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End Of An Era

v1.1.1 / chapter 26 of 26 / 01 apr 13 / greg goebel / public domain

* The last Moon missions were not quite the end of the Apollo program. The Moon flights were followed by the "Skylab" space station, which was based on Apollo technology, and a rendezvous between a Soyuz and Apollo capsule as an exercise in superpower detente. Both exercises were effectively dead ends. By the time they were done, NASA was becoming a much different place from the energetic organization that had put men on the Moon.

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[26.1] SALYUT 2 / SKYLAB / SALYUT 3
[26.2] APOLLO-SOYUZ
[26.3] ADVANCED APOLLO MISSION PLANS / THE APOLLO DEBATE
[26.4] MOON HOAX?
[26.5] COMMENTS, SOURCES, & REVISION HISTORY

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[26.1] SALYUT 2 / SKYLAB / SALYUT 3

* Following the Salyut 1 fiasco, after a lapse the Soviets pushed on with their space station program. Having realized that sending cosmonauts into space without rescue suits was a bad idea, the Zvezda organization modified their "Sokol" military high-altitude aircrew protection suit to do the job. The result was designated "Sokol-K", the "K" essentially standing for "kosmos / space". It was very lightweight, only 10 kilograms (22 pounds). Since the Soyuz didn't use ejections seats, the Sokol-K didn't feature any provisions for parachuting; a separate survival kit was provided for dealing with conditions after touchdown, with the kit including a survival garment that would be worn in place of the Sokol-K suit. However, only two crew could fit into the Soyuz without a lot of redesign, and so the Soyuz would not be flown with three crew again for a long time.

The Soviets performed an unmanned test flight of a Soyuz ferry spacecraft, built for a two-man crew and using battery power instead of solar arrays, on 26 June 1972. The spacecraft was designated "Cosmos 496" and the reentry capsule was safely recovered six days later. The Soviets then launched "Salyut 2", a military Almaz station, on 3 April 1973. It suffered catastrophic decompression in orbit and fell back to Earth on 28 May. Soviet propaganda announced that the mission had been "successful", but nobody was impressed. The Soviets launched a civilian station on 11 May 1973, which also came to a bad end, going into a tumble and falling to Earth eleven days later. It was only referred to as "Cosmos 557". All that was disappointing, but at least no one was hurt in these two accidents.

* It was left to the Americans to perform the first successful space station mission, and ironically it was the cancellation of the later Apollo Moon landings that made it possible.

In the early days of the space program, Krafft Ehricke had envisioned putting an Atlas booster into orbit, just like in SCORE, and then setting up crew quarters in the empty fuel tanks to create a simple space station. In the mid-1960s, NASA began to consider concepts derived from that idea, envisioning an "Orbital Workshop (OWS)" along the same lines, but based on the Saturn S-IVB upper stage. With the cutbacks in the number of Moon landings, NASA had more Saturn Vs in the pipeline than were needed, and in July 1969 McDonnell Douglas was awarded a contract to fit up two S-IVB stages as "Skylabs". Only one was planned for launch; the second was intended strictly as a backup.

Although there had been consideration of launching a Saturn IB into orbit and then launching a second one with a crew to rig it up as a space station, detailed examination showed that trying to rig up the station in orbit would be a horrendous job. The option chosen was the "dry" OWS, with the upper stage preconfigured as a space station. The S-1VB stage's main engine was replaced by a much more modest "orbital maneuvering system (OMS)" and crew quarters and gear were installed in empty tanks. The astronauts would be launched in an Apollo capsule on a Saturn IB for residencies on the station.

Accommodations were downright luxurious compared to every other spacecraft flown to that time, with the astronauts provided with private sleep stations, exercise gear, a workable zero-gravity toilet, and even a wipe-down "shower" stall. They would wear modified versions of the A7LB Moon suit for station operations, featuring a thinner thermal / micrometeoroid protection layer to reduce weight, the level of protection required not being as great as on the Moon. For EVA, the Skylab A7LB suits featured a simplified helmet-visor assembly, plus an umbilical for oxygen and cooling water supply, a self-contained system being seen as more cumbersome; the suit had a half-hour backup oxygen supply in case the umbilical was blocked or broken.

Externally, Skylab featured a docking adapter; a space telescope system known as the "Apollo Telescope Mount (ATM)"; and six solar arrays, with one big array sticking from each side of the station and four smaller arrays arranged from the telescope in an "X" configuration. All this gear was tucked into a launch shroud until the station reached orbit. There was no way to effectively resupply the station: once its food, water, and other consumables were used up, it was history.

