Episode 4 - Why it Ended (With John Logsdon)

**Casey Dreier** (0:00)
This is A Political History of Apollo, a limited series podcast from The Planetary Society, exploring the reasons why the United States decided to send humans to the moon and why the nation pulled back after landing only six times. I'm Casey Dreier, The Planetary Society's chief advocate and senior space policy advisor. I'm going to be joined by some of the world's leading experts in space policy and history in interviews originally broadcast as part of our monthly show, Planetary Radio Space Policy Edition. We grouped these interviews together in an attempt to tell a fuller story about Project Apollo, to get beyond the flags and footprints we so often see and look at the deeper issues, like the political prehistory of the space age, the Cold War, the political opposition and cultural impacts to the nation, and even look at the Soviet side, of the space race to the moon. The show is a production of The Planetary Society, a non-profit dedicated to space science and exploration. So if you like what you hear, please consider joining or donating at planetary.org/membership. This is episode four, Why It Ended.
Project Apollo functionally ended on a hot August day in 1968, three months before the first crude launch in the Apollo program, and nearly a year before the first lunar landing.
It was that day, August 1st, when James Webb, the NASA administrator, finally responded to his associate administrator for manned space flight, who had sent multiple requests to begin work on the next batch of Saturn V rockets. You see, NASA had contracted to build 15 Saturn Vs for the Apollo program. But the immense Saturn manufacturing capability created in the past decade had always assumed that those 15 were the first batch, the first order. Surely, the Saturn V would be a critical component of the nation's space program for years to come. But citing the current budget situation in fiscal year 1967, Webb disapproved the request to begin production on the 16th and 17th Saturn Vs, which effectively shut down key production lines for the rocket. And he knew what this meant. This decision, he wrote, limits at this time the production effort on Saturn through vehicle 515 No further work should be authorized. So 15 is all the Saturn V rockets that there would ever be. After spending roughly $75 billion in today's money, to develop and build the most powerful rocket in history, still in history as we look back, it took a mere 72 words written in a memo on a hot August day for the United States to turn its back and walk away.
Absent the lift capability of the Saturn V, there could be no further missions to the moon. A program born in infinite opportunity and idealism had collapsed suddenly to become resolutely finite. As someone born long after Apollo, I confess that I struggle to comprehend this point in its story. From 1968 to 1972, the United States had hit the peak of achievement in human spaceflight capability. There was an Apollo mission roughly every four and a half months. I mean, people were walking on the moon. But during this same period, NASA's budget dropped by more than 25 percent, and due to inflation happening at the time, its purchasing power was nearly cut in half.
I try to remind myself that obviously, Apollo was not the only thing happening at that point in history. The US involvement in the Vietnam War was at its peak, and the country was spending more on that war every single year than it spent on the entire Apollo program.
I remind myself that Richard Nixon, who had lost his first presidential bid to John F. Kennedy, would have never have supported the moon goal, despite enjoying the public attention from it.
I also have to remember that Apollo succeeded in its stated goal. It landed a man on the moon and returned him safely to the earth before the Soviet Union did. The US had proved its technological and organizational capability over the Soviet Union, and also that the tensions had relaxed between the two countries. I also have to remember that this is when the space shuttle enters the story. It was pitched to be everything that Apollo wasn't. Reliable, reusable, and most importantly, affordable.
Each Apollo mission at the time had a marginal cost of about $3 billion and launched maybe three to four times per year. The shuttle was promising to launch for a fraction of that cost upwards of 40 to 50 times per year.
But still, I struggle. To help me understand why this happened, why the United States turned away from the moon, I spoke with someone who was there. Dr. John Logsdon, currently space historian and author of the book After Apollo, Richard Nixon and the American Space Program. He joins us today. Okay, John, welcome to the show. I want to pick up maybe midway through the 1960s when everything is looking really good for NASA. The funding is extraordinarily high, historically high as it turned out. You have Gemini is wrapping up. It's clear that the US is probably going to succeed at this point by the mid-60s. But politically, there's starting to be a lot of hesitation and critique of the spending levels of the Apollo program. And what I notice is not happening at this point is a real serious discussion of what a post-Apollo world looks like. We had the beginning of Apollo applications as a program, but Lyndon Johnson himself didn't seem to be pushing a post-Apollo future. Is that an accurate way to characterize this situation? And what was Lyndon Johnson's thinking at this point in the mid-60s?