Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science - Space Policy Edition: Why Apollo Happened (with Roger Launius)

Episode Date: July 5, 2019

Half a century has passed since Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin imprinted humanity's first footsteps upon another world. Apollo 11 was the culmination of a decade's worth of fervent activity in which the United States marshaled resources and manpower at a pace not seen outside of warfare. Space historian Dr. Roger Launius joins the show to explain why Apollo happened the way it did, how a moonshot briefly became a solution to a national security problem, and why it is unlikely to happen again. Casey Dreier also provides a space policy update.  More resources about this month’s topics are at http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2019/space-policy-edition-39.htmlLearn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoicesSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Welcome to the July 2019 Space Policy Edition of Planetary Radio. We are so glad to have you back for this monthly series. And we also have back with us the chief advocate for the Planetary Society, Casey Dreyer. Welcome, Casey. Hey, Matt. I just saw you in person not all that long ago. It was kind of a family reunion because so many of us gathered there on the Space Coast. And wasn't that a great event?

Yeah, we saw light sail go off into space on possibly the most dramatic way possible on a Falcon Heavy at night. And it was so late in the morning or early in the morning, however you want to say it. How late was it? Yeah, it was 2.30 in the morning, it felt. But it was so close to sunrise that when the rocket got up to that upper atmosphere, it illuminated the morning sunlight, illuminated the upper atmospheric staging and plasma and plumes coming out of the rocket and created this spectacular planetary nebula. In addition to being a night launch, I've seen four launches, you know, more than most, but not as much as some. And it was the best launch I've ever seen in my life. That was a spectacular launch. I am not surprised. I have only seen two now that I've seen the Falcon Heavy.

And I have to say, no offense, ULA, but the Atlas V really just didn't compare. And that, of course, was the launch of LightSail 1. And now LightSail 2 is up there on orbit communicating with us. Data is coming back as we speak. In fact, by the time this Space Policy Edition goes up, we might just be getting ready. If not, we'll have already released the solar panels. Probably will not have unfurled or deployed the solar sail yet. But anyway, that's all still to come. I hope everybody is keeping track of this through the Planetary Society social media, at ExplorePlanets is our Twitter handle,

or on the website, planetary.org, where there will very soon be this great dashboard that will tell you exactly what's going on with the mission. Of course, while you're there, why not drop over and become a member, become a part of all of this excitement about LightSail 2, to say nothing, although we will, about the great advocacy work that is being done by Casey Dreyer and others on behalf of all of us who care about space exploration and space development. If you want to get there directly, It's planetary.org slash membership. And we do hope that you will join our growing party of space geeks, space fanatics, space fans. Space advocates.

Yeah, space advocates. Thank you. And become part of the Planetary Society. Casey, one more thing about watching that launch of LightSail 2 on the SpaceX Falcon Heavy. It, of course, happened at Pad 39A. I was wandering around there with some of our communications staff colleagues earlier in the day, which is one reason I was so tired. and affecting to see that big rocket lifting off with our light sail from, I would guess,

what is the most historic and well-known of the launch pads anywhere in the world. Yeah. I mean, that's where they launched the Saturn Vs that went to the moon. It really did make me think a lot. Matt, how old were you when Apollo 11 happened, just out of curiosity? I have to tell, huh? No, I don't mind. I was, I had just turned 15, which is why I was allowed to videotape a whole bunch of the mission with my father's super eight camera off of our black and white TV. Oh, cool. Well, I was negative 19 years old when Apollo 11 happened, you know, so I never had the chance to experience it in real time, but it was special to think about being there at the launch pad or being at the launch center,

looking at the pad where the Apollo missions happened. And it made me think a lot about Apollo 17, which was the night launch, the final launch of Apollo to the moon, night launch, and the most powerful rocket at the time, the Saturn V. And here we were 50 years later, or maybe at that point, 46 years later, all together as members and supporters of LightSail, watching the world's current heaviest rocket, strongest rocket, lifting off at night from that very same pad.

It gave me a glimpse of what it must have been like to witness the power of the Saturn V with a gathered crowd, something going off into space from that historic pad. It really made me think. And that's obviously here we're in July, we're in the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11. You know, even for those of us like me who weren't there to witness it, or those of us like you who were, it's this really unifying moment, right? It has such a power to it. And so that's why we've been doing these series of interviews. Last month, we had Asif Siddiqui talking about the Soviet side of the moonshot. This month, I'm really excited. We have

Roger Lanius, the former chief historian of NASA, talking about why Apollo happened. And we'll get into that in a little bit. But it was really special just to be able to be there at the Cape around the 50th anniversary to watch something so magnificent. Space brings us together. Someone says that that we know, right? Space brings out the best in us, and it really felt like it. Yep, yes, there was an awful lot of that phrase going around as we enjoyed the launch. Like I said, it was just made that much more dramatic and meaningful because it was happening at that historic site.

I never got to see a shuttle launch, so this was my stand-in, at least until we get to see the space launch system. Hey, how's that for? Yeah. How's that for a segue into talking about what's going on in space policy? What's happened over the last month? Maybe beginning with the House of Representatives in the United States, which I think has passed its version of a NASA funding bill.

It sure did. The full House actually voted on the Commerce, Justice, and Science legislation that contains NASA. Talked about it a little bit last time, and we have data up on our website at planetary.org about the NASA 2020 budget, which this is or will be. The House has taken their action. They passed the budget. It basically provides no new funding as requested for the Artemis program. It's not clear that, you know, the Artemis program request came very, very late

for the House to react to. They're also as democratically controlled, not super inclined to give the president money without a little more work on their end being proposed for it or being done to make that groundwork, the political groundwork happen. So what we did see a NASA budget boost of 4% and a huge amount of that went to NASA science, which is really exciting. Pretty much every single priority of the Planetary Society made it into this bill, which was now passed by the House of Representatives. So everyone who wrote in the beginning of the year, all the thousands of members who wrote or made phone calls, and particularly the 100 members who came to Washington, DC, advocating for these issues, pat yourself on the year, all the thousands of members who wrote or made phone calls, and particularly the 100 members who came to Washington, D.C., advocating for these issues, pat yourself on the

back. You made a difference. These are in this bill. This is the House version of the bill. So WFIRST, the Wide Field Infrared Survey Telescope, Space Telescope, is funded again after facing cancellation. NASA's Education Division is restored. We have additional funding for Earth science and other science missions. And Mars sample return is funded in this bill as well. So it's a pretty spectacular bill. It just doesn't really accelerate the lunar program the way that the Trump administration has requested. So at this point, the Senate needs to do something, right?

The Senate hasn't released its even draft version of NASA's bill yet. This isn't the normal way that this happens. Budget bills start in the House, they go to the Senate. So all action moves to the Senate. We're going to see what happens next in the next couple of months. I'm glad you mentioned WFIRST because just this morning, as we're recording this, there was a story about NASA awarding a contract to the Space Telescope Science Institute for operating, building and operating the control room for that next generation space telescope, next, next generation after the James Webb.

Let's talk about some of the other action that has been taking place. I know there have been some reports, not entirely positive about, well, like a mission to Europa, the Europa Clipper. Yeah, I mean, it's overall pretty positive. There's been a ton of stuff happening that we really need to devote full episodes to. So we'll just preview these and we'll be talking about these later in the year. But we've had a number of inspector general reports from NASA and then a government accountability office reports looking at some major NASA programs. The biggest issue with Europa that was highlighted, interestingly enough,

was that JPL is being overwhelmed right now. JPL is functionally running two flagship missions at the same time, Europa Clipper and Mars 2020, in addition to missions like Psyche, Earth Science missions, and other missions. And JPL's workforce is functionally stretched thin. JPL has too much to do. Great problem to have, but still a real problem. Like rarely do we see flagships overlapping like this. The internal report highlighted that the workforce issues getting the best people and the best engineers to get on Europa Clipper has been difficult. And so JPL struggling with that. Other issues are, of course, the space launch system taking longer and costing more than expected. The GAO, the Government Accountability Office, pretty harsh language for NASA.

They awarded Boeing, the crime contractor of the space launch system, about $217 million in bonus awards for good performance, despite the fact that the rocket has been slipping further and further and further into the future. So the question is, why did Boeing get those performance awards for not delivering on time? It's not clear. NASA was pretty defensive in this. And they said that, you know, there's reasons that these are awarded and not. But the fact of the matter remains that the Space Launch System, despite overall critical pressure, is about as protected of a political program as you can get. It was funded higher than requested in the bill just provided by the House of Representatives. Expect to see the same thing in the Senate. That rocket is not going away anytime soon.

Take a moment to talk about planetary defense, which is something else that we care a lot about at the Society. We just finished a big campaign regarding this topic. And, of course, the Planetary Defense Conference, a biannual conference, just took place. And we were big players there as well. But there have been some other developments? Yeah, well, the House, again, they funded planetary defense at about $150, $160 million. That's a great level, one of the record levels for planetary defense funding within NASA. They directed continued funding for the NEOCAM space telescope

mission, which is fantastic. That's one we've been really pushing for. And the National Academies just released a formal report basically outlining the need for a space-based infrared telescope to search for near-Earth asteroids, basically NEOCAM. So we've had political support for it from the Congress. We've had the stamp of approval from the scientific community. All that's kind of waiting to happen here is that NASA needs to formally request NEOCAM as a mission. Until then, they're kind of keeping it going along as we talked about before by funding the instrument development, but basically not building the spacecraft to go along with it. That's all the money they have for it right now, but hopefully we'll start seeing some more movement in that direction soon.

