo division by Meggitt of IBM in 1962." For an interesting insight into how Osborne built a computer without any test equipment, see the Reference Section at the end for his interview with Steve Leibson.
"Barney and Hewlett compared notes, and Barney called a bunch of us together to see if we could marry the two concepts, with Osborne's help. We decided we could put McMillan's algorithms in Osborne's floating-point architecture. Barney asked, 'Who's going to do the algorithms?' I answered, 'What's an algorithm?' Barney said, 'Well Dave, you're going to find out.' Gee, I should have learned about volunteering from my stint in the military."
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Our general impression is, that public interest in space and financial support for space waned after the Landing. It is a false impression. There was never public support, or politicall will to spend so much money (relaitive to the US GDP of the time) on space exploration. This amount of money was spent only because of superpower rivalry. THAT goal was important enough. Apollo was much cheeper than a real war.
Of course, the Landing was a huge thing from many other point of view. It will be remembered in the far future, when most of the people will not know whether the Soviet Union existed before, or after the Landing. But this hugness was not the reason for spending that money. Space fans and emplyees deceived themselves into assuming that it was a financing for space and space was THAT important. Of course, the financing waned, when its justification disappeared.
I was 13 during the Landing. Grandpa, who had seen Bleriot flying when he was young, was very-very excited and infected me with space-fanship. I knew everything about Apollo. I was sure about the historic importance of the onset of spaceflight. I saw it as an huge leap in science, technology and human development. Grandpa told me also, that this was about superpower rivalry. I remember clearly that I preferred not to think about this detail.
So, there is a question that interest me badly. How would spaceflight have developed if there was no Cold War?
As I said below, I found this post interesting-and indeed touching-for very similar reasons to why I love the film The Dish. And as I said:
I was particularly interested in geza's post, about how he saw Apollo from Hungary. I can't answer his last question, and won't try, but I may write a response to his post, about my own path to being reconciled with history. If it seems worth reading when I read it back, I'll post here.
I've decided on reflection that I'd need a book, or at least a long article to summarise my path, and the executive summary is
that in the end I became more interested in trying to understand i) what did happen than ii) what could have happened and iii) what I'd like to have happened. Though I do think understanding i) requires honest answers about ii) and iii).
But I was also reminded, when looking at the remarkable workmanship in the Minuteman guidance system, of Clarke's words in 2001: A Space Odyssey, grabs below.
In a very real sense the book and film are attempted answers to your question, but on the very biggest scale of all-being concerned with the tool/weapon dichotomy and how fundamental it has been to pretty much all technology. So if there's a counterfactual, it's right back in the Primeval Night ...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=avjdKTqiVvQ
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There is actually one other substantive point that intrigued me in @geza's post, and which is definitely more relevant to the OP's question than my own 2001 post.
Our general impression is, that public interest in space and financial support for space waned after the Landing. It is a false impression. There was never public support, or politicall will to spend so much money (relative to the US GDP of the time) on space exploration. This amount of money was spent only because of superpower rivalry. THAT goal was important enough. Apollo was much cheaper than a real war.
I wondered what the relative magnitudes are here. Apollo's ballpark cost in late 60s dollars is from memory about $25 billion. The first cost estimate I encountered for the Vietnam war https://www.thebalancemoney.com/vietnam-war-facts-definition-costs-and-timeline-4154921
which I haven't checked is about a trillion (10 to the 12) dollars in present day dollars. That equates to about an 1/8 of a trillion on conversion from 1969 to now, so let's say ~ 125 billion.
So Apollo was about a factor 5 cheaper than the Vietnam War. Whether this is "much cheaper" rather depends on your point of view, and how long you date the war as having lasted.
I suspect the really important comparison is with the cost of the unfought WW3 ...
What I think this comparison does illuminate though is the statement that "everything we showed on screen [in 2001] would have been paid for by the Vietnam War" (or words to that effect), in an essay by Clarke. I think that is an untestable proposition, but is unlikely to be true, and is very much the optimistic Clarke I so loved to read in my youth.
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Can't remember where did I red that nor the exact number, but Apollo $25 billion value was worth only a few days (a week ?) of Vietnam war.
Which says something about the dirty and unwinnable war being eye-watering expensive.
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Can't remember where did I red that nor the exact number, but Apollo $25 billion value was worth only a few days (a week ?) of Vietnam war.
Which says something about the dirty and unwinnable war being eye-watering expensive.
I don't know where you read it but that's a rather higher number than e.g. Wikipedia.
Financial cost
United States expenditures in South Vietnam (SVN) (1953–1974) Direct costs only. Some estimates are higher.[325]
U.S. military costs $111 billion
U.S. military aid to SVN $16.138 billion
U.S. economic aid to SVN $7.315 billion
Total $134.53 billion
Total (2015 dollars) $1.020 trillion
Between 1953 and 1975, the United States was estimated to have spent $168 billion on the war (equivalent to $1.59 trillion in 2022).[326] This resulted in a large federal budget deficit. Other figures point to $138.9 billion from 1965 to 1974 (not inflation-adjusted), 10 times all education spending in the US and 50 times more than housing and community development spending within that time period.[327] General record-keeping was reported to have been sloppy for government spending during the war.[327] It was stated that war-spending could have paid off every mortgage in the US at that time, with money leftover.[327]
As of 2013, the U.S. government is paying Vietnam veterans and their families or survivors more than $22 billion a year in war-related claims.[3
I should add that I am not in any way saying it was a small amount of money, or minimising the human cost-I am just trying to scale Apollo more accurately than is usually done.
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The massive spending on technology in the sixties turned Silicon Valley and other tech centers around the country into the powerhouses they are now. By the mid to late sixties the Apollo program was purchasing 60 percent of everything produced by Silicon Valley companies.
This seems like a made up number to me.
I lived in that era, and I remember when I got my first transistor radio while in the 60's. You're telling me that 20 units of Apollo hardware were consuming more transistors than all the transistor radios being produced at that time?
