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How President Nixon Saved/Wrecked the American Space Program
MarkWhittington writes John Callahan posted an accountof a talk given by space historian John Logsdon on the Planetary Society blog in which he described how President Richard Nixon changed space policy. The talk covered the subject of an upcoming book, After Apollo: Richard Nixon and the American Space Program. Logsdon argued that Nixon had a far more lasting effect on NASA and the American space program than did President Kennedy, most famous for starting the Apollo project that landed men on the moon.
Nixon came to office just in time to preside over the Apollo 11 lunar mission. At that time, the space program was a national priority due to the Kennedy goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. However by the time Neil Armstrong made that first footstep, public support for large-scale space projects had diminished. Nixon, therefore, made a number of policy decisions that redound to this very day.
Nixon came to office just in time to preside over the Apollo 11 lunar mission. At that time, the space program was a national priority due to the Kennedy goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. However by the time Neil Armstrong made that first footstep, public support for large-scale space projects had diminished. Nixon, therefore, made a number of policy decisions that redound to this very day.
He dead.
He's a damn traitor. Dig up his carcass and throw it in the hoosegow! And throw that damn Kissinger in there with him.
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It takes a very long time for policy decisions to achieve their full affect.
Reagan's economic changes doomed Bush Sr due to debt but helped Clinton with a the good economy. But his support of a puppet in Iran led to a overthrow by an extremist regime that will be in power for decades more.
Clinton's economic decisions are affecting us now through joblessness (Perot had it right - a big sucking sound as jobs leave).
Bush Jr decisions will take at least another 10 years to pay off.
It was VP Johnson who began the push for space in the first place. What evidence is there that Kennedy would not have taken the necessary steps to fulfill his own famous proclamation? Because, you know, without it, all this article is doing is underscoring the fact that Nixon just reaped the rewards for something he didn't personally undertake.
Coincidentally, just today I've read about the NERVA (Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application) and related projects and their cancellation again. It really boggles the mind... They basically had a working and thoroughly tested nuclear engine design, ready for use in manned missions to Mars and beyond by the 1970s, which was, ironically, its own downfall:
The RIFT vehicle consisted of a Saturn S-IC first stage, an SII stage and an S-N (Saturn-Nuclear) third stage. The Space Nuclear Propulsion Office planned to build ten RIFT vehicles, six for ground tests and four for flight tests, but RIFT was delayed after 1966 as NERVA became a political proxy in the debate over a Mars mission. The nuclear Saturn C-5 would carry two to three times more payload into space than the chemical version, enough to easily loft 340,000 pound space stations and replenish orbital propellant depots. Wernher von Braun also proposed a manned Mars mission using NERVA and a spinning donut-shaped spacecraft to simulate gravity. Many of the NASA plans for Mars in the 1960s and early 1970s used the NERVA rocket specifically, see list of manned Mars mission plans in the 20th century.
The Mars mission became NERVA's downfall. Members of Congress in both political parties judged that a manned mission to Mars would be a tacit commitment for the United States to decades more of the expensive Space Race. Manned Mars missions were enabled by nuclear rockets; therefore, if NERVA could be discontinued the Space Race might wind down and the budget would be saved. Each year the RIFT was delayed and the goals for NERVA were set higher. Ultimately, RIFT was never authorized, and although NERVA had many successful tests and powerful Congressional backing, it never left the ground.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/N...
There is no sig.
All real exploration, if not underwritten by governments for purposes of war, is done by private entities for obscene profit. I don't want any US president making up some faulty reason to drop more taxpayer dollars into the NASA money pit. I'm looking toward companies like SpaceX, Weyland, and others to begin exploiting mineral resources across our solar system.
Nixon was happy to pragmatically use the shuttle program for space-based surveillance. JFK idealistically sending a man to the moon was an empty gesture meant to save face after Sputnik.
Nixon was a "complicated" man, with a "complicated" presidency. I personally think the guy did a lot of rotten shit, although through the course of time, I have come to view him more with pity rather than contempt. He was a deeply unhappy and insecure man with (it seems to me) few, if any, real friends.
Reading this article, I get the sense of his pragmatic realism, especially in light of a country which was at-the-time engaged in a very costly war, and a nation riven with socio-economic strife. (It is a good thing those days are behind us).
Congress could have, and I think should have, killed the Space Shuttle after Challenger, when it was apparent that the Space Shuttle was expensive to fly. The Titan IV could have been America's rocket for a while, and launch the ISS.
