What went wrong with the space program? Contemplations on a 1962 "Sci. American"

Great Debates
1

Some time ago I came across a discarded issue of Scientific American from 1962. Looking at that one issue, I find ads full of optimism for tremendous strides in space exploration which were obviously around the corner:

An advertisement from Perkin-Elmer, who built the periscope used on the first American space flight, with a picture from that flight. Opposite that is:

The Garrett Corporation, which was studying or designing thermal and atmospheric systems for manned space flight. The picture shows a little orbiting lab with scientists working in shirtsleeves. You’d almost think that Boeing was going to have this in test before their next passenger jet model came out.

Speaking of Boeing, that’s next. Their ad mentions the Dyna-Soar space glider, for which they were the system contractor. It was going to fly into space and land like a—space shuttle, was that?

Let’s move along to Boeing’s then-competitor, Douglas. Among other things, they were working on: [ul]
[li]The Saturn rocket (at least we did get that one)[/li][li]Lunar cargo handlers[/li][li]Orbiting space observatory that looks like Deep Space Station K7 from "The Trouble with Tribbles[/li][li]Supply and Escape vehicle, resembling the DynaSoar[/li][li]Nuclear powered space ship[/li][li]Lunar VTOL craft[/li][/ul].

You see what I’m getting at. Obviously, in 1962, there was tremendous optimism about what was going to be possible in space. Yet, in 2005 hardly any of this has yet been achieved. As a layman, I’m curious as to what went wrong. Should not the engineers and scientists been able to recognize even then that the ideas being considered were too expensive or impractical to be feasible? And what were the problems, exactly? I can’t believe that these folks would have underestimated the amount of fuel that would have been required. But were there other unforeseen difficulties in structural engineering, or in life support systems, or in the human physical capacity to endure flights in these vehicles?

2

Sorry, got a couple of those examples mixed up. Garrett was doing the orbiting mini-lab. Boeing was doing the DynaSoar.

3

I think they overestimated the financial return from manned space flight. If there’s no money in it, no one will spend money to do it.

Many of the “space station” type blue sky projects became obsolete as soon as we developed eye-in-the-sky satellites that could keep watch on those sneaky Commies without Major Matt Mason having to peer out a window.

4

American lost their guts.:mad:

We no longer dare to dream, much less dream big, & we have become a nation of cheap, short-sighted, mean-spirited hustlers. Worse–we no longer have the courage to live on/explore a frontier.

The Space program was a dream of the WW2 generation, & as they pass away, their dreams go with them. :frowning:
The Baby Boomers–well, they’re quantity Americans, not quality ones. :frowning:

5

Oh, and I really hope you know of this site.

http://www.astronautix.com/index.html

Hours of space nostalgia.

6

This certainly sounds more like a GD but I’ll let the mods decide that.

One factor I think was the space race. We might have been more systematic in our approach had we not been racing the Russians to every milestone and I’m sure having them beat us to all those landmarks didn’t help either. If we hadn’t been trying so hard to beat the Godless commies we might have developed true space planes like the X-15 to its logical successor. By the time Apollo got the budget axe everyone was burned out on the race.

I think the other factor is the relationship between complexity and difficulty which is certainly exponential. The concept of the space shuttle is simple to understand but the reality of it is so much more difficult to realize.

7

The short answer is that in the early '60s it was presumed that manned spaceflight was going to be of extreme importance to the strategic balance between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R. People thought nuclear warheads or ABM systems would be based in orbit. Even the moon being claimed by the first power to reach it was a possibility. This changed in 1965 when a treaty banning nuclear weapons in space and nationalizing other planets was signed. It also turned out that there was very little that manned observers in a space station could do that couldn’t be done just as well by remote controlled surveillance satellites. And once we went to the moon simply to prevent the Soviets from being there first, there was little point in continuing. This cut much of the urgency out of the “space race”.

Studies and proposals are easy to do, since they basicly require math and thinking, and produce papers full of plans and conceptual art. Billions have been spent on paper proposals.

The Dyna-Soar (X-20)program had problems. The best material they had to build a space glider out of at the time was nickel-steel alloy, and no one was sure if it would even survive reentry. Later X-programs focused on “lifting bodies” with much reduced wing surfaces to try to address this. It was also very heavy and would have required a Titan-3 to launch it with one pilot and a small discretionary payload. It might have been a good test bed for further research; but Dyna-Soar, along with the Manned Orbiting Laboratory and various plans to have a standing manned space capacity based on the Gemini capsule, were all scrapped when the Air Force lost it’s bid to have it’s own space effort parallel to NASA’s. So the Air Force said “Screw you guys, I’m going home!” and further undercut support for manned spaceflight.

