How Nasa betrayed the legacy of Neil Armstrong

Thirty years ago today, Eugene Cernan and Harrison Schmitt stepped on to the Moon. They were the last human beings to do so. The two men left three days later with the inglorious remark from Cernan, as he climbed into his capsule: “Let’s get this mother out of here.”

It wasn’t only the astronauts that left that day. Imagination, inspiration, generosity of spirit and of means headed back to Earth as well. With blinding shortsightedness, the space programme was allowed to stall and has never recovered. Nasa wastes its time firing shuttles to and from an empty space station in the sky.

Cernan’s flight, on Apollo 17, ended a glorious decade of space exploration which was launched amid the optimism of JFK’s Hundred Days. Never mind that the moonshot’s real goal was geopolitical and military, not scientific — to get one over on a Soviet regime that had beaten the capitalists to the punch in every facet of space flight. Never mind the fact that it discovered little of any use.

For a too brief period mankind stopped staring at itself and peered instead at the stars. Hope defied gravity, millions of potential astronauts suddenly sat up and paid attention in science class, and self-effacing pilots such as Neil Armstrong and Jim Lovell became global superstars — not least because they came up with better exit lines than “let’s get this mother out of here”.

Apollo 17’s final Moon landing was meant to mark the end of the beginning of space travel. It turned out to be the beginning of the end. Since then, Nasa has morphed into a vast, bureaucratic, unimaginative organisation presiding over a $60 billion floating white elephant: the International Space Station. This, the flagship project and the only one that could possibly recapture the spirit of the Sixties and Seventies, has descended into farce.

Decades of bloated overspending on one inept failure after another — the loss of a $125 million Mars probe, for instance, because Nasa couldn’t tell the difference between metres and feet — has meant that the ISS budget has been so severely cut as to render the project useless. Nasa’s own analysts have concluded that plans to scale back its crew from seven members to three will leave it worthless as a science laboratory: those astronauts who do make it will be so busy with maintenance that there will be no time for any more than rudimentary experiments. And research, into the effects of weightlessness on the human body for instance, which is crucial to the next giant leap for mankind — a manned mission to Mars — simply will not be done.

Yet when the Russians took the truly imaginative and potentially lucrative step of actually taking the first paying tourist to the space station, Nasa humourlessly banned him from the American parts of the module. So a programme envisioned as a stepping stone to the planets has become a pointless vanity that circles the Earth for its own sake, while bleeding the taxpayers of 16 countries. Yet shuttles continue to come and go between Cape Canaveral and the ISS, adding a part here and a module there. Like Nasa, the space station no longer has any purpose beyond perpetuating itself.

Cernan’s frustration at the way Nasa has squandered the legacy of the Apollo astronauts is palpable. “After Apollo 17, America stopped looking towards the next horizon,” he said on a recent visit to London. “The United States had become a space-faring nation, but threw it away.”The vision that brought the Moon landings, Voyager’s journey to Jupiter and Viking’s mission to Mars, long ago went blind. Nasa has, unforgivably, missed an historic opportunity that may never be repeated. After consuming close to 3 per cent of the US budget for a quarter of a century, with such minuscule returns, politicians have become understandably reluctant to write more blank cheques. Cernan’s last footprint may have aged another 30 years before mankind makes it as far again.

The usual explanation for lack of manned flights to other planetary bodies is that robots can do similar tasks for much less cost.

Had we sent people to Mars instead of the satellite, and made the same mistake, it might have led to loss of life as well as being much more expensive and a public relations nightmare.

Space needs to compete with other priorities, such as defense and exploration of inner space (eg deep ocean exploration). Man has probably logged more time on or around the moon than in the Marianas Trench, for example.

The fact of the space station is that it is a solution for a problem that has not yet been fully formulated (industrial exploitation of weightlessness and vacuum). With no positive ROI in sight, and budget overruns, it makes sense to scale back the space station project in favor of other priorities (eg robotic exploration). We already have a lot of data on the effects of weightlessness on the human body thanks to Soyuz, so I believe that is not really a critical justification for increasing space station resources at this time.

While I don't begrudge the moon shots and applaud a good romantic goal, I think it is also good to keep goals in perspective.

"Never mind the fact that it discovered little of any use."