So go neocam. Any other policy issues or updates that you'd like to provide before we go on to talk about some of the most amazing work that I've seen come out of your computer. Well, why would I delay that discussion? I will take it. No, I mean, those are the highlights. Let's move to Apollo. I mean, frankly, my head has been in Apollo now for the last couple of months. I think a lot of people's minds are there. We're hitting this big 50th anniversary and we're all, it's all in our minds. And it's July, right? It's we're in the anniversary. This is the anniversary show, Apollo 11. So let's talk about it, man. Let's go Apollo. Well, let's start with this June 16th blog post that you posted at planetary.org, reconstructing the cost of the one giant leap. How much did Apollo cost? Seems like a simple

question, but the monumental amount of work that you put into this demonstrates that that's not really the case. The numbers that you've pulled together are in a spreadsheet that anybody can review. And it's really fascinating detective work. That's what it is. What did it take to pull this together, Casey? And why did you take this on? Yeah, this actually turned out to be a really fun project. I ended up going to NASA headquarters, the reference collection, the document collection, to look for more detailed numbers of Apollo. Because basically, you know, I'm a numbers guy, right? I talk about budgets all the time.

How much do things cost? When did the money show up for them? How did the cost profiles work? It tells us something, particularly now when we're talking about Project Artemis going to the moon. How do we evaluate if it's a serious political commitment? Well, we can compare it to the one data point we have for successfully sending humans to the moon and bringing them back to the earth, right? There's no other ways to, you know, obviously times have changed a little bit, but fundamentally the physics of sending people to the moon and back them back to the earth, right? There's no other ways to, you know, obviously, times have changed a little bit. But fundamentally, the physics of sending people to the moon and back

have not. So what did Apollo cost? And as I was looking around to answer that question, I started seeing lots of different numbers. It was weird, actually, how uncertain the numbers were. And the numbers that I saw, I could not trace back to an origin. Where did the numbers even come from? It seemed to have all these kind of circular reference points to various NASA historical books published in the 70s or the 80s or 2000. And they all referenced books published in the 70s. It's just there wasn't a clear answer to this. And so I tried to thought what would be a simple project to say, all right, how much did Apollo cost? Let's find the original reporting from NASA. And the problem is NASA doesn't have any original reporting about this. There's no like secret internal numbers that NASA

kept for Apollo. They were rushing through this in the 60s, obviously, and the bookkeeping is pretty poor. And then you've had 50 years of, you know, software upgrades, document movement, storage, and all these sorts of things. It's, it's very difficult. And I actually found when I was looking through this historical collection at NASA headquarters, I'm not the first person to come across this problem. People in NASA's financial office, I'd found a memo, Apollo cost reconstruction memo or something like that. And he had a group of actual NASA employees saying like, we need to figure out how do we normalize the cost of Apollo, decide what the actual cost was, like, how do we pull this data together. And I found some handwritten notes after that meeting happened. They're pretty sad. They're very disappointed. Like they're saying like, well,

the meeting went about as expected. No one was prepared to talk about this. Data varies by upwards of 20%. We really have no idea. And that's prepared to talk about this. Data varies by upwards of 20%. We really have no idea. And that's amazing to me. This was the largest human spaceflight project in history, the most high profile thing that NASA has ever done. And the bookkeeping is really sloppy about it. So it became this bigger project of what can I do to contribute better data to this overall discussion, given what we have access to. You mentioned some of the previous efforts that you came across. And in fact, the NASA History Office, you mentioned in the blog post, has this breakdown of the Apollo program's costs. But is it reliable?

That was kind of fascinating, too. No, no, it is not. If you search for Apollo appropriations or something, the first hit is from a NASA. It's actually from a NASA book published in 2000 called Apollo by the Numbers. And that itself is using numbers first published in this thing called the Apollo Project Chronicle one through four or something like that. First published in the early 1970s. It basically takes some of those numbers and puts it into a table. The problem is they're wrong, like they're really wrong. And it's a good example of how it pays to not just take everything at face value, even from authoritative sources like the NASA history office. There's some really obvious mistakes in that table. One, like there's basic arithmetic errors, like NASA's budget numbers as represented don't add up to the sum that they claim, right? Literally,

no one has bothered to check that sum since I and then I until I did. Other things are obviously wrong that they claim that no money was spent on the Saturn one vehicle until 1964. But the first launch of the Saturn one was 1961. Obviously, they spent some money on it. They weren't just working for free in those years. And so there's a lot of problems. And that table is now the bane of my existence. There's this old XKCD comic of this guy saying, sorry, I'm busy. There's something wrong onitative source. My God, Matt, it is so wrong. So I tried to create a better version of that table. And I tried to be really open with the data so people can go back, you know, everyone has to make certain amounts of choices when you're trying to group accounting things together, because NASA reported this data publicly throughout the 1960s. But they reported it in different ways, right? The types of reporting changed over time. You had different budget people working in the budget office, different

administrations expecting different amounts of detail. You have to make some choices to group those together. But what I did in our ultimate data source that we put online was that I kept the original raw data for every single fiscal year from 1961 to 1973. So people can look at every decision that I made, and you might disagree, but the original data is there, you can trace back why it came. And I made a bunch of annotations and comments and all this stuff. But fundamentally, what was fun is that, you know, assuming that I'm within a reasonable amount, which I which I am, I believe I am, we can break down here's the cost per, we can break down, here's the cost per year of the command module. Here's the cost per year of the lunar module. Here's the cost per year of

the guidance and navigation computer. Then I ran some new analysis using kind of the latest inflation indexing standards for aerospace projects. It's NASA's New START inflation index. And you can look at really the true cost of Apollo, the direct cost, plus your overhead of building your facilities, operations, and so forth, comes to about $263 billion in today's money between 1961 and 1973. If you look at just the Saturn cost, the family of Saturn rockets that was developed for Apollo, that's $100 billion. That's almost half the cost of the entire program. And then you realize people talk about,

why isn't the space launch system flying? We've spent $17 billion on it. It's like, well, we spent $60 billion on the Saturn V. Like, it peaked at something like $12 billion a year of NASA spending adjusted for inflation. SLS has been a flat roughly $2 billion for its entire history. That's not how you run giant aerospace projects. Of course it's going to have some problems in that context.

So I think it's really illuminating and also really tells you how much of a priority this was, particularly in the early 1960s. The money started flowing almost immediately, and it was there at those critical early years of development when you need to be doing the research, the technology development, the basic work of figuring out how to build this stuff. It makes these beautiful cost curves. And again, all online. You can tell Matt,

I could probably talk about this for the next two hours. It's all online. There's a whole new Apollo cost data. I have some beautiful plots and charts. And of course, all the data is out there and free to use. So take a look at it. Play with the data. You can see what it took to go to the moon in the 1960s.

So it wasn't nothing. It is quite an accomplishment. And I do recommend that people take a look at this and open the spreadsheet as well. And look at some of the sources that Casey provides down at the bottom of the post. Like I said, it's a June 16 post at planetary.org, reconstructing the cost of the one giant leap. How much did Apollo cost? Let's stick with Apollo and go on to this terrific interview that you have for us today. It's very much in line with what we've been talking about. Tell us about Roger Launius and your conversation with him.

Yeah, Roger is great. He's one of my favorite writers in space history and space policy. He's about as titled as you want to get. He was the chief historian at NASA for 12 years. He was also one of the associate directors at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum, the Smithsonian Institution, I should say. And he's semi-retired now. He is the founder and principal at Launius Historical Services.

I recommend basically everything he's written. He has a new book out about Apollo, and he has one of my favorite previous books he had written is called Robots in Space that he wrote with Howard McCurdy, looking at the overall kind of human spaceflight, robotic spaceflight history and policy. And he's got great papers that he's posted online. He's an important, really one of the most important people in this field. And if you love space policy, search for his name, search for some of his writings. He will not disappoint

you. He's really interesting. The reason I wanted to talk to Roger Launius today on the anniversary episode, basically of Apollo 11, is that I feel generally, you know, and it's reasonable that we focus on the achievement itself, right? We look at Neil and Buzz, we look at Michael Collins, we look at, you know, the flags and the footprints and the pictures of the people on the moon. We're like, what an incredible thing that we did with all of the people who made it happen. But where did that money come from? Going back to this costing data, why did that money flow the way that it did? I mean, that's an incredible amount of money, right?

We've all talked about how much Apollo cost peaked at something like 4% of all of federal expenditures. It was rated one of the highest priorities of spending in the federal government. How do you get to that point? And why hasn't it happened again? This discussion was a lot of fun with Roger. I try to start very, very far back in the prehistory of the space age. Way back, 19th century. Yeah, some of this now discredited, but important at the time,

concepts of self-identity, cultural identity, and of exploration, and how some of these early space advocates like Wernher von Braun and Willie Lacer delayed the groundwork for the concept of a moon mission being real. And then when all of these factors basically lined up to enable it to happen, they had done the groundwork in a certain sense from a public relations perspective and a political perspective. And Apollo became briefly a solution to a significant national security problem. And that's why it happened. And the reason why we haven't had a recreation of Apollo, or even a minor version of Apollo, you know, even a half-priced version of Apollo,

was that so far, human spaceflight program has not provided that solution to a problem since. Roger and I talk about that, and we go right into this history of why Apollo happened and what got it to that point of this, you know, one giant leap, what enabled that to even progress, to even be built, to even have that person on the surface. I think it's fascinating. It's really important for any space advocate to understand this too, that it just wasn't some soaring rhetoric on John F. Kennedy's part. It was an actual policy

national security issue that was really bought into by a broad segment of the congressional and power structure in the United States. It's a terrific conversation. So we'll go into it, I guess. This is your special gift from the Space Policy Edition and Planetary Radio and the Planetary Society. A little bit of an early, not very early, celebration of this 50th anniversary of humans setting foot on the moon. Here is Casey Dreyer talking with Roger Lanius. Dr. Lanius, I want to thank you again for joining us here in the Space Policy Edition. My pleasure. It's nice to be here. So we're talking in the year 2019, the 50th anniversary year of Apollo 11,

roughly the same time of year of the Apollo decision going all the way back to 1961 that happened in April. I want to start in the 19th century, and I want to start with something called the Frontier Thesis by Frederick Jackson Turner. So could you explain to the listeners, what is this thesis and how did it intertwine with the thoughts about space exploration, at least in the first half of the 20th century in the United States? Sure. The frontier thesis, as it's called, the Turner thesis, some people refer to it, was offered as a paper at the American Historical Association meeting in 1893. Turner had read in the census report from 1890 that the so-called frontier, the area which has a very small percentage of the population,

didn't really exist anymore. And because of that, he opined that we had lost the boundaries that had been present for so many years that had made America the way it was. His argument was that open expanse of land that continually moved westward was a place where people from the east could go, they could live their lives in freedom, they could do pretty much whatever they wanted, and they could also then remake society. And in the process, they were remade at the same time. Our American culture was very much a product of the frontier, according to Turner. That became a very popular thesis in the first part of the 19th century. When I was in graduate school, that was one of the first papers I read.

