Shooting the Moon

By John Greenfeld

JOURNEY TO TRANQUILITY by Hugo Young, Bryan Silcock, Peter Dunn. 302 pages. Doubleday. $7.95.

THE MAKING OF AN EX-ASTRONAUT by Brian O'Leary. 243 pages. Houghon Mifflin. $5.95.

In the earthly scheme of things, success answers Questions. Failure -- even of the triumphant kind -- poses them. The peril of Apollo 13 accordingly has raised all the old backed-up doubts: Is the American space program worth the cost? Has it been capably and carefully administered? Has its emphasis on manned lunar landings been correct?

Just Nuts. Among space scientists themselves there is a frequent complaint that costs of the Apollo program have eliminated -- or crucially postponed -- more important space projects. Leading members of the scientific community in general have argued for years that the space effort was an indulgence that should be placed low on any list of scientific priorities.

Dr. Warren Weaver, science consultant to the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, has estimated that the billions earmarked for Apollo could be redistributed to provide "a 10% raise in salary, over a ten-year period, for every teacher in the United States, from kindergarten through universities (about $9.8 billion required); $10 million each to 200 of the better smaller colleges ($2 billion required); seven-year fellowships (freshman through Ph.D.) at $4,000 per person per year for 50,000 new scientists and engineers ($1.4 billion required); contributions of $200 million each toward the creation of ten new medical schools ($2 billion required)." Former President Eisenhower was more succinct: "To spend $40 billion to reach the moon," he said in 1963, "is just nuts."

According to the authors of Journey to Tranquility, it was neither the desire for scientific achievement nor hope of economic gain that mainly propelled America's man-on-the-moon program. Instead, this British trio of Sunday Timesmen argues, the program evolved pragmatically from the cold war. The builders and launchers, the technicians and crews of the Apollo missions have always been "soldiers in an age when technology has become warfare by other means. Americans did not go to the moon for mankind. They went for America."

Though that fact is hardly news, the three authors' detailed, provocative and thoroughly partisan review of the space program should command attention, particularly as the U.S. takes its bearings again in the wake of the near tragedy that befell Apollo 13 and the recent inquiry assigning blame for it to U.S. industry and NASA alike. For its humor and irreverence, Brian O'Leary's tale of what it is like to be an astronaut dropout is also worthy of note.

Pilot Syndrome. O'Leary was an unlikely candidate from the start. He was a civilian. He was myopic ("Astronauts don't wear glasses, and there I was wearing glasses"). His personality smacked more of Berkeley than of Houston. Nevertheless, at 27, a Ph.D. in astronomy and a skilled mountain climber, he was selected as a member of the sixth space-training program, the second group of scientist-astronauts. He resigned after seven months' intensive training because, ha decided, he wanted to go to the moon, not spend his time training to fly T-38 jets.

O'Leary's basic complaint is that the astronaut program is considerably more operational than scientific because of the U.S. test-pilot syndrome. He paints a wry picture of the scientist-astronaut suffering second-class citizenship at the Manned Spacecraft Center. It is true that, while the Russians have already sent astronauts who are predominantly scientists aloft, no American scientist-astronaut has yet been assigned to a space mission.

Curious Drive. According to O'Leary, the Apollo moon harvest has been badly handled scientifically and has produced scandalously meager results. Yet as a scientist, O'Leary still champions a space program. "Space," he asserts, "is as cheap as six weeks' fighting in Viet Nam, cheaper than deploying a useless anti-ballistic missile system, and [it consumes] less than 5% of the present annual defense budget."

There have been important economic and technological byproducts of the space program, but in the long run there is perhaps no entirely rational way in which to assess it. Such a project can only be viewed and approved --if approved at all--in inspirational terms. "The real reason for undertaking the space program," says one Apollo defender, Physicist Harold Urey, who is quoted in Journey to Tranquility, "is an innate characteristic of human beings, namely, some curious drive to try to do what might be thought to be impossible--to try to excel in one way or another." Urey compares such drives to the devotion that led to the building of the Parthenon and St. Peter's, which represented real sacrifice for many people. The space program, Urey concluded, "is our cathedral." The authors give Urey his due, but they point out that the Parthenon and St. Peter's have for centuries offered the world a certain beauty and utility. The young moon program still has far to go.

. John Greenfeld

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