[AR] Apollo (was Re: SSTO)
- From: Henry Spencer <hspencer@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: Arocket List <arocket@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Sun, 18 Feb 2018 19:43:30 -0500 (EST)
On Wed, 14 Feb 2018, Uwe Klein wrote:
[Apollo had] Two objectives.
A: get a grip on the uniformed mad men that think nuclear war is winnable.
B: sidetrack mil expenditure with "Science" expenditure.
Nope, sorry, neither. Apollo simply had nothing to do with A (and the
"uniformed mad men", incidentally, included the entire leadership of the
Soviet Union -- the idea that nuclear war would be the end of everything,
and therefore unwinnable, was almost completely a Western belief). And
Apollo was never large enough to divert major amounts of funding from the
military, which in any case generally had higher priority. (The end of
Apollo happened partly because of budget pressure from the Vietnam War.)
The objectives of Apollo were:
1: Impress the world's uncommitted nations, and show that the US really
was still the greatest power on Earth -- that recent Soviet space firsts
were a temporary historical accident rather than a sign of a fundamental
shift in technological superiority.
2. Impress the US's voters that Eisenhower's Republicans had screwed up,
letting the US fall behind on missiles/space issues, and that Kennedy's
Democrats had fixed it.
C: select a "sporty competition" project for A and B --> D
There was nothing "sporty" about it; this was a propaganda battle in the
Cold War, not a game. For example, the original requirements for the
Apollo navigation system specified a completely autonomous on-board
system, not relying on so much as a voice link to Earth, because of fears
that the Soviets might attempt to jam radio links. Despite occasional
naive rhetoric at the time, this was war, not sport.
The Soviets were trumpeting their achievements in space as a sign of their
growing superiority and US decline. An effective response was necessarily
an impressive space achievement, difficult enough and long-term enough to
give time to overcome the Soviet head start. (In fact, the US was
probably wrong about a manned lunar landing being far enough away -- if
the Soviets had promptly matched Kennedy's commitment, the first man on
the Moon might have been a Russian. Instead Khrushchev took over three
years to authorize a matching effort, and it never had Apollo's
blank-check funding and national-crisis priority.) Once that achievement
appeared imminent, Apollo gradually lost its priority, and also the
funding needed for follow-on efforts.
Henry
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