And that doesn't even count all the technology that was being consumed by businesses like IBM, utilizing the latest technologies for products that had global appeal, or the technology that was being consumed by the military (such as Minuteman that Jim pointed out).
There is a lot of Apollo worship out there that claims all sorts of things that aren't true, and this one seems like one of those...
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Our general impression is, that public interest in space and financial support for space waned after the Landing. It is a false impression. There was never public support, or politicall will to spend so much money (relaitive to the US GDP of the time) on space exploration.
When people say "The Sixties", take it with a grain of salt because in the U.S. The Sixties started with the idealism of JFK, and came to a close with MLK and RFK assassinated, the failure of the Age of Aquarius, and the country in upheaval. Yeah, people paid attention during the Landing, but there were much more important things going on. (I was born in 1961, and am still a Space Geek, but only 2nd Class now.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4&ab_channel=AceRecords (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=goh2x_G0ct4&ab_channel=AceRecords)
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The massive spending on technology in the sixties turned Silicon Valley and other tech centers around the country into the powerhouses they are now. By the mid to late sixties the Apollo program was purchasing 60 percent of everything produced by Silicon Valley companies.
This seems like a made up number to me.
I lived in that era, and I remember when I got my first transistor radio while in the 60's. You're telling me that 20 units of Apollo hardware were consuming more transistors than all the transistor radios being produced at that time?
..
ICs (integrated Circuits) not transistors. It is not made up. Minuteman and Apollo drove the products rates for them.
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The massive spending on technology in the sixties turned Silicon Valley and other tech centers around the country into the powerhouses they are now. By the mid to late sixties the Apollo program was purchasing 60 percent of everything produced by Silicon Valley companies.
This seems like a made up number to me.
I lived in that era, and I remember when I got my first transistor radio while in the 60's. You're telling me that 20 units of Apollo hardware were consuming more transistors than all the transistor radios being produced at that time?
..
ICs (integrated Circuits) not transistors. It is not made up. Minuteman and Apollo drove the products rates for them.
Yep. WIkipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit
claims that ICs entered production in about 1961, and quotes a book source as saying
"NASA's Apollo Program was the largest single consumer of integrated circuits between 1961 and 1965."
the source is "Journey to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Guidance Computer"
https://books.google.com/books?id=G8Dml1x55r0C
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The massive spending on technology in the sixties turned Silicon Valley and other tech centers around the country into the powerhouses they are now. By the mid to late sixties the Apollo program was purchasing 60 percent of everything produced by Silicon Valley companies.
This seems like a made up number to me.
I lived in that era, and I remember when I got my first transistor radio while in the 60's. You're telling me that 20 units of Apollo hardware were consuming more transistors than all the transistor radios being produced at that time?
And that doesn't even count all the technology that was being consumed by businesses like IBM, utilizing the latest technologies for products that had global appeal, or the technology that was being consumed by the military (such as Minuteman that Jim pointed out).
There is a lot of Apollo worship out there that claims all sorts of things that aren't true, and this one seems like one of those...
Transistors were being produced in many places besides Silicon Valley so those are irrelevant to the count of products produced in Silicon Valley. The same was true for lots of other technology of the day. It was the ICs that really made Silicon Valley grow at the time. Minuteman and Apollo had the money that could afford to pay for the development, which was not cheap. That is what kick started Silicon Valley into its growth. This has nothing to do with what you derisively call "Apollo worship". It has everything to do with being familiar with the history of technology.
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Aaron Bateman has a new article in a journal that discusses intelligence community support of Silicon Valley during the 1960s. It went way beyond ICs. It included things like building up the education infrastructure at Stanford University to produce the people who would work in Silicon Valley.
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Aaron Bateman has a new article in a journal that discusses intelligence community support of Silicon Valley during the 1960s. It went way beyond ICs. It included things like building up the education infrastructure at Stanford University to produce the people who would work in Silicon Valley.
I look forward to reading that-do you have a link ?
Meanwhile I also need to catch up with Steve Blank's remarkable series here: https://steveblank.com/secret-history/
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Our general impression is, that public interest in space and financial support for space waned after the Landing. It is a false impression. There was never public support, or politicall will to spend so much money (relaitive to the US GDP of the time) on space exploration.
When people say "The Sixties", take it with a grain of salt because in the U.S. The Sixties started with the idealism of JFK, and came to a close with MLK and RFK assassinated, the failure of the Age of Aquarius, and the country in upheaval. Yeah, people paid attention during the Landing, but there were much more important things going on. (I was born in 1961, and am still a Space Geek, but only 2nd Class now.)
Indeed. I always feel that one of the infinite possible choice of things to symbolise this extraordinary arc is that 2001 was concieved in 1963-64, filmed in about December 65-1967, and released in mid 1968. These are the eras of a Please Please Me/With The Beatles/Hard Day's Night; Rubber Soul/Revolver/Pepper; and The White Album respectively, if we convert, rather than dog years, to Beatles years ;-);-)
I think that a fair amount of my early life was spent first trying to understand the extraordinary events of Apollo which flashed before my eyes aged from about 6 to 10, and then using space as a gateway to the even richer story of the country that achieved it, and the decade in which it happened. So I resonated with your post.
One of many eyewitness accounts that I still find interesting is Norman Mailer's Fire On The Moon, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2019/07/norman-mailers-fire-moon-blastoff/594154/ and I liked Geoff Dyer's recent preface to a new Penguin Classics edition, reproduced here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/may/24/norman-mailer-fire-moon-book-landings
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Spotted at Kazakhstan. N-1 mural.
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Arguments sometimes rage over which president was responsible for killing the Apollo program.
Attached is the Apollo flight schedule as it stood in October 1962. To my knowledge, this is the earliest official schedule, produced shortly after lunar orbit rendezvous had been selected. The missions with the objective of "lunar exploration" are A-509 through -515. That is to say that the number of landing attempts scheduled was seven -- which is exactly the number that ultimately occurred.