The station itself, "Skylab 1", was launched from Cape Canaveral on 14 May 1973, in the very last flight of the Saturn V booster. The launch itself seemed to go well, but once the station arrived in its operational orbit at an altitude of 435 kilometers (270 miles), mission controllers realized that the space station had lost one of its two main solar arrays and much of its sunshield on the way up. The second main solar array didn't deploy.

Without the second array, Skylab didn't have enough power to operate or maintain temperature, but NASA reacted quickly, coming up with a set of fixes. The "Skylab 2" crew mission was launched on a Saturn IB on 25 May, 11 days after the launch of the station. The crew was Pete Conrad, Joe Kerwin, and Paul Weitz. They did a go-round of the space station to inspect it when they arrived and confirmed the damage assumed by Mission Control. The astronauts set up an improvised sunshade to get the overheated station cooled off and performed several EVAs to unstick the solar array. The crew spent four weeks in the space station in total, observing the Sun with the ATM, performing biomedical experiments, and imaging ten million square kilometers (four million square miles) of the Earth. They came back home on 22 June 1973.

A little over a month later, on 28 July 1973, the "Skylab 3" crew was launched to the station, with the crew consisting of Alan Bean, Owen Garriot, and Jack Lousma. The second crew performed maintenance and followed up the experiments of the first crew. The Skylab 3 mission lasted twice as long as Skylab 2, with the astronauts coming home on 25 September 1973, after 59 days in orbit.

The last Skylab mission, "Skylab 4", was launched on 16 November 1973, the crew consisting of Gerry Carr, Dr. Ed Gibson, and Bill Pogue. The Skylab 4 crew spent 84 days in space, a record for human spaceflight to that time. The only significant problem with the flight was that all the astronauts got spacesick, even Bill Pogue, who had been a pilot with the Air Force Thunderbirds flight demonstration team. They conspired among themselves not to report it, providing a bit of evidence that astronauts who claimed they had never been spacesick weren't necessarily telling the truth. They failed to realize that their conversations were being monitored, and Al Shepard gave them a thorough chewing-out.

That was the end of the Skylab program. It had been highly successful, placing a roomy and sophisticated space station in orbit, performing useful experiments, and establishing endurance records. The backup Skylab ended up as an exhibit in the Smithsonian Museum of Air & Space in Washington DC. Due to solar activity that increased the density of gases in low orbit, Skylab 1 fell back to Earth several years earlier than expected, on 11 July 1979. Much to NASA's embarrassment the reentry was uncontrolled and some debris scattered over the Australian outback, but there was no damage and nobody was hurt.

There was an ironic footnote to the end of Skylab. Not long afterward, Cosmos 434, the third prototype Soviet T2K Moon lander, was projected to fall to Earth over Australia as well, but the USSR assured the Australian government that it was only a manned Moon lander prototype that was lightly built, would break up completely on reentry, and carried no radioactive or other hazardous materials. Apparently someone hadn't been briefed on or had forgotten the official line that the Soviets had never had a manned Moon program.

* The Soviets had not been discouraged by the problems with their space station program, and in fact it would be the way of the future for their space program. Another unmanned Soyuz ferry, designated "Kosmos 573", was flown on 15 June 1973 and recovered successfully. It was followed by a manned test flight of the ferry, designated "Soyuz 12", on 27 September 1973, the crew consisting of Vasily Lazarev and Oleg Makarov.

The Soyuz 12 mission was followed by the "Soyuz 13" flight, with launch on 18 December, the crew consisting of Pyotr Klimuk and Valentin Lebedev. Soyuz 13 was a scientific flight, not a space station flight; it carried the "Orion" array of ultraviolet telescopes in place of its docking adapter. The crew returned to Earth on 26 December.

The first successful Soviet space station, a military Almaz station designated "Salyut 3", was launched on 24 June 1974. A first crew, Pavel Popovich and Yuri Artukhin, was launched on "Soyuz 14" on 3 July, spending over two weeks on board, and then a second crew, Gennady Sarafinov and Lev Demin, was launched on "Soyuz 15" on 16 August 1974, but failed to dock. That was the last mission to Salyut 3, and it was deorbited over the Pacific on 24 January 1975.

By that time, another Soviet station, a civilian station designated "Salyut 4", was already in orbit, having been launched on 26 December 1974. Several crews would be sent to the station before it was finally deorbited on 2 February 1977.

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[26.2] APOLLO-SOYUZ

* In the meantime, the Soviets had also been working with the Americans on a collaborative space flight. In the late 1960s, US President Nixon was pursuing a policy of "detente" with the Soviet Union in hopes of drawing down Cold War tensions, and in the fall of 1969, Nixon had set up a committee of various space-related organizations to consider Soviet-American cooperation in space, with one of the items on the agenda being a space rescue capability.