Then immediately, everybody went about debunking it because it's actually not true. It didn't really shape our culture in fundamental ways. Mostly we replicated what we had seen previously and what we had experienced previously with some minor modification. commodification? And if it was such a, if it such was a truly shaping influence on us, why did it also not shape the other nations who were engaged in the frontier experience in America, the Spanish or the French principally? They had entirely different backgrounds there. So anyway, it was important, but it wasn't as influential over time as one might think. But even though it wasn't true, I guess, in the sense, I mean, you're talking about when you were in graduate school later in the 20th century. Right. People wanted it to be true. Right.

I mean, this is what I was kind of looking for in the early 20th century when people, particularly like Willie Lay or Wernher von Braun, started to talk about and popularize spaceflight. Willie Lay or Wernher von Braun started to talk about and popularize spaceflight, they latched onto this thesis of hooked into this American self-identity myth that at least the country wanted to tell itself at that period, it seems like. Well, there's no question about that. We wanted to believe it, which is the reason why it became so popular, to be perfectly honest. Because of that, it sort of shaped a lot of people's thinking in the first half of the 20th century. By the second half, it had pretty much fallen by the wayside and was really pretty thoroughly debunked by the 60s. But as it was, those early people who thought about the frontier experience, they essentially put all of those same ideas into space travel. those same ideas into space travel. So if we go to Mars and we found a civilization there, it will have the same sort of attributes and benefits that the frontier experience did in

the American West. That was viewed as an attractive thing. And rightly or wrongly, that sort of shaped a lot of people's thinking in that first half of the 20th century. Did it allow kind of a manifest destiny style approach to discussing space? I mean, again, just to connect this really literally, the classic Star Trek opener is space is the final frontier, right? So we're taking the same structure and mythos and narrative structure that the country has been telling itself and just putting it into this new domain, it seems like, at least in the first half of the 20th century. Yeah, no question about that.

And we tended to do that. We viewed space as the final frontier of the Star Trek soliloquy at the beginning of the series, every episode. And it sort of shaped our thinking about this, no question. But in a very, and I should just clarify, you mentioned this too, a very romanticized idea of it too, obviously. Like it completely disregarded the native peoples who lived there, the roles of non-whites basically or non-European descendants as they moved out west. I mean, the whole aspect of it just seemed it was just this utterly romantic story. And you talk about this in some of your papers writing about Apollo, this value of myth, and myth in terms of how a nation sees itself and also how it

approaches problems in terms of its self-identity. Right. Well, yes, that's absolutely right. The frontier thesis and its application to the American West was a misnomer, and it was nostalgic and mythological in itself. The replicating of that towards space also created sort of the same sort of mythology and romanticization of this particular concept. And it doesn't take into account the many horrible things that took place in the American West and would presumably take place in any sort of space frontiering experience as well. There's an article that was written back in the 1980s in which it said, pity the poor Indians of space, aliens, which, of course, we don't know actually exist. But nonetheless, that was a sort of turning on that frontier thesis into a bad sort of experience that might take place in space. And again, I'm kind of hitting on this topic because Howard McCurdy discussed this a lot in his book, Space in the American Imagination, I think, or roughly the name of it.

The idea that in order to get to something like Apollo, where you're talking about a moonshot and, you know, they had done polling back, I believe, in the 1950s saying, how realistic is it to go to the moon in one's lifetime? And most people didn't think it was possible. And so how do you get from that kind of general skepticism, cultural skepticism about what's possible to a crash effort to land on the moon roughly 15 years later that succeeded. Yeah, there's a couple of things about this that are really interesting. The first one is that period between about the end of World War II and the time of Sputnik was a very significant one in the context of the shaping of people's attitudes towards spaceflight. In, I think it was 1949, there was a poll taken, a scientific poll done by one of the polling firms in the United States that said that only about 25% of the population believed we would land on the moon in their lifetimes. By the time of Sputnik, that had

absolutely flipped. 75% believed we would do it within a fairly short period of time, certainly in their lifetimes. And so you have to ask the question, between those two poles, what changed? What happened? And I would contend that two important things took place. The first one was a concerted effort on the part of space enthusiasts, people who were advocating for space exploration, and a very concerted effort to sort of convince people that this is real, it's going to happen really soon, and we can do this. And we're familiar with some of the literature on this, the Collier series of articles starting in 1952 and extending for

two or three years that really tried to say, you know, this is something we're going to do. And what are we waiting for? This is possible. Let's seize the initiative. Wernher von Braun was critical to this. Willie Lay was critical to this. There were others as well. The Walt Disney series, three episodes from the Walt Disney weekly television series that talked about spaceflight and talked about it as a real thing. We can do this. And here's how we're going to go about doing it. Those efforts at sort of selling spaceflight made Werner Von Braun a household name in the United States. And that was significant. But that one effort to sort of convince people that this is real and we're going to see it soon

made an important difference, I believe. But the other part of that, and it's just as important, was the demonstration of rocket technology that was taking place on a daily basis during this period. Now, they hadn't put anything into orbit yet, but there was sounding rockets that were going to the upper atmosphere, and there were the first pictures taken from space as one of the V-2s went up 100 miles or so and pointed a camera back down at the Earth.

Those sorts of things made it seem real at the same time that there's a concerted effort to tell everyone that it is soon going to happen. And I would contend that that was a fundamental shift. That just sounds so familiar. Do you think this is happening now, particularly with things like in commercial space, as kind of broadly you would define that, this idea of socializing future potential and kind of capturing some would define that, this idea of socializing future potential and kind of capturing some aspect of public imagination that corresponds with some sort of technological demonstration happening at the same time. Yeah, I believe that there is something to that,

no question about it. And one of the things that we've also found is that the closer public perceptions are to the realities that they see around them, the greater the support for this whole endeavor is. And that was very clear in the late 1950s and the early 1960s and into the Apollo program, where you've got this sort of science fiction, science fact world that is converging with the reality that you see taking place. And I think it builds support. And where there's a divergence, I think that people are less interested. If it's fantasy, then you might enjoy it as a story, but it's not something that you're necessarily going

to go out and say, we really need to expend resources to undertake these things. And again, I think that's something also important in looking at the context of Apollo is that this is happening in this period of incredibly rapid technological change and quality of life, particularly in the United States, but also more broadly throughout the world. technocratic, if you'd like to use that term, technocratic approach to the modern industrial world was born after kind of symbolic first atomic weapon, but also the start of the rocket age with Wernher von Braun's V2. It seems like this capability that's developing, nothing seemed impossible. And it seemed to drive that convergence almost of fantasy and reality. Why wouldn't we be able to have rocket powered cars taking us to the moon in 20 years? That's absolutely right. The downside of those expectations, however, are when those don't happen. I've said many times, other people have, where's my jetpack? I was promised a jetpack.

And when you don't have those things, it sort of ticks you off. You get 140 characters, though, on Twitter instead. Right. That's not the same. So we have post-World War II. I want to hit on this a little bit and dwell on this period before Sputnik. You mentioned this already where you had Wernher von Braun and others making a concerted effort to popularize spaceflight.

And I've done a whole episode on Wernher von Braun in the past. And it's a fascinating character, obviously. Interesting to me that both him and Willie Lay were both immigrants coming to the United States. But then speaking about space in this very kind of mythological, broad narrative, they had this amazing capability, I feel like, to really hook into the American self-identity. Do you think their history as immigrants gave them some extra perspective on how to communicate to their adopted nation? I wouldn't be surprised if it did. But at the same time, we have to remember that, you know, there's lots of other immigrants and they weren't able to tap into that in the same way. same way. So I think there's a uniqueness to Von Brown and Willie Lay and a few other people who are immigrants that can say something about the American culture that maybe other people don't

see. So de Tocqueville in the 1830s comes to America and writes this terrific book sort of explaining the nature of American society. He got a lot of it right. Probably had he not been somebody visiting here from someplace else, he wouldn't have had the insights that he had. And that's probably true for Von Brown and Willie Lay too. Such an interesting ability that they demonstrated. And again, also, I think it had to do with, would you agree with the kind of the concentration of media at the time? You have this wonderful paper about human spaceflight as religion, could be a whole other topic. But you talk about some of the holy writ of this religion. And you already mentioned it, the Collier's

articles, beginning in the 1950s. How important were those? And just to clarify, I mean, I had my students read this, the cover isn't just we're going to go to space, we're going to conquer man is going to conquer space soon, or something to that effect. How really important were those in terms of setting this expectation? Do we look back and kind of slot them into this or do they really create a fundamental shift of expectation? Well, I think they certainly go a long way toward helping to reshape perspectives on this. They weren't alone. I mean, we sort of reverentially look at the Collier series as being prophetic. It is sort of sacred text for those of us who are spaceflight advocates and believers. But one of the things

about it that seems so real was that you had people writing those articles in Colliers and for the Disney series later as well, who are sort of engaged in this as professionals. They're not crackpots. And so it helps, I think, to give it legitimacy, maybe that it wouldn't have otherwise. But they also sort of spin these stories in which, you know, this is not that hard to do, as they say in this particular, you know, this is not that hard to do, as they say in this particular, in these writings that were put out in the 1950s. There's so many things that we know now about spaceflight and how much more difficult it really is than Von Braun anticipated at the time, that you can look at this and say, these were a little naive. But for the time, they were the best understanding that we had. They were presented by someone who had legitimacy as a professional and nobody had any reason to discount what was being said.