Apollo-Saturn production could have been extended. More missions could have been flown even without additional production. But there is a good case to be made that Apollo's end was inherent in its beginning.
Notify me of replies. Return to this topic. Don't use smileys.
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EDIT: Made thread title more descriptive
Hello! hope you all are well, The Apollo program came to an end due to a mix of reasons, such as shifting national priorities, limited funds, and the successful completion of its main objective. It wouldn't be fair to solely blame any single president for its conclusion.
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I know that it is mentioned up-thread, but it's so important that it is worth revisiting. John Logsdon's book is really the definitive answer on this subject:
https://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/1137438525/spaceviews
(I don't know why the image at Amazon is different than the book's cover. One of life's little mysteries, I guess.)
Going back to the thread topic question about what caused the end of Apollo, it somewhat depends upon what kind of answer you are looking for. If you want a simple, one or two sentence answer, then you can get it. But it doesn't fully explain the issue. The full answer is in Logsdon's book. And when you read it you'll be very surprised by a number of things. For instance, during the Nixon administration there were not only people looking to end Apollo, or end it short (even at Apollo 14). There were people looking to end human spaceflight altogether, and even people who were talking about eliminating NASA, or at the least renaming it and making it a more generic science and technology agency that maybe did space on the side.
So when people ask how come we got so little after Apollo, in some ways we were lucky that we got anything at all.
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The full answer is in Logsdon's book. And when you read it you'll be very surprised by a number of things. For instance, during the Nixon administration there were not only people looking to end Apollo, or end it short (even at Apollo 14). There were people looking to end human spaceflight altogether, and even people who were talking about eliminating NASA, or at the least renaming it and making it a more generic science and technology agency that maybe did space on the side.
If you are old enough to have been going on nine at the time of Apollo 14, and if your family read the UK's Daily Telegraph (below), you'll be slightly less surprised ;-) ... however I general I agree, and heartily concur re the book ... as I said upthread it really did help lay the issue to rest for me.
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So when people ask how come we got so little after Apollo, in some ways we were lucky that we got anything at all.
Honestly, the question of why we got so little after Apollo is far less of a conundrum then why Apollo happened in the first place.
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When people say "The Sixties", take it with a grain of salt because in the U.S. The Sixties started with the idealism of JFK, and came to a close with MLK and RFK assassinated, the failure of the Age of Aquarius, and the country in upheaval. Yeah, people paid attention during the Landing, but there were much more important things going on. (I was born in 1961, and am still a Space Geek, but only 2nd Class now.)
I loved Oliver Morton's coinage of the phrase "recovering space addict" in his characteristically brilliant review of one of Maria Benjamin's books here: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/jan/18/featuresreviews.guardianreview6
His own "recovery" has been very artistically fruitful, having given rise to this essay https://www.edge.org/response-detail/10839
at Edge.org, and to the coda, recounting a Falcon launch and recovery from the Cape, of his recent book on the Moon, among other work. I'd say that, like mine, it's ongoing ...
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The full answer is in Logsdon's book. And when you read it you'll be very surprised by a number of things. For instance, during the Nixon administration there were not only people looking to end Apollo, or end it short (even at Apollo 14). There were people looking to end human spaceflight altogether, and even people who were talking about eliminating NASA, or at the least renaming it and making it a more generic science and technology agency that maybe did space on the side.
If you are old enough to have been going on nine at the time of Apollo 14, and if your family read the UK's Daily Telegraph (below), you'll be slightly less surprised ;-) ... however I general I agree, and heartily concur re the book ... as I said upthread it really did help lay the issue to rest for me.
I apologise for slight snark in my reply, but am glad I chased up that 1971 article. I'd not seen that issue for decades but have now bought one, and it's interesting to see how Ken Gatland (at various times BIS vice-president, Spaceflight's editor and the Sunday Telegraph's space correspondent) summarised the situation in spring 1971.
It's also striking to see that while he acknowledges that if Post Apollo not funded past Skylab the US will end manned spaceflight, optimism is still v much evident in the costings. A 12 man space station, shuttle and tug for 10 billion (i.e. less than half cost of Apollo) seems quite a good deal ;-)
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To me the most maddening thing is that the hardware existed for at least two more lunar flights. They could have had them at virtually no cost
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To me the most maddening thing is that the hardware existed for at least two more lunar flights. They could have had them at virtually no cost
Yes, but that’s also like saying you could buy a Piper Cherokee for $40,000. Once you add the operating costs like training, fuel, support and recovery crew, it’s not a zero/low cost item any more.
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To me the most maddening thing is that the hardware existed for at least two more lunar flights. They could have had them at virtually no cost
It was not just cost, there was a lot of concern about risk, including in NASA. There was a view that the more flights, the more likely it was that they were going to kill somebody. Apollo 13 scared a bunch of people.
I really wish that those last two flights had happened, but I'm not sure that they were fully justified. I think the science would have been great.
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Yes, but that’s also like saying you could buy a Piper Cherokee for $40,000. Once you add the operating costs like training, fuel, support and recovery crew, it’s not a zero/low cost item any more.
Indeed. Flying Apollos 18 and 19 would have cost $800 million in 1970 dollars (vs a predicted $7.45 billion total development cost of the Shuttle). More importantly this money would be available immediately without higher approval. Funding from the cancelled Apollos covered Shuttle concept work that allowed it to get a formal go-ahead in 1972.
The way Thomas Paine saw things, it was either cancel the two missions or give up on the Shuttle, and the later had far greater long term promise. NASA's budget was rapidly shrinking, it was clear this money wouldn't be available after 1972 so it was now or never.
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The way Thomas Paine saw things, it was either cancel the two missions or give up on the Shuttle, and the later had far greater long term promise. NASA's budget was rapidly shrinking, it was clear this money wouldn't be available after 1972 so it was now or never.
