Wow! Did they mention Mondale by name? Please post details here. I wonder if this series is available at the library? And speaking of libraries, could AT LEAST ONE of you MN Freepers check to see if this book is in your local library? If so, please check it out and post details here. Thanx in advance.
A lot of people have asked me why I wrote Children of Apollo to begin with. Aside from a desire to make money on royalties, my desire was to answer two of the most haunting questions of the last century. Why didn’t the Apollo Program lead to a space faring civilization, with people living on other worlds, and space craft voyaging further and further out to the planets and hence the stars? The second question stems from the first. Could things have turned out different?
The answer to the first question is that the Apollo Program, born of the Cold War politics of the early 1960s, perished of the Vietnam era politics of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Neil Armstrong had barely lifted his foot from the surface of the Moon when people began to decide that we now needed to spend more money on social programs and less on space adventures. We had beaten the Soviets, now it was time to help the poor, clean the environment, and so on. Liberal politicians and the media encouraged the attitude. Some did that because they believed the proposition that every dollar spent on space was food taken from the mouths of the hungry. Others, with more sinister motives, saw an irresistible issue. Then Senator Walter Mondale expressed the latter very well, in the wake of the Apollo Fire, when he said, “I don’t give a hoot in hell for the program or your future. I intend to ride this thing for all the political advantage I can get.”
Story: On January 27, 1967, the fledgling Apollo program suffers its first setback, a disaster which almost ends the American space program. During a seemingly innocuous ground test of the Apollo capsule's ability to function independently, a fire begins in the vehicle and burns out of control in the highly-pressurized, all-oxygen atmosphere. Astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee die when the life support systems of their sealed pressure suits are infiltrated by toxic smoke. In the already highly-politicized atmosphere of the space race, the finger-pointing begins immediately. An internal NASA review board begins an intense investigation of the charred Apollo capsule, as well as North American Aviation, the manufacturer contracted to build it. To make matters worse, Senator Walter Mondale sees the hotly-debated and very public accident as an opportunity to further his goal of ending the space program in favor of more Earthbound concerns. Before NASA can continue its quest for the moon, it will have to win back not only public opinion, but the confidence of the government.
The Apollo 1 fire ignited a wave of skepticism in Congress that almost ended the Apollo program. Indeed, critics like Representative William Ryan (D-NY) and Senator Walter F. Mondale (D-MN) were so opposed to the federal government spending U.S. taxpayer money on space programs that they launched a campaign to stop all funding of manned space flight. Both members used the Apollo 1 fire to support their claims that NASA was inefficient, cut costs at the expense of safety, and used contractors that performed shoddy work. In the end, Astronaut Frank Borman, who participated in NASA’s review group of the Apollo 1 fire, and others who testified before Congress in 1967, successfully defended Apollo 1 as an accident not worthy of condemning all manned activities in space. Indeed, Ryan’s and Mondale’s efforts backfired as Congress as a whole gave its support to the Apollo program and to sending a man to the moon. See, “Apollo 204 Accident,” Report of the Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences, United State Senate, January 30, 1968, 90th session, 2nd Session, report number 956 , Government Printing Office, Washington, D.C. 1968; “The Phillips Report’s Tortured Trail – The Congress Should Resume the Apollo Hearings,” Congressional Record, July 25, 1967, page H9317; Chariots for Apollo: A History of Manned Lunar Spacecraft, NASA SP-4205 (Washington, 1979), pp.214-17; and Charles D. Benson and William Barnaby Faherty, Moonport: A History of Apollo Launch Facilities and Operations, NASA SP-4204 (Washington, 1978), pp. 390-94.