The Value of the Moon

by Paul D. Spudis

  The story becomes less definitive and not completely positive when evaluating Apollo’s legacy to the idea of human spaceflight. During the era of the Apollo program, America learned how to journey in space with people and machines. The accumulation of such knowledge was not the result of any systematic attempt to acquire it for its own sake, but was developed and acquired because of need. The tight schedule dictated by a decadal deadline, coupled with the clear geopolitical need to demonstrate American technical superiority, made reaching certain technical milestones essential. We learned how to do orbital rendezvous because we needed to master that skill—and quickly. This lesson has been lost on many current space policymakers: the acquisition of true spaceflight capability results from the attempt to fulfill a mission, not from vague directives to “develop technology” so that we can eventually “go somewhere.”

  The Apollo program architecture—the legacy of launching a mission “all up” in one or two launches that deliver all the pieces needed for a single mission, discarding the expendable hardware along the way—persists in the minds of most space policy makers and planners to this day. While this approach worked for the fulfillment of Apollo’s limited primary objective (“Man-Moon-Decade”), it is not conducive to developing a long-term, permanent spacefaring capability. The physics of spaceflight dictate that you use most of your rocket propellant to simply achieve low Earth orbit, with little, to no, fuel left to go beyond it. Apollo defied the “tyranny of the rocket equation”17 through brute force, by launching a fully fueled Saturn IV-B stage that could throw some fifty-five tons along a translunar path. To go farther, or to go with more capability, requires either a much larger launch vehicle, multiple launches of a heavy lift vehicle, or the development of propellant depots in space. These depressing mathematics rapidly tally up to an infeasible launch rate, along with complex orbital operations needed to assemble an interplanetary craft. Yet, exactly such a cumbersome, impractical, and expensive approach is part of the current NASA Design Reference Mission for a human mission to Mars.18

  For thirty years, following the end of Apollo, the enormous logistical requirements for sending human missions beyond low Earth orbit (LEO) made most manned space activity there unthinkable. In its place, other ideas began to emerge—concepts designed to take advantage of what space had to offer in terms of creating new capability from what we could find out there. Additionally, a more incremental approach was sought, whereby the pieces would be reusable, smaller, and less expensive. In part, the development of the space shuttle was pursued for these very reasons. Although the shuttle was not completely successful in obtaining this part of its various mission goals, the idea of an incremental program, developed using smaller, reusable pieces, remains attractive from a variety of perspectives.

  The cost of the Apollo program still generates a lot of discussion.19 The entire program cost an estimated $25 billion in 1965 dollars (about $200 billion in 2014 dollars). However, that number includes the construction from scratch of an enormous material infrastructure, such as the NASA field centers and the facilities used to test and stage the lunar missions. Much was made at the time about the “misplaced priorities” of the space program, as if the cancellation of Apollo would cure a plethora of social ills. Looked at from the perspective of ending the Cold War struggle with the Soviet Union, the race to the Moon was very cost-effective.

  However, there was another aspect to Apollo, one that constrains our meaningful progress in space to this day. One of Apollo’s baneful legacies was the entrenchment of the notion of exploration as a public spectacle or contest, designed to distract and excite the public. Although an attempt was made to justify the race to the Moon in terms of technical spinoff benefits, such efforts were always subject to the criticism that technical innovation would have occurred anyway, without a space program—an irrefutable proposition because the counterfactual cannot be demonstrated. Instead, supporters of ambitious space efforts have spent the last fifty years trying to convince policymakers that the country needs challenging and “exciting” goals to engage and inspire the public. This panem et circenses mindset remains a fixture of modern society and is an especially well developed standard used by the media to evaluate (and usually, denigrate) proposed new space initiatives.

  This entrenched way of thinking is ineffectual and counterproductive. By making the human space program into an overblown “reality show,” we are forever doomed to perform singular and unconnected stunts of no lasting value. Rationales for space exploration that require public “excitement” too often rely on being the “first” to do something. This involves promoting distant, unachievable goals such as human missions to Mars instead of reachable, near-term goals and destinations that we could accomplish on reasonable timescales, such as a lunar outpost. Current concepts of public support for space exploration are based on a false reading of public sentiment: Most people simply do not care about space, so attempts to “excite” them are bound to fail. There are always vocal proponents for space, individuals and small groups who hold strong opinions, but too often lack the necessary technical knowledge to understand what is feasible, against what they desire.

  Despite this problem, a case still can be made that an affordable, long-term strategic goal for human spaceflight not only exists but can be adopted and attained without breaking the national bank. After fifty years of human spaceflight, we realize that there are tasks in space beyond the capabilities of robotic machines—tasks that require human presence. People must be present to interact physically and intellectually with the space environment in real time to accomplish some goals, such as scientific field exploration and the repair and maintenance of complex machines. We need to develop a system that ultimately permits us to go anywhere we need, with humans and machines, to accomplish whatever goals may be desired. A large ambition, to be sure, but we already have signs that the creation of such a space system is possible.