It didn’t help that by the mid-60s the first Mariner probes were confirming that Mars and Venus were both much less hospitable than people had hoped, dashing dreams that people could live there in anything short of full-pressurized habitats.

The Saturn 1-B rocket could have been a decent medium-weight workhorse launcher. It was man-rated, had a payload of over 30,000 pounds, could accomodate wide payloads, and was designed from the get-go to be upgraded to stretch versions that could boost more. But NASA treated it merely as a test-bed for components of the Saturn 5, while the Air Force said “not built here” and strapped solid rocket boosters to the Titan-2 ICBM to make their Titan-3. This meant that by the mid-70s we actually had no man-rated boosters until the Shuttle came online. Meanwhile the Soviets stuck with their R-7 (Sputnik, Vostok, Soyuz) rocket for moderate payloads and the Proton (Salyut, Mir) rocket for medium-heavy payloads and gained decades of experience with these boosters.

There were cultural considerations as well. By the end of the 60s people were more focused on earthbound problems and questioned massive space projects. Nuclear rockets fell victim to the anti-nuke hysteria of the 70s; and in any case would only have been useful for a massive space program that simply didn’t come about.

8

This is purely my opinion, and not worth GQ, but here I go:

Once we got to the Moon, we had “won.” The race was over. As a matter of fact, there was considerably less public interest in the last moon landings.

And the end of the “space race” took all the steam out of the space program in general.

9

Hmmmm? GD or IMHO? IMHO or GD?

Moved.

samclem GQ moderator

10

The OP is such a complicated and extensively debated topic that I don’t really even know where to start, except to say that your comment about manned spaceflight being perceived as strategically vital is on the mark and as good a framework as any within which to understand the issue.

As far as man-rated boosters in the 70s, the Titan 3M (the MOL vehicle) was man-rated and not cancelled until 1969. Since Martin was making Titan 3s of many shapes and colors throughout the 70s, it would have been relatively easy to make some 3Ms, if the need had arisen.

11

I agree with kunilou. Originally space exploration was based on the idea of developing a whole system of vehicles and stations, working by increments to build a growing presense in space. Then it became a race; instead of working on a number of parallel programs and then building on the ones that showed the most potential, NASA committed essentially all its resources to one or two projects in order to reach specific goals as quickly as possible. But even when these projects succeeded, they were so goal specific that they didn’t lead anywhere.

12

I’m no historian, but wouldn’t the Vietnam war and the collapse of the economy also have made it difficult to continue with manned space programs? I know the timing’s a little iffy, but by the time we had shot our wad on Vietnam, the Great Society, the inflation that followed it, and the Apollo program, even the shuttle program seemed pretty damn aggressive.

Besides, looking at your list, there’s not much there that I can see a reason for doing. I mean, we’ve been to the moon, we’ve remotely explored Mars, and I imagine someday we’ll go there, but right now I can’t imagine any reason for going anywhere else in the Solar system with currently imaginable technology. Lunar craft? Why? Nuclear space ship? Why? Space station? Why? (I still hold a grudge against the existing one – that clusterf*ck killed the Superconducting Supercollider). I love doing cool stuff just for the sake of doing it, but you’ve got to pick your battles.

13

There’s no mystery here. Space exploration stalled because A) it’s really hard and expensive, and B) there are no obvious paths to profitability in space.

As long as there are no ways to make money from space, the market will not be interested. That means it’s left to government, and that means it’s going to be subject to the whim of each administration and fighting for finite funds against a political backdrop. That’s NASA in a nutshell.

If we discovered some rare material on the moon that was incredibly valuable, could be mined and marketed within a decade or two, and promised to make the company who figured out how to get it rich, then you’d see a robust private space program. That’s really what’s holding us back.

The thing is, the development in space hardware that came between 1950 and 1970 was truly astounding in many ways, but in others it was merely incremental engineering. The V-2 rocket isn’t fundamentally that much different than the Saturn 5, in that they both relied on liquid fuels and a reaction motor to propel them. The space shuttle added wings and solid rocket boosters, but in terms of efficiency and payload capacity, didn’t really bring anything new to the table.

So once we built out to the practical size limit of chemical rockets, we hit a roadblock. Can’t go much faster or lift much more, because the law of diminishing returns gets you real fast. So we need a breakthrough in materials, propulsion, or systems in order to lower the cost of access to space by an order of magnitude.