Everyone except the US military was for the idea, and Nixon encouraged Tom Paine to make contact with the Soviets. Paine began a correspondence with Mstislav Keldysh, with Keldysh being encouraged by his counterpart at the US National Academy of Sciences, Philip Handler. These activities led to formal talks and a proposal for a rendezvous mission between a US Apollo CSM and the Soviet Soyuz capsule.

Joint working groups were set up in October 1970. Discussions even included the idea of an Apollo mission to a Salyut space station. That was too ambitious, but the idea of a joint Apollo-Soyuz mission remained attractive, and on 24 May 1972, Mr. Nixon and Soviet Premier Alexey Kosygin signed an agreement committing the two countries to such a mission in 1975. The program was given the formal designation of the "Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP)".

There was a long list of technical problems to deal with. For starters, the two spacecraft had incompatible communications gear, and so both spacecraft were fitted with additional radios. There was also the issue of mission control and rendezvous procedures, which required a great deal of discussion to get working together properly. For example, the Americans wanted the Soyuz painted white instead of its normal green so it would be more visible. The Soviets replied that would upset the spacecraft's thermal balance, but compromised by painting it selectively with white stripes and patches. The Soyuz was also fitted with docking lights to make sure it could be spotted by the Apollo.

Another set of difficulties was caused by the fact that the two spacecraft had incompatible docking ports, so a "Docking Module" was developed to mate the two. It would be carried into orbit on the Saturn IB that would launch the Apollo CSM. The Docking Module had to be designed as an airlock, since the two spacecraft also had incompatible atmospheres. The Apollo used a pure oxygen atmosphere at a pressure of about a third of a standard atmosphere. The Soyuz used an oxygen-nitrogen atmosphere at a bit over twice that pressure. An astronaut or cosmonaut going from the Soyuz to the Apollo without decompression would suffer the "bends", with nitrogen gas bubbles forming in his bloodstream and causing extreme pain. The Soviets agreed to lower the atmospheric pressure in the Soyuz to ease the requirements on the Docking Module and reduce the amount of time spent in the airlock for decompression.

Crews were trained for the mission, with American crews getting training sessions at the Gagarin Center, and Soviet crews getting training at the Johnson Space Flight Center. The American flight roster was considerably brightened by the presence of Deke Slayton. He had undergone surgery to deal with his minor heart problem, and the doctors had cleared him for flight. Now, after so many years watching the astronauts under him go into space, Slayton was finally going himself.

George Low had, astoundingly, been against assigning Slayton to the flight. When Chris Kraft told Low that Deke was being placed on the crew manifest, Low replied: "Why Deke, Chris? You don't have somebody else who can fly this mission?" Kraft shot back, a bit indignantly: "Why? Because we've screwed this guy long enough, George, that's why. And that's plenty reason."

Slayton was a bit discouraged by the fact that he wasn't going to be in command of the mission, but nobody knew better than him that somebody with more flight experience than "the world's oldest rookie astronaut" deserved that slot. Slayton shrugged: "What the hell, flying is flying."

The Russians struggled with learning English and the Americans struggled with learning Russian. Cosmonauts got training in the US, while astronauts got training in the USSR. After the initial visits of astronauts to the Soviet Union, a special "Hotel Cosmonaut" was actually built in Star Town for foreign visitors. Deke Slayton liked the trips, enjoying things like caviar for breakfast, and finding some unique amusements. The astronaut's accommodations were bugged; they found they could make suggestions to a lamp, and things would get done. They were tailed when they went out in public, and got to playing games to try to shake their tails. When the cosmonauts visited the US, Deke took them to sporting goods stores and on hunting trips.

The elements of the joint mission were implemented and validated. Soyuz 16, launched on 2 December 1974, took Anatoli Filipchenko and Nikolai Rukavishnikov to test Soyuz ASTP docking hardware. By the summer of 1975, all was ready for the actual mission.

* The Soviet part of the ASTP mission, "Soyuz 19", lifted off from Baikonur on 15 July 1975. The crew was Valeri Kubasov and Alexei Leonov, who had performed the first spacewalk. The Soviets, going along with the spirit of international cooperation, actually allowed the launch to be televised live, a first.

The American component, "Apollo 18", was launched on a Saturn IB from Cape Canaveral only a few hours later, carrying Deke Slayton, Tom Stafford, and Vance Brand into orbit. It was the last shot of a Saturn booster. Two days later, the spacecraft docked. The Apollo was the active partner in the rendezvous since it had a larger fuel supply. Tom Stafford went through the Docking Module to shake hands with Alexei Leonov, who greeted him in English with: "Glad to see you!"

