Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: Why Apollo Ended (with John Logsdon)

Episode Date: September 6, 2019

As NASA struggles to return humans to the Moon by 2024, it's worth asking: why did it stop in the first place? Space historian John Logsdon joins the show to discuss the politics behind the decision to abandon the Moon in 1972. Casey and Mat also discuss the proposal to offer a $2 billion prize for sending humans back to the Moon and establishing a base there, and why that's not good public policy. More resources about this month’s topics are at http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2019/space-policy-edition-41.htmlSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome, Space Policy folks. This is Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio, back with the September 2019 Space Policy edition of our show. Joining me once again is the chief advocate for the Planetary Society. That would be Casey Dreyer. Casey, I want to welcome you, and I'm looking forward to yet another of these great interviews that you did as part of that Apollo miniseries. Well, thanks, Matt. Always love to be on my favorite podcast in the entire world, the Space Policy Edition.

And why am I not surprised? It's pretty good. It's pretty good. I'd say it's an objective opinion. Well, we're going to provide some other objective, we hope, opinions of some of the things going on in the news today before we get to that interview with one of your faves, one of my faves, the great John Logsdon. Yeah, we had a very good discussion capping off our series of interviews here on the 50th anniversary of Apollo. We talked with John Logsdon about why Apollo stopped and what were the motivations, what happened in order to walk away from building up hundreds of billions of dollars of infrastructure capability for the United States just to say, well, we did it, and to move on. John Logsdon was there while it happened. He obviously founded the Space Policy

Institute, one of the chief space historians in the world today. I think it's a really interesting cap and really nice comparison to the original discussion we had with Roger Lanius. Why did Apollo happen? Why did it end? It kind of has the same story of what sorts of external political forces were going on to drive the need for a moon program. And then, of course, once we landed, to make it effectively irrelevant going forward from a political perspective. effectively irrelevant going forward from a political perspective. I think every space advocate should listen to this interview and really internalize the lessons learned from this going forward if we want to have a long-term sustainable human presence beyond low Earth orbit. And we will have that interview for you in just a few minutes, as promised. A couple of other

things that we will talk about before that. And even before that, I want to make our usual pitch to those of you who enjoy this program. Maybe it's your favorite podcast too. Maybe you love the work of the Planetary Society, but you haven't yet gotten around to going to planetary.org slash membership and becoming part of the organization, part of our society, which is a word that I love to use in describing our organization. I'm so glad it's part of our title. We are a society of believers in the potential of space exploration and space development. I hope that you will consider joining our community. There are lots of levels to do it at, and every single one of them supports this effort, Planetary Radio and the Space Policy Edition, along with everything else that we are up to,

including LightSail 2, which, as we speak, is still raising its orbit, its apogee in Earth orbit, powered by the light of the sun alone. And we have so many other things going on that you can check out at planetary.org. If you need a little bit more convincing of the value of this proposition, I'll just say it again, planetary.org slash membership. Please take, I want to make one more plug in addition to our usual membership plug, which is we have opened up registration now for next year's Congressional Visits Day at the Planetary Society, the Day of Action 2020. We have selected the dates. It's going to be February 9th and 10th, a little earlier next year. We have our training space. We're going to be working on scheduling meetings. And we want to have even more members of the Planetary Society.

We want to blow past our last year's new record of about 100 people. And we want to have people from around the country bring your kids, bring your family, bring your friends, and advocate for space directly to the offices and to the people that make it happen. We schedule your meetings for you. We provide you training. We provide you talking points and experience. And we provide you an opportunity to meet your fellow Planetary Society members who love space as much as you do. It is so much fun.

And so many people who have come have enjoyed it. I had someone talk to me last year saying that they actually left the experience feeling more optimistic about our system of government than when they walked into it. And I would say that's a pretty damn good bit of feedback. It's a really fun, intense experience, but it's really worth it.

So planetary.org slash day of action. If you want to register now, you have early bird registration discounts going on to the end of the year. Planetary.org slash day of action. You know, I hear the same thing from listeners, Casey, who let me know that they joined you at the 2019 days of action, and they feel the same way. They left it more optimistic. They left it with greater faith, believe it or not, in our federal government. It was a real affirming experience in many, many ways, apparently. And I sure hope that I can join you this time. I know you've invited me in the past. I'm going to have to add it to my list of travel requests for fiscal year 2019, because it's something that I would love to be a part of again. I've had a little

taste of this, not with these big groups of our members and others who get involved at the grassroots level. It really is an exciting and very rewarding experience to visit with our lawmakers and their staffs and feel like you're making a difference. And not just feel, actually make a difference. As I pointed out to our folks last year, all of the requests that they made to Congress, just about all of them have been reflected in the House's budget for NASA going through for 2020. It really is an important thing to be able to do. And Matt, if you come, if this works out, we should seriously consider maybe doing one of these live with our members if they come. We will consider it.

That's the thing that I would most want to do there. During one of these enthusiastic gatherings, that would be a great time to capture some material for, if not Space Policy Edition, then maybe the weekly show. But I think it could make a great live SPE. I think we should look into it. So again, if you want to be there for that, if it happens, or just join me and our Chief of Washington Operations, Brendan Currie, and hundreds of other Planetary Society members and space fans and advocates. Planetary.org slash Day of Action.

Come and join us. Register now. It's so much fun. It's really worth it. You will make a difference. All right, Casey, there are other games in town, of course. The sixth meeting of the National Space Council, led by Vice President Mike Pence, took place, well, as we speak, more recently, because we're having to record this opening pretty early this time, but a couple of weeks ago, as this program becomes available. Let's talk a little bit about

what this latest gathering of the Space Council considered. There were some interesting conclusions, or at least recommendations. Yeah, the recommendations were, to me, the most interesting part. Space Council meetings, they're pretty scripted, honestly. There's not usually too many surprises that come out of these. What they like to do, I think, is the idea is that you're raising attention and you're also making the agencies like NASA, but also Department of Defense, the Commerce Department, all these agencies that have a hand in space of some sort, whether it's defense, civil or commercial, that they're being held to account pretty regularly by the vice president at a very public forum. That is a really interesting way to address space policy. This is very, very different than we saw really with the last two or three administrations, that it wasn't just one speech about space and then they just disappeared, they being

the president or vice president. We're seeing regular high profile meetings being led by the vice president about major issues in space. And what we're seeing them use that for is basically, it's almost, it's not quite a public shaming, but it's definitely a public accounting of where these agencies are to press them on their schedule. The fifth meeting that we had earlier this year, Vice President Pence kind of did the equivalent of a high profile excoriation of Boeing, not to, you know, he didn't mention them by name, but basically criticizing NASA for their management of the space launch system,

rocket for being over budget and far behind schedule. So you're seeing NASA try to scramble to react to that in the last few months. Of course, then we've also had the sudden announcement of the 2024 moon landing goal. And then kind of a lot of mixed signals from the president himself about whether the moon is the goal or landing humans on Mars is the goal. So we saw that reflected at this most recent meeting by a tonal shift, or really maybe a vocabulary shift to say that now NASA is looking at how the moon is going to lead to Mars again, which is familiar rhetoric for a lot of us

who've been following space policy for a long time. But again, no giant surprises, but the recommendations made it interesting for, I think, the next Space Council meeting. So some of the things that they recommended that NASA, or not really recommended, demanded that NASA do for next time is that NASA needs to submit a plan for a sustainable lunar surface exploration and development, including how it's going to lead on to Mars. And so that includes dates for Artemis one and two and three, really the test missions and then landing date for the lunar program and then trying to pitch it. How is this going to feed into a long term Mars exploration? So now we're not just talking about long-term sustainable exploration of the moon. NASA has to then, or has to now, really show how it's going to use moon as a stepping stone to Mars, you really

have to keep Mars as the goal the whole time. You can't just solve for the moon problem. You need to say anything that we do for the moon has to feed forward into a Mars application. It's very easy to ignore that long-term requirement and focus on the immediate problem. So this is actually really good from a policy perspective if Mars is the goal. And so we're seeing these comments from President Trump start to trickle down to the actual policy-making apparatus of the National Space Council and to NASA fundamentally to say, how are these immediate moon goals going to feed into this longer Mars goal? on track that they said that they want to see in fairly short order a plan for stabilization of those projects by NASA. A stabilization, interesting word.