Wrong. It wasn't Paine's doing. And they were cancelled in Sept 1970, long before shuttle was in the major part of the budget.
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Wrong. It wasn't Paine's doing. And they were cancelled in Sept 1970, long before shuttle was in the major part of the budget.
Well, in the end it was Nixon's OMB and congress's fault for not providing funding.
Apollo 18 and 19 were cancelled as part of the budget negotiations for FY 1971. The process started in mid-late 1969, with Paine initially requesting $4.2 billion in funding. The proposed budget included work on a proposed reusable space shuttle, a nuclear space tug, and a space station. (this was already after Paine has been told to drop any discussion of a manned Mars landing)
The OMB responded with a figure of $3.333 billion. Paine was furious, at that level NASA wouldn't even be able to fund development of a new space probe, much less anything manned.
In response Paine permanently shut down the Saturn V production line (which had been sitting idle since 1967), reduced the flight rate of Apollo missions from 4x a year to 2x a year, and delayed the Viking probes' landing from 1973 to 1975. Through this he managed to squeak out $110 million for work on the Shuttle.
But this was just a budget request, it still had to go to congress for approval. The budget was sent to congress in January 1970, and they took it up in debate from August to September 1970. They ended up cutting NASA funding to $3.269 billion.
To make up part of the $64 million dollar shortfall, Paine cancelled Apollo 18 and 19 on September 2, 1970. It saved $42 million dollars for FY 1971. Two weeks later he resigned from NASA.
The Shuttle received its full $110 million in initial funding.
In 1971 NASA managed to find $105 million for Shuttle R&D for the FY 1972 budget, despite another decrease in overall funding.
NASA finalized the design of the Shuttle in 1972, and after a good deal of convincing Nixon and congress were persuaded to approve it it as a program of record for FY 1973 with $200 million in R&D money. That didn't keep them from cutting NASA's budget again though.
The next year, in 1973, NASA's budget bottomed out at just a hair over $3 billion. Yet the Shuttle was finally starting to pick up speed with $475 million in funding in FY 1974.
Apollo 18 and 19 would have probably flown in FY 1973 and FY 1974, respectively.* at a cost of $800 million. In the real world, NASA spent around that same amount up until FY 1974 developing the Shuttle.
Would really recommend reading The Space Shuttle Decision by T.A. Heppenheimer, especially chapters 3 and 4, he goes into a lot of great detail about this.
*note: the US government fiscal year runs from October 1st to September 30th. From what I've been able to tell, when Apollo 19 was cancelled it was targeting a December 1973 launch, which would have fallen in FY 1974.
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Wrong. It wasn't Paine's doing. And they were cancelled in Sept 1970, long before shuttle was in the major part of the budget.
Well, in the end it was Nixon's OMB and congress's fault for not providing funding.
<snip>
Would really recommend reading The Space Shuttle Decision by T.A. Heppenheimer, especially chapters 3 and 4, he goes into a lot of great detail about this.
Logsdon and Heppenheimer both have prominent place on my shelves, both well worth reading, but latter is free, so readers, fill your boots ... https://history.nasa.gov/SP-4221/sp4221.htm and various other versions including archive.org and pdf via NTRS.
But I can't help wondering how well the estimates that Gatland was quoting in early 1971 reflected NASA's own for OMB. See grab below. If accurate, and Gatland was very well connected for the time, I 'd say OMB were entitled to some scepticism.
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But I can't help wondering how well the estimates that Gatland was quoting in early 1971 reflected NASA's own for OMB. See grab below. If accurate, and Gatland was very well connected for the time, I 'd say OMB were entitled to some skepticism.
Assuming he didn't just make his own guesses, those must have come from one of the contractors working on the Shuttle's Phase B studies.
In March 1970, towards the end of the Phase A studies, NASA estimated the development cost of a fully reusable Shuttle at $9.92 billion. That was presented to the OMB alongside options for using current expendables and new expendables (see attached chart, from Heppenheimer).
As you can see, the Shuttle comes out ahead despite its much higher development costs. But this estimate was predicated on a flight rate of 57 launches a year from 1978-1990. The OMB wasn't very impressed. NASA hadn't provided much proof the demand was there for that many launches.
It's easy to paint the OMB as the bad guys in this story, but they had a point. NASA was basically pulling numbers out of thin air. IMO NASA had gotten very used to getting whatever they wanted no matter the cost during the Apollo program, and weren't used to making an economic case for themselves.
After a great deal of effort (described in my previous post), a few months later NASA managed to get $100 million for Phase B studies in FY 1971. A big focus of those studies was ways to reduce development costs. NASA wouldn't make another official cost estimate, even an internal one, until late-1971.
All of the Phase B contractors would be continuously making cost estimates though. It's hard to read the magazine cover you posted earlier in the thread, but I think it says January 1971. That's right around the time Grumman figured out that disposable LH2 tanks lets you radically reduce the size of the orbiter, and allows for lower staging speeds which reduced the size of the booster.
That cut development costs considerably. Grumman put their estimate at $6.497 billion, which if you squint might be rounded down to $6 billion. NASA was so excited that in March 1971 they requested all the contractors make a version of their design with external tanks.
But NASA knew that still wouldn't be low enough for the OMB, so they had the contractors delete the SSMEs and the reusable heat tiles. The orbiter would use 4 J-2 engines and an ablative heat shield. The first stage would either be a manned version of the Saturn S-1C, or a large pressure fed booster that would parachute into the sea and be recovered. In September NASA had all the contractors present cost estimates (see chart, again from Heppenheimer)
But in reality these estimates were ridiculously low, especially for the winged S-1C. There were some internal debates on this, and eventually NASA requested an additional set of cost estimates for parallel staging, which were delivered in November 1971 (see chart, from Heppenheimer). It quickly became clear this was the only option that even stood a chance at meeting budget limits.