Blaming Nixon, also neglects the ISS. The ISS is doing a lot of research that is really helpful if you want to send people to Mars. It is only in the last year that the vegetable garden was delivered to the ISS, and the sabatier reactor went up a couple of years ago. Lets not forget the discovery of degredation of eye focus, and discovery that osteoporosis drugs can slow bone degredation.
The American Space Program is completely on its ass because of the scumbag muslim Obama, and you complain abvout Nixon? This country is a mess.
an ill wind that blows no good
Nixon was the first U.S. President to see a human space launch (Apollo 12).
Someone forgot Project Mercury.
President Kennedy - Jan 20 1961 to Nov 22 1963
Freedom 7 (May 5 1961), Liberty Bell 7 (July 21, 1961), Friendship 7 (February 20, 1962), Aurora 7 (May 24, 1962), Sigman 7 (October 3, 1962), and Faith 7 (May 15, 1963). Kennedy, as president, saw ALL the manned Mercury spaceflights. Here's a pic of Kennedy watching the Shepherd launch on TV in the White House, same as millions of other people.
And Project Gemini.
President Johnson - Nov 22 1963 to Jan 20 1969
Gemini 3 (23 Mar 1965) through 12 (11-15 Nov 1966), all manned. Apollo 1 (fatal fire), Apollo 7 (11 October 1968), Apollo 8 (21 December 1968) - the "around the moon mission". Here's a pic of Johnson watching the launch of Gemini 3
And there were the other flights, Apollo 9 through 11 - the first moon landing, all observed by Nixon as president.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
I really want to hate Nixon for what he did to NASA. But... There is a small voice of reason that keeps reminding me that I do value Democracy and the president SHOULD act on what the people want. Therefore instead I should hate all the supersticious luddite voters!
But.. if I feel like Nixon hating there is always Vietnam....
Logsdon and Callahan, for reasons best known to themselves and like so many others, continue to mythologize the space program... to the detriment of the facts.
They forget, as so many do, there's a third President (Johnson) and a number of years between President's Kennedy and Nixon. Nixon's policy decisions were shaped largely by decisions made by and during the Johnson Administration by the President and Congress. Most notably, in the budget battles of '65-'67 Apollo's budget was sharply cut, capping hardware production (and thus limiting the number of landings) and all but cancelling the follow on Apollo Applications program. During the same period, both NASA management and the Administration began to concentrate on the Shuttle as an Apollo follow on as cheaper access to space began to loom as a more important national priority than flags-and-footprints stunts. Nixon was thus caught between a rock and a hard place - inheriting (as every President after him has) a rudderless, directionless mess that would take far more money to fix than the public would stand for and far more political capital than the returns could possibly justify.
And really, Apollo has screwed us up in space pretty much for all time... Because it's lead too many people to believe that progress is only made by Great Leaps Forward. Because it stuck us (as a nation) with a bloated and inefficient NASA bureaucracy. Because it's blinded too many people to the fact that it was an accident of history and a detour from any rational path of space development.
Recently released documents confirm that our then-president nixon committed treason, which directly resulted in the deaths of more than 20,000 US servicemen. http://www.commondreams.org/vi...
The Shah was gone before Carter could do anything other than give him a place to hide, and Reagan came after Carter.
As for Reagan, not even Republicans could stand him after part way into his second term. He was a pariah after what he did to the economy among other things, even though now he is revered as some sort of saint.
To build NASA’s post-Apollo program around the space shuttle without establishing a specific goal or long-term strategy the shuttle would support
Not true. The shuttle was designed to lift and recover spy satellites. It actually did put several in orbit (and the Hubble, same size as a spy satellite) but in the end it was more cost effective to use one-time rockets.
This was an argument raised by one of Jimmy Carter's loyal servants (recently made jobless by Reagan's election) back in 1981. The story never had ANY shred of truth and ultimately went away after the details were exposed as impossible. The original story had George HW Bush (Bush41, then VP candidate and former CIA guy and former Ambassador to China) flying to Iran to negotiate. When people pointed out that Bush (the older one) would have had to fly an SR-71 to pull that off on the schedule claimed, the tale fell apart. I remember quite well all you bitter lefties being so incredibly angry after Reagan won the nation in a landslide; former members of the Carter administration accused Reagan of every evil thing under the sun (including the accusation that Reagan tricked the Russians into shooting down KAL-007, which was in a book by an angry Carter aid, and immediately made into a movie). During those years you had numerous pop stars making music videos depicting Reagan and Thatcher as wanting to blow up the planet - when really it was just a bunch of mal-educated idiots not understanding two very solid political leaders winning a global cold war without firing a shot (the sort of REAL improvements in the world that no drug-addled mental midget musician could achieve).