The crews got along famously. They performed a number of experiments, and on 19 July the two spacecraft separated after spending almost two days connected. Following a few experiments, the Apollo docked again with the Soyuz to test the docking system for future joint missions, and the two spacecraft undocked again a few hours later. Soyuz 19 returned to Earth on 21 July, with the Apollo returning on 24 July. The mission brushed with disaster at the last moment, when the Apollo crew failed to shut down the reaction control thrusters soon enough, filling the command module with toxic gas. Deke Slayton later found out they had taken 75% of a lethal dose. Other than that, the mission had gone off very well, and proven an excellent public-relations exercise for both sides.

That was all it was. The agreement signed between Nixon and Kosygin in 1972 lapsed in 1977, and though the two superpowers signed a follow-on five-year agreement on space cooperation, there would be no more joint manned spaceflight exercises between the two sides until the 1990s. Nixon had been forced to resign the US presidency in disgrace in 1975 and his schemes for detente with the Soviets did not last, with relations gradually falling into the same old pattern of mutual distrust and confrontation. By the time Ronald Reagan became US president in 1981, the Cold War was as frigid and hostile as it had ever been.

* The end of the Apollo program was a watershed for NASA: the place would never be quite the same again. A few veterans would hang on, including Tom Mattingly, Vance Brand, and John Young, who would become among the first to fly the NASA space shuttle. Young become something of the "Grand Old Man" of the astronaut corps, finally retiring from the agency at the end of 2004 at the age of 74. Deke Slayton would work on the shuttle program but would never get a ride on the thing, retiring from NASA in 1982, becoming president of a company working on commercial space launchers, and flying little zippy Formula One air racers. He died of a brain tumor on 13 June 1993.

Most of the other astronauts dispersed in the 1970s, some going back to the military, most going on to business careers, and some going into politics. Jack Schmitt actually served a term as a US senator from New Mexico from 1976 through 1982, though he was about as out of place there as he had been with the fighter-jock astronauts. He felt the other senators lacked vision, and most of them certainly lacked technical knowledge. On their part, they nicknamed him "Moonrocks". Jack Swigert would win a seat in the US House of Representatives for Colorado, but sadly he died of a brain tumor in late 1982, only days before he was to take office.

Jim Irwin and Charlie Duke would set up Christian ministries and act as lay preachers. Ed Mitchell, in keeping with his ESP experiments, founded the "Institute of Noetic Sciences" in Palo Alto, California, which would investigate parapsychology and consciousness and acquire an association with the "New Age" movement. Neil Armstrong served as a spokesman for and member of the board of a number of firms, maintaining as was his custom a low profile, finally dying of complications from heart surgery on 25 August 2012.

* And then there was Wernher von Braun, the man who sold the Moon. He had actually been promoted to a NASA headquarters job in March 1970, as the "Deputy Associate Director for Planning". With the steady decline in NASA funding, planning was mostly an exercise in futility, and after Tom Paine left, von Braun basically didn't have much to do. Most of the Paperclippers had already quit the agency; with headcount reductions, US military veterans had priority in being retained, and the Germans ended up being excess. A wit with a midnight black sense of humor called it NASA's "Final Solution to the German problem." The Germans called it the "Great Massacre".

Von Braun resigned in June 1972 to become vice-president of Fairchild Industries in Germantown, Maryland. He stayed there until the end of 1976, when he was forced to resign because of cancer. The cancer finally killed him on 16 June 1977, at age 65. It was the final end to a career that was remarkable in many senses of the word. Few people could have decided to go to the Moon and then actually have done it, and become a media star along the way. He paid a price for it as well, with one of his testaments being the mocking tune "Wernher von Braun", written by 1960s musical satirist Tom Lehrer:

   Don't say that he's hypocritical,     Say rather that he's apolitical.     "Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down?     That's not my department," says Wernher von Braun.  

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[26.3] ADVANCED APOLLO MISSION PLANS / THE APOLLO DEBATE

* The end of Apollo missions shut the door on manned Moon exploration for the duration. NASA had actually considered ambitious follow-ons to Apollo through the agency's "Apollo Applications Program", also known as "Apollo X".

There were schemes for using the Apollo for Earth-orbit missions, for example with a set of remote-sensing instruments in the SIM bay, but the primary focus of advanced Apollo flights was the Moon. The basic concepts envisioned Moon missions conducted with two Saturn V boosters, not just one. The first mission would carry an Apollo CSM on a Moon-orbiting mission, along with a new version of the LEM called the "LEM Truck". The LEM Truck was designed for a one-way mission, able to land on the Moon's surface but not take off again. Instead of an ascent stage, it would have relatively comfortable living quarters and supplies for a two-week stay on the Moon.