None of this was shown to OMB though, it was way too technical for them. They had agreed to fund Phase B for FY 1972 without a cost estimate, but were pretty unhappy about it. After a whole lot more discussions, negotiations, and arguments the Nixon admin ended up unexpectedly overruling the OMB and agreeing to fund the Shuttle with SSMEs and reusable heat tiles for FY 1973.
Ironically, the final approved development cost was $5.5 billion. Turns out Gatland's estimate was more accurate than NASA's!
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The massive spending on technology in the sixties turned Silicon Valley and other tech centers around the country into the powerhouses they are now. By the mid to late sixties the Apollo program was purchasing 60 percent of everything produced by Silicon Valley companies.
This seems like a made up number to me.
I lived in that era, and I remember when I got my first transistor radio while in the 60's. You're telling me that 20 units of Apollo hardware were consuming more transistors than all the transistor radios being produced at that time?
..
ICs (integrated Circuits) not transistors. It is not made up. Minuteman and Apollo drove the products rates for them.
Yep. WIkipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit
claims that ICs entered production in about 1961, and quotes a book source as saying
"NASA's Apollo Program was the largest single consumer of integrated circuits between 1961 and 1965."
the source is "Journey to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Guidance Computer"
https://books.google.com/books?id=G8Dml1x55r0C
Just a small addendum to the above: NASA wasn't purchasing ICs just for "20 units of Apollo hardware," they had many HUGE computers on the ground that did the vast majority of their launch and orbital trajectory guidance calculations.
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Wrong. It wasn't Paine's doing. And they were cancelled in Sept 1970, long before shuttle was in the major part of the budget.
*note: the US government fiscal year runs from October 1st to September 30th. From what I've been able to tell, when Apollo 19 was cancelled it was targeting a December 1973 launch, which would have fallen in FY 1974.
Wrong! The US Gov’t fiscal year, until 1977, was 1 July to 30 June.
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The massive spending on technology in the sixties turned Silicon Valley and other tech centers around the country into the powerhouses they are now. By the mid to late sixties the Apollo program was purchasing 60 percent of everything produced by Silicon Valley companies.
This seems like a made up number to me.
I lived in that era, and I remember when I got my first transistor radio while in the 60's. You're telling me that 20 units of Apollo hardware were consuming more transistors than all the transistor radios being produced at that time?
..
ICs (integrated Circuits) not transistors. It is not made up. Minuteman and Apollo drove the products rates for them.
Yep. WIkipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit
claims that ICs entered production in about 1961, and quotes a book source as saying
"NASA's Apollo Program was the largest single consumer of integrated circuits between 1961 and 1965."
the source is "Journey to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Guidance Computer"
https://books.google.com/books?id=G8Dml1x55r0C
Just a small addendum to the above: NASA wasn't purchasing ICs just for "20 units of Apollo hardware," they had many HUGE computers on the ground that did the vast majority of their launch and orbital trajectory guidance calculations.
Computers were 2nd generation until about 1965. They used discrete transistors, not ICs. IBM 7090, CDC 3800, Burroughs 5500, UNIVAC 494, etc. Even the first IBM 360s in 1964 used "hybrids" not ICs. Some of those big beasties were still in service as hand-me-downs to second-tier agencies as late as 1971.
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The massive spending on technology in the sixties turned Silicon Valley and other tech centers around the country into the powerhouses they are now. By the mid to late sixties the Apollo program was purchasing 60 percent of everything produced by Silicon Valley companies.
This seems like a made up number to me.
I lived in that era, and I remember when I got my first transistor radio while in the 60's. You're telling me that 20 units of Apollo hardware were consuming more transistors than all the transistor radios being produced at that time?
..
ICs (integrated Circuits) not transistors. It is not made up. Minuteman and Apollo drove the products rates for them.
Yep. WIkipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integrated_circuit
claims that ICs entered production in about 1961, and quotes a book source as saying
"NASA's Apollo Program was the largest single consumer of integrated circuits between 1961 and 1965."
the source is "Journey to the Moon: The History of the Apollo Guidance Computer"
https://books.google.com/books?id=G8Dml1x55r0C
Just a small addendum to the above: NASA wasn't purchasing ICs just for "20 units of Apollo hardware," they had many HUGE computers on the ground that did the vast majority of their launch and orbital trajectory guidance calculations.
Computers were 2nd generation until about 1965. They used discrete transistors, not ICs. IBM 7090, CDC 3800, Burroughs 5500, UNIVAC 494, etc. Even the first IBM 360s in 1964 used "hybrids" not ICs. Some of those big beasties were still in service as hand-me-downs to second-tier agencies as late as 1971.
Interesting. I knew NASA had many large computers - five of those IBM 360 machines (Models 91 and 95) - which were used to calculate trajectories for Apollo. I simply presumed ICs would have been used in their construction. It is deeply fascinating to me that IBM did not ship out any computers made with ICs until years later.
Doing some more digging into this later, but I found this useful chart.
Source: https://historyofcomputercommunications.info/section/2.20/the-integrated-circuit-1959/
Interesting summary article about how MIT bought so many ICs for NASA and forced their production to become more reliable:
https://www.fastcompany.com/90362753/how-nasa-gave-birth-to-modern-computing-and-gets-no-credit-for-it
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Computers were 2nd generation until about 1965. They used discrete transistors, not ICs. IBM 7090, CDC 3800, Burroughs 5500, UNIVAC 494, etc. Even the first IBM 360s in 1964 used "hybrids" not ICs. Some of those big beasties were still in service as hand-me-downs to second-tier agencies as late as 1971.
Interesting. I knew NASA had many large computers - five of those IBM 360 machines (Models 91 and 95) - which were used to calculate trajectories for Apollo. I simply presumed ICs would have been used in their construction. It is deeply fascinating to me that IBM did not ship out any computers made with ICs until years later.