Yeah, it's hard to read into that. At a certain level, I think from the last Space Council, my guess is, I don't have any internal insight of this, but my guess is that you saw Boeing and their lobbyists basically work up into overdrive to try to react to this threatening political situation beginning to form against their very lucrative, very large contract with NASA and the federal government for the SLS. a lot of support, particularly with key members of Congress, Senator Shelby in Alabama, who chairs the Senate Appropriations Committee that funds NASA, among many other agencies, or literally all agencies, I suppose. He's chair of the full committee. And of course, other key Republicans in the House who are in Alabama, who all really benefit politically at some level from the jobs, from the funding that comes into their states through this program. They have to walk a very fine line in order to keep the support of these key members of Congress for their goals at the moon and now onto Mars without alienating them by taking away their kind of favored local district funding. This is just how funding and politics work in a democracy

where you don't have to spend money on a program. So I think you're trying to see a little more of a positive spin being put on this. And, you know, and Jim Bridenstine, as administrator, he has gone to Michoud, he's gone to Marshall Space Flight Center, you know, he's trying to highlight the progress that's being made on the SLS. He claims now that 90% of the first rocket is completed, that they're getting on track to launch relatively soon. Though, of course, at the same time, we just learned that the first launch of the SLS is very likely going to happen in 2021. At this point, later than the 2020 deadline, that was earlier stated, they've been reincorporated, or they recommitted to this idea of doing a green run. This is a test firing of the whole first stage of the SLS rocket down in Mississippi. That adds to the schedule. There's only so much time you can accelerate that. But

according to Bridenstine and according to Vice President Pence, they are seeing some progress. But again, the stabilization, what does that mean? Your guess is as good as mine at this point. You know, stabilization to me says, how do they maintain a program over time? One of the big issues with SLS and Orion is that, you know, both of them have been going on for almost over a decade, about a decade, kind of each one of them. They still haven't produced really the first flight rocket yet. And they, you know, they've produced a flight version, a test version of Orion that's been modified quite a bit. But ultimately, you need to have a production line, need to be able to make these at a pretty regular cadence to serve the needs of launching regularly to the moon or

wherever. And right now, the build time for a Space Launch System rocket is five years. You need a five-year lead time to build one rocket. That is not a good sign. So my guess is maybe stabilization has more to do with production-level expectations than first-time launch and testing. Yeah, that makes sense. The Council also addressed some other important areas like commercial space development and international collaboration. And we'll note that the service module for the Orion capsule has arrived, the first article arrived some time ago, actually, to be mated with the Orion capsule, the equivalent to the command module in Apollo days. Do you want to talk a little bit about these areas?

Nothing too surprising here. I think NASA was already expected and has been going out trying to build international collaborative opportunities with Artemis and, frankly, with most of its missions. The issue with the State Department, I mean, I think that the big gold standard here is the International Space Station, right? We have over a dozen different countries, you have bilateral agreements, it's a very high level diplomatic agreement, not just between NASA, but through the State Department, very high levels of government, signing agreements to work together. I point to this level of diplomatic, peaceful integration and cooperation as actually one of the best return on investment from human spaceflight.

That's something that's big enough. It has to be big and complex enough, which human spaceflight is to demand a certain amount of awareness because you're committing large sums of money to it. It's a very, very good diplomatic tool. And in terms of a very practical way of engaging allies and even frenemies in space right now, I'd say with Russia as a good example, having this peaceful, collaborative, technically inclined, problem solving force, which is what human spaceflight is, is actually such a great diplomatic tool. It's one of the great benefits of spaceflight. So I'm glad they're doing it. It's obvious. I don tool. It's one of the great benefits of spaceflight. So I'm glad they're doing it. It's obvious. I don't think it's anything surprising.

But they are basically saying the State Department is hearing, the Vice President is telling you to work with NASA to not just keep these going, but to find new opportunities to bring other nations in who want to work together. Unfortunately, China is not going to be one of those due to a variety of other political factors, particularly with Congress passing an annual rider to their appropriations legislation saying that NASA cannot enter into bilateral projects with China. strongest potential collaborative opportunities by working with China in human spaceflight. All that said, these are ways, I think, also that you're seeing that civil spaceflight and human spaceflight is being pitched as a solution for problems or at least a useful, widely used tool throughout government, not just as a way to spend money in Alabama functionally, right, or Florida or Texas or what have you. This is a way for NASA to solve diplomatic problems or to

be a tool in the diplomatic tool set to help them solve or work with nations in a peaceful way. And of course, China proceeding with its own plans for a separate space station and development of a moon base. That's the ultimate goal, I suppose, with lots of international collaboration. So you could have parallel international developments going on on both those fronts before long. In fact, it's already underway. What about on the commercial side? In fact, it's already underway. What about on the commercial side?

I know that the Council had some more directions for the Commerce Department and others as they appear to be achieving some success and smoothing the way for in terms of how commerce is developing in space, more potential for commerce, particularly in low Earth orbit, so they can free up, theoretically, NASA resources to focus on deep space exploration. They are going to be looking at more ways to quantify, perhaps, the resource potential at the moon for commercial uses. Again, it's more of a way to, I think, start to engage other departments within government to get them thinking about this issue and also to raise the profile of NASA inside government. So it's not just this space agency that does its own kind of thing.

It's actually a wide application of opportunities. The Department of Commerce starts to align with their goals of promoting economic development, not just in the United States, but potentially now out in space. As the National Space Council sat right under a space shuttle in their very public and, as you said, somewhat scripted presentation, there was a lot going on behind the scenes. Of course, there always is in the Beltway and in this case, just outside it. One of those developments is something else that I know that you wanted to talk about. And I'm really glad because this is fascinating. Here is the headline from Politico that was covering this.

Newt Gingrich trying to sell Trump on a cheap moon plan. moon plan. This is a fascinating proposal that apparently is coming from quite a group of odd fellows who have the ear of the president and very possibly a number of members on the National Space Council. Yeah, this is fascinating. You're right. This is fascinating. I've written a piece about this that's online that folks can read more about. Their idea is to put a $2 billion prize to incentivize private entities, you know, to basically send humans to the moon and establish a lunar base. Details exactly to be worked out. But basically flip it from saying instead of the United States paying for the companies to build this, the United States would pay as a reward for providing the capability. And this is pitched by Newt Gingrich. This is why it's getting so much press. Obviously,

Newt Gingrich is well connected in the DC political press world. Other folks like Bob Walker, ex-congressman, influential lobbyist now on space issues. He was part of the transition team under President Trump for space issues. You're right. It's an interesting idea. And I don't think it's a good idea. And this is what I wrote about in my article. Fundamentally, what it is, is that when you have a prize incentive, you have to carefully structure those in order for them to work, to deliver the results that you want, and not just to have an entity oversolve for the specific goal of winning the prize, if that makes sense. motivated Bert Rutan and scaled composites to build Spaceship One, launching a human twice within two weeks into suborbital flight, crossing 100 kilometers of von Kármán line. Well, that was a successful prize. But if you take that as a success and apply it to launching a moon base,

you would have the United States pay out a $2 billion prize for establishing a moon base and then the company being basically bought out by another company, retiring, and then not doing anything at the moon for 15 years. I mean, we still haven't seen spaceship to fly as we're talking right now. Well, at least not with paying passengers. Not with paying passengers. You're correct. Yeah. The revolution of low Earth orbit or even suborbital commercial human tourism in space has not happened the way that many people predicted it would in 2004 after this flight of Spaceship One. Not that it didn't inspire people or create companies like Virgin Galactic, but it's a qualified success, right? It didn't deliver exactly what the Instar X Prize was looking for, which was regular, cheap, reliable access to space with humans that has not delivered yet. And I think the Google Lunar X Prize is another good example of this because, of course, nobody won that prize. Nobody was able to achieve the goals that were set out. But I had John Thornton, the chairman of Astrobotic,

who was on the show just a few days ago, talk about how he feels that that prize did serve its purpose, that competition, because it provided so much encouragement to companies like his. And, of course, his company, Astrobotic, is one of those. It's just received tens of millions of competition because it provided so much encouragement to companies like his. And of course, his company, Astrobotic, is one of those. It's just received tens of millions of dollars from NASA as part of the CLPS program and will be sending a payload to the moon. So yeah, I guess these benefits have to be weighed pretty carefully. But in this case, you're thinking that this is the wrong approach. Well, again, if your approach, if your goal is to stimulate competitive ideas,

new entrants into the market to raise awareness of a particular area, prizes can be great. But what this prize is pitched as doing is saying, this will be the infrastructure for NASA and the United States to work, live, explore the moon. Those are two very different things. And it's not just me making this up. There are studies about this that I referenced in my article about how you design prize. When is a prize competition appropriate and when is it not? And when it's not really appropriate is when you don't have a large pool of people who can participate in it. I mean, think of it this way. In order to succeed at landing people on the moon and then getting a prize, you need to be insanely well capitalized, right? Right. You need to be able to sustain billions of dollars of spending for years on your own and raise investment on the potential that on the risk that someone won't win instead of you.

It's not impossible, but for something with such a high barrier to entry, again, Google Lunar XPRIZE, great idea, a great, great comparison to this. It's very, very difficult. And so if the goal of the United States is to have humans on the moon, you're basically using a prize competition. You're basically shifting it and taking a much, much riskier posture. And it's not that the United States would risk the money. What they're risking is loss of time. Say four years go by and no one wins. Sure, you may have helped the stimulating industry and so forth.

That's all good. But you still aren't landing people on the moon. It's a time opportunity cost. And you're basically pitching to a very, very, very small group of organizations that may be able to just do it anyway. There's really only two or three that I can think of that would even be in that competition. And again, this is how you structure a prize competition. So actually, you know, government uses lots of prize competitions all over the place. There actually, legislation was passed about 10 years ago, authorizing prize competitions through all areas of government. You see DARPA doing that now with this launch competition, trying to launch very rapidly into arbitrary orbits. You see NASA running lots of

small competitions. If human spaceflight is as important as this administration believes it is, and if you need that capability, a prize competition in a sense is like throwing a piece of bread into a flock of seagulls and hoping one catches it, right? And they'll fight for maybe one will catch it or maybe whatever metaphor you want to use. It sounds like a good idea on a lot of levels, but if you want the result, and this is actually another aspect of this that I think is really fascinating that deserves a lot more thought. It's also the abrogation of responsibility of policymaking. It's basically saying, throwing your hands up and saying that the system that we have designed as a polity no longer works and all the government should be

responsible for now is putting up sums of money, stepping away and hoping someone can solve a problem. So instead of going about and doing the hard work of defining the needs, defining the reasons, building coalitions politically and in public support, you're trying to sidestep all of that. It's the absence of public policy. And I don't think the absence of public policy is going to be useful in this context. So perhaps it's not surprising to see this spearheaded by Newt Gingrich, one of the founders of the neoconservative movement. Certainly somebody who has in the past attempted to upset lots of apple carts. The reaction to it has also been interesting, at least as of the time that we're speaking.