Sorry, but you moon-hoaxer, 9-11-truther, Reagan-Iran-deal, guys need to stick to Comedy Central, Kos, and Huff Po if you want your fevered imaginations to be properly fed and maintained; In the real world, there's little time for this nonsense.
Yeah, we get it. In the era of Obummer, EVERYTHING is "the dog ate my homework" (as "The Republicans did it")
Clinton's very well publicized efforts to force the banks to lend to people who were otherwise unqualified (as a typical liberal "fairness" play) were at the core of all of this. While, yes, the Glass-Steagall act ultimately helped the banks dump all that bad paper onto the taxpayer when things went down, the FACT is that the bad paper was only an issue because government-imposed "fairness" policies, which were financially unrealistic, were jammed into the banking sector. This effect of Glass-Steagall was not by design, but rather because very smart big bankers with lots of money on the line will always outsmart stupid public sector bureaucrats who get payed and promoted no matter how badly they perform. The guys in the big banks employ the best lawyers and accountants money can buy and they are always probing for ways to maximize profits and minimize risks; when they are ordered to do something stupid, they will look for a way around it, but if they cannot find such a path, then they will look for a way to shift the down-side risks onto somebody else - because they're SMART and they have money on the line!.
As a matter of basic fairness, if the voters are going to elect officials who insist on making banks lose money, then its only fair for the bankers to comb through the laws and find a way to shift those losses onto the idiot voters who want the losses to occur. In this case, the stupid taxpayers/voters who voted for the Clinton "fairness" agenda and its airheaded impossible economic schemes got exactly what they voted for - and NO, if you vote to ignore the basic laws of the universe you do not get an automatic escape from the consequences (consegeunces are part of a "package deal" when dealing with universal laws). The basic laws of economics are like the law of gravity; you can elect a guy who promises to help you jump off the skyscraper, BUT he cannot keep you from the subsequent impact with the ground. Similarly, you can vote for the guy who will help everybody get home loans (or college loans) as an act of fairness BUT you cannot then avoid the economic crunch when people fail to repay those loans (as will happen again in a few years, probably when a Republican is in office, when all the Obama-era college loans default). When the people DEMAND economic disaster (through the ballot box) then they deserve the disaster they get.
The thing that angers ME is that I did NOT vote for Mr. "I feel your PAIN" and yet I am left paying the bills anyway - TWICE. Clinton's economic "prosperity" also was an economically-unrealistic internet (Pets.com ring any bells?) bubble that burst in 2000 during the presidential cycle so that Bush(43) inherited a recession (the one everybody was already starting to feel before the planes hit the towers but whose economic impact immediately merged with those of 9-11 so that Clinton dodges any significant blame)
I am NOT a big Bush fan (not EITHER of them - that whole gene pool is toxic), I just like my history as it happened and NOT as it is rewritten by partisan ideologues.
The push to put a man on the moon was by Von Braun and his boys from Germany who'd been dreaming of it for many years. While they were working for the US Army under the auspices of the Army's Ballistic Missile agency they designed the Saturn I (which was already being built in 1959 before Kennedy was elected president). Grumman actually did early lunar mission studies under contract for that effort way back then, which gave them a leg-up in knowlede of the problems years later when an actual moon mission was announced. Johnson did NOT "begin the push for space", there were already guys in the pentagon looking at VonBraun and his boys as a way to put a military facility on the moon (the ultimate "high ground").
.The idea of moving all this activity into a CIVILIAN agency was a joint idea, across party lines, of both Senator Johnson (D-TX) and President Eisenhower (R). They created NASA together as a joint, bi-partisan act using the civilian aviation research agency NACA as the core, and immediately shifted the Early Saturn (at the time called the "Juno V") and its team (led by Von Braun) over to this new agency. THAT is how there was so much early ground work in place so that several years later when Kennedy asked for a bold plan, NASA guys could offer him the moon (they already were working the idea, already building Saturn I rockets, already had let the contracts for the mighty F-1 engines, and were planning Saturn II though V and "Nova" designs - only ever building the I, IB, and V). The first Saturn launched from the army-designed pad LC-34 in Oct 1961 (only months after Kennedy was sworn in) precisely because so much was already in place and underway thanks to Von Braun, Johnson, and Eisenhower.
is not prone to [amazingkreSkin.com]
Growing up on the mythology of Apollo (the space program not the god) I was shocked to read the things found in the quite below. But mythology is one thing and history is another.
As a Senator Kennedy did not believe in manned space flight, he thought the money should be spent on social programs. He was more open to less expensive robotic missions.
As President he was still not interested in manned flight. The "new frontier" was actually of little interest to Kennedy. What did get Kennedy behind the Apollo program was, payback to Vice President Johnson for his support and more importantly Cold War politics.