  How? The answer is right next door.

  3

  After Apollo: A Return to the Moon?

  The two decades following the end of the Apollo program are the wilderness years of lunar exploration. Despite repeated attempts and endless discussion, except for flybys by spacecraft on their way to somewhere else, between 1972 and 1994, there were no American missions to the Moon. Still, we continued to study the samples and data returned by the Apollo missions. There was occasional excitement when an international mission returned new lunar data or information, or when the odd American spacecraft acquired some new data as it flew past the Moon. During these years, we made significant advances in our understanding of the nature of the Moon and with it, gained a better understanding of the requirements for living there, all which added to the frustration of advocates desiring a return to the Moon.

  The entire American space program suffered an identity crisis in the early 1970s. Following the success and hoopla of winning the race to the Moon, America seemed to lose interest in space. At least, that’s what we were told had happened.1 Social commentators decried the efforts of the American space program, describing them as irrelevant and a waste of money. Defenders of the space program spoke about technical spinoffs and societal inspiration. But the most inspirational aspect of Apollo turned out to be the most effective one used against it: the striking image of a nearly full Earth rising above the lunar horizon, first seen during the Apollo 8 mission of December 1968. Similar images were subsequently captured by each succeeding mission. The view of a blue and white Earth suspended in black space above the barren, lifeless Moon initiated the modern environmental movement, which, in turn, quickly blossomed into a Luddite, anti-technological crusade. People were encouraged to eschew technology, forswear a modern civilized lifestyle, and go back to the land.

  During this time, human spaceflight was focused exclusively on low Earth orbit. The development of the space shuttle was billed as a program that would “make spaceflight routine.” Many equated “routine” with “cheap.” While the program achieved t
he former, it did not attain the latter. With the space program effectively capped at less than 1 percent of the federal budget per year, there was no money to develop human missions beyond low Earth orbit (LEO). While the shuttle has been labeled a policy failure,2 in truth, it offered several unique and valuable capabilities, including some that are not available now, or even contemplated to be present on any future manned spacecraft. The shuttle’s development was marked by technical difficulties and fiscal challenges, but in hindsight, it is hard to see how it could have been done any better or more inexpensively.

  In addition to developing the shuttle, NASA used surplus hardware from the Apollo Moon program to make Skylab, America’s first orbiting space station.3 Skylab was a Saturn third stage (S-IVB) with its interior configured into a living and laboratory space for three crewmembers to inhabit for periods of up to ninety days. The laboratory, launched on a Saturn V on May 14, 1973, quickly encountered problems when during ascent its thermal shield was torn away. Skylab also experienced significant problems when one solar array was torn off during launch, and the other did not deploy on arrival in orbit, pinned to the side of the lab and unable to generate electrical power. As a result, when the crew arrived a few days later, the workshop was severely underpowered and overheated. So severe were these problems that they threatened to cause an early termination of the first Skylab manned mission and the Skylab program as a whole.

  Skylab 2’s crew, consisting of Pete Conrad, Paul Weitz, and Joe Kerwin, went straight to work troubleshooting these problems. They erected a sunshade parasol that allowed the vehicle to remain cool under the glare of solar illumination. They conducted spacewalks to free the pinned solar array. Once it was fully deployed, it started producing electrical power. The crew spent a record-setting twenty-eight days in orbit, and thanks to their sustained and heroic efforts, Skylab was saved. During their long-duration mission, they activated on-board experiments, conducted a variety of medical experiments, mapped the Earth, and made solar observations with the use of a special telescope.

  Two additional Skylab crews followed, spending periods of two and three months respectively in the orbiting space station. The last crew left the station in a configuration that would allow it to be visited and used by a future crew of the yet-to-fly space shuttle. In order to attach new solar arrays and a docking mechanism, and to outfit the laboratory for use by up to six or seven crew members, plans were developed to fly a couple of shuttle missions to Skylab in 1979–80. However, these missions never flew. The shuttle had run into development problems, which delayed its first launch until well after 1980. By the late 1970s, enhanced solar activity had heated and expanded the atmosphere outward, increasing the drag on Skylab. This increased drag made the orbit of Skylab decay at a much higher than anticipated rate, eventually leading to an uncontrolled reentry of the lab on July 11, 1979. Although NASA attempted to steer the vehicle to uninhabited ocean, large chunks of debris fell on the outback in southwestern Australia. Fortunately, no one was injured and there was little property damage.

  Once believed to be the beginning of a long-term effort, one that would see Apollo space hardware conducting a wide variety of missions throughout cislunar space, Skylab now represented the shriveled remnant of our ambitious post-Apollo plans. By using the basic building blocks of Saturn and the Apollo command and lunar modules, this program, dubbed Apollo Applications, had envisioned space stations with orbital servicing vehicles, lunar orbital observatories, and even surface outposts. The problem for Apollo Applications was that it needed the Apollo and Saturn production lines to remain open and that required more money than Congress and the President were willing to make available. The shuttle had been sold politically on the promise of making space affordable. Since there was no affordable way that both could be in production at the same time, something had to go. With the demise of the Apollo-Saturn production lines, plans for missions throughout cislunar space ended.