I was "privileged"(?!) to program for Burroughs 5500, IBM 7040, IBM 1401, and CDC 3800 that had been handed down to places I worked for in the early 1970s. We got useful work done, but it was really false economy because of the cost of electricity for the machines and the air conditioners and the extreme maintenance costs. Fantastic learning experience.
Over on the Apollo side, I would have guessed NASA was using mostly CDC 6400 and 6600s, which were also transistor machines. I'm guessing the ICs that started this conversation were mostly used in the actual spacecraft.
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Yes, but that’s also like saying you could buy a Piper Cherokee for $40,000. Once you add the operating costs like training, fuel, support and recovery crew, it’s not a zero/low cost item any more.
Indeed. Flying Apollos 18 and 19 would have cost $800 million in 1970 dollars (vs a predicted $7.45 billion total development cost of the Shuttle). More importantly this money would be available immediately without higher approval. Funding from the cancelled Apollos covered Shuttle concept work that allowed it to get a formal go-ahead in 1972.
The way Thomas Paine saw things, it was either cancel the two missions or give up on the Shuttle, and the later had far greater long term promise. NASA's budget was rapidly shrinking, it was clear this money wouldn't be available after 1972 so it was now or never.
It’s striking that that $800 M equates to about 6 1/2 billion today if I’ve done sums right, or about 2/3 of JWST. Obviously an apples and oranges comparison, and perhaps quite meaningless, but it emphasise how hard comparing science yields can be.
I’m lucky in that I saw the Apollo landings on tv, but I can’t say that I miss the absence of Apollo 18 and 19.
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Computers were 2nd generation until about 1965. They used discrete transistors, not ICs. IBM 7090, CDC 3800, Burroughs 5500, UNIVAC 494, etc. Even the first IBM 360s in 1964 used "hybrids" not ICs. Some of those big beasties were still in service as hand-me-downs to second-tier agencies as late as 1971.
Interesting. I knew NASA had many large computers - five of those IBM 360 machines (Models 91 and 95) - which were used to calculate trajectories for Apollo. I simply presumed ICs would have been used in their construction. It is deeply fascinating to me that IBM did not ship out any computers made with ICs until years later.
I was "privileged"(?!) to program for Burroughs 5500, IBM 7040, IBM 1401, and CDC 3800 that had been handed down to places I worked for in the early 1970s. We got useful work done, but it was really false economy because of the cost of electricity for the machines and the air conditioners and the extreme maintenance costs. Fantastic learning experience.
Over on the Apollo side, I would have guessed NASA was using mostly CDC 6400 and 6600s, which were also transistor machines. I'm guessing the ICs that started this conversation were mostly used in the actual spacecraft.
Apparently yes, from what I'm learning, all or almost all of the ICs NASA bought went into developing, testing, and building the guidance computers for the CM and LM, where mass was at a premium and computing power was most needed. The Saturn rocket guidance computers used transistors.
A total of 75 AGCs (Apollo Guidance Computers) were built. Early builds had 4,100 ICs each, with the flight computers for the lunar landings using about 2,800 ICs (fewer, but more capable).
Fun fact: Surplus AGC hardware was used in 1972 to develop an experimental fly-by-wire system for an F-8 Crusader. Lessons learned were directly applied to the Space Shuttle's fly-by-wire system and to the development of military fly-by-wire systems.
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Computers were 2nd generation until about 1965. They used discrete transistors, not ICs. IBM 7090, CDC 3800, Burroughs 5500, UNIVAC 494, etc. Even the first IBM 360s in 1964 used "hybrids" not ICs. Some of those big beasties were still in service as hand-me-downs to second-tier agencies as late as 1971.
Interesting. I knew NASA had many large computers - five of those IBM 360 machines (Models 91 and 95) - which were used to calculate trajectories for Apollo. I simply presumed ICs would have been used in their construction. It is deeply fascinating to me that IBM did not ship out any computers made with ICs until years later.
I was "privileged"(?!) to program for Burroughs 5500, IBM 7040, IBM 1401, and CDC 3800 that had been handed down to places I worked for in the early 1970s. We got useful work done, but it was really false economy because of the cost of electricity for the machines and the air conditioners and the extreme maintenance costs. Fantastic learning experience.
Over on the Apollo side, I would have guessed NASA was using mostly CDC 6400 and 6600s, which were also transistor machines. I'm guessing the ICs that started this conversation were mostly used in the actual spacecraft.
Apparently yes, from what I'm learning, all or almost all of the ICs NASA bought went into developing, testing, and building the guidance computers for the CM and LM, where mass was at a premium and computing power was most needed. The Saturn rocket guidance computers used transistors.
A total of 75 AGCs (Apollo Guidance Computers) were built. Early builds had 4,100 ICs each, with the flight computers for the lunar landings using about 2,800 ICs (fewer, but more capable).
Fun fact: Surplus AGC hardware was used in 1972 to develop an experimental fly-by-wire system for an F-8 Crusader. Lessons learned were directly applied to the Space Shuttle's fly-by-wire system and to the development of military fly-by-wire systems.
Was interested in this remark from the Fast Company article you linked to
Inside the government, there was only NASA using the chips, and the Air Force’s Minuteman missile, a relatively small project compared with the Apollo computers.
I assume these were Minuteman 3? These would have been several hundred units but presumably less chips per unit?
I’d also be curious to know about later space computers and ICs, eg the IBM computers for the shuttle and MOL that have been discussed in MOL thread.
It would also of course be interesting to know about when the NSA started to use them, it reportedly had its own fab plant at Fort Meade by the 90s iirc.
And I imagine Bill Perry’s ESL were investigating them pretty early though we may never know when and how in detail.
I find v myself wonder when I first saw an IC chip. Probably taking apart a dead pocket calculator in the 70s I reckon… back when to quote Douglas Adams we thought digital watches were a pretty neat idea ;-)
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Was interested in this remark from the Fast Company article you linked to
Inside the government, there was only NASA using the chips, and the Air Force’s Minuteman missile, a relatively small project compared with the Apollo computers.
