The manned space program, entrenched as a sacred cow, has deflected critical examination for decades with promises and visions of utopian attractiveness. Since the end of the Apollo program, there has been little evidence of tangible scientific benefit. Yet it remains uniquely popular, enjoying the personal pronoun “we” for hopefully exciting vicarious adventures. “We” do not have car accidents. “We” go to Mars. Sharing a religious vocabulary, space mania evokes the unreasoning beliefs of the “Electric Monk” of writer Douglas Adams. Quoting Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency,

The Electric Monk was a labour-saving device, like a dishwasher or a video recorder. Dishwashers washed tedious dishes for you, thus saving you the bother of washing them yourself, video recorders watched tedious television for you, thus saving you the bother of looking at it yourself; Electric Monks believed things for you, thus saving you what was becoming an increasingly onerous task, that of believing all the things the world expected you to believe.

I propose that you believe too much. Readers will search this post, and prior, for unreasoning signs of anti-scientific prejudice or  political agendas.. You will be more receptive to my arguments if I tell you a little bit about my beliefs:

• Climate change is real, and largely anthropogenic.
• I am a fan of Dr. Anthony Fauci and RNA vaccines. Though I did warn against vaccine mandates, and  was skeptical prior to proofs of effectiveness and safety, I’ve had about 10 shots and hope for another.
• I am a fan of the scientific method, and horrified at the politicization of science. There is bad science, but it does not discredit the whole. If there is to be a future, it must be a collaboration of man, his knowledge, and his inventions.
• I am a fan of unmanned, robotic space probes, and the great space telescopes. I am an enthusiastic backyard astronomer, and not entirely skeptical of UFOs.
• I want to know.

Science has on many occasions been co-opted for political goals. Some have been as narrow as ending World War II. Others have been as broad as nurturing the national spirit. On September 12, 1962, JFK gave the “Moon  Speech” at Rice University (text). Quoting,

We choose to go to the moon. We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard, because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills, because that challenge is one that we are willing to accept, one we are unwilling to postpone, and one which we intend to win, and the others, too.

My eyes get a little wet, as I remember some of my older engineer friends, as they began what they would later call the best years of their lives.  They were not hard to find; the Apollo program had 100,000 subcontractors, at a time when making things smaller, faster, more powerful, and more reliable was the secular religion of this country. They were making the modern equivalent of a national myth: We can do damn near anything.

They say that “we” went to the moon on slide rules, which is not literally true, but what they did, with what they had, is an epic that surpasses the Odyssey by many powers of ten. My view was not of The Right Stuff riding the rocket, but of unsung heroes, of how a balding, pudgy nondescript man and his buddies, called by NASA to solve an emergency, managed to reduce the astronaut’s life support monitoring electronics, without which Apollo could not fly, from the size of several bricks to a few cubic inches. They did it with things just out of the lab called PMOS, and Bunker-Ramo Planar Coax. They had to build a hundred for every one that worked, but there was never a failure in service. Countless advances like this one gave rise to the term spin-off, which provided the U.S. with a technological  lead that endured into the 90’s.

Then, in August, 1971, Nixon’s commitment to the program wavered.  Apollo 18, 19, and 20 were cancelled. Quoting Canceled Apollo missions,

John Young, who flew on Apollo 10 and 16, believed that fear of losing astronauts was a reason why NASA canceled Apollo 18, 19, and 20.^[14]

Consider: The largest conventional bomb in the U.S. arsenal weighs 15 tons. The Apollo rocket contained 2700 tons of explosive fuel. Accidents will happen. Suddenly, it was over, for 100,000 companies, and for the engineers, the best years of their lives.  I felt a personal void. Yet the end of Apollo was inevitable. The myth was too costly, requiring 5,400,000 pounds of explosives for what the Greeks did with poetry.  New spinoffs would not occur with repetition.

***Next: The Big Tent Revival***