And von Braun in particular wasn't just talking about one off missions. He was talking about much larger kind of ambitions for humanity and destination or again, almost like this manifest destiny. But this maybe is a good point to bring up the concept of the Von Braun paradigm that he started to talk about early, early on before even Apollo was a glint in his eye. Right. There's been some controversy over the Von Braun paradigm and whether or not it's real. At one time or another, Von Braun said almost anything you can think of when it came to spaceflight. But that sort of stepwise approach that sort of got codified in the NASA long range plan in 1959, it really did, I think, have its antecedents in some of Von Braun's thinking earlier in the 1950s. And, you know, you put a capsule up just to see if you

can send somebody up there and have them survive. That was unknown at that point in time. Secondly, you build a winged reusable vehicle that enables you to come back and forth to Earth relatively easy. Easy is not the right term, but safely, securely, and with moderate strenuous activity. and with moderate strenuous activity. You put a space station up in orbit that then becomes the jumping off place for trips to the moon and ultimately to Mars. That's sort of a five-step process, and it makes sense when you think about it. And that's sort of gotten codified as what we call the Von Braun paradigm.

And I think it works in that context. NASA adopted it pretty thoroughly in the long-range plan from 1959, and I will contend that it's been engaged in this ever since. In 1961, Kennedy sort of threw out the plan by saying after only the first step had been accomplished, they had a capsule up and put an astronaut in it. Well, let's go to the moon now and do it by the end of the decade. But no sooner did NASA complete that, then they went right back to that stepwise approach of a winged reusable spacecraft, a space shuttle, if you will. And then they no sooner started flying that than they started pushing for a space station, which is now in orbit. and ultimately with a return to the moon and on to Mars. We've heard that many times. Sounds quite familiar at the moment, in fact.

Just to establish here that von Braun's talking and people in these magazines and on these Disney shows are talking about these broad, ongoing possibilities for space, not just going up and down. Right. So let's actually shift a little bit from the cultural kind of priming that's been happening in terms of spaceflight to the geopolitical context. And first, I want to go back to the immediate post-war years, almost kind of this brief period where people are taking stock of what it means to be demobilized in a world where you have nuclear weapons that you can put theoretically on

intercontinental ballistic missiles? And how does that change the concept of peacetime, particularly once the Soviet Union detonates its first atomic weapon? Well, I mean, one of the things that happened in the 1950s was both the United States and the Soviet Union realized that a very economical means of delivering nuclear weapons on the heads of an enemy is ballistic missiles. And so they both began to pursue those very thoroughly. I mean, obviously, they'd started in 1945, 46 to work on this. But it wasn't until the 1950s that they had anything approaching a really legitimate threat in this particular arena. And all of that gets raised to a level that is essentially catastrophic when you have nuclear weapons that you can put on top of these.

And the Americans have the atomic bomb in 1945. The Soviets have one in 1949. Neither of them had missiles at that point that could deliver them, which gave us a little breathing space, but they all pursued that all through the 1950s. And the Treasury was opened on both sides of that Cold War, not because we wanted to explore space, but because we wanted that ballistic missile delivery capability. Rockets, of course, are dual-use technology, and they don't really care what's the payload. Consequently, you could put a person on it or a scientific package or something else and explore space with it as well as deliver a nuclear weapon.

Right. And that was why, at least in the 1950s and early 60s, there was such a focus, it seems like, on the lift capability of Soviet missiles and rocket. They'd always talk about, oh, you know, how big was Gagarin's capsule compared to a Mercury capsule? How big was Sputnik heavy, Sputnik compared to Explorer 1? And it was really just a placeholder for how big of a nuclear weapon could you put on an ICBM? Is that correct way to think about this? This is why there was this focus and fear of this so-called missile gap, let's say? could. And so consequently, they had to build big, dumb boosters that allowed them more throw weight, which gave them an edge in terms of space exploration activities, because they could put up a larger capsule and they could put a person on it and all this sort of thing, when the Americans didn't have that capability just yet.

I think just going back to this whole development of the Cold War between the US and the USSR, it just really strikes me again, this strange development of the Cold War between the US and the USSR, it just really strikes me again, this strange accident of history where they basically learned, you know, once you combine nuclear weapons with ICBMs, there's no defense against those. There's no direct defense, right? You can't shoot them down. We're still, we still can't. Certainly couldn't back then. And so Eisenhower comes in, and at least as some of his biographers have characterized him, you know, he was a conservative, small C conservative. He didn't want, some people have described as a garrison state with a giant army ready to react to any Soviet

threat. And you already kind of alluded to this. If you had some sort of nuclear armaments that you could have ready to launch in a retaliatory strike at any point or at the time of their choosing, they would also say. You don't have to have this big standing army. So it was relatively cheap to have this capability, but also it fundamentally, again, changed, I believe, what peacetime meant, right? You could no longer ever really have peacetime if at any moment an adversary could not just destroy your armies, but wipe you off the face of the earth. Can we just talk a little bit about how this growing standoff between Soviet and US political ideologies globally really started to influence this development? We already talked about this a little bit with ICBMs, but so rocket developments happening, but what's broadly happening with throughout the world at the same

time throughout the 1950s? Yeah, well, I mean, one of the things that's taking place is the Cold War is in full swing. It emerges almost immediately with the end of the Cold War, or with the end of World War II. It really comes to a head in 1948, 49, the Berlin crisis, the Berlin airlift, and so forth, really sort of sets us on a path of rivalry with the Soviet Union. And it's a global struggle between two competing economic and political systems, each believing that they were right and seeking to either bring into the fold by design because they wanted to be a part of it, or in some cases through conquest of various other nations who would be supporters in this particular,

and allies in this particular struggle. And it just found a competition all over the world. And we were terrified of the Soviets, and the Soviets were terrified of the Americans. There is no way to get that across to people who don't have an appreciation for the Cold War environment. Kids today have threats in schools, for instance, but it's things like active shooter drills and things of this nature. When I was a kid in the mid-1960s, we had duck and cover exercises where we would crawl under our desk like that would protect us from a nuclear blast. I thought it was stupid when I was 10, but this was very real stuff.

It was drilled into our heads that at any moment we could be wiped off the face of the earth. All it took was a decision on the part of a leader in the Kremlin to make this happen. And this had never been the case in American history before. Our two great oceans had protected us throughout our history, and we were almost invulnerable from attack. Occasionally, you know, during the War of 1812, the British invaded from Canada and fought a couple of wars with Mexico and so forth. But beyond that, there was never really a threat to the United States. It now was very present. And we had this great fear of it. And we also had the experience because of both ballistic missiles and intercontinental bombers of living our lives as a target. It's a truly unique experience that does not predate the 20th century.

And it really became desperate in the context of global thermonuclear war. I'm glad you brought this up. It's that it's hard to convey to someone who didn't live through it, what that experience was like. Would fear would be the right way to describe it or panic? Or it feels like in terms of human nature, a few things are more motivating than an existential fear, at least in terms of spending money. There is this huge investment in terms of military technology, particularly around the Air Force rocketry, nuclear weapon development in the 1950s, not in a sense of offensive desire, but in a concept of

self-preservation. Is that? Yeah, no, I think it is. I'm not sure it was fear. That may be too strong a statement for most people. There was a sense of foreboding that was present. No question about that. And in some cases, it may have manifested itself in fear. You know, I think there was public instances where there was a where there were standoffs between the United States and the Soviet Union, like the like the Cuban Missile Crisis, where fear really did take hold. But most of the time, it was this sort of overarching sense of foreboding and concern. And we needed to be prepared for whatever could happen, the worst in some cases. You know, people build bomb shelters in their backyards and do things like this.