The second Saturn V would launch an Apollo CSM with a "LEM Taxi", which was more or less a standard LEM, improved to the extent that it could sit idle on the Moon for several weeks and still be able to safely send the two astronauts back to lunar orbit. The plan envisioned that astronauts would be able to range far from their base of operations, using a two-seat "lunar flying vehicle" or "Mooncopter", which used thrusters to allow astronauts to fly over the Moon's surface. The Mooncopter gave some of NASA brass fits, but the astronauts loved the idea, since it was the sort of thing they were born and bred to do.

An alternate scheme involved a different version of the LEM Truck that carried a long-range lunar rover, the "Mobile Lunar Laboratory (MOLAB)", with living quarters and supplies for extended journeys over the Moon's surface. The ultimate goal was landing a permanent Moonbase module, the "Lunar Exploration System for Apollo (LESA)", launched by a Saturn V, carrying a MOLAB and powered by a nuclear reactor, with LESA capable of supporting at least three astronauts for at least 90 days. Farouk el Baz and other researchers devised mission plans where the astronauts would conduct extended lunar surface studies over various terrain of interest.

* Of course none of it happened; follow-on Apollo mission plans had been abandoned long before the last Moon landing. The Moon program had become a subject of controversy, as questions accumulated in a time of national self-doubt that the project was a good use of public funds.

In contemporary dollars, Apollo cost $25 billion USD, and at its peak it accounted for almost one cent on every dollar of US economic output. Apollo funds similarly totaled about 20% of all US public and private research money at that time. In 1971, NASA commissioned a study that claimed the Apollo program generated a $7 USD return for every dollar spent. The impartiality of such a study was suspect, since NASA used it to justify their funding requests, and the Congressional General Accounting Office (GAO), never much of a friend to the agency, was highly critical.

There was also the question of how relevant such a statistic was even if it was true. A critic could easily observe that to justify the Apollo program only in terms of its incidental benefits and not on its own merit was to imply that it had no merit in itself. States with industries and centers that were the beneficiaries of Apollo funding, such as Florida, Louisiana, Alabama, Texas, and California, of course obtained an economic benefit from the work, but could the money have been better spent?

The US interstate highway program, another huge Federal project, also boosted the economy through government contracts, but the end result of the interstate highway system was an "infrastructure" that was directly useful to the vast majority of American citizens, and by even conservative accounting exercises paid back its investment many times over. It is difficult to identify similar long-term benefits from Apollo. The specific technologies developed for the program, such as the Saturn V booster, were more or less abandoned later. While manufacturers used the publicity hype associated with Apollo to promote "space age" products such as Velcro and Teflon, these products had been developed long before. Teflon was actually discovered, more or less by accident, in 1938, and had been used in chemical processing for the US atomic bomb project in World War II.

The only major consumer products to obviously owe their origins to the Apollo program are cordless tools. The Black & Decker company had won a contract to develop a lightweight portable drill for the Apollo program, and promptly developed and delivered it. The company thought they could leverage this effort into a commercial product, and in 1974, Black & Decker introduced a multifunction portable tool that could be configured as a drill, portable vacuum cleaner, and a hedge trimmer. The product died in the marketplace, since nobody had developed low-cost rechargeable batteries that had acceptable lifetimes. The Moon drill itself had used high-grade silver-zinc batteries that were too expensive for a consumer product. It wasn't until 1978 that General Electric was able to provide Black & Decker with rechargeable batteries that could last from five to six years, and in 1979 Black & Decker introduced the popular "Dustbuster" cordless vacuum cleaner.

Apollo clearly did benefit the "finite element modeling" software that is now used for everything from computer-aided engineering to Pixar movies, and the funding no doubt did assist in the development of integrated circuitry, computers, and new materials. Still, there is no strong reason to believe such advances wouldn't have been made at about the same rate even if Apollo hadn't come along. The development of integrated circuits and computers in the post-Apollo timeframe moved along at an amazing clip without any major government funding.

A clear benefit of Apollo was the greatly improved scientific understanding of the geological history of the Earth and the Moon obtained from the 381 kilograms (840 pounds) of rock samples returned by the lunar missions. However, few of the planetary scientists who used the Moon rocks for their studies could argue that there had been any urgent reason to perform that research at such high cost.

It must be emphasized in this context that the Apollo flights were performed as a political demonstration, with the technical and scientific returns seen as strictly secondary goals by the people in charge. It could even be convincingly argued that as a political demonstration, Apollo had achieved the goals set out for it at the outset. Still, those goals seemed less relevant in the end than they had appeared at the beginning. More the point, after the end of the Apollo flights, there were no more manned flights to the Moon for the rest of the century. Apollo was not a stepping-stone to any long-term program, and the long lapse of interest in going to the Moon suggests there was no urgent reason to get there.