  The space shuttle was originally designed to become the first piece of an entirely new line of reusable, extensible space hardware. The shuttle, as developed, could only go to and from low Earth orbit but its designers certainly had no intention of stopping there. The official name of the shuttle was the Space Transportation System (STS), a name chosen to convey that the Earth to LEO orbiter was only a single piece of a larger, more comprehensive system—a system that included a permanent space station and an orbital transfer vehicle, a space-based “tug” that could haul satellites and other payloads to high orbits above LEO. But that concept was gradually forgotten as we busied ourselves with specialized missions to LEO and with the monumental task of building a new space station—NASA’s principal destination in space for the 1980s—assembled on orbit over time from pieces brought up by the shuttle.4

  The end of the Apollo program was followed by the doleful coda of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP), a joint flight of American and Soviet human spacecraft designed to inaugurate a new age of cooperation in space and ensure peace on Earth.5 The Apollo crew consisted of veteran Apollo astronaut Tom Stafford commanding, flying with Vance Brand and Deke Slayton, who was finally getting his chance in space after being grounded for thirteen years because of a heart murmur detected in 1962. They rendezvoused in space with a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft commanded by the first man to walk in space, Alexei Leonov, and his copilot, Valeri Kubasov. The two spacecraft docked using a common berthing mechanism provided by the United States. After exchanging handshakes and smiles, the crew drifted over the Earth in an extended demonstration of good will, good spirits, and fervent hopes for future cooperation in space. Cooperation would eventually come twenty years later after the Iron Curtain was dismantled, and with it the Soviet Union.

  With the splashdown of the ASTP on July 24, 1975, America was without any means to send people into space until the new space shuttle system became operational. The shuttle was a complicated and delicate vehicle. It had to withstand a violent launch and ascent as well as a harrowing reentry speed of Mach 25, all while retaining a low enough mass to make the entire system work. Low-weight silica tiles that were glued onto the outside of the orbiter airframe provided the necessary thermal insulation to block the searing heat of reentry. These thermal protection tiles caused ongoing and endless headaches over the entire thirty years of shuttle operations. The thermal tiles were both fragile (likely to break if dropped) and tended to fall off the airframe (finding the right bonding agent to glue them in place took some time).

  Several drop tests were conducted in which a shuttle was released from its carrier 747 aircraft and allowed to glide to the surface before the first space shuttle orbital mission launched in April 1981. Astronauts John Young and Bob Crippen flew the first shuttle orbiter Columbia into space and safely returned it to Earth.6 That flight verified the system’s basic design and started the next chapter in the history of the US space program. Shuttle flights continued apace throughout the 1980s, as flight after flight delivered satellites to their orbits and flew a variety of Earth observation and medical experiments. The shuttle design allowed it to be fitted with Spacelab, a cylinder-like module roughly the size of a school bus that was carried inside the shuttle cargo bay. Since Spacelab flew only during a shuttle mission, its operation in orbit was limited to about two weeks, the limit of the amount of reactants that could be carried for the shuttle’s fuel cells and fuel for attitude control.

  In addition to these high profile civil space missions, several early shuttle flights were dedicated to the launch of national security payloads. This was a consequence of promoting the shuttle to the Congress as the universal replacement for all expendable launch vehicles. The argument was made that shuttle could handle and deliver on orbit any and all payloads—scientific, commercial, and national security. Estimates made during vehicle development suggested that as many as fifty flights per year were possible. But after the shuttle became operational, the vehicle required much more refurbishment between flights (and consequently, more time to prepare for
launch) than had been anticipated. At peak rates of activity, the shuttle flew about eight to nine times per year. While this flight rate was quite respectable for such a complex system, it was not the level of activity envisioned and desired in the early days of the program.

  Despite the operational successes of the space shuttle program, a gradual sense of ennui developed within the space community. The program’s seemingly endless series of missions to LEO had become its own justification, and it was perceived, perhaps unfairly, as a dead end. Initially, this was because there was no space station to support. When the additional pieces of the STS “system” did not materialize, it meant we had no station, no orbital maneuvering vehicle and no lunar tug. Thus, the STS had become a system with just one piece, and it was getting harder to justify a human space program that only orbited in endless circles.

  The stasis, however, was more illusionary than real. Despite the shuttle program’s focus on low Earth orbit, advanced program planners in Houston had indeed been thinking about follow-on steps once the orbiter became operational. In accordance with the classic von Braun architecture, the obvious next step was some type of space station.7 Because Skylab had been lost and we no longer had the Saturn V launch vehicle, the shuttle would have to be used to assemble a space station. Using the shuttle as a delivery system meant that construction needed to be done in small pieces, with full station assembly requiring dozens of launches, spread out over many years.