That statement bugs me everytime I hear it.

Let's not forget that the space program's pressure to succeed also forced new developments in material sciences (more than just Teflon!), communications, and especially, electronic miniaturization (everything had to be smaller and lighter to fit on those rockets) - discoveries that gave US industry a lead it has never relinquished. Not to mention the unquantifiable "inspirational value" of the project.

Billions well spent.

Irony on -I agree. Since the Times is so concerned, might the Brits now take up the mantel and send men to Mars? It would be magnificent. If they do not, then shame on them for not following up there concern with action.- Irony off.

It is always fun to tell someone else how to spend their money, especially from a morally correct position.

"...new developments...more than just Teflon...communications...electronic miniaturization..."inspirational value"..."

I think it is narrow-thinking to assume that none of these things would have ever come to pass were it not for NASA.

My extreme analogies run like this:
Were it not for a passion for spices, Columbus would have never discovered America.
Or, were it not for World War II, radar would have never been invented.

So from this, we should continue to spend gobs of money to cultivate our passion for spices and to lenghten our wars beyond their mission.

Now don't get me wrong, I think there are some legitimate things for NASA to do, but it seems now that most of what they do are done just for public relations and self-survival of the program. They sound like a bunch of rah-rah-rah cheerleaders.

I just don't see value of the billions and billions of dollars that are being spent. Space may be infinite, but dollars are not. Especially when these bloated programs are being fed from the public trough.

We need to get our asses to Mars and colonize it.

Before I shuffle off to Buffalo I want to see some wimpy liberal media-puke on TV whining about the terrible pollution in New Denver while a video plays on the screen behind him of a beer bottle and trash littered street in a bawdy Martian mining town.

Interesting article, but the author completely misses the point about Apollo.

Apollo was not about the Moon, not about exploring the universe, and not about boldly going where no man had gone before. Apollo was about, purely and simply, beating the Soviets to the Moon!. Once that goal was reached, we stopped going there. Put another way, what happens when you win a battle? You stop fighting it.

Space enthusiasts (and I'm one of them) cannot seem to comprehend this simple fact of life. We are doing nothing of any significance in space because there is no national imperative to do so. Thus, 30 years of stop-gap programs, the entitlement Shuttle, and make-work ISS.

Want to conquer the Solar System? Find something out there that'll make millions for somebody. Then, get financing and go do it. Quit thinking of Apollo as a template for the future -- it wasn't a plan to explore space; it was a battle in the Cold War (and one that we won, thank God!).

And stop moaning about our "lousy space future." The only ones responsible for that are ourselves.

"Were it not for a passion for spices, Columbus would have never discovered America. "

Not quite the same case, because Columbus did not have to invent and refine a variety of technological material before he could make his voyage; he could simply set off in an already-built ship.

And that's my point - that requirement jump-started so many American industries, that they are now world leaders (IBM in computers, DuPont in materials, etc.) How many jobs have they created over the years? That's value.

Daniel Golden was the worst thing that could have happened to NASA. He allowed slick to squander billions paying Russia's obligations to the international space program. And that was just a small part of the overall corruption.

For now we need someone to get the financial house in order and then move forward with some real exploration.

So true "Cincinatus."

The Saturn V laying on its side in front of NASA JSC is a metaphor for NASA itself - a beached whale. A magnificent giant of yesterday, that now is helpless to even save itself, let alone do the impossible that it once did with apparent ease.

Instead of trying to resurrect the ghosts of Apollo, space activists would realize their dream sooner by embracing the engines of capitalism, which historically is what opens frontiers, not government programs.

Robots are safer, but they lack the drama of man conquering the stars. If you want to fire the imagination, you have to put people up there and out there.

That's drama at a premium cost. We can do better by going to see a play at the local theatre and using robots to explore outer space.

One thing that JFK perhaps did not get enough credit for is redirecting feelings of nationalism during the Cold War from arms buildup to peaceful technology buildup.

Exploration in the past was done mostly for profit or to escape persecution. Until there's a real reason to explore space, we won't. Wasting money on NASA won't accomplish anything. The agency should be disbanded.

Commercial space ventures exist where there is a demand. Sea Launch launches commercial satellites for profit. My guess is that there will be an commercial space tourism venture independent of the ISS within 10 years.

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