Blue Origin has not reacted, but there was a kind of semi-positive reaction from a representative at SpaceX. I guess attention was called to a quote from Elon Musk, which I told you before we started recording, I thought was such an interesting quote. Musk said, incent outcome, not path. not path. I fall in line with the argument that you're making that prizes like this probably can be extremely useful as a stimulus for new approaches, new technology. But for this kind of thing, it's a time to be very wary. Well, to Elon's point, and I think this is interesting, there's a difference you can draw from here between those two things. You can incentivize outcomes, pay for success, don't pay to build it, or even pay for experimentation. That's a fundamental contracting difference. And NASA has already been doing this. And so this is the thing, you can actually have

a hybrid version of this. This is the flip side of this whole discussion. This is exactly what COTS was, the commercial cargo, basically a competition where the prize wasn't cash. The prize was multi-year billion-dollar contracts to service the space station. NASA had a highly structured, modified system where basically you had multiple companies competing for these contracts. NASA would actually give them fixed amounts of money, right? NASA put in roughly half the development costs of the Falcon 9. SpaceX funded the other

half. And then, of course, you had Orbital Sciences doing the Antares rocket, now part of Northrop Grumman, basically running a similar motivation where the amount of upfront cost by the government is minimized, is capped. More money would be released by the government to these companies once they demonstrated capability. So that's totally in line with what Elon Musk is saying. But it wasn't at the same time, it wasn't just a fixed prize outcome. It was a carefully designed system and highly structured by NASA to say, these are the requirements we need you to solve. It was still a contract, but it was a fixed price contract. So there's a way to do this.

And I think that's what ultimately where NASA is even moving in general already with its approach. You know, we've seen now contracts being awarded for the Gateway, the space station orbiting the moon that's coming up. NASA awarded a fixed price contract to the Maxar company. What's fascinating about that contract, the deal is that NASA will buy it from Maxar. So Maxar gets a fixed cost from NASA to build it. If they can't do it within the cost, they have to absorb the difference. After a year it's in orbit, NASA can exercise its contract to purchase it basically from the company and take on ownership. So if they don't like it, if it doesn't perform, NASA doesn't have to buy it and they don't have to fill out the rest of the cost of the contract. And you're seeing this

also with the lunar lander that they're putting together. They're trying to take a very hybrid approach between incentivizing outcomes through fixed cost contracts and still retaining responsibility to demonstrate these are the types of expectations we have for safety, for performance, for needs. And so, you know, trying to find a way to kind of thread that needle between the two. So I absolutely think there's a lot of opportunity for new ways of contracting it. No one has been impressed with the old school of cost plus contracting coming out that's feeding the SLS program. That is obviously not working that well at the moment.

However, going and throwing your hands up completely and absolving ourselves as a public of much responsibility and just saying, hey, we'll just put up cash. Maybe someone else can solve the problem. We no longer have a say in this. That's going too far, I think, to the other side. Yeah, I like your suggestion of a hybrid approach. We'll note in passing that it'll be interesting to see how the Marshall Space Flight Center leads development of a human lunar lander in the direction that was just handed down by NASA headquarters, that Marshall will head that effort, not without some controversies. There were some Texas congresspeople I know who were not thrilled about that decision. They wanted to see the lead of that program take place at the Johnson Space Center.

Yeah, human spaceflight can be so dramatic sometimes, Matt. Human spaceflight can be so dramatic sometimes, Matt. This is an old, old story of the internal political battles between NASA centers. This same debate happened in 1981, 1982 with the space station project of who would get to own the space station. Marshall was putting out their ideas for it. Johnson said, we know human spaceflight, we should do it. Not much has changed in that. If anything, it tells you how unlikely a prize competition would be to even happen politically. Because again, this debate is happening about which NASA center gets to manage that program. I think they were talking about on the order of hundreds of new jobs per NASA center. And then, of course, all the contracting and so forth. But that itself caused the entire delegation of Texas to write a very stern, upset letter to the NASA administrators saying that, you know, they weren't just angry. They were disappointed.

They said basically that Alabama, of course, has Shelby, who's the chair of the Appropriations Committee. But Texas has Cruz, who chairs the committee that writes NASA's authorization bill that can set NASA policy. So it's like whose toes do they step on? And this is for this a relatively modest program compared to something like the space station. So politically, I see literally no way where the same Texas delegation that got really upset that they didn't get the moon program would be willing to fund $2 billion to anyone, probably outside of Texas, to solve this problem for us, you know, solve this problem for us, and most likely being won by a company based in Southern California or Washington State. The whole politics, you know, beyond the feasibility and the quality of the policy, the whole politics behind a prize incentive at that scale is very, very unlikely. Because again, what we're already seeing quite a bit of squabbling to get the rewards as it's progressing now through this hybrid approach.

And this is the kind of drama that makes it so interesting to talk to you on a monthly basis in these Space Policy Edition programs, Casey. There will be more developments, I'm sure, new ones and ones that build on this discussion that we've just had by the time we talk again in October. But we can get on to the main attraction of this month's show now. It'll be that conversation with John Logsdon. You want to say anything else to introduce this? Well, again, you know, this is somewhat relevant in the sense, let's just try to connect the dots a little. Yeah. plug A Political History of Apollo, our limited series podcast. This interview is from that series. It has a little more context. It's part of the whole story. If you want to hear the whole political story of Apollo from beginning to end, that's on A Political History of Apollo. You can find that

on every podcast aggregator you can find, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher, and Apple Podcasts. But in this context, we're talking about here the politics of establishing a large lunar program or a functionally mid-sized lunar program. Here with John Logsdon, we're going to be talking about how the politics no longer could support the implementation of a lunar program after it succeeded. And so we have to put ourselves into just an incredibly different political situation in the early 1970s, where even the marginal costs of going to the moon, to land on the moon, to get to Apollo 11, the US spent about $21 billion of thenyear dollars, right? This is roughly $200 billion today. To continue, the last, from Apollo 12 to Apollo 17, over the next three years, NASA spent a little less than $5 billion

for those ongoing missions, right? So that's a dramatically lower cost, right? You've spent all the money building up the infrastructure. The ongoing cost was a couple billion a year. Even that was deemed too expensive for the country to continue paying for that capability, even though they had spent all the money to get to that point. What I tried to get into with John was trying to understand what was happening in the nation and in politics to allow that complete turning of the back of the nation on everything it had just done? How had things changed so much? And how are people willing to just basically throw away that investment going into the future? You know, and obviously look what we're talking about.

We're struggling 50 years later to rebuild a fraction of that capability that the nation had built up in just eight years at that point. The politics, again, that underlines everything we're able to do in space. What's the political agreement? What type of fertile ground or not do we have to continue these investments or even to continue a marginal version of those investments? And in a sense, I think it continue a marginal version of those investments. And in a sense, I think it says a lot about the state of the nation and the cultural state of the nation, what it's interested in, and what it's not, in order to take on those risks, or to not. So I think that kind of connects these two ideas we were just talking about. And of course, John Logsdon will bring a great insight into that.

He has literally written the book on this. It's called After Apollo. It's about Richard Nixon, president at the time, the internal policy process that occurred through 69 to 71 that basically ended Apollo and left us with the space shuttle as the national policy and what types of debates happened internally and what the United States was willing and not willing to do anymore in terms of humans in space. It's a fascinating tale, and you're about to hear it as Casey sits down with the great John Logsdon. Here's that conversation. Okay, John, welcome to the show. I want to pick up maybe midway through the 1960s when everything is looking really good for NASA.

The funding is extraordinarily high, historically high as it turned out. You have Gemini is wrapping up. It's clear that the U.S. is probably going to succeed at this point by the mid-60s. But politically, there's starting to be a lot of hesitation and critique of the spending levels of the Apollo program. And what I notice is not happening at this point is a real serious discussion of what a post-Apollo world looks like. We had the beginning of Apollo applications as a program, but Lyndon Johnson himself didn't seem to be pushing a post-Apollo future.

Is that an accurate way to characterize this situation? And what was Lyndon Johnson's thinking at this point in the mid-60s? Well, by the mid-60s, certainly by 67, the United States was bogged down in a war in Southeast Asia. There were riots in the cities. The Great Society programs were just getting underway. Johnson was kind of perceiving himself as failing in his presidency. He had no appetite for another big new space program, even though he had been one of the leading advocates for Apollo. He said, that's really something for the next president. I'm not going to run again.