* Even before the end of the Apollo Moon landings, the general public had become more or less indifferent to space exploration. The Mercury 7 had been national heroes, but during the 1970s, except for Glenn and Shepard, they moved generally unrecognized in public. They got their second shot at fame in 1979, however, when Tom Wolfe published his book THE RIGHT STUFF, a pop history of the Mercury program. It was a best-seller and the movie made from it was a hit.

The Mercury 7 astronauts generally regarded THE RIGHT STUFF as a comic book without pictures and found the movie even shallower. Alan Shepard was particularly annoyed with it, because it played up the worst features of his reputation -- the book blew the lid off the screwing around by the astronauts, in fact probably exaggerated it -- and he also insisted he was better looking than actor Scott Glenn, who had played him in the movie version. Some of the other astronauts shrugged. Hate it or like it, it did put the honestly heroic early days of the US space program back on the map. The astronauts had drifted apart and had a few grudges, but THE RIGHT STUFF brought them back together and the grudges didn't seem all that important any more.

THE RIGHT STUFF did little for the other astronauts. Wolfe had wanted to follow the US space program up to Skylab, but it was just too hard of a slog. Pete Conrad did an American Express commercial in the mid-1970s and found himself recognized everywhere for a while, but then his second fifteen minutes of celebrity passed and he became anonymous again. The Apollo Moon landings were more or less forgotten by the public; when the 20th anniversary of the first Moon landing took place in 1989, many schoolchildren not only didn't know America had been to the Moon, they refused to believe it had actually happened.

However, that anniversary led to retrospectives on the flights, and then to Ron Howard's 1995 hit movie APOLLO 13, with popular all-American-boy actor Tom Hanks very well cast as Jim Lovell. Interest in the Moon landings became surprisingly lively, considering how they were neglected for so long.

All the postmortems of the Apollo missions do not really diminish the fact that they were a great adventure, conducted with technology that sometimes seems frighteningly crude only a few decades later. Future generations will see any controversy over the politics and cost of the missions as academic, and will likely see them as comparable to the daring polar expeditions of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, if fortunately not quite as brutal. Future generations will also realize that Apollo was something well ahead of its time, and that the real opening of doors to other worlds was a task for another century.

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[26.4] MOON HOAX?

* One of the odder consequences of the Apollo program was the rise of a clique that claimed the whole thing never happened, that the difficulties were so enormous that NASA simply faked the whole thing in a movie studio at the ultra-secret "Area 51" base in Nevada. The conspiracy theorists (CTs) cited as evidence:

• The astronauts' film cameras had crosshair marks to help with photo-interpretation back on Earth, and in some frames they seem to be "overlaid" by bright image objects. The CTs claimed this was evidence that the shots had been faked. Debunkers replied that the bright images "bled" through overexposure around the narrow dark graticule lines in the photographic film, and also wonder how much trouble it would be to do such a complicated job of retouching, instead of just photographing a stage-managed shot. This was in the days before digital image manipulation, after all.
  
  
• A similar complaint from the CTs was that the Moon pictures didn't show stars in the sky. Debunkers replied that an exposure long enough to show the stars would have vastly overexposed the bright objects in the photograph, and the same thing happens in night photography on Earth.
  
  
• The CTs pointed to the fact that the shadows in some of the images seem to point in different angles, as if they were illuminated by a close-up light source instead of the distant Sun. Debunkers pointed out that the same effect could be obtained by putting two people on different sides of a pitcher's mound and photographing their shadows in the late afternoon.
  
  
• The CTs claimed that some images supposedly taken several kilometers apart on the Moon were of the same scene. Debunkers replied that even if this is true, misindexing of the photos might be a more plausible reason than a massive conspiracy -- anybody who's ever tried to manage a big collection of photos knows it's not a trivial job.
  
  
• The CTs claimed that the US flag planted by Armstrong and Aldrin waved as though it were in a breeze. Debunkers replied that this was simply due to vibrations set up when the flag was planted, which continued for an extended period of time because there was no air to damp the movement.
  
  
• The CTs claimed that the extremes of lunar temperatures would have killed the astronauts. Debunkers replied that the landings were performed in the lunar morning and no Apollo crew was on the Moon's surface at lunar noon or midnight.
  
  
• The CTs claimed that space radiation, particularly in the Van Allen belts, would have fried the astronauts. Eye-glazing lists of numbers and citations have been compiled by both sides to argue the matter. The fact seems to be that the radiation exposure was on the same level as that provided by a chest X ray, and Dr. Van Allen himself, who might be assumed to be the definitive expert on the region of space that bears his name, gave what could be judged to be the authoritative answer: "The claim that radiation exposure during the Apollo missions would have been fatal to the astronauts is ... nonsense." The CTs said he was part of the conspiracy, which then made his long-standing reputation as a critic of and an irritant to NASA somewhat puzzling.