Shockingly, here is NASA's portrayal of Kennedy's motivations:
"Kennedy as president had little direct interest in the U.S. space program. He was not a visionary enraptured with the romantic image of the last American frontier in space and consumed by the adventure of exploring the unknown. He was, on the other hand, a Cold Warrior with a keen sense of Realpolitik in foreign affairs, and worked hard to maintain balance of power and spheres of influence in American/Soviet relations. The Soviet Union's non-military accomplishments in space, therefore, forced Kennedy to respond and to serve notice that the U.S. was every bit as capable in the space arena as the Soviets. Of course, to prove this fact, Kennedy had to be willing to commit national resources to NASA and the civil space program. The Cold War realities of the time, therefore, served as the primary vehicle for an expansion of NASA's activities and for the definition of Project Apollo as the premier civil space effort of the nation. Even more significant, from Kennedy's perspective the Cold War necessitated the expansion of the military space program, especially the development of ICBMs and satellite reconnaissance systems."
http://history.nasa.gov/Apollo...
Another interesting and shocking bit of trivia.
"Consistently throughout the 1960s a majority of Americans did not believe Apollo was worth the cost, with the one exception to this a poll taken at the time of the Apollo 11 lunar landing in July 1969. And consistently throughout the decade 45-60 percent of Americans believed that the government was spending too much onspace, indicative of a lack of commitment to the spaceight agenda."
http://www.theatlantic.com/tec...
Leon Panetta has already laid the blame for the rise of ISIS at Obama's feet.
As he should. Obama's head is stuck in 2003. In 2003 Al Qaeda was not in Iraq.
However in 2006 they were in Iraq and the proto-ISIS groups were defeated by US forces and Sunni tribal fighters during the Anbar Awakening.
Today, without US support and without real support from their own government in Baghdad those same Sunni tribal leaders have sided with ISIS.
If the US had maintained a sizable special ops / rapid reaction force / anti-terrorist force in Iraq, and with the US air support such a force would be able to call in, Sunni tribal leaders may have been less inclined to side with ISIS. What is beyond debate is that ISIS would not have rolled down the open highway in their Toyotas and heavy weapons capturing one town after another. Their vehicles and heavy weapons would have been destroyed by US air power. Plus with US air support and the nearby US "boots on the ground" it is far less likely that the Iraqi army would have fled, especially considering how degraded any ISIS force that got past air attacks would be.
So what prevented any such residual force in Iraq. It was entirely Obama's mindset born of the 2003 invasion. It is a *false* narrative that the Iraqi's unwillingness to grant US forces immunity is to blame. The status of US forces in Iraq had to be negotiated multiple times prior to Obama. The Iraqi's always initially refused immunity until US negotiators offered a better deal. Its a negotiating tactic to get the US to offer a little more. The difference between Obama and his predecessor is that instead of offering the Iraqi's more he used it as an excuse to pull everyone out. He wanted to pull everyone out, the Iraqi's gave him a convenient excuse. One could say that Obama was not negotiating in good faith, he really did not want to have an agreement, did not want to leave a residual force, he wanted to be completely out and rid of Iraq.
The problem is that his head is stuck in 2003. Whether the invasion was right or wrong, whether the occupation was right or wrong, all of that is irrelevant. Decisions in 2012 have to be made based on the realities of 2012, not the decisions of 2003 or 2006 that you hate, not the decisions of your predecessor who you hate, not to be consistent with your 2003 position that is no longer relevant. What mattered in 2012 were all the experts who were saying that a complete US withdrawal could lead to a very dangerous destabilization of Iraq. He should have negotiated in good faith and sweetened the deal enough to get immunity for a residual force, but he couldn't get his head out of 2003.
And in 2014 it continues. The Al Qaeda type are in Iraq, in 2008 and in 2012 Obama claimed these were the people who were the real enemy, the real threat, the real ones we shouldn't have taken our focus off of. He needs to act accordingly.
I am NOT a big Bush fan
Michael Douglas said he got oral cancer from cunnilingus which begs the question is there anything the Democrats won't blame Bush for?
1. the government regulations? The Americans and the Russians have launched enriched fuel in reactors into orbit, because governments will allow themselves to do ANYTHING no matter how dangerous or toxic if it is in their interest BUT that does not mean they will allow a private business man to do it even if he does it far more responsibly than they would have. Consider: Musk has already flown a few Dragon capsules to the space station carrying VERY expensive stuff, keeping each there ON ORBIT and WITH people going in and out of it, and then brought them back safely to Earth with VERY expensive stuff but they will not let him put a man aboard one until he does several abort tests, jumps through several more years of paperwork, etc. On the other hand, when government launched shuttles for the first time, there not only was no escape system test, there was no realistic escape plan. When government placed John Glenn into orbit, the capsule he rode in had NEVER been to a space station, and was probably 1/8th the capability of a Dragon.