I'm not going to run in 68. And those decisions can wait. And'm not going to run again. I'm not going to run in 68. And those decisions can wait. And so indeed they did. There was some funding for Apollo applications, which were basically ideas for using the Apollo hardware to do other things, which ended up basically going nowhere. It just resulted in the Skylab experimental space station and nothing else. As the Apollo funding ramped down, the NASA budget decreased. There wasn't new program initiatives to take up the released funding. What point did Johnson decide he wasn't going to run again? I mean, he must have decided internally long before he said it publicly,

but did that have something to do with his lack of direction on the space program? Well, he announced his decision not to run again in March of 1968, but he had made his mind up well before that. There are stories that he told Jim Webb, a NASA administrator, that he wasn't going to run again sometime in 1967. So I think he was not thinking about making decisions that would result in large financial commitments in the years after he would leave the White House. So there just wasn't much forward momentum behind the program. Do Apollo meet Kennedy's goal, and then let somebody else worry? Is it as simple as the fact that Vietnam basically consumed his presidency? Because I mean, he really was on the kind of the vanguard of this pushing space as a critical national security infrastructure back in the late 50s.

He who controls space controls the world. I find really telling in a sense that you were there for the beginning of space history, basically, and created this field. You have a book about JFK, and you have a book about Nixon, but you don't have a book about Lyndon Johnson in that middle part. And so it's striking to me that someone who started out so strong would seem in retrospect to have such a small impact on the program. Well, I think there are a couple of things that explain that. One is that once Kennedy decided space was important, he took it back as an issue. He had given it to Johnson as he came into the

White House, but he took it back. And basically, LBJ was marginalized on space issues from, let's say, May of 61 on. And then after the assassination, his other priorities, his other responsibilities as president kind of consumed him. He said, either it was an interview with Walter Cronkite or in his autobiography, I'm not sure which, that he spent more time on space as vice president than he did on as president. It just was not very high on his agenda, given all the other things that were. Yeah, I mean, it's easy to say Vietnam consumed it. But I mean, Vietnam was spending an Apollo in aggregate budget every year and lives were at stake. And yeah, Great Society, civil rights. Great Society,

say the urban problems in the 60s. There were plenty of things on President Johnson's plate without worrying about the future of the space program. Do you think he abrogated his responsibilities there? Do you think he misstepped by not putting his stamp on that in the long term? No, I don't think so. I think he also recognized that starting something new before we finished Apollo was unlikely to get much of a positive reception. So I think there was a political judgment that it was not something that spent a lot of his waning political credibility in support of. Yeah. I just spent a whole episode talking about some of the domestic political opposition to Apollo. And would you say that that grew over time, even as the program became more successful? Or do you think it kind

of maintained its position and then the support diminished as this program succeeded? Well, I think the criticisms of Apollo and the sense of misplaced priorities, that kind of argument started in 63 and I would say peaked in the 66-67 period. It was hard to criticize the program after the Apollo fire because that means you're criticizing the sacrifice of three lives. I mean, the reaction to the Apollo 1 fire is we've got to keep going. The reaction was not, oh, my heavens, we've lost these three people, let's quit. Yeah, pull the plug after that.

So I think the criticism kind of tempered down in the 67, 68 period, peaked in the mid-60s. What role, if any, did space play in the 68 elections? Oh, I think it virtually none. That's fascinating. I mean, again, we're about to land on the moon and it was... Well, 68 elections, November of 68 was after the first Apollo human flight. Apollo 7 was October of 68. But in looking back, I don't see it was an area of contention between Hubert Humphrey.

Humphrey had been chair of the Space Council as vice president under LBJ, but didn't do much, didn't make space a major Humphrey issue. And Nixon, as he started the campaign, said, we've got to have a strong space program, but it's a place that we're probably going to have to cut the budget. But it's a place that we're probably going to have to cut the budget. So typical kind of ambivalence with Nixon and his attitude toward the space program. So it really was not an electoral issue of any significance. price to pay from the public, right? Apollo wasn't driving whether they would get votes or not beyond maybe the fact that there were jobs related to it, right? But there was no fear about the politics of it. No, I don't think so. Humphrey wasn't going to get votes because of his involvement in space. And Nixon wasn't going to get votes because of his attitude towards space. It just was not an electorally

relevant issue. Coming in to the presidency, what attitudes or what lessons did Nixon bring from when he was vice president at the very birth of the space age, working with Eisenhower? Did he internalize any lessons from that? or did he bring things back to maybe a pre-JFK attitude? Well, I think, first of all, he hadn't paid much attention to the space program once he left the vice presidency in his campaign for governor in California, and then his retirement, getting ready to run for president again, space was not central to anything he had been doing. Immediately after Sputnik, he was a strong proponent of a civilian space program rather than putting the emphasis on military, and he was a proponent of international cooperation.

I mean, the reason he favored a civilian program back in the 57, 58 period was so a new civilian space agency could engage in international cooperation. So I think he brought those biases, but they weren't, again, very high up on his priority list. To the extent that he thought about it, I guess. Should we preface every statement about Nixon in space with that to the extent that he thinks about it? No, that's not fair. He had a transition team on space that was composed of very senior people that told him major decisions were going to be needed in the first months of his administration. And Nixon did his homework. So he, I'm sure, read that transition team report and was very much aware as he came to the White House that one of the things on his short-term agenda was post-Apollo

space efforts. What was in that report telling him to do? Was it basically, you need to decide now because we don't have the time to ramp up something new immediately after Apollo? Or was there ever a consideration of just saying, why don't we just keep doing Apollo missions? Well, I think that the main thrust of the transition team report was that there was justification for continuing a human spaceflight program, but not at the budget level that had been reached at the peak of Apollo, and was already on the way down. And I think the transition report said reduce it even more. There were some skeptics of the value of human spaceflight in that report, notably Lee Dubridge, president of Caltech, who

Nixon picked as his science advisor. The general tone of the report was, yes, we have to continue a leadership program, but not like Apollo, not on a crash basis, not setting deadlines, and not at a high budget level. Nixon assumes office January of 69. Great timing. Six months to the day before the first steps on the moon. It's a great timing, right? He doesn't have to politically push that program through. He's doing his own thing at the time.

Yet he gets to be kind of the face of the government that's celebrating this achievement. Was there any indication that enjoying that, basking in the glow of Apollo, or celebrating the success changed his thinking about whether space should be a priority? Or was that just kind of a cherry on top of whatever he was dealing with? Well, I think Nixon was quite aware that when the United States landed on the moon, it was going to be a world event, everybody paying attention, and consistent with some of the themes that he wanted to stress in his presidency, humanity's unity and peace and goodness for all. I sound like kind of kabobby there, but

there's a quote in my post-Apollo book, Nixon book, from his then speechwriter, Bill Sassar, who says he was recognized that he was going to be shot in the arm in terms of national morale, and he was determined to be a very visible part of it. Also, we should just acknowledge, it's easy to look back on this with hindsight and say it would succeed, but it could have easily not, right? There's the famous alternate speech written by, was it Bill Sapphire? Yeah. About what would have happened if the Apollo astronauts hadn't lifted off. Well, but as he came into office, Nixon was still able to bask in the glow of the Apollo 8 mission at Christmastime of 68.

Apollo 8 mission at Christmas time of 68. LBJ had had the Apollo 8 crew to the White House after the mission, and they found a kind of somber place, and him very down. But then Nixon invited them back, and apparently they had a great time. And Nixon and the Apollo 8 commander, Frank Borman, hit it off very well. And Borman became Nixon's kind of chief space advisor with respect to Apollo 11 over the following few months. I found that really kind of funny because Borman isn't known as a big space booster. He's a very kind of no-nonsense guy, right? Which is maybe why Nixon enjoyed his advice on that. But he wasn't coming in as carrying the fire of space behind him, right? No, no. I mean, the issue there was who would Nixon pick as head of NASA? Jim Webb had left NASA in the fall. His deputy, Tom Paine, was acting administrator. And the Nixon administration

searched kind of far and wide for a good Republican with strong technical credentials to be the NASA administrator. Because of the uncertainty of the future, nobody wanted the job. And people knew that Tom Paine was a space visionary, a space crusader, and a liberal Democrat. His wife had campaigned for Hubert Humphrey. and a liberal Democrat. His wife had campaigned for Hubert Humphrey. Despite all that, kind of by default, Payne was selected for the job. How important was that NASA administrator transition into ultimately what? Could Jim Webb have changed this trajectory at all through his presence and experience? Well, I think by 1968, Mr. Webb was tired, beaten down, kind of said, I'm done with my job. My job was to get us ready to land on the moon, fulfill President Kennedy's

mandate. I don't think he had the appetite to continue political battles. And again, Mr. Webb was a very committed Democrat. He didn't get along with Humphrey. So he said, if Humphrey's elected, I don't want to be there. He won't want me there. And if a Republican is elected, I certainly don't want to be there. So it seems just like the trajectory coming into 68, 69 is looking just very poor for the future of the program, just baseline, right? The fundamental structure seems weak for continuing Apollo. Well, uncertain is the word I would use.

