Is the Moon the Limit for the U.S.?

EIGHT years and $24 billion after John F. Kennedy challenged his countrymen to become "pioneers in a space project," the U.S. is poised to put men on the moon. Yet even as they stand on the threshold of success, officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration are in a state of public stoicism and private gloom. Their triumph has become their travail: having progressed from orbiting a 31.5-lb. Explorer satellite to the Apollo lunar landing program, they are like showmen who brought off a spectacularly successful act and are now having trouble deciding upon an acceptable encore.

Beset by critics and uncertain about the Nixon Administration's objectives in space, high NASA officials from Cape Kennedy to the Houston Manned Spacecraft Center mutter about quitting or fret about being laid off once the initial lunar landings are made. Internal feuds, once muted, are beginning to erupt in public; most notable was the resignation of Paul Haney, "the voice of Apollo." The NASA budget is down to $3.8 billion from its $5.9 billion 1966 peak. The army of skilled craftsmen, whom Wernher Von Braun calls 90% of NASA's investment, has dwindled from a high of 400,000 to half that number. At current attrition rates, the force will shrink to 50,000 by 1972.

Preoccupied by the Viet Nam war and proliferating troubles at home, the White House has placed a low priority on establishing America's post-Apollo goals in space. Unless stimulating goals are enunciated, the team that made Apollo possible may begin to disintegrate for lack of a sufficiently compelling challenge. For purely technical reasons as well, time may be running out if the Administration is to maintain America's current lead in space. The last of the 15 first stages for the Saturn 5, NASA's journeyman booster for manned flight, will roll off assembly lines a year from June. By 1972 at the latest, all of them will be used up. Although NASA has been given funds for three additional Saturn 5s, the money will be just enough to ward off protracted delays in manufacture. Says Apollo Spacecraft Program Manager George Low: "This summer is our last chance to establish a new goal with continuity."

Searching Re-Evaluation. Not since John Kennedy first proclaimed Apollo has the entire space program undergone so searching a reevaluation. NASA's manned flight chief, George Mueller, has even asked veteran newsmen: "Now you tell me how we can sell the country the space program." Other NASA officials fear that too many Americans view the lunar landings not as a beginning but as an end. All the old questions are reappearing with increasing frequency in public debate: Does man have a place in space? Should he establish a base on the moon? Should he explore the planets? Is the space program an extravagance when the nation's other needs already dwarf available funds? Just how fast should the U.S. venture yet farther into space?

A four-man presidential task force headed by Vice President Spiro Agnew hopes to answer these questions in a report that is scheduled to be issued on Sept. 1. Lee DuBridge, President Nixon's science adviser and a member of the group,* has promised a "balanced program." What that means is not certain, but for their part, NASA officials have let it be known that they will be quite content to settle for some sort of balance between the practical and the visionary. Last week, in a report from its own advisory committee on goals for 1975 to 1985, the agency endorsed a program that would call for continued manned flight, lunar exploration, orbiting space stations, planetary probes and cheaper space transportation. This should be accomplished, the committee noted, with a budget ranging from 1/2% to 1% of each year's gross national product ($4.5 billion to $9 billion based on a projected 1969 G.N.P. of more than $900 billion).

Whatever the size of NASA's future budget, the agency hardly faces bankruptcy. Projects now scheduled, but not yet completely funded, will consume more money in the next decade than the $24 billion that Apollo has already cost. On NASA's list of ventures:

-APOLLO 10. The eight-day mission scheduled to begin May 18 will put Veteran Astronauts Thomas Stafford, Eugene Cernan and John Young into lunar orbit for 62 hours. Apollo 10, according to Stafford, will "tie together all the knots and sort out all the unknowns" before U.S. astronauts set foot on the moon in a mission that is now scheduled for launch on July 16.

-APOLLO 11 THROUGH 20. July's lunar landing is to be only the first of at least ten. Tentatively, three landings are scheduled to follow within a year of the initial touchdown by Apollo 11 astronauts. Lunar modules (LMs) will be set down on two lowland maria, or seas, as well as on two separate highland sites. In Apollo 11, the astronauts will stray no more than 50 ft. away from their craft. Their scientific equipment--called EASEP for "Early Apollo Scientific Experiments Payload"--includes a solar-powered seismometer to check on moonquakes and a mirror to bounce back an earth-based laser beam to measure the distance from home.

The astronauts who make the second, third and fourth landings will carry a far more sophisticated payload called ALSEP, for "Apollo Lunar Surface Experiments Package." It features a magnetometer to measure the moon's magnetic field, an ion detector to study charged particles reaching the lunar surface, a mortar to fire grenades to determine the elastic properties of lunar rock, and a device to measure any heat flowing out of the moon's interior.