I assume these were Minuteman 3? These would have been several hundred units but presumably less chips per unit?
It was MM II
I’d also be curious to know about later space computers and ICs, eg the IBM computers for the shuttle and MOL that have been discussed in MOL thread.
The shuttle computers were based on the B-1 computer
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I’d also be curious to know about later space computers and ICs, eg the IBM computers for the shuttle and MOL that have been discussed in MOL thread.
<snip>
Computers in Spaceflight: The NASA Experience, which covers Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, and STS, is a good place to start
https://history.nasa.gov/computers/Part1.html (https://history.nasa.gov/computers/Part1.html)
More details on the STS computers, and some of the problems encountered, can be found, e.g., at
https://klabs.org/DEI/Processor/shuttle/ (https://klabs.org/DEI/Processor/shuttle/)
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Wrong! The US Gov’t fiscal year, until 1977, was 1 July to 30 June.
Huh, you learn something new every day!
The shuttle computers were based on the B-1 computer
Not quite.
Both the Shuttle and the B-1 used variants of the AP-101. The Shuttle initially used the AP-101B (later upgraded to the AP-101S in the 90s), while the B-1 used the AP-101F. The AP-101B predates the AP-101F used on the B-1.
The AP-101 was based on the AP-1, which was used on the F-15. The AP-1 itself was based on the IBM System/360, which among other things was used in mission control during the Apollo program. System/360 descendants were also used for MOL and Skylab.
A big part of the Shuttle program was this use of "off the shell parts" (although in many cases they would be so heavily modified as to show little relation with their forebearers), in contrast to Apollo which used mostly custom hardware.
An underrated aspect of the end of Apollo was that it was part of the general deemphasis on government lead industrial policy that occurred in the 1970s.
From 1950-1960 defense spending as a % of GDP averaged 2-3x as much as it does today, and a large amount of that was in the aviation sector. Eisenhower was disillusioned with the military-industrial complex and repeatedly spoke against increased military funding, but didn't secure any major cuts during his term.
Kennedy and later Johnson would though. Part of Apollo's purpose was to provide a replacement for the defense spending that would usually go to these contractors. From 1964-1966 NASA essentially replaced military funding on a 1:1 basis. And then, when Vietnam war spending began to ramp up in 1967, you immediately saw a hesitation to grow NASA's funding and later to cut it.
Kennedy and Johnson were New Deal democrats, while they might have been against large amounts of peacetime military spending, they weren't very interested in shrinking the size of government. Nixon, a republican, was however. He made cuts to military spending post-Vietnam, but was uninterested in replacing it with funding for NASA.
This lead to a major recession in the aerospace sector in the early 1970s, which was one of the factors that lead him to approve the Space Shuttle in early 1972. He had an election coming up later that year, and wanted to keep unemployment numbers from falling too heavily.
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The AP-101 was based on the AP-1, which was used on the F-15. The AP-1 itself was based on the IBM System/360, which among other things was used in mission control during the Apollo program. System/360 descendants were also used for MOL and Skylab.
Thanks for the trip down memory lane. Bit OT, but... S/360 (specifically 4/Pi) derivates were everywhere and have a lineage predating even the F-15. Including *gasp* desktop "calculators" (another subject). Reason was simple: we could develop code on existing assets with far better dev-test-debug capabilities. (That was before high fidelity software-hardware emulators were readily available.)
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Thanks for the trip down memory lane. Bit OT, but... S/360 (specifically 4/Pi) derivates were everywhere and have a lineage predating even the F-15. Including *gasp* desktop "calculators" (another subject). Reason was simple: we could develop code on existing assets with far better dev-test-debug capabilities. (That was before high fidelity software-hardware emulators were readily available.)
Oh yeah, I am really underselling the reach of the IBM System/360, which was one of the most influential computer systems ever built. It basically invented the concept of having different computer models use the same instruction set, i.e. allowing the same program to run on different models of computer.
By that measure, flying the Space Shuttle was actually one of the less important parts of the System/360's story.
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Over on the Apollo side, I would have guessed NASA was using mostly CDC 6400 and 6600s, which were also transistor discrete logic machines. I'm guessing the ICs that started this conversation were mostly used in the actual spacecraft.
Nit: FTFY. Those machines were great. CDC 6xxx series could not get the speed required with anything other than discrete logic.[1]
True medium-scale integrated circuits (MSI) showed up later; aka "IC's". That's when we saw the move from less analog to more digital.
[1] Those little plug-in modules you see in the attached image (credit Steve Jurvetson). All discrete. Spent a lot of time around those and sitting in front of that console, among other things playing Lunar Lander, which was a NASA training aid (oh, and chess). Excellent diagnostics. Which is how we managed to trade time with the CDC customer engineers to play. :).
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An underrated aspect of the end of Apollo was that it was part of the general deemphasis on government lead industrial policy that occurred in the 1970s.
From 1950-1960 defense spending as a % of GDP averaged 2-3x as much as it does today, and a large amount of that was in the aviation sector. Eisenhower was disillusioned with the military-industrial complex and repeatedly spoke against increased military funding, but didn't secure any major cuts during his term.
Kennedy and later Johnson would though. Part of Apollo's purpose was to provide a replacement for the defense spending that would usually go to these contractors. From 1964-1966 NASA essentially replaced military funding on a 1:1 basis. And then, when Vietnam war spending began to ramp up in 1967, you immediately saw a hesitation to grow NASA's funding and later to cut it.
Kennedy and Johnson were New Deal democrats, while they might have been against large amounts of peacetime military spending, they weren't very interested in shrinking the size of government. Nixon, a republican, was however. He made cuts to military spending post-Vietnam, but was uninterested in replacing it with funding for NASA.