We have civil defense drills, things that are sort of lost to us today. And when we think about them at all, we sort of think how silly they might have been. But this was a serious business. And the seriousness of it was really exacerbated by this rocket technology that enabled the Soviet Union to hit us within a matter of minutes with nuclear weapons. In terms of this competition between the U.S. and the USSR, happens. In terms of this competition between the U.S. and the USSR, who were they competing for? Let's just really clarify that. And who were they and what did they hope to get out of it even? Well, I mean, in both cases, the two central nations involved in this believed that their political and economic systems were superior to the other sides. One or the other was going to be successful

and win the day. Maybe not through some form of war, but certainly they were not going to be able to survive indefinitely with this contentious arrangement that had existed. And of course, the Americans assigned to the Russians and the Russians assigned to the Americans, And of course, the Americans assigned to the Russians and the Russians assigned to the Americans, all kinds of sort of bad actor things that we thought they were going to do. And we've seen this played out in other settings. I mean, at the end of World War II, the Soviet Union, the Red Army swooped into Eastern Europe. And the next thing we know, there's a series of puppet states that are put up in Poland

and other parts of Eastern Europe, a major civil war in Greece and so on and so forth. So it looked from the standpoint of the Americans that this was a very aggressive Soviet Union that was seeking to control the rest of the world and that we needed to counteract that force with other force wherever it was. This led us into fights in places where client states were sort of involved. Korea and Vietnam, of course, are the two best examples. The Soviets did the same sort of thing in Afghanistan in the 1970s and 80s. And the Americans are helping the other side. And at the same time, and this is actually a really important piece of this, and space plays into it pretty fundamentally, new emerging nations that gained their independence at the end of World War II

as European nations began to withdraw from their colonies. India and a variety of other countries in Africa and Asia gained their independence. Whose side are they going to be on in this global struggle? They're not aligned at this point in time. And both sides wanted them to align with them. At some level, the space race of the 1960s was fundamentally about convincing those emerging nations that whoever has the technology, and the Americans wanted to demonstrate that with the race to the moon, that these emerging nations would align with them because they would see them as the most forward-thinking, and technology is sort of where the future is. And so if the Americans can do this,

we want to be on their side. They're going to end up winning. I feel like this is one of the most important pieces of context that this is coming out of a rapidly decolonizing world because of World War II destroyed the European powers functionally. And so this was a historical one-off, effectively, at least. This is why when people, I think, historical one-off, effectively, at least. This is why when people, I think, talk about China as this competing ideological space nation that the U.S. could get into a space race with again, it fundamentally misses the point. As you just said, who are they trying to impress and who is their audience? Well, we don't have a bunch of nations deciding what their ideological political systems are going to be anymore. Like that, that seemed to be just this one time opportunity, or if you want to use that word, situation, given this broad and very bizarre and destructive historical conflagration. No question about that. We don't fear the Chinese

the way we feared the Soviets in the 50s and 60s and 70s and even into the 80s. It's a remarkably different setting. And you sort of have to ask yourself the question, what would the Chinese do that our response to that would be some sort of race to return to the moon or maybe go to Mars or do something else? I just don't see that out there. And they're not a threat. Mostly we want to trade with them and maybe they're bad actors from some standpoints of trade policy and so forth. But those are issues to be worked out diplomatically. And we're not afraid they're going to nuke us at any moment, although presumably they do have the capability. And we're not going to nuke them either. So that's sort of off the table. And without that sort of fear and crisis and foreboding, I really don't see this happening in the same way. So we're getting close now to this decision and

to actually one of the sparks I would, I think most people would argue for how we got to Apollo as we start to progress through the Eisenhower administration. And maybe just very quickly, can you just highlight some of the important aspects of Eisenhower in the context of the upcoming space race and some of the decisions his administration made that set this table for Apollo to happen, whether they were good or bad decisions, and whether you can make that argument.

Okay. Well, I mean, one of the things that's important to understand about Eisenhower is he spent a fair amount of money on space. He didn't spend it on a civilian program, and NASA didn't exist until 1958, but he spent a lot of money on national security space things. So working on ballistic missiles and fielding the first generations of those was a significant investment, and he was willing to spend that money because he thought it was necessary for the long term. Spending money on reconnaissance satellites, and he spent a lot of money there too. Corona emerges from that and not just Corona, but that's the first one that became public. And he wanted to be able to, here's an individual who was

really sort of fundamentally affected by World War II. And his response was, no more Pearl Harbors. I don't want another sneak attack. I want to know what the Soviets are doing. And oh, by the way, I'm happy for them to see what we're doing too. And in that context, reconnaissance satellites are a stabilizing influence in the Cold War and are really important on both sides. Eisenhower was willing to spend a lot of money on that. Science rode piggyback on the rocket technology development efforts, but they were never a part of the major agenda behind it. But you can put a payload on it. If you're going to test a rocket, you can put a payload in the nose of it and collect data too.

And that's what they ended up doing a lot. So at some level, you know, Eisenhower sort of set the stage for a lot of things that come a little bit later. He was also willing to expend resources in the International Geophysical Year. You may want to spend some time talking about that, but Sputnik and the American efforts to put a satellite into orbit both spring from that particular agenda. And science is a big driver on that. But Eisner wanted to keep the cost low enough that he could justify it. And he was sort of complaining in the summer of 1957 about how much this was all costing. And every time he turned around, they were coming in and asking for more dollars to engage in this activity. He wasn't sure it was necessary. In the end, especially with the launch of Sputnik in October of 1957, he realized it was important.

I feel Eisenhower, his kind of role in this has changed over time as people have understood more his role in national security space, particularly for reconnaissance satellites. I actually wanted to toss out something to consider too. I'd be interested to hear your thoughts on this, which is Eisenhower too, as an example of competent governance and creating this post-war or continuing, I guess, this like post-war concept of a functioning and trustworthy federal government that did what it set out to do. And I thought about this a lot in the context of the interstate highway system, which was this huge, massive federal undertaking that functionally improved people's lives a

significant degree broadly and helped commerce and so forth and do all these other things that really transformed the nation. Do you think that helps set the stage for something like Apollo and the Kennedy technocratic approach to governing where we can, you know, just it's a management problem and the U.S. government's up to it compared to how we talk about, or at least how a lot of political parties talk about government now as a problem? Yeah. Well, at some level, I think that's probably true. It's important to understand that the interstate highway system was really viewed by Eisenhower as a military objective. He saw the great autobahns in Germany at the end of World War II, and he thought, God, we need that here. And that was fundamentally about being able to move troops and tanks and other things from place to place relatively quickly.

And so this was a national security effort from Eisenhower's perspective. It's an example of dual use, to be perfectly honest. It had not just a military purpose, but also a fundamentally commercial one. It did change the nature of the United States when that system was put into place. So let's get here to the International Geophysical Year. And why don't you just start out, what was that and why did it come together? And what were some of its goals kind of broadly around the world at that point? Most people don't realize that there were two earlier efforts along the same lines.

And they were known as the International Polar Years. There was one in the 1880s. And it was the simplest of all ideas. Can we get nations or research institutes or somebody to sponsor expeditions to the polar regions? And mostly for the 1880s, they were thinking of the Arctic as opposed to the Antarctic. And can we take measurements about the weather patterns, the ocean temperatures and how tall it is and how all of these other things, you know, climatology, oceanography, geology, geophysics, magnetism, on and on and on. Can we take readings with various sponsored research groups in various parts of the pole using the same instruments, the same procedures, and collecting the same type of data. And at the end of that, we can then combine all of this and we'll have a data set that gives us a more broad understanding than we've ever had previously. And it was an enormous success. There were, I think, 17 or 18 major research stations established at that particular point in time. The Americans were

involved, but almost all the nations of Europe, Russia, and others were also involved. And they collected this data. So it was a great success. 50 years later, scientists said, let's do this again. And so the second International Polar Year was also created. It was not quite as successful because it took place in the 1930s at the height of the Great Depression. Every nation was strapped for cash and so were research institutes. While there was some impressive data collected, it wasn't quite as broad as everybody had hoped at the time. But they did expand to Antarctica at the same time. And so there were a few stations down there. The idea of the 1950s was to do this again. And initially, they called

it the International Polar Year, the third one. They decided to broaden that. They could make it bigger than that. They could take readings from various other places in addition to the Poles. And so they changed the name to the International Geophysical Year, doing the same type of work, essentially. And it was enormously successful. Many nations signed on. There were research stations established at both of the poles and around them. The Americans and the Russians engaged in this Cold War objective of rivalry for the hearts and minds of emerging nations really went all out on this. that there was an opportunity to stake a claim in regions of the world, like the two poles, where there were no claims at that point, or there were no successful claims, let's put it that way. Various nations had claimed parts of Antarctica. And then they expanded that not just to the ground-based activities, but this idea of launching a scientific satellite that will

collect data on a global basis. And that became both Sputnik and what was initially Vanguard, but ultimately the Explorer program sort of arose from this and took the first American readings in orbit. Just to clarify, both countries, U.S. and USSR, stated in advance that they intended to launch a satellite during the IGY. We've gotten to this point now where we have these, I think these threads start to co-mingle and come together really tightly. As you just said, we have this Cold War competition that is literally kind of

fighting for the hearts and minds of these emerging nations that are coming around the world. One of the ways in which you demonstrate your technological capability is to use science and engineering as a signaling factor. You have increasing capability in rocketry at the same time coming from this Cold War competition as well. And overall, I'd say a strong economy, particularly in the US, that has led to the ability to expend the resources necessary to develop this. At the same time, as you pointed out, the United States was still kind of, at least maybe conceptually, or as a self-identity, was protected by the oceans. It had emerged from

World War II relatively unscathed in terms of physical destruction that had wiped out Europe and good swaths of the Soviet Union and also in Asia. And suddenly, on October 4th of 1957, that idea of that kind of oceanic protection is shattered by Sputnik. Let's look at Sputnik here as the sparking factor as it leads into Apollo. Was it really, as I just described it, is that accurate way in terms of the public perception? Or is this kind of seen as such after the fact by who was writing the history of it? How much of a shattering effect was this on the American psyche? Well, it wasn't initially a shattering thing. It's also a part of sort of the mythology is that everybody, you know, the Soviet Union puts up a satellite and everybody is,

runs around with their hair on fire and we have to respond. That's really not what happened. You know, the initial reactions were pretty mild. Yes, it was big news. No question about that. It gets covered in the major newspapers. There's a lot of congratulations of the Soviet Union on their success. There's some people who are concerned, but that concern doesn't really coalesce until a couple of weeks later. And it really was the result of a memo to Lyndon Johnson by George Reedy, who was a Democratic strategist who worked for him. And he said, in effect, I think I found the wedge issue. That term hadn't been invented yet, but that's how we would think of it today. The wedge issue that can return the

Democrats to the majority in Congress and can put you, meaning Lyndon Johnson, in the White House. And it's this concern over the Soviet capabilities to send a satellite into orbit and what that signals mostly about their rocket capability. You know, and there were simplistic analyses where, you know, if they can send a satellite over our heads, that means they can send a nuclear weapon down on our heads. Those are not the same thing necessarily, and anybody who's an engineer knows that. But for those who were not technologically skilled, it was an easy point to make. The result of that was that Johnson really began to push on this. I should also mention, Reedy said something else very interesting in this memo. He said, you know,

this is not the issue the Democrats really ought to run with. We should be running on civil rights and desegregation, but there's too many Southern segregationists in the Democratic Party and we'll never get anywhere with that. And that's a shame. But this is the next best thing. And it's not long after that that Johnson begins to give speeches. It's the middle part of the month of October talking about this concern that he's got about about this military capability that has been demonstrated by the Soviet Union, not used for military purposes, but it does mean that they have a capability that we need to be concerned about. He starts, you know, he holds hearings, beats the drum that this is something we really need to be concerned about. And that begins to shift public opinion. And that shifting of public opinion really sort of takes off with the launch of Sputnik 2 a month later on the 3rd of November of 1957.