The CTs were undiscouraged by the fact that most of their evidence was easily dismissed, simply contriving more arguments: the TV images from the Moon were suspiciously grainy; the camera film would have melted; the astronauts couldn't have taken such nice clear film pictures; and the takeoff of the LEM as recorded by the TV camera looked unconvincingly abrupt. Some of the accusations of the CTs went into the grotesque, asserting without the slightest real evidence that the astronauts who had been killed in accidents were "silenced because they knew too much".

In the end, the arguments of the CTs had no credibility, since they were based on a highly implausible premise. To pull off such a hoax would require a conspiracy involving the full knowledge of hundreds or thousands of people, including Mission Control, top NASA and government brass, all the astronauts, and whoever set up and implemented the fake movies. The idea that such a secret could be kept by such a large group of people for decades is hard to believe. Claiming there's an elephant in the room is one thing; saying it's invisible is another. Those asserting the existence of such a huge conspiracy provided no concrete specifics of its organization -- who gave the orders, what orders were given and when, and who carried out the orders -- as if no paper trail for or well-placed witnesses to such a complicated operation ever existed.

Furthermore, the Soviets monitored US spaceflight communications and tracked American spacecraft, and it would have been difficult (though not impossible) to have faked the mission to that level of detail. They had also put satellites into the Van Allen belts to study the radiation levels there, and conducted Zond flights carrying live organisms through the belts. If the conditions had been as lethal as the CTs claim, the Soviets would have been perfectly aware of it.

In other words, had there been a Moon hoax the USSR would have blown the whistle immediately and would have had every good reason to do so. The United States was an adversary; the Soviet manned Moon program had been a dismal failure, and unmasking the American "hoax" would have provided a perfect cover for their botched efforts, in much the same way that US space nuclear tests in the early 1960s gave the Soviets a convenient cover for a temporary lapse in manned space shots that was actually due to limited resources.

The Moon landing conspiracy theory eventually ran out of steam, not that it had ever been taken all that seriously. In 1995 a short and seemingly convincing "history" of the effort to fake the landings was posted to an Internet forum, claiming that none other than Stanley Kubrick, who had done such a good job of depicting spaceflight in 2001: A SPACE ODYSSEY, was contracted by NASA to produce the videos of most of the Moon landings. The essay was so well-written and deadpan that it is said CTs have actually cited it as evidence -- failing to notice claims in the article that Kubrick was into celestial mechanics and spacecraft navigation as a hobby; that the scenes on the Sea of Tranquility were filmed "on location", with Kubrick not accompanying the film crew "because of his well-known fear of flying"; and that the article originally appeared on a humor forum.

To the extent that the "Moon hoax" conspiracy lingers, it's mostly as comedy. One satirical publication published a mock story in which Neil Armstrong reportedly admitted his trip to the Moon was a hoax. He hadn't realized that at the time, but after watching online videos and reading websites created by conspiracy theorists, he had to admit he was mistaken: "It has become painfully clear to me that on July 20, 1969, the Lunar Module under the control of my crew did not in fact travel 250,000 miles over eight days, touch down on the Moon, and perform experiments, ushering in a new era for humanity. Instead, the entire thing was filmed on a soundstage, most likely in New Mexico."

The fact that there's one born every minute who will still buy off on conspiracy theories was highlighted when it was then discovered that two newspapers in Bangladesh, the DAILY MANAB ZAMIN and the NEW NATION, had picked up the story and run it as news. After a flurry of excitement with readers, the editors realized they'd made a mistake: "We thought it was true, so we printed it without checking."

BACK_TO_TOP

[26.5] COMMENTS, SOURCES, & REVISION HISTORY

* I never really planned or even wanted to write this document. It grew out of some notes I took in the early 1990s from a book by William Burrows named EXPLORING SPACE. In the late 1990s I decided to flesh the notes out into a comprehensive survey of space technology, with a focus on satellite technology. I didn't plan on doing very much on manned spaceflight, since I figured that was pretty well documented already. However, I got pulled in up to my neck, finding out that a comprehensive survey was an enormous job. I completed a rough draft, but it was simply too big and clumsy to be readable or maintainable. The only thing to do was to break it down into about six separate documents.

RACE TO THE MOON is the core document, and even with its more restricted focus it was a pain to get into shape for release, since it kept growing and growing. Tom Wolfe had to give up on writing THE RIGHT STUFF up to Skylab; having actually done that myself, now I understand why he changed his mind.

* Sources include:

• THE ILLUSTRATED ENCYCLOPEDIA OF SPACE TECHNOLOGY, edited by Kenneth Gatland, Salamander Books, 1981.
  
  
• THE SOVIET MANNED SPACE PROGRAM by Phillip Clark, Salamander Books, 1988.
  