The good news is, that may be happening. The best thing to come out of the dot-com boom was that a lot of very bright, energetic, young entrepreneurs found themselves with billions of dollars, and they are now spending it on geeky things like space. That’s helping to bootstrap the private launch industry. In the next year or two, Spaceship 3 will launch, and it will be capable of carrying nine people into suborbital space. If enough people buy tickets on that, it will attract more venture capital into the private space program. Burt Rutan is already working on an orbital ship, and Bigelow Aerospace has an inflatable habitat that they want to use to build a modular ‘hotel’ in orbit (and they want to sell it to the government for ISS as well).

If the tourism industry flourishes and becomes self-sustaining, then you’ll see a lot of effort being put into lowering cost to orbit and improving space systems. That will lower costs and lead to the next level - perhaps lunar excursions.

It’s hard to see tourism alone creating a whole new space infrastructure, but it could certainly give it a strong shot in the arm.

14

The thing is that space is full of free energy and raw materials; it could support the biggest economic boom ever. It’s just that the initial start-up costs are high.

15

In large part because it was fashionable; the West was saturated with the products of savvy political spin doctors and Madison Avenue types, who had run out of fins on cars (but which had helped make the case for space among the tax-paying masses by using rockets glued to the trunk).

Like fins on cars, most mass-consumption space stuff was fluff (surprise, surprise) but fun, from newspaper articles filling the future with transparent domes on the moon under which beehive-coifed women served turkey dinners to their families, to cheesy architecture with rocket motifs and the original Star Trek (try to sit through the hippie episode again). To millions, Telstar wasn’t just the first active communications satellite (boring after five of your Earth minutes). It was a pop-music hit.

Then the fun disappeared, and I blame reality, damn its glowing, red eyes. But it was the way the future was, and I loved it.

I doubt anything like it could happen again, at least on that scale. Too many people have traded in their naivety for tinfoil hats.

16

While I have no knowledge in this area, just from looking at the posts in this thread I would psotulate that the big thing which killed space travel is the same one as is keeping it down and dead now: Computers.
Ideas like space exploration and everything are perfectly cool–up until the point where the cost to go to Mars is five or ten times higher than sending a robot that can still do all the same things the human was intended to do. But what’s the fun in that?

17

I agree with alot of this esp. Sam Stone. Let me add one other factor: Bad decisions at the fork in the road.

I am especially referring to the decision to go the shuttle route. Nixon’s Space Task Group in '69 recommended a vigorous human space program that included continuing lunar exploration. The vision was a couple of Apollo missions per year leading to a full-fledged lunar base - probably sometime in the 80’s. (use your imagination to insert something snide about coming full circle and shake your fist at the sky at space station/shuttle technological cul de sac’s)

Those proposals were rejected by the White House in favor of the Space Shuttle program. :smack: Let me quickly say that hindsight is 20/20 … this wasn’t as INSANE a turn on the decision tree as it seems now.

I am certainly not claiming that we would have all the cool stuff in the 62 article if only Nixon had listened to a wide range of space experts. But I think we would be much closer and would not have lost anything much appreciable.

18

Yes, but’s it’s still maddening to realize that if we’d spent exactly as much money on continuing Apollo/Skylab as we have anyway on the Shuttle/ISS, we’d have a hell of a lot more to show for it. :frowning:

19

For the sake of clarity I’d better restate that it wasn’t an article in the magazine, it was the ads of various technology companies spaced throughout the magazine (which was actually 1961, now that I looked at it again, not 1962).

20

I think it’s economics, not lack of guts. Resources are still finite. I don’t think the benefit of manned space exploration is exceeded by the benefit or worth the cost and risk.

NASA calculates risk of failure that is much less than 1% probability. Just counting the number of shuttle flights and failures says that this calculation is in error by several orders of magnitude.

Who can cite any important science that’s been enabled by the space station? What zero-gravity experiments have been worth all those billions?

I think we’ve learned much more from unmanned missions like Voyager and the recent forays to Mars. The Hubble telescope has been a godsend. Why that’s being allowed to wind down I’ll never understand. The payoff is worth the risk to send the shuttle up to fix it; the risk is no greater than the last mission where astronauts did a space walk to inspect tiles.

I’d rather see a NASA-style expenditure and effort to make us less dependent on oil. Not the solar, wind energy technologies that have been around forever and haven’t gone much beyond incremental improvements. I’d like to see if we could move to a hydrogen-based energy economy. I’m not sure if it makes sense thermodynamically (e.g., does it cost too much energy to capture that hydrogen in usable form), but I think we need to do better than wishing and hoping there’s more oil in the ground that’s easy to extract.

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