2. the costs? Just how much money do you think Mr. Musk would have to spend designing, building, and TESTING a nuclear engine? Even governments are now far too scared to allow a government owned nuclear rocket engine to be run on Earth; Musk would have to launch every early test engine into space and try it there.
3. the fuel? Aside from the costs of GETTING the fuel, there's the issue of whether the government would even allow him to possess the stuff in sufficient quantities and at sufficient purities, and that's before you get to the range safety issues of whether they would ever allow him to put the fuel aboard a rocket and launch it. Remember: malfunctioning rockets have a tendency to EXPLODE, and rockets that do not explode but either place a payload into orbit or fail to properly push it out to escape velocity have put something above everybody's heads that WILL come back down someday and probably in an inplanned location.
Do you want Must to succeed in opening a path to Mars and reducing launch costs OR do you want him to hand space back to the big defense contractors and go bankrupt trying to recreate Star Trek?
The linked article is stilted and brain dead. It did not discuss the real science at NASA, i.e. the unmanned robotic probes that have been so successful such as the Voyager and Mariner missions and Hubble. There was (and still is) almost no scientific returned from the manned spaceflight missions. Almost all the discoveries and science come from robotic missions. Yes in spite of that, the unmanned directorate had to (and still does) fight for its life as the manned missions people who run NASA are always trying to steal their funding. That is why Carl Sagan started the Planetary Society; to stop the poaching of funds my the manned spaceflight pork-masters.
What the hell does that mean?
Watch this Heartland Institute video
As a kid, I saw this summarized in the World Book Encyclopedia, but this is a much more grown-up explanation for it. By all accounts, Nixon was flabbergasted by the cost, and that's what really killed it. The shuttle was part of the plan, and it's all that got built, which explains why it seemed to have no purpose. http://www.wired.com/2012/06/t...
Good points. For those who care about the NASA budget, you need to understand federal budget politics. The NASA budget is part of "domestic discretionary spending". The Republicans have successfully pressured domestic discretionary spending for many years, and Democrats have failed in defense of it. Now defense discretionary spending consumes a larger share of total federal discretionary spending. If you support Republican budget policies, you support squeezing the NASA budget.
I could tell you many things to cut in domestic discretionary spending, but not enough to free up money to fund NASA. NASA has poorly managed its budget by starting too many projects it could never pay for. Then NASA whines about the result.
Because it's lead too many people to believe that progress is only made by Great Leaps Forward.
Whoa, whoa, whoa, buddy! Not cool! WTF were you thinking with that? Casually using the name of the greatest human genocide of all time in an unrelated context? What's next, the Final Solution to the space problem?
Shutting down free speech with violence isn't fighting fascism. It IS fascism!
From the article, which none of you seem to have read,
Excerpt:
Logsdon points to three key decisions Nixon made regarding the U.S. space program, which had long-term consequences for NASA. The three decisions were:
To treat the space program as one area of domestic policy competing with other concerns, not as a privileged activity
To lower U.S. ambitions in space by ending human spaceflight beyond low Earth orbit for the foreseeable future and not embark on another space goal requiring a massive investment similar to Apollo
To build NASA’s post-Apollo program around the space shuttle without establishing a specific goal or long-term strategy the shuttle would support
Professor Logsdon says that Nixon’s lasting imprint on the space program was an end to human exploration of space beyond low Earth orbit in the twentieth century, and he sees the Nixon Space Doctrine and more ambitious human space exploration as incompatible. Under Nixon, NASA became just another domestic program, and the agency’s budget decreased even as it retained ambitious goals. During this time, however, NASA’s efforts did include increased international participation in U.S. human spaceflight programs.
--- end excerpt ---
As I've been saying for decades, the Republicans hate civilian space programs becase a) they've *always* seen it as a Democratic initiative, and because they're too dumb to see how the money is spent here on earth... and how it drives new technology.
For the 90% of you who are kids, here's one of the real-life, it-was-in-the-media-in-the-sixties, motivatoin for the space program: a moral equivalent of war.
But you turkeys would rather have wars (and y'all have, as traitor Dick Cheney put it, about the draft, "other agendas" than fighting) none of you put yourselves in danger. It's all a fucking video game with other peoples' lives.
mark "this is *not* the Real 21st Century; I want the REAL one back RIGHT NOW, thankyouveddymuch"