This lead to a major recession in the aerospace sector in the early 1970s, which was one of the factors that lead him to approve the Space Shuttle in early 1972. He had an election coming up later that year, and wanted to keep unemployment numbers from falling too heavily.
Thanks for digging those plots out. I’d been meaning to find the NASA one, but had never seen the DOD one.
Do you have the equivalent as a fraction of the US budget as opposed to GDP. That’s also very interesting-and would be even more so with the numbers for non NASA govt space included.
The apples and oranges comparison that is hard to do but would also be interesting is to add in commercial funding like AT&Ts support to comsat R&D, as discussed in the Advent thread, but that’s probably a good economics student project for someone;-)
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Thanks for digging those plots out. I’d been meaning to find the NASA one, but had never seen the DOD one.
Do you have the equivalent as a fraction of the US budget as opposed to GDP. That’s also very interesting-and would be even more so with the numbers for non NASA govt space included.
The apples and oranges comparison that is hard to do but would also be interesting is to add in commercial funding like AT&Ts support to comsat R&D, as discussed in the Advent thread, but that’s probably a good economics student project for someone;-)
Here you go. The transfer from DoD to NASA is a bit obscured looking at it like this by the overall expansion of the federal budget in the 1950s and early 60s. It makes it look like military spending is falling, when in reality it was mostly flat.
Trying to figure out historical non-NASA space funding rapidly runs into a brick wall, since most of it was classified DoD programs or CIA.
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Thanks for digging those plots out. I’d been meaning to find the NASA one, but had never seen the DOD one.
Do you have the equivalent as a fraction of the US budget as opposed to GDP. That’s also very interesting-and would be even more so with the numbers for non NASA govt space included.
The apples and oranges comparison that is hard to do but would also be interesting is to add in commercial funding like AT&Ts support to comsat R&D, as discussed in the Advent thread, but that’s probably a good economics student project for someone;-)
Here you go. The transfer from DoD to NASA is a bit obscured looking at it like this by the overall expansion of the federal budget in the 1950s and early 60s. It makes it look like military spending is falling, when in reality it was mostly flat.
Thanks. The most surprising thing to me was the swing back up to about 70% due to Korean War, but a look at Wikipedia will of course remind one that a war on that scale is expensive even in comparison to the early cold war, although I take your point about the subsequent expansion of the budget.
Trying to figure out historical non-NASA space funding rapidly runs into a brick wall
Yes but, interestingly, unclassified DoD figures have quite often been quoted on such plots. I find this was in fact done in the first plot I ever saw of the NASA budget, attached, from Spaceflight Feb 74. I've also attached the inkstained front cover for purely sentimental reasons.
I'm sure I've seen better more recent examples of such a plot, I'll post if I can find one, though they tend not to be normalised in the useful way you did-thanks for doing this.
While the NRO nearly always still redacts costs from declassified documents, as far as I know there was an absolute cap on its budget of $1 billion until the late 70s, achieved in part by billing launch costs elsewhere. Best evidence of this cap is a memo from Hans Mark as outgoing DNRO I think, but I'm sure Jim and/or Blackstar can correct me if there's now a better source.
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Reposting just the zoom of Baker 1974 plot as I'll want to replicate this and will attach to same post. I think it raises some obvious questions about what decisions were made for *total* space funding in Nixon administration, and when.
Trying to figure out historical non-NASA space funding rapidly runs into a brick wall
Looking at Baker's Feb 1974 plot-attached-I think it'd be worth checking and replicating sometime. I'll post if/when I get round to that. One obvious question is whether it's in adjusted 1974 dollars, or what.
One key takeaway from the plot is that *if* the NRO budget was indeed capped at $1bn until late 70s, when Hans Mark reportedly negotiated a deal allowing it to exceed this, then the (white DoD space + NRO ) total would have become equal to the NASA space total sometime in the mid-late 70s.
Another is that *total* US govt space funding probably stabilised for a while about 1970, before inflation started to bite ? Do Blackstar and/or Jim have any idea who would have had sight of the total # apart from POTUS, Kissinger etc ?
[For the avoidance of confusion my understanding is that the NRO budget was *not* included in the DoD unclassified spending, but may well have been buried discreetly somewhere else in the budget numbers. Others may know better.]
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Looking at Baker's Feb 1974 plot-last attachment-I think it'd be worth checking and replicating sometime. I'll post if/when I get round to that. One obvious question is whether it's in adjusted 1974 dollars, or what.
NASA's total budget peaked in the mid-60s at a bit over 5 billion then-year dollars. The inflation-adjusted non-aeronautics total would have been well over $5 billion in 1974, so Baker's plot must exclude such adjustments.
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Looking at Baker's Feb 1974 plot-last attachment-I think it'd be worth checking and replicating sometime. I'll post if/when I get round to that. One obvious question is whether it's in adjusted 1974 dollars, or what.
NASA's total budget peaked in the mid-60s at a bit over 5 billion then-year dollars. The inflation-adjusted non-aeronautics total would have been well over $5 billion in 1974, so Baker's plot must exclude such adjustments.
Thanks. I was too lazy to check. Helps get a sense of what a $1bn cap on NRO until late 70s would mean, among other things.
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I’d also be curious to know about later space computers and ICs, eg the IBM computers for the shuttle and MOL that have been discussed in MOL thread.
<snip>
Computers in Spaceflight: The NASA Experience, which covers Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, and STS, is a good place to start
https://history.nasa.gov/computers/Part1.html (https://history.nasa.gov/computers/Part1.html)
More details on the STS computers, and some of the problems encountered, can be found, e.g., at
https://klabs.org/DEI/Processor/shuttle/ (https://klabs.org/DEI/Processor/shuttle/)
This may please Apollo computer fans, an MIT film from 1965 "Computer for Apollo"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ndvmFlg1WmE&t=11s
If I've understood right the term chip wasn't necessarily being used then, with phrases like "micrologic circuit" occurring.