Everybody recognized that we were coming up on a kind of apocryphal event with the first moon landing, and that that would provide potentially the support, the political excitement for a major new initiative. So I don't think the program was on the edge of collapse kind of condition. It was a very high level of uncertainty. It just seems like a lot of poorly timed things happened all at once. But the presidential transition happened to be right before the first landing. You had the NASA administrator transition. You had the issues with Vietnam and then all the other domestic issues really destabilizing the country. I mean,

the country of 1961 of JFK announcing a Project Apollo to the country of the moon landing in 69 was almost unrecognizable in some ways, right? Sure. I mean, we had had the assassinations of the 60s, the urban riots of the 60s, Vietnam, Southeast Asia, bogged down, a president basically being driven from office by public protests. The only positive thing at the end of 68 was the space program, was the beginning of the Apollo flight and particularly the success of Apollo 8.

I think coming in Christmas Eve of 68 and bringing back the Earthrise photo was a very positive thing. So the program was not in horrible political shape. I want to introduce you as a character into this story, since you were there following the program, right? And following this as an academic at this point. In your perspective then, right before Nixon came into office, what did you see as the future for NASA at this point, if you can put yourself back in your shoes? Oh, I haven't. NASA at this point, if you can put yourself back in your shoes. Oh, you know, that's a long time ago. And I really don't remember, Casey. I remember what I was doing at that point. I had chosen in

1967, finishing up my graduate work at New York University, to write my PhD dissertation on the foreign policy uses of the American space program. And when I started research on that topic, I realized that everything I was interested in was tied up with the decision to go to the moon. And so I decided to do the dissertation as a case study of Kennedy's decision to go to the moon. So that's what I was doing, 67 and 68, early 68, was doing the interviews, writing the dissertation, getting ready to defend it in 68, 69. I think I finished the manuscript just before Apollo 11, or it certainly was almost finished by Apollo 11. I was so tunneled into why we were doing what we were about to do that I don't think I gave much thought to the future of the program. Let's move into Nixon and the Space Task Group then at this point. So what was the Space Task

Group? How did it come together? I think more even interesting, what were their recommendations coming out of this? As I said, Nixon's transition team for space said immediate decisions are necessary to keep the engineering, Apollo engineering team together, to keep the momentum of the program. To do that, Nixon turned to his science advisor, Lee Dubridge, president of Caltech, former president of Caltech. And Dubridge proposed a blue ribbon committee to take a quick look at the space program and make definitive recommendations on a post-Apollo program. Lee Dubridge thought he would run that committee. He was viewed with skepticism by Tom Paine and others at NASA as being anti-human spaceflight. And so they were able to get to the White House and say, this kind of task force is fine, but Dubridge is not a person that we think is balanced in

his judgment or will give us NASA a fair shake. And so find somebody else. The Space Council carried over, National Aeronautics and Space Councils, still at that time, with the new vice president as the chair. Vice president was Spiro Agnew. I was in a position, he was my governor in Maryland. And he had been the liberal candidate for governor

the year I moved to Maryland, which shows how conservative the Democrats were. Agnew was put in as kind of a substitute chair of this group and called the Space Task Group. But it was still staffed by the science advisor's office, by the Office of Science and Technology, and consisted of the head of NASA, Secretary of Defense, but the new Secretary of the Air Force was the former deputy at NASA, Bob Siemens, so Mel Laird asked him to do the job, the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, and so this group began its process in March of 1969 with the aim of having recommendations on a post-Apollo program by September. NASA, of course, had been thinking about its future. It had a very dynamic head of,

I'll say manned spaceflight, because that's what it was called back then, associate administrator for manned spaceflight, a man named George Miller. And Miller and his associates had come up with an ambitious plan that involved a 12-person space station, or at least a space station. There was a big debate. Some people wanted a 100-person space station. But a space station as a staging base for outward movement and a reusable logistics vehicle to go back and forth to the space station called a shuttle. That was the program that NASA wanted to get approved. In fact, Payne tried an end run of the space task group, went directly to Nixon and said, the next step is a space station.

group went directly to Nixon and said, the next step is a space station. Why don't you approve it now or at the time of Apollo 11 and let's just get going on it. And never mind this whole process that we don't control. That didn't sell. It didn't go anywhere. And so Payne and Miller basically convinced Agnew of the attractiveness and the wisdom of this so-called integrated plan for the future. Payne said, well, yeah, but there's no goal there. It's building infrastructure. It needs a goal. It needs something jazzy. He liked very dramatic, jazzy things. He said, how about Mars as the goal? He had NASA study options for early missions to Mars and then brought in to present to the space task group, Werner von Braun, to present the idea of a mission leaving November the 12th, 1981, aiming at Mars in 1982, late 1982, and returning to Earth in August of 1983. And that was presented in detail to the Space Task Group about three weeks after Apollo 11.

It was August the 4th, maybe two weeks after Apollo 11, maybe two weeks after Apollo 11 and became the core of the Space Task Group report was recommendation of setting Mars. It got toned down when the White House found out what they were going to be presented. In the first version, it was Mars in 82 or something like that. And John Ehrlichman saw a draft of the report and said, don't give that to the president because he'll have to reject it.

Give me a recommendation that he can accept. And the recommendation ended up being Mars by the end of the century as the goal, with all these intermediate steps of shuttles and space stations and lunar bases along the way. I love this chart that was ultimately presented. And it's just like a fantasy. It's like the Wernher von Braun fantasy from the 50s almost, right? Where you see reusable shuttles, nuclear tugs, you know, 100 crew space stations, permanent lunar bases, and then just maybe a six person base on the surface of Mars.

You know, it's just, I can see why they were excited to do this, right? This is in the midst of- Well, they just landed on the moon. See can do anything. Exactly, right? The most excited. And they just had this huge marshalling of resources and political support for it. Was there anyone on the space task group who was saying like, wait a minute, like this may be a misreading of the political situation? Yeah, there was. The DOD representative, Secretary of the Air Force, Bob Seamans, wrote a letter to Agnew when he saw what the recommendation was going to be, saying, slow down a little bit.

We're not either technically ready or politically ready to take on another Apollo-like commitment. So even within the group, cautions were raised, and the report itself was revised to tone down the language, at least the front of the report was, when the back remained unchanged. And the chart that you're talking about was in the back of the report, still had the mid-'80s Mars goals as possible alternatives. But there was so much momentum with Agnew supporting it.

Agnew, at the Apollo 11 launch leaked to the press. It was a very conscious leak. I think we should go to Mars next. Created a flurry of interest and probably more criticism than not. So I can understand Thomas Paine and others in NASA misreading this, but how did Spiro Agnew not understand who he was working for or even read the political situation? They had a couple of recommendations for funding levels to achieve this, but one of them was

roughly $10 billion a year, per year, which is higher than the Apollo peak, sustained almost for the next decade. Yes? Well, Agnew was not a very good politician. He for the next decade. Yes. Well, Agnew was not a very good politician. He was out of his element in national politics, I think. He had been a local Baltimore politician and then governor of Maryland for a couple of years before he was plucked by Nixon to be his vice president. A little side note, I have a letter signed by Spiro Agnew thanking me for helping him support the man most qualified to be president, Nelson Rockefeller.

He led governors for Rockefeller until Rockefeller pulled out of the race without alerting him, and it made him kind of a prime candidate to ally with Nixon. He was basically snowed by von Braun and pain and drank the Kool-Aid of Mars or nothing. Well, if anyone could mix a good Kool-Aid, it would be von Braun, right? What happens then? They present this to the White House. Does Nixon even read it or does this go through? I don't know whether he read it or not.

Again, he did his homework. So his budget director, a man named Robert Mayo, and the science advisor, Lee DeBridge, and he had a special assistant named Peter Flanagan, who came from Wall Street. And Flanagan had a 30-year-old, very bright young assistant named Clay Whitehead, Thomas Clay Whitehead, who actually was the top space policy assume that the White House would approve anything close to the Space Task Group report, and so should prepare a much more modest budget request in accordance with a slow-paced, not very ambitious program for the 70s. What a modest budget request meant to NASA ultimately was very different than what the budget office thought. Yeah, the budget office was talking about maybe a three billion dollar budget. NASA was talking about four and a half or five billion dollar budget, which is what

they submitted. It was kind of amateur hour in the White House. The White House had all kinds of trouble formulating its first budget. Their revenue estimates were way off. They were trying to put in a tax cut, and they didn't know how much influence that would have. They didn't want to run a deficit. So there were successive ratchets in the NASA and many other, but particularly the NASA budget request went down to, I don't remember off the top of my head the numbers, but let's say from $4.5 to $3.3 or $3.2 billion before the final budget went to the Congress. And this was 1970? This was the fall of 1969 and the January of 1970. Preparing for the 71 budget. Preparing for fiscal 71, yeah. And in there, there were trades that were very interesting. The production of Saturn V moon

rockets had been temporarily halted. I wanted to touch on this. The first time I read this memo, there's one I'm thinking of in particular, the 1968 memo from James Webb. Yeah. Which is on the procurement of better. Long lead time items for Saturn. Yeah. And it was basically saying we're not going to produce any more first stage Saturn rocket. We're not going to start the production lines for any more beyond the 15 that were ordered for Apollo.

Because there's no program. To use them. To use them. Yeah. And so like in 68, this is in program to use them. To use them. Yeah. And so like in 68, this is in 60, this is the summer of 68, I think, before Apollo even started, before the first human launch for Apollo 7, the program had functionally ended, right? I mean, the hardware wasn't going to be there. Unless the decision was reversed, the program had functionally ended. Yeah. And reversed quickly, right?