For the last six Apollo landings, the LMs will be modified so that the astronauts can remain on the moon for up to 72 hours. Apollo 11 's crew will remain only 22 hours, though their LM is designed for a maximum 48-hour stay. Later astronauts should have more mobility on the lunar surface. A "lunar flyer," a one-man rocket vehicle, will enable them to range up to six miles from the LM and scale cliffs 500 ft. high. Less advanced but coming along is a 750-lb. "lunar rover," a tracked vehicle with a range of up to 620 miles. Administrator Thomas Paine puts high priority on a lunar shelter, where stranded astronauts could remain in safety for at least two months, time enough for a rescue mission to be mounted.

-ORBITING LABORATORIES. A byproduct of the billions spent on Apollo is the hardware to send three missions, beginning in late 1971, to a manned space laboratory in orbit some 200 miles above the earth. Saturn 4B rockets will spend their fuel and then serve as bungalow-size space stations for three-man crews. The first will include a doctor, who will study the effects on himself and his companions of 28 days under zero gravity. The crew will also try to learn how vacuum and weightlessness affect certain manufacturing processes. These include electron beam welding and the use of molten substances to fabricate extra-strong materials and perfectly round ball bearings. The astronauts' 10,000-cu.-ft. living space will feature a wardroom for relaxation, a microwave oven, a "sponge shower" with a vacuum cleaner to get rid of wastes, and even a forced-air toilet. Both the second and third missions will keep crews in orbit for 56 days. In the third, an orbiting observatory will be sent aloft with 13 instruments for studying the sun --particularly the solar flares that are a hazard to space flight.

In the later 1970s, NASA hopes to put up a giant "orbiting campus" that will remain in space for ten years, with twelve-man crews changing every six months. Eventually, the campus can be expanded to house a "faculty" of 100 U.S. and foreign scientists, including women as well as men, who would be ferried up and down by shuttle vehicles.

-HARDWARE FOR THE '70s. To handle the shuttle operation back to earth, NASA would use rocket vehicles that are described as "lifting bodies." Some of them will have retractable "switchblade" wings and enough maneuverability for landings at airfields instead of in the ocean. Eventually, Administrator Paine also hopes to cut the cost of putting a pound into earth orbit from the current $500 to $50. To help achieve this breakthrough, NASA has three different rockets on its drawing boards: Tri-Maran (a reusable three-stage booster whose stages are mounted side by side instead of atop each other); Dixie Cup (with a low-cost, discardable, solid-fuel first stage), and the Big Dumb Booster (so called because it has neither guidance equipment nor complicated fuel pumps and plumbing). A Nerva nuclear engine, which will be used only after a rocket has left the atmosphere, is being test-fired at Jackass Flats, Nev. When perfected, the engines could generate 75,000 Ibs. of thrust with half the fuel that a conventional rocket would use.

-BEYOND THE MOON. In 1971, NASA plans to place two spacecraft in orbit around Mars. In 1973, two "Viking" missions are scheduled to make soft landings on the planet's surface. Also proposed is a Venus-Mercury "minitour" using the Venusian gravitational force to whip a satellite on toward Mercury. Perhaps most visionary of all is NASA's dream of "Grand Tour" flights to the "outer" planets--Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. The four outer planets will be aligned in such a way that a single craft launched between 1976 and 1978 could fly by all of them. Such an alignment will not recur for 179 years.

A Microsecond to Decide. For all its plans, NASA is still having difficulty convincing its critics that it ought to be sending men even to the moon. As the lunar landing approaches, the debate over manned v. unmanned space shots has intensified. Historian Arnold Toynbee calls Apollo "moonmanship follies." John Kennedy's science adviser, Jerome Wiesner, warns that "it would be a mistake to commit $100 billion to a manned Mars landing when we have problems getting from Boston to New York City." Says Physicist Ralph Lapp: "Given a choice between $500 million for basic research and the same amount to bring back a second bagful of rocks from the moon, only a lunatic scientist would take more than a microsecond of decision time."

In rebuttal, NASA's Mueller notes that man has three capabilities that no machine can match: "A very wideband set of sensors for acquiring information, a built-in memory and a computer better than our best machine, and a remarkably versatile capability for action and physical operations." Wernher Von Braun, the father of the German V-2 and a pioneer in the U.S. space effort, is blunter. "The space program is the first time we could keep the cutting edge of science and technology sharp without having a major war," he declares. "Goddammit, does it take another war to get technology up to a higher plateau?"

The Spur of Competition. If not war, then Realpolitik may hold the key to the future of manned space flight--and future prosperity of NASA itself. Sputnik spawned Apollo, and Soviet competition can be expected to spur other U.S. space ventures. Several Russians have recently emerged from a sealed chamber with self-contained life-support systems, after a year--the duration of a manned voyage to Mars. Moreover, NASA officials claim that Soviet scientists may soon unveil a rocket big enough to fly directly from earth to the moon, land and take off again. Such brute-force spacemanship might convince the U.S. that, as Von Braun maintains, "Russia still wants to beat us in space." If that happens, the money spigot would probably open wide again, and a new race would begin.

*The other members are NASA Administrator Thomas Paine and Air Force Secretary Robert Seamans.

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