Now, it wasn't just a relatively small satellite that couldn't do very much. This thing was a pretty big capsule and it had a dog aboard. And so that really signaled that there could be an issue. And a lot of people began to be concerned. The Americans then tried to respond with the launch of Vanguard in early December of 1957. And it's the most beautiful explosion on the pad you've ever seen. And it was done on national television and all this other stuff. So it's sort of three strikes you're out. I mean, you've got two Soviet successes and then you've got an American failure that was spectacular. You know, it immediately was dubbed Flopnik, Karputnik, various things like that, making fun of the American attempt to launch their satellite into orbit. their satellite into orbit. All of that sort of plays into this concern that's starting to be expressed that is being whipped up for political purposes. No question about that. And when you

start delving into American reactions right after the launch, what you see is not that fear factor, but sort of, you know, this belief of, you know, a new age has begun. It's important. And people have been, going back to Von Braun and the campaign to sell the idea of space exploration, they have been conditioned to believe this is something that's going to happen. This is what's happening. Von Braun was a prophet in that sense. It takes this effort Brown was a prophet in that sense. It takes this effort to sort of turn it into something that is much more dangerous than initially thought. Now, that's not to say it wasn't dangerous. The same rocket used to launch Sputnik was also going to be an ICBM launcher. And so you could use it to launch a nuclear weapon, although it was never very reliable in that sense.

And it took a lot of iterations before they got to the point where they had a weapon that was actually work. But that's how people thought about it. a domestic political angle worked purposefully by the Democratic Party at this point to open up this opportunity for them politically, because there was, I believe, midterm elections were coming up in 58 to try to capture back, was it the House of Representatives that they were trying to get back? You had Eisenhower kind of in the back half of his second term, you know, and presidents always tend to lose a little bit of influence as you go, you know, that far in the role. This is, I think, when, was it Johnson who said that famous line, those who control space control the world? Right.

In those hearings, not long after Sputnik. Right. Almost like a comedy of errors in a very dire sense, because as you were pointing out, the reliability of the Soviet rockets were not high. But the fact that they almost just got lucky that they ran, I think almost three, it was three in a row within the first couple of months, and everyone succeeded. And so it made it look like the Soviet Union was far more capable than perhaps they actually were. And then it fed into this insecurity that was being purposely whipped up by domestic political forces looking to use those against a popular president. So it just the unlikeliness

of all this happening and all these pieces being there at the same time to lead to the sudden explosion of space. So after Sputnik, let's jump forward to NASA gets established partly in response to this, right? NASA starts looking for defining itself, you know, so obviously we're going to put some things into space to follow the Soviets, but they start looking at this long-term goal. What do we do now that we have a space agency? Starting in 59, they were planning to go to the moon, right? Right, right. And there were people before that time also planning. They just didn't have a long-range plan yet. Right, right. And there were people before that time also planning. They just didn't have a long range plan yet.

But Keith Glennon, the first NASA administrator, put together the best people he could think of in the agency to come up with sort of a long range agenda. What are we going to do? And what was in the plan from 1959 is what they came up with. There were other things that that they were also doing. So it wasn't it wasn't just those five objectives that I mentioned earlier, but they got from the DOD several basically robotic science programs that were underway at the time. So what became Pioneer, that all got transferred to NASA. The man in space program with Mercury got transferred from the DOD into NASA, literally at the time the agency was stood up. And you can do those things, but then walk beyond that. And that's where the planning comes in. Again, Eisenhower at this point in time was relatively resistant to any kind of crash

efforts at NASA. He always seemed to be a little bit out of step with at least ultimately the public opinion or perception of the space program versus its importance to the nation. And again, a lot of it is because I feel like he couldn't talk about a lot of the national security aspects of spy satellites and so forth

of why he was interested in this. But he always was kind of holding, it seemed like holding onto the reins a little bit, particularly after Sputnik and this growing calls, I would say, for more aggressive space actions on behalf of the United States to catch up to the Soviet Union. He, you know, NASA was talking about these long-term plans, and I believe Project Apollo, or the concept of Apollo, was that named while he was still... No, it didn't get that name until a little bit later. The only human spaceflight program he approved was Mercury, right?

And so this very limited, almost like test, engineering test for humans in space. You have now moving forward into the early 60s, election between John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon. We can just touch on this a little bit, since we're starting to get to the very end goal of this discussion, which is understanding how this decision came. But just in terms of the 60 election, how did Kennedy portray himself and what was that kind of symbolism wrapped around him, particularly in contrast with the Eisenhower administration

represented by Nixon? Well, obviously, I mean, Kennedy is sort of diametrically opposed to Eisenhower just in their persona. Eisenhower was a man of the 19th century more than anything else. Kennedy is clearly a man of the 20th century. Both of them were World War II heroes, but, you know, Eisenhower in a totally different way than Kennedy. And Kennedy campaigned on the missile gap, which didn't really exist. It's interesting. There's a lot of analysis of this that political scientists mostly have done. The issue of that missile gap, which Nixon knew that didn't really exist, but he couldn't say anything about it because that was all super secret. And because of that being used in the 1960 election, there became a decision to to essentially read every candidate into the reality of what is taking place in those areas. So they would not campaign on stuff that wasn't real.

Before we proceed much further, can you define exactly what we mean here by the missile gap? What was the main message that they were trying to push with this? Well, the main issue was, did the Soviet Union have missiles that the Americans did not possess yet? And would they be able to hit the United States with them? And since they had demonstrated launches of ballistic missiles, and we knew that, and that we knew that they were sending up spacecraft into orbit, and we knew that, and that we knew that they were sending up spacecraft into orbit that were also launched on ballistic missile

launchers, it suggested that they had capabilities that we did not have. And that was terrifying to some people and certainly was concerning to most of the public when they saw that. And of course, the Democrats made hay with that as much as they possibly could. So how did Kennedy use this as part of his narrative he was developing for himself as a presidential candidate in 1960? He sort of took the high road when it came to the politics of it. But he certainly tarred the Republicans in general and Eisenhower in particular with failing to take affirmative action to deal with this particular issue. As a result of that, it looked like the Soviets had stolen the march on the Americans and had capabilities the Americans did not have yet.

The reality was that missile gap really didn't exist. The Soviets had a few rockets, of course, and they were able to demonstrate some success with those, but they had nothing approaching a launch capability that would be able to hit the United States. So JFK wins the election very narrowly, comes in, and he's immediately hit with a pretty rough April of 1961. This is roughly 58 years ago now. What happened in very short succession that really started to lead into this issue with space and Apollo being a relevant issue for him? Before we go there, let me say something about Kennedy's approach to space. It wasn't something he was particularly interested in or excited about. If it was a political issue that that he could use in some particular way, he was OK with that.

But it wasn't like he was a space cadet and that he really wanted to send people to the moon or anything like that. And we know that he didn't campaign on this or anything. Right. He wasn't campaigning in the election saying, I'm going to send people to the moon if you elect me. He wasn't campaigning in the election saying, I'm going to send people to the moon if you elect me. He never said anything like that. And in January, when NASA came in and asked for additional money for the Saturn rocket, he was opposed to that idea. He ended up after a meeting with them of giving them some of what they wanted, but not all of what they wanted. And he sort of did it reluctantly.

And that suggests that he wasn't gung ho about this at all. But fast forward for a few months. And on the 12th of April, the Soviet Union launches Yuri Gagarin into space on a, you know, a one orbit flight around the world. As luck would have it, and it sort of was luck, Gagarin was an enormously attractive figure. I mean, he was a handsome young man and all that sort of thing, but he was also a good spokesperson for the Soviet Union. They sent him around the world. He talked to people all over the place. He smiled all the time. So he was an attractive person that could be identified as sort of the forward-looking Soviet individual and how we're going to fly into space. But within a few days after that flight, the American-backed Bay of Pigs invasion failed when American-equipped Cubans invaded Cuba to overthrow Castro. Kennedy took an enormous black

eye from that. So within about a week, he had two major setbacks. One was the Gagarin launch, and the other was this ill-fated, bad idea CIA instigated invasion of Cuba. And he felt like, again, to use a term that may not have been first on his lips at the time, but he needed to change the subject. This was a way to do that. Well, this is what's kind of fascinating to me too. Again, the historical happenstance to lead to this point. I wanted to discuss maybe just to add a little context here.