Because that was part of the problem, that you either sustain some big standing army cost of engineers sitting around doing nothing, or they disperse. So the Nixon transition team had pointed this out. Yeah. And it said you probably should invest in sustaining the ability to produce Saturn V until you make a decision of what you want to do post-Apollo. When you get to the budget formulation, you now had Apollo 11 and Apollo 12, which was November of 69. Nixon was already saying, I don't see any need to go back to the moon six more times. He was not a fan of continued lunar exploration, even early on. NASA wanted to get started on studies for the space station and, incidentally, the shuttle. The station was the top priority, not the shuttle.

So when did the Saturn V production or get started on these new programs. You can't do both. Paine, oriented toward the future, said, if I have to, I will give up Saturn V. And that was in the proposal that went to the Congress in February of 1970. So within eight months of landing on the moon, we basically threw away the capability for future exploration. It's truly hard for me to understand that thinking. I mean, you point out in your book that the nation had spent tens of billions of dollars just to – I mean, the Saturn V was, I think, roughly half of the total cost of Apollo, all the Saturn family of rockets, the F-1 engines. I mean, that was the –

The launch complex. Yeah, right. Yeah, all the associated capabilities and infrastructure. And they were done after 15 times, roughly. Well, not even 15. Yeah, right. It's true. Yeah, there's a couple.

But was there any hand-wringing? Did Wernher von Braun, did his head explode? I mean, just metaphorically, how was there not some sort of national awareness or conversation or thought about this at this point? Well, I think it's reflective of the national mood at the time. And it was part of the problem of Kennedy defining Apollo as a race to the moon. We had won the race. There was no compelling reason offered

to continue a program of lunar exploration after having done what Kennedy told NASA to do. It was clear that the Nixon administration was not going to approve a program of continued deep space exploration that would require the Saturn V. So there was no requirement for that capability. And in the public mood of the time, Nixon said to Tom Paine, as they discussed these issues, I'm hearing from the public that they don't want a continued strong ambitious space program. And so I don't think politically I can approve anything. And that was correct too, right? There was never a strong public demand for this.

But the public interest in Apollo peaked with Apollo 11 and very quickly disappeared. One remembers that by the time of Apollo 13 in April 1970, it wasn't carried live on television until the accident. Attention span was very short. Yeah. It almost seems like a different era in terms of lobbying and investment. I mean, Boeing and Rocketdyne and Grumman and all these contractors who stood to gain or lose financially seemed completely out of the picture on this whole discussion. Yeah, there's no evidence that there was a lobbying campaign, a campaign by the aerospace industry. There weren't organized groups in support of the space program. So the Saturn V was allowed to die with a whimper, betting on the future, betting on the station.

Right, and station serviced by a space shuttle. Yeah, but station was a top priority. The shuttle was really not center to the argument in 1970. Thinking about this the other night when preparing for this interview, and it seemed like there was just this overwhelming desire to say, all right, we've gone to the moon, where do we go next? Low Earth orbit? Why was that the big step? I never quite understood why that was the focus. Well, it wasn't going to low Earth orbit. It was going back to the quote, right, unquote way to do a space program, which has been called the Von Braun paradigm,

but it's not only Von Braun, which is that the first step in a long-term sustainable program is learning to operate in low Earth orbit and then gradually moving outward. By setting the moon before the decade is out deadline, Kennedy had jumped over that step. So what was being proposed was going back to basically starting over. The station service by shuttle, I mean, that was in your Collier's article. Yeah. By this time, George Miller had left NASA or was in the process of leaving NASA, had left NASA or was in the process of leaving NASA, but his vision of this integrated plan of station and shuttle and tugs and all of that lived on. So I think it had captured the support of the senior people at NASA that this kind of future program was a more important priority

than continuing Apollo. It is telling that, unless I haven't seen it, which is very possible, but I've never seen like a New York Times editorial or anything at that point saying the U.S. has invested so much in creating this capability, how dare we just throw this away, we just waste all this money. Now it's truly a waste. But there didn't seem to be any public hand-wringing about this decision at all. Certainly not much. And almost as a consequence of, as we've talked about before and in other episodes,

the reasons for Kennedy's call for Apollo, because it was very top-down, because it wasn't in response to a big public grassroots demand, when that shifted, when that changed, there wasn't some big public demand waiting in the wings to step in and sustain it, right? Like NASA had never cultivated that really to the point where they could sustain itself. I think that there was a certain arrogance, maybe hubris even, among NASA that, look what we did for the country. We got Armstrong and Aldrin to the moon, Conrad and Bean. The country will love us. Whatever we decide we would like to do, it will be supported. And it came as a very rude awakening, I think,

in these late months in 69, early months in 1970, that that support was not there, that they were dealing with a White House that wanted to cut the budget, that had no stomach for Apollo-like initiatives, that wanted a good space program, but one at significantly lower share of the federal budget. Also, we didn't have a competitor. There was no driving need for an ambitious program. I think people said at the time, Mars will always be there. And the Soviets clearly weren't in a position to really challenge us on that at that point. Well, by that point, the Soviets had tried twice and failed twice

to launch their big N1 rocket. So we knew from our intelligence capabilities that they were basically out of the race. So going back to the 71 budget negotiations where NASA had to trade basically what it had for this promise of the future, is that also when they gave up Apollos 19 and 20, or had those already fallen by the wayside by that point? That was more the next budget negotiations later in 1970.

It's a fairly complicated story and worth talking about. There were people in NASA, most notably the director of what was still the Manned Spacecraft Center, later Johnson, Robert Gilruth, and his deputy, who became NASA deputy administrator, George Lowe, who recognized that Apollo was operating right on the edge of its capability and was an extremely high-risk operation. They didn't fight very hard the idea that maybe they should quit while they were ahead. And then they get a budget mark, a budget target from... It was right then that Bureau of the Budget

became Office of Management and Budget. So it's a transition from DOB to OMB. I'll say OMB from now on. That said, there's no way they could afford an ambitious program. And even if they needed money for the space station, they'd have to cut something else. Cutting two Apollo missions reduced the risk and saved a lot of money. And it was NASA that came up with that proposal. It was not the White House.

The White House gave a budget context that kind of forced NASA's hand. But it was NASA that said, we're going to cut one of the remaining missions without the lunar rover. The original Apollo 15. Yeah, original 15 and 19. 20 had already, when it was clear that Apollo was going to succeed in getting people to the moon, 20 had been canceled and its booster reassigned to become the Skylab space station. So that was already done. So 20 was already gone. What was canceled was then 15 and 19, and the remaining

missions were numbered 15 through 17. And that was September of 1970. Obviously, there must have been reaction part of that to Apollo 13, right, which was in that spring. Yeah, I mean, that just reinforced. Again, play the dates out. Apollo 13 was April of 1970. The decision to truncate the program and cancel 15 and 19 was made in the summer of 1970. So 13 just dramatized the risk that the NASA human space flight leadership already was very much aware of. I mean, I think that's a really important point to just dwell on a bit here because, I mean, we're looking back. I mean, I grew up in an era

where people had always walked on the moon, right? And you look back and say, oh, they were successful and they had this near catastrophe, but they pulled it off. We forget that every time they landed, there's always some problem, right? That every mission wasn't free from problems. It was- No mission was free from problems. Yeah, it was extraordinarily dangerous. And so, and if you just look at the numbers, one out of seven missions failed, right? Which is a pretty high, potentially- But at least it didn't kill the crew. Yeah yeah but it's still it almost should have in a sense like this by how bad it was it's fascinating to see people inside of nasa basically saying this maybe let's you know this is what you just said like it's quite

we're ahead as and but nixon was kind of shaken by this nixon was very emotionally very vested in the fate of the apollo 13 crew ignored, according to Henry Kissinger, ignored his foreign policy issues by focusing on the conduct of the mission and getting the crew back safely. He was already skeptical of the value of continued lunar exploration. This just reinforced that skepticism. Maybe it's getting a little ahead of the story, but he tried very hard to cancel 16 and 17 also. Nixon did. Nixon did, yeah. He kept telling his advisors, we don't need to do this. Let's quit. And then when he got close to 72 re-election, he said, no missions. I'm not going to risk anything on Aikapala 13 right to 72 re-election, he said, no missions.

I'm not going to risk anything like Apollo 13 right before my re-election. So no missions before the election. And this is why Apollo 17 happened in December of 72. And Apollo 16 was moved forward a couple of months, I think, till April 72, to keep it away from the election. That's a good reminder that politics was never that far from why Apollo was happening or what was going on. The program is being trimmed, the budget's going down. There was never, it sounds like, any serious discussion of saying, what if we just don't do anything and just keep doing what we're doing? In a sense, that would almost be the cheapest way because you wouldn't have a new development program. You could just keep landing maybe we're doing. In a sense, that would almost be the cheapest way because you wouldn't have a new development program.