  
• ICBM by G. Harry Stine, Orion Books, 1991.
  
  
• A MAN ON THE MOON by Andrew Chaikin, Viking Books, 1994.
  
  
• DEKE! by Donald K. "Deke" Slayton with Michael Cassutt, Tom Dougherty & Associates, 1994.
  
  
• COUNTDOWN: A HISTORY OF SPACE FLIGHT by Tom A. Heppenheimer, John Wiley & Sons, 1997.
  
  
• THIS NEW OCEAN by William E. Burrows, Random House, 1998.
  
  
• WERNHER VON BRAUN: THE MAN WHO SOLD THE MOON by Dennis Pizzkiewizc, 1998.
  
  
• JOHN GLENN: A MEMOIR, by John Glenn with Nick Taylor, Bantam, 1999.
  
  
• THE LAST MAN ON THE MOON by Gene Cernan & Don Davis, Saint Martin's Press, 1999.
  
  
• FAILURE IS NOT AN OPTION by Gene Kranz, Putnam, 2000.
  
  
• FLIGHT by Chris Kraft, Dutton, 2001.
  
  
• THE ROCKET MEN by Rex Hall & David J. Shayler, Praxis Publishing, 2001.
  
  
• LIGHT THIS CANDLE AND GO by Neal Thompson, Crown, 2004.
  
  
• "The Road To The Deep Space Network" by Craig B. Waff, IEEE SPECTRUM, April 1993, 50:57.
  
  
• "Apollo's Scientific Exploration Of The Moon" by Andrew Chaikin, PLANETARY REPORT, May-June 1994,
  
  
• "Was The Race To The Moon Real?" by John M. Logsdon & Alain Dupas, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, June 1994, 36:43.
  
  
• "Like Green Cheese, Moonshot's Benefits Are Sometimes Myths" by Frederick Rose & Jeff Cole, WALL STREET JOURNAL, 20 July 1994.
  
  
• "The Scientific Legacy Of Apollo" by G. Jeffrey Taylor, SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN, July 1994, 40:47.
  
  
• "CIA Papers Reveal Spy Satellites" by Philip J. Klass, AVIATION WEEK, 16 January 1995.
  
  
• "A Sudden Loss Of Altitude" by Carl Posey, AIR & SPACE, June-July 1998.
  
  
• "The Coldest Warriors" by William Burrows, SMITHSONIAN AIR & SPACE, January 2000, 70:77.
  
  
• "The Lunar Module's Evil Twin" by Joshua Stoff, SMITHSONIAN AIR & SPACE, October-November 2000, 22.
  
  
• "Saving Apollo 11" by Barbara Honegger & Hank Brandli, AVIATION WEEK, 13 December 2004, 78,80.

A few TV programs helped provide background color. The US Public Broadcasting Service did a two-hour installment titled TO THE MOON, which had interesting interviews with some of the people involved.

A number of websites were consulted as well, particularly those of the NASA website network, which has detailed histories of the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs. If this document seems critical of NASA at times, that should not diminish in the least the excellent and praiseworthy job that NASA has done in ensuring that their mission is communicated to the public. Their historical information is often surprisingly honest. Mark Wade's online ENCYCLOPEDIA ASTRONAUTICA was also very valuable; it was a useful reference that often resolved various nitpicky questions. There were various other interesting sources on the web. David S.F. Portee's BEYOND APOLLO website provided many fascinating entries on "what if" space technologies that were never fielded. Another item worth looking up is an online copy of Andy Duncan's short story THE CHIEF DESIGNER, a semi-fictional biography of Sergei Korolyev.

I ended up wading through more memoirs and biographies than I like to think about. It became more than a bit redundant and tedious after a while. My hat's off to the astronauts, but I got pretty sick of listening to macho flyboys after a while. I eventually just skimmed through the books as fast as I could, slowing down to pick out interesting items. I tried to add more biographical details but they ended up just bogging down the document, so I yanked many of them. In one case the biographical details were distinctly uncomfortable: I had worked in industry for a time with a son of one of the Apollo astronauts, and when I found out some of the dirty laundry about his dad, I felt like I was prying into things that were none of my business.

I never thought of myself as an absolutely fanatical space cadet who could cite chapter and verse on the space program, but that's what I had to at least simulate to do a worthwhile job on this document. I feel some satisfaction in writing this document but I can't say that doing it was a continuous pleasure.

* Revision history:

   v1.0.0 / 01 aug 05 / 24 chapters.     v1.0.1 / 01 may 07 / Review & polish.     v1.0.2 / 01 may 09 / Review & polish.     v1.1.0 / 01 apr 11 / Added materials on spacesuits, 26 chapters.     v1.1.1 / 01 apr 13 / Review & polish.