Kennedy's, again, narrative of being this youthful, forward-looking, highly capable person, right? And he brought in all these people into the administration to bring like these good management practices to government, a lot of energy. And then kind of right out the gate, these are two events that completely undermine that narrative about himself and his administration. So it wasn't just like these were bad news, right? These were kind of uniquely almost designed to undermine that identity of his. That's true. I would go even further and say that his problems predate those two incidents. You know, he's viewed as the kid and he wasn't necessarily viewed as the best person to be president. He didn't have that much experience. He sort of

came out of nowhere from the Senate, having served only a few years, and into the office. Almost immediately, he was sort of tarred by the Republicans as somebody who really wasn't up to the challenge. His sort of smart people around him, they might have been smart in the sort of well-educated Ivy League sense, but they weren't necessarily people with a lot of practical background, most of them. And from that sense, there were a number of folks who sort of questioned whether or not he was up to the task before him. And this just proved it. With Sputnik and the Bay of Pigs, I mean, that just suggested this is the administration that couldn't shoot straight.

Can you contrast a little bit the reaction to Gagarin's flight compared to Sputnik? Maybe the decisions for some of them happened at a different pace, but in terms of public reaction, was Gagarin a bigger deal? Was this a worse political situation because of that, because it was a human in space? I think it was. And I think it was largely because of Gagarin himself, who was this really compelling figure who could talk to people and hold their attention, was charismatic and all those sorts of things. And you didn't have any of that with the Sputnik launches and those sort of activities. You had an individual who could really sell what the Soviets were doing. And he did it very well.

And of course he orbited when Mercury was just doing up and down. It's like a elliptical kind of hops, right? Yeah. Well, and of course they hadn't flown yet at that point. Well, yeah. Yeah. Not to mention that. It wasn't until May 5th that Alan Shepard flew. Yeah. And so, but, and, and that was just an up and down. And so you had this just comparatively different, again, it just seemed to accentuate that expectation that the Soviets were ahead or were technologically more capable or more daring or something like that. Again, just to hit on the Bay of Pigs, the timing with this. So I was trying to look around

and see if there was anything directly comparing or directly stating that this helped push the Apollo decision. Is there something like that? Like how well, how confident are historians that this played into it? Or was it just an accident of timing? No, I think, I think it's a one-two punch. It's Gagarin followed by Bay of Pigs. And then Kennedy really had to do something. And he decided that the best way forward was to do something spectacular in space and to set an agenda that's far enough down the pipe that they could actually be successful. And the result of that was the decision to go to the moon. But it took him a few weeks to get there.

Yeah, I think this is worth delving into for at least a few minutes here towards the end. How do you go from Gagarin Bay of Pigs to suddenly, and we're talking about our Alan Shepard suborbital hops, how do we go from that to saying, okay, let's go to the moon and here's all the money in the world to do it, roughly speaking? What happened in those couple of weeks? How did the Moon Project even rise to the top as an option, given some other opportunity? Well, just a few days after the Bay of Pigs, and Kennedy had already talked to Johnson about this. And Johnson was now his vice president.

And he had responsibility for the National Space Council. And he had been identified with space from, you know, from the time of Sputnik. He wrote a memo to Johnson in which he said, you know, what can we do in space that we'll be successful at beating the Russians at? You know, can we do it by sending a capsule around the moon? Can we do it by, you know, landing a robotic lander on the moon? Can we do it by landing a robotic lander on the moon? Can we do it by this, by that, by something else? What can we do that will be a spectacular event in which we can win? And he specifically used that term win. He told Johnson to go out and talk to the NASA folks, figure out what is doable from a technical perspective,

go to Congress and figure out what is doable from a political perspective, come up with an answer for him. That was the objective. Johnson duly undertook that particular effort and came back within two or three weeks saying, here's what we can do. And that the NASA folks say, this is something that we can be successful about if everybody buys into it and puts the money against it, that's going to be required. But it is going to take several years and it's going to be expensive and hard and time consuming to do. They seem to be pretty upfront with the cost. They were really clear it'd be what, 20 to30 billion is what they were estimating at the time? Yeah, that's right. James Webb, the NASA administrator at the time, asked his best minds at NASA to come up with a budget, and they said about $20 billion. He basically

added another $10 billion or so to that, saying, this is probably what it will take, because he didn't want to get caught short. Extraordinary, considering that they hadn't launched a person into space yet. And they're trying to estimate what it would talk to land on the moon. So, and again, I think this Kennedy memo, it's just such an extraordinary memo. It's worth reading in whole. It's not long. He's like, literally, I have it written down here.

Is there any other space program that promises dramatic results in which we could win? That's what you were saying. And that was basically the only opportunity. Landing on the moon was the only thing that checked off all those boxes. Because I think you point out in some of your writings, the Soviets were pretty much just as far from getting to the moon as we were functionally, or we, the United States were at the time. Yes, that's correct. And it's important to recognize that Kennedy was very mindful of the cost. When he got to the point of giving the speech on the 25th of May of 1961 to the joint session of Congress, and he talked about landing on the moon, in the written text

for the speech, he talks about this is going to take a long time and it's going to cost a lot of money. And you, meaning members of Congress, have to agree that this is something we want to do. And interestingly enough, if you then listen to the speech, he says all those words, but at the end, he ad-libs and he comes back to the cost and says, you know, this is going to cost a lot of money. And if you don't want to do it, tell me now and let's not go down this road, you know, because let's not start something and then quit halfway. That suggested this was really weighing on his mind. of the land in Congress to pony up the resources and support for this. I mean, obviously, this is not something you really see these days in American politics of having such a large, quintessentially ambitious endeavor, very closely aligned with the president being embraced so wholeheartedly. So how did he develop that political coalition that said, sure, we will bear any burden for this ambitious program to land on

the moon in 10 years. That was fundamentally Johnson doing. At the end of the speech, Kennedy goes back to the White House and he's writing with Ted Sorensen, his speechwriter. He tells Sorensen, I don't think they're going to go for this. They didn't exactly stand up and cheer when I said all this. And by the way, that was true. You can watch the speech on YouTube. And at the point where he announces, I believe this nation should commit itself before this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. There's not a lot of applause. There's some smattering of claps, but not a lot. And Sorensen says, don't worry, it'll be okay. Johnson has everybody under control.

And Johnson was a master of running the Congress. He had the capability, and I don't think there's been anybody like him since that time. And it was a different time, of course, in Congress, too. If you could persuade the sort of senior people that were chairing committees, If you could persuade the sort of senior people that were chairing committees, they could line their their their folks up and get it supported. And Johnson was brilliant at doing that. I mean, he would he would horse trade with you and give you something else. If you supported this, he could threaten you. He was known to do that. He was famous for sort of taking his big belly and pushing people around a room and cornering them so they couldn't get away until he had persuaded them that they needed to support something. Sometimes he could threaten. If you don't do this, I will do that. All of that was was about ensuring that he got what he wanted.

As I said, he was a master at it. As I said, he was a master at it. The fascinating thing to me here is that landing on the moon was, in a sense, kind of a pragmatic solution within the confines of Kennedy's self-identity, his narrative to the public, his public persona. But also that there wasn't really anything else that was that obviously capable from a technological standpoint. I recall a statement of him, and I don't remember where this was written, but he was saying something like, it didn't have to be a man on the moon. If it had been desalinization, I would have done that instead or some other thing. If there had been some other more practicable or cheaper alternative that would have just as big of a splash in this Cold War context, he would have done it, right? Yeah, no question about that. Another question you need to ask. I mean, this is very much about Kennedy's personality. There are those who've done sort of psychological profiles of Kennedy in which he had to win at whatever he did. Not to do something spectacular

here would be to admit defeat. But ask yourself the question, had Eisenhower still been in office, do you think the response that Eisenhower made would have been to announce a moon landing program? You could ask the question, if Johnson had been at the top of the ticket in 1960 instead of Kennedy and was president in 1961, do you think he would have announced that? I don't know. I think it's problematic. Yeah, I want to hear your. What's also a kind of a tragic coda to this is that, you know, there's been arguments made that Apollo happened the way it did because Kennedy's legacy got intertwined in it after his assassination as well. Because you have him mulling about, well, this is costing so much in 1963. Let's maybe work with the Russians on this and why keep it a competition. But after that, that all ended after his assassination. Yes, it did. Within a week after the speech,

Kennedy's already having second thoughts. His budget director, David Bell, comes in and tells him, you know, NASA is going to break the bank with this. Really, you find a way out of it. with this. Really, you need to find a way out of it. And he goes to meet Khrushchev for his one and only summit in Vienna in the first part of June, in which he proposes to Khrushchev not once but twice that we do this as a joint program. And he never abandoned that idea. Comes back to it repeatedly, especially in 1963, where he gives a major UN speech. And it would be easy to ask yourself the question, had he not, and I think the response would have been, had he not been assassinated, there may well have been some actions to turn it into a joint program, or at the very least, to turn the clock off. We don't have to do it on the schedule we talked about. And had he

done that, that could have raised all kinds of interesting differences in the way it unfolded. Yeah, because NASA's, I think their peak funding for Apollo was 65, continued to grow until through 64. And so these were, those could have been really seriously tailored back, pulled back. We see a lot of reconsideration by Congress, of course, too, as you go through the 1960s. Obviously, things, the Great Society, costs of all these social programs, the Vietnam War, which I remember reading somewhere. I think the year of Vietnam expenditures in 1967 was more than the entire nation ever spent on Apollo. But that's how spending in war works. But just to put things in context, and you've used this before too, where did Apollo fit,

Project Apollo fit in terms of government projects, size and complexity? What else can we compare this to? Well, I mean, it's sizable and it's complex. There's no question about that. In terms of peacetime efforts, the only things that might be considered bigger would be the Panama Canal over a short period of time, you know, and probably the interstate highway system over a longer period. I mean, that took 30 years to build. But, you know, warfare is the only other thing that rivals it in terms of size and complexity. And it kind of is a function of warfare. Is that accurate to say in terms of its role in this broader Cold War context? It was war by a different mean?