You could just keep landing maybe a couple times a year, go all different parts of the moon, slowly increment it. There were some people. There were some people saying that. That said, that kind of status quo program, flying with longer times between Saturn V launches, like nine months between launches, so that you could extend the program out through the mid-'70s,

and maybe the budget situation would be better by then, and you would have some new hardware under development. But that didn't get any traction. Is that basically what the Soviet space program did from the 70s, the small incremental changes, like nothing drastically new, they just kind of kept the capability they had and slowly improved it over time? The Soviet program in this time period made a fundamental shift. It gave up on trying to go to the moon. Yeah. Well, once they had like a proton and Soyuz is what I was thinking. Yeah, right. But they gave up on developing their N1 moon rocket and an ambitious Soviet program and took what

they had and began a program of Earth orbital modest space stations with a solute space station, which extended through the 70s and the early 80s until Mir in 1986. So the Soviet Union, once it had lost the race to the moon, lowered its ambitions and was still a strong space power, but not competing with the United States. In fact, they competed in a different way. They started flying well before we did, non-Soviet cosmonauts, visiting cosmonauts. And they began to use it as a tool vis-a-vis their satellites, their allies. You've described something that you characterize as the Nixon space doctrine. And if I remember correctly, it's not formalized necessarily as such, but you've kind of condensed

what the attitude of the White House was at this point. So when did that really come into being? Was that the 70 budget? And maybe just like discuss the three points of that. The term Nixon space doctrine is mine. Nixon never gave a space speech in his house. Beyond just the Apollo congratulatory. Yeah, I mean, you know, ritual ceremonial speeches,

but nothing the equivalent of Kennedy at Rice in 1962. Finally, the White House, in reaction to the September 69 Space Task Group report, issued a statement on March the 7th, 1970, and it said, here's what we intend to do in the future, and laid out some initiatives, and said space has to take its place as one of the things that we do as a normal part of our life, and adjust and compete in priority with everything else that we want to do and not be a series of expensive, highly energetic jumps. So that's what I call the doctrine is space is a normal part of what government does, competing for budget priority with everything else. And in that competition, from Nixon on, it has settled at a level, one-fifth or one-tenth now, the level at the peak of Apollo. Yeah, you say that the day

in, day out activities, right? That's just part of what the government does. And by restructuring it that way, the kind of the trade space of what NASA could do was substantially diminished. Let's maybe move on, closing out here, to what became the paradigm of the human spaceflight program up until just a few years ago, which is the space shuttle. You were talking about here how the space station was really the goal. NASA's been wanting to put up a space station. Skylab is kind of a test station stuck on top of a Saturn booster. How did we get to the shuttle first before that? And why did that end up dominating everything? Well, if one goes back and looks at the congressional justifications for the NASA program in 1970, there's one program

that's called Station Shuttle. Tom Paine, disappointed by all of this, left NASA in September of 1970. George Lowe became acting administrator in September of 1970. And Mr. Lowe was much more politically sensible than Tom Paine had been, a very good engineer and very judicious in his judgment. During the fall of 1970, going into the spring of 71, it became clear that NASA was not going to get approval for the space station and the shuttle together and basically had to pick one. The judgment was made, and I think it was the correct judgment, that a station without the shuttle was not viable because of the economics of operating it would drive the cost too high. But that you could

have a human spaceflight program with the shuttle without setting a major goal, that the shuttle could do a wide variety of things, that it was attractive to at least some in the military, and that there could be a case made for the shuttle independent of the space station. We're giving up on the space station. We're just deferring the space station and developing the two sequentially with the shuttle first. So Mr. Lowe's contribution, I think, was adopting the policy beginning in the fall of the 70s that the program that NASA would seek approval for was the shuttle. Could they have called the Nixon administration's bluff? Because, I mean, fundamentally, you also, I think an important aspect of this is that some of the internal memos you have from the

Nixon White House is saying that, you know, that we don't want to be the presidency that ends human spaceflight now that we've done it. That had to continue. They took that as a given. And so... Plus Nixon liked astronauts. But yeah, right. I remember John Ehrlichman in a 1983 interview telling me that they were the sons that Nixon never had. Oh, interesting. The visible, right? The kind of the symbols, right, that he wanted.

Do you think NASA could have called his bluff and said, look, we can't do anything at this level. We're going to cancel all of human spaceflight. We're just going to focus on robotic probes. Do you think they could have then gotten something better? Or were they really facing down the barrel of the gun here, so to speak? I think they made a political judgment. I think it was the correct political judgment that there was insufficient support at the White House level for the kind of program that might have resulted by calling NASA's bluff. And again, Lowe wrote a letter to the

deputy director of OMB in the fall of 70, who was Cap Weinberger, saying with the space shuttle, you could have a continuing program of manned spaceflight, human spaceflight, and not set another major goal. And I think that, you know, in a sense, that played the face card. If NASA tells you that, OMB is certainly going to say, okay, let's do it, but let's now start putting the squeeze on the shuttle. Let's make it cost effective. So there's economic analysis got applied to the program beginning in 1970

to show that it was cheaper than continuing to use expendable launch vehicles. It was cheaper than continuing to use expendable launch vehicles. And NASA decided that it had to have national security support for the shuttle. So the shuttle had to meet a set of rather demanding national security requirements, which largely determined the design of the shuttle as it finally turned out. This is a complete inversion from how human spaceflight was really perceived at the very beginning, particularly in 61 under Kennedy, where we had to do this big thing to show off our capability, to show up our technological rival in the Soviet Union. And there's one or two ways that we can do that.

You chose that one way, it's going to the moon. Now NASA's doing this day in and day out competition with everything else in the federal government to show, here's what we can do for you now. Right. Right. And so they have to shop around for customers and shop around for their raison d'etre. So, oh, yeah, we can launch DOD payloads. We can launch things into space more cheaply.

We can eventually maybe make a space station. But we're building a capability. It's like building a highway system as opposed to- Yeah, it's building infrastructure. Yeah, it's an infrastructure project. And there's also maybe just a, we don't dwell on this, but also kind of a political reason why Nixon wanted to go with the shuttle, right? Right before the 72 elections. Yeah, but there's a lot that we have to talk about before we get to that. I mean, the shuttle that NASA was trying to sell in the fall of 1970 was a fully reusable two-stage shuttle with a 747-sized booster stage and a, these days I would say a 767 size upper stage.

So it was a big thing they were still. And they thought they would take maybe $10 billion to develop. And the OMB said, well, you can maybe have five. This was May of 71. And at that point, NASA was faced with another dilemma, not enough money to develop even the one thing we want to develop. What do we do about it? There were proposals to just give up on the shuttle, stretch out the rockets we have and do a very modest program, or give up on the full reusability and build a shuttle with the upper stage turning into the orbiter, which will be reusable. And then you have to figure out how to get it into orbit. So basically what was driving the design, and again, just in comparison to Apollo, where you had the goal, then the design met the needs of that goal, right?

You need to get humans on the moon, bring them back safely. So that drove all your design decisions, engineering decisions. This was being limited by budget. And fundamentally, which is an arbitrary concept based on who is the budget director, what the president's priorities are, what the economy is like, right? So they're trying to do their engineering trade space in this shifting arbitrary field where someone says, this sounds like too much, right? So you fit to this. And so the idea of this fully reusable shuttle was undermined from the very start then. Well, undermined once they got that budget mark. As their studies progressed, the end of 70, the start of 71, they were still studying two-stage fully reusable until May of 71, when the first budget mark for the fiscal 73 budget would have been, I think, came out, the budget that

would be decided at the end of the year. And it was totally inadequate for the thing they wanted to build. Then everybody became a shuttle designer. But you still had to meet the DOD requirements. 15-foot, but in particularly 60-foot long payload base, you could launch large reconnaissance satellites, delta wings, so you could maneuver on re-entry to get back, basically, back to Vandenberg Air Force Base on the West Coast, which is where you had launched from. But in one orbit, it would have moved 90, how many miles? A thousand miles.

And so you had to be able to maneuver sideways to get back to that secure landing spot. And you had a particular amount of weight to get into polar orbit because of these intelligent satellites. There were requirements that drove the design, and there were budgets, limits that drove the design. And finally, somebody figured out, well, if you threw away the fuel tank and used solid rocket strap-ons and reuse them as much as you could, that you could make the economic calculations fit. You could project that you could launch this thing at development for $5 billion and launch it at $10 or $14 million a launch, were the numbers that were floated around as the time for decision approached in the fall of 71. Was there any sort of public or cultural reaction to this idea of a reusable shuttle?

Or was this kind of an idea that was being hashed out broadly? Or was this all very internal inside of NASA at the time? No, it wasn't internal to NASA. NASA had study contracts with the major aerospace contractors, Grumman, and by this time North American Rockwell, McDonnell Douglas, to study shuttle designs. So it was being hashed out inside the aerospace community. I don't think there was a public debate. Because we were still doing Apollo missions after all. Apollo 15 was the summer of 71.

This was a debate internal to the space community. OMB was very much involved. The science advisor by now, a man named Ed David, and his staff were very much involved. by now a man named Ed David, and his staff were very much involved. I was writing an article for MIT Magazine Technology Review right about this time, 1971. The title of the article is Should We Build the Space Shuttle? And I was in good contact with the staff at the White House Science Office, and I showed them a draft of the article,

and the guy named Russ Drew, he said, you better wait a little bit. Things are changing very quickly. That was right as the article was talking about the two-stage fully reusable, and it was right as NASA was coming off of that and moving to advocating the single stage strap-on design. So what were your feelings then about it at the time? Well, I'm a product of the Apollo generation.

I like human spaceflight. I wanted it to continue. And the proposition sounded very attractive, lowering the cost of access to space. I could look back at that article and see what I concluded, but I'm pretty sure I said the shuttle is something the country should do. The shuttle as proposed was pretty different than the shuttle as manifested. Well, yes and no. Shuttle, as it turned out, was designed the way it was designed in 71. It just didn't have the economics. Or the...

The launch rate never quite achieved. Well, the operability, I guess, is the jargon word. I mean, this was back when we were going to launch 40, 50, 60 a year. And airline-type operations and all those kind of illusions. I mean, you're the one who wrote the paper, Space Shuttle, a policy failure, which is true, right? It did fail in its policy goals beyond just the engineering aspects of it. But going back again, just to look at this, to think of this as kind of a capstone of the Apollo era,

this future has been kind of focused down to a point where shuttle seems to be everyone kind of got in line behind the shuttle or else it seems like they left the agency and i'm thinking about this kota von brown here did he leave because of his frustrations with the the end of the moon program did he i mean in some ways it's a very tragic end for someone who his life was this dream and he made so many compromises for this dream. And then at the end, we just decide to stop at the end of it. Well, I think after Apollo 11, von Braun was tired. He was tired of running a large organization. He got along well in his visionary manifestation with the fellow visionary, Tom Paine. And Paine said, well, come to Washington and be our planner for the future.

And von Braun agreed to do that and came up to Washington. And then Paine left. And his successor, George Lowe, was very representative of the Houston culture, deep roots in the manned spacecraft center. They, Houston and Huntsville, had never gotten along. Basically, Lowe was not very interested in using von Braun and marginalized him. And the reality was von Braun had some serious doubts

about the shuttle design that was emerging, that it could meet any or all of the promises that were being made. I think a combination of fatigue, being marginalized, and not agreeing to the company program, if you wish, caused him to leave the agency, as you suggested, kind of sadly. I mean, you know, this man, whatever you think about his total background, was one of the four or five people responsible for getting us to the moon. So at this point, you know, NASA finds this kind of compromise design that fills out all these obligations they have to the military, to the budget office, and so forth. What is the final kicker that makes

Nixon support it? Was that pretty much it? Did he make this decision? Did his advisors recommend that he make it? It's one I think we'll never know. The end game was November, December of 71, and then New Year's weekend. It was clear that a decision on the shuttle had to be made. And Nixon, in discussing that, said, well, it's going to produce a lot of jobs in California, isn't it? By this time, the taping system was in, so this stuff is on tape. You know, he's talking to Ehrlichman, and he says jobs. That's what it's about is jobs.

He was concerned about this. He's talking to Ehrlichman, and he says jobs. That's what it's about is jobs. He was concerned about this. Again, you have to go out a bit in context. His opponent at that time was Ed Muskie. He, Nixon, was behind in the polls in the fall of 71, and California was a critical election state. And he said there was a California jobs project in the White House looking for ways to create new jobs in California across the board. And the shuttle and making sure that the shuttle contract went to a California firm was key to a lot of job creation.

And so I think the final decision was driven by the reality that whatever else its merits, it would also help Nixon's re-election by job creation. But then the White House Science Office came in with an alternate shuttle design to NASA's, which somehow had been suggested to them by the one or more contractors, which again, in doing my research, I could never get anybody to admit who it was. But all fingers kind of point at Rockwell, which is ironic since Rockwell ended up building the full-size shuttle. So there was a smaller shuttle, which Nixon approved in early December, and NASA's loudly protested. And the rest of December of 71 was spent arguing between the NASA full-size shuttle, full-capability shuttle, and this smaller version,

with a few other alternatives kind of floating around the edge. But those were the two main contenders. And it finally came down at the very end of the month to a decision of what size shuttle NASA would build. NASA came in and said, we still think the full capability is the right one to build, but one a little smaller is still acceptable and can let us do most of the things we want to do. Which one, OMB, will you approve?

George Shultz was the head of OMB, Weinberger, his deputy. Shultz said, go away and let us think about it over the weekend. Come back on Monday. Monday was January the 3rd, I think. And NASA went back to OMB and were told we're going to go with the full size one. NASA walked out of the meeting amazed. It was very much a surprise that they had gotten permission to build the shuttle that they actually built. Whether Nixon was involved

over that weekend or whether it was Schultz, Weinberger that made the decision to, over the protests of the science advisor, to go ahead with the full-size shuttle. Schultz knows, probably, and he's still alive, but he won't talk about it. The decision was announced to NASA January the 3rd. Nixon was out on the West Coast. They said, fly out to the Western White House in San Clemente and meet with Nixon. There's a classic picture of, by now, NASA Administrator James Fletcher and Nixon looking at a shuttle model. Once again, a statement was issued that said the president has approved the shuttle. We'll take the astronomical costs out of

astronautics by routinizing access to space, or some words like that. Nixon didn't get up and announce it. In a sense, the rest is history. Yes, literally. Was there an awareness at that point? I mean, was it seen as that this was the end of deep space presence for humanity for the next half a century? The half century, I don't think. But Nixon issued another statement as Apollo 17 left the moon, which was December of 72. So again, 12 months after approving shuttle. And he said, this is the last time in this century

that humans will walk on the moon. So saying that in 72 is basically a 30-year forecast, which by his decisions he made true. Quite true. It wasn't even close, really. Well, we're not. We're only 250 miles up in 2019. Yes. And I remember, it wasn't Gene Stern, it was Jack Schmidt who felt, I think it was written about being profoundly disappointed by he was still on coming home from apollo 17 and seeing that this is the last of the century see nixon statement yeah and that so that that seems like a fitting coda in a sense to all of this that the the in response to the greatest achievement i would say, easily arguably of human spaceflight, the response was to lessen our ambitions. Lower our sights. Yeah. Fundamentally, do you think that was a function of

the political and cultural expectations at the time? That was a period, I know, ultimately, Jimmy Carter talked about the malaise. Well, Casey, this is a tricky question. Was it a good thing to go to the moon in the first place? Maybe the mistake was skipping all the intermediate steps and going on a crash basis to the moon and using up that destination, creating the expectations that this was what a successful space program was about, was deep space exploration. I don't want to believe that because I was there.

I was a close-in observer of the Apollo program, went to three Apollo 11, Apollo 14, Apollo 17 launches. So they were grand things. Were they mistakes in the grand scheme of human progress? Yeah, you could argue it, but I don't want to. I mean, it's almost like the formulation of Kennedy's statement has almost slipped. We go into low Earth orbit and we do space stations and the other things, not because they are hard, but because they are easy. And because they're perceived as useful. Maybe that's more of the practical thing.

Dr. Logsdon, thank you for joining us today. It's been a pleasure. John Logsdon, author, space historian, space policy expert, with the chief advocate for the Planetary Society, our own Casey Dreyer. Casey, great conversation. Thank you for that. And I do want to note once again that your limited series about Apollo, this was the penultimate, the second to last episode, your conversation with John Logsdon in that separate series that you did great work preparing and writing these special introductions and other content around. and writing these special introductions and other content around.

But there is one other episode which I take special interest in because you invited me to join you for sort of a wrap-up conversation. All of that now available as part of that miniseries. Yeah, and that's our last and I think excellent conversation that we had. I was very happy with that conversation. We are not going to include that on the Space Policy Edition. To listen to that, you have to go to that special edition show. That is a bonus episode for subscribers of that show, but it's not hard to subscribe because it's free. You can just go online, A Political History of Apollo on any podcast aggregator out there. Let's wrap up with a couple of reminders, including, and I'm so impressed that you're on

top of this already, the Day of Action. If people want to take a personal role in the kinds of policy decisions that led to and eventually led away from the Apollo program and are still determining what happens in space in the United States today. Bring us up to date once again, Casey, on how people can participate. Go to planetary.org slash day of action. It has links about the thing. If you have questions, we've got answers for you, background, and then there's a link you can register to attend. It's February 9th and 10th of 2020.

Again, we provide training. We'll schedule the meetings for you. You might actually be meeting face-to-face with your representative to talk about space. And you get to hang out with me, Brendan Curry, other members of the Planetary Society and talk about space and how awesome it is. That's one of the great benefits of it. So there'll be all kinds of special stuff with that, meeting opportunities, special briefings by folks at NASA and scientists and everything. We try to make it really fun, and you get to stand and speak for space, you know, metaphorically.

So it's great fun. It's really worth it. You really do make a difference, and I really hope you consider signing up. We want to break our records again this year, try to get more than 100 members in attendance, all speaking for space. I think we did something like 130 meetings last year. I'd like to get way more than that. So it'll be really worth your time. And we've only heard really great feedback from everyone who's participated. So I hope you join us. While you're there, by the way, when you visit planetary.org slash day of action, look for the little button up at the top left that says join,

or go to planetary.org slash membership and become part of the planetary society that is standing behind the day of action behind Casey, behind the space policy edition and the weekly program, planetary radio that it is my pleasure to host and produce. Join us, become part of this organization, Become part of this organization. Become part of this movement. Casey, been great talking to you once again,

and I look forward to the next opportunity on the first Friday in October. As always, Matt, I will be there. Casey Dreyer, chief advocate of the Planetary Society. I'm Matt Kaplan, the host of Planetary Radio. Hope that you will again join us in October for the next SPE. Hope that you will again join us in October for the next SPE. And on Wednesday morning, when yet another weekly edition of Planetary Radio will come out, just as they have been for nearly the last 17 years. Ad astra, everyone. Thank you.