Yeah, it's absolutely war by another means in which nobody dies, at least not intentionally. But it's all about besting the Soviet Union. I mean, it's just important for people. And I think it's especially important for people who are sort of committed to space exploration that they understand that this was undertaken not because of a desire for space exploration on the part of the political leadership of the nation, but because of this Cold War context. And absent that Cold War context, they never would have made the decision and they never would have sustained it. decision, and they never would have sustained it. Where would you place this in terms of achieving its goals? What would you define if you had to just kind of step back from the engineering and scientific achievements of Apollo? What was its goal, and do you think it achieved that goal? I absolutely do. First and foremost, this was about impressing the other nations of the world that the United States was second to none. And science and technology is the thing that makes a nation great in the 20th century, certainly. And this is a

demonstration of that, that the Soviets were never able to make. Believe me, that was not lost on all of those non-aligned nations out there. They may have tried to play both ends against the middle, and they did, and sometimes they did it quite successfully. But the reality was they recognized by the time of the moon landings that the United States is far ahead of anybody else. And ultimately, they're going to be successful where the Soviet Union probably won't be. That was the reason for which it was established. And that was the reason that it succeeded in doing all those things. And that was the reason that it succeeded in doing all those things.

In terms of looking back to Apollo, was it overall worse for U.S. space policy going forward, given the fact that it was this strange intertwining of all these variety of political and timing factors that are very unlikely to ever be created again? Is it possible? Did it set our expectations too high? Have we been suffering through that ever since? I actually think we have in a couple of different ways. You know, NASA and the space community sort of drew the wrong lesson from Apollo. They believed for years that if they could just get the president to support an agenda item along these lines, some bold, aggressive activity, that all things would be well. The budgets would fall into place and they would be able to carry out this stuff. And they have spent a lot of time over the years persuading presidents to make similar sorts of statements. And they've done it in several cases,

but it's never turned out quite the same. In fact, one could make the case that it's never turned out the same. At some level, I think a lot of people in the spaceflight community learned the wrong lesson. Secondly, this was fundamentally about a set of engineering decisions, which were not too far beyond what we could do at the time the decision was made. We could see a clear path to all of those things. You know, they had a lot of smart people working on problems and they had lots of problems. Of course, they ended up with some astronauts dying in the process. But they could clearly see what was going to be necessary to be successful in terms of moon landings. And it turned out well. Anything beyond that, putting a research station on the moon,

sending a mission to Mars, you name the activity of your choice, is much more complex, mostly because of the human body and how hard it is to sustain it in this very hostile environment. And I don't think we've really come to grips with a lot of that yet. Again, it's almost heartbreaking in a sense as space fans growing up where you see, here's what we could do. But that also, again, I think that's an interesting angle you bring up of that maybe we can't do it in that same way. I was just thinking, as you were saying that, you know, the term moonshot is used all over the place. I think most recently under the Obama administration

are saying let's do a moonshot for curing cancer. Right. But we have no idea how to cure cancer. Right. There's no clear path to that. And you can't just pluck, you can't just immediately solve an impossible problem. Apollo, again, seemed to have that right timing where the technology had advanced just enough that the contours of the path were there, but not every step. But it was possible, right?

And it just, again, as another example of how it seemed to just line up. It almost is maybe a question, maybe a bigger picture one is, do you think something like Apollo is even possible in the future? Have we discovered kind of, have we gotten through that period of the 20th century where all of this quote unquote easy discoveries have been made and there's no obvious way to achieve something such a big step so quickly again? Yeah, I don't know that that's true. When you talk about spaceflight,

I think that there's a lot more complexity. I mean, you want to, it is infinitely more complex to send a mission to Mars than it was to send astronauts to the moon. Again, I think it's mostly biomedical. How do you maintain their life, their lives on a mission that's going to last a couple of years? That really is an interesting question that I don't see a lot of people talking about. It seems like if all the money in the world showed up again, would there still be a solution or would it be more of a curing cancer type of a problem where we don't actually know how to sustain human life in space that long? That's interesting, broader issues to me.

Maybe just to direct this back to the core question for this episode, as we wrap up, looking back on Apollo and the lessons that we learned from it, what is it important to understand, maybe just as a citizen in the United States or as a space advocate in the United States? What is something we can take away from Apollo? And how can we use that historical set of coincidences as we move forward with space ambitions in this current day and age? You know, some interesting things that we can always point to. One of the things that Apollo did more than anything else was it taught NASA and by extension, lots of other organizations, how to organize to do complex technological tasks. But I have to emphasize, it was technological tasks and not some other types of tasks. And we can do that again. So if we want to put a research station on the moon, we can probably do that. It would probably look a lot like Antarctica. And we could cycle people in and out. It would be costly. There might be some loss of life in the process, and we might have to take everything with us. Apollo was essentially a set of camping

trips. We went to the moon, we took everything we needed, we stayed a few days, and then we came back. But if we try to move beyond that, what are the major questions that have to be worked? And a lot of them have to do with our biology and how do we sustain ourselves in an environment that's very different than what we have here. It can be done, but it's going to be a difficult set of tasks. And we've seen this already in the context of Earth orbital activities with long duration missions and what happens to the astronauts. So I guess we shouldn't just sit around and hope that there's some sort of geopolitical

existential standoff between two superpowers that space could then solve a symbolic problem for going forward? Well, I don't think that those things are likely. Probably not desirable. I think sitting around and wishing for it's sort of a lost cause. If we can figure out how to do useful things in space, and when I say useful things, I mean things that can make a buck. I think there's a lot of innovation that'll come from that process.

And maybe we can solve a number of problems along the way. And maybe we'll be willing to take risks, individuals, companies, whoever, will be willing to take risks, individuals, companies, whoever, will be willing to take risks in which there'll be some serious loss of life. But until that profit motive is present, we're doing it as a government program, really. And the prestige factor is what drove Apollo, but that's not going to drive future activities, I don't think, at least not to the moon, probably not to Mars. Dr. Lanius, I want to thank you for joining us today and exploring this history of Apollo. I'm sure you'll be talking about this a lot the rest of the year. I'm sure I will. Take care. Planetary Society Chief Advocate Casey Dreyer talking with space historian Roger Lanius

here on the Space Policy Edition. Absolutely fascinating, Casey. And not the last of these Apollo conversations that you began, as you said, a month ago with Asif Siddiqui. We've got at least a couple more and a very special sort of assembly of these that will also be available very soon. It's been so fun to talk about Apollo from a variety of political

perspectives and historical perspectives to try to just flesh out. Again, it's an amazing achievement that the people of NASA and the country did at the time. And it's so important, again, I think, to understand how that all came together and also to understand that it wasn't a simple process. You know, I think we, in retrospect, as something disappears into collective memory, that we tend to simplify the story. And we forget that there were people opposed to Apollo, that people didn't want Apollo to happen, or maybe it wouldn't have happened the way it did without very unlikely world events shaping it. So it's very good. I think, again, this is why you study history, I guess. But it's, I think, a fun way to acknowledge and celebrate this singular achievement of human spaceflight by understanding how it came to be and maybe influence how we can make it happen again. By the time we talk again, Casey, for this monthly edition of the Space Policy Edition, which will be another one of these Great Apollo Conversations. They should all be collected in this little mini-series. I don't know if you want to say anything, a little tease, a little bit more of a tease for that

as we prepare these? Yeah, you'll be able to find it at planetary.org slash Apollo 50. It'll also be available on where all good podcasts are sold or slash made available for free, however you want to phrase that. So it'll be findable and I'll be adding little additional introductions to each one of these conversations. So you'll be able to get right to the meat of the stuff. And please say something about all the other great Apollo resources that I think you've been most in charge of pulling together at Planetary.org. Yeah, Planetary.org slash Apollo 50. I deep dove into the archives of the Planetary Report, and I pulled out just a beautiful essay by Carl Sagan that he wrote on the 25th anniversary of Apollo.

25th anniversary of Apollo. Same with Andrew Chaikin, who wrote A Man on the Moon, one of the best definitive kind of volumes of the entire program. Essay by him from the 25th anniversary. We have special my cost analysis. Matt, we've got a bunch of your podcast or radio interviews with Apollo astronauts and Andrew Chaikin and others on various Apollo anniversaries. Very grateful for that. Pictures. And then my colleague Jason Davis has been putting together these just absolutely beautiful and definitive resources for each single crewed Apollo mission, starting with Apollo 7. And it gives you important mission timelines, beautiful, I think really rare photography

and pictures of those. And of course, unique cost data, the marginal cost of every single Apollo mission. Did you know that Apollo missions cost on average about $450 million original each, which is about $3 billion each now. So those are, you can see why those were hard to sustain. Another, maybe another topic to discuss in the future. You think? Thank you.

It is a great resource. It really honors what was achieved in those days, you know, without sugarcoating it. But there's no question that it is one of the great accomplishments by humankind throughout all of our history. And I'm very grateful to you and the others who have contributed to this. If you are grateful, if you also want to honor the spirit of Apollo

that the Planetary Society carries on into the future, the best way to do that, you know what's coming, is to go to planetary.org slash membership and join us, become part of the Planetary Society and become part of what's ahead of us as we continue to explore across the solar system and beyond.

Casey, thanks. It's been fun, as always. Oh, Matt, I always look forward to this every month. See you in August, I guess. Yep. See you on the first Friday in August and the rest of you as well. And I hope that you will be joining us for the weekly edition of Planetary Radio. It comes out every Wednesday morning. We will talk to you again very soon. Take care, everyone. Ad Astra. Ad Lunum. Lunum or Luna?

Lunum. I looked it up. Yeah, because it's a weird, because you conjugate the nouns in Latin. So if it's a command, an imperative, it becomes Lunum. you