Clouds over the Space Program

But Voyager 2 and the shuttle show new signs of life

"Seven hundred and fifty feet, coming down to 23... "Edwin ("Buzz") Aldrin methodically ticked off the readings. "Four hundred feet, down at nine, three forward ... 75 feet, things looking good ... Faint shadow ... drifting to the right a little ... Contact light. Okay, engine stop."

"Houston," called Neil Armstrong.

"Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed."

It took six hours of preparations before Eagle's hatch was finally opened and Armstrong squeezed through the small opening. Toting the bulky life-support pack that kept him alive on the airless surface of the moon, he cautiously, hesitantly climbed down the ship's ladder. By now a TV camera was monitoring his descent, flashing his image a quarter of a million miles back to earth. There was a moment's pause. Then Armstrong took the final step, planting his left boot on the finely powdered lunar surface. "That's one small step for a man," he said, "one giant leap for mankind."

It seems only yesterday, but the drama of those first extraterrestrial steps is now a decade old. To many people the tenth anniversary of the lunar landing, on July 20, 1969, may be no more than an exercise in nostalgia, a look backward to simpler times when it appeared that the U.S. could solve most of its problems through its vaunted technology. To others, coming as it does in the midst of Skylab's downfall, it may be something of an embarrassment. By now most of the moon walkers have slipped into oblivion; even Armstrong, boyish no more, was barely recognized when he recently re-emerged on TV screens in automobile commercials.

Yet, for all its problems with reduced budgets and technical mishaps, the space program survives. Indeed, it shows definite signs of increasing its slackened pace. This very week Voyager 2, a brilliantly conceived robot, is streaking past Jupiter, directing its color cameras and multiple instruments at the giant, banded planet and its great moons. Seized by Jovian gravity, Voyager 2 will swing around the planet and then fly off in the cosmic wake of its twin, Voyager 1, for a reconnaissance of Saturn in August 1981.

The era of manned exploration is also about to take a new turn. At Florida's John F. Kennedy Space Center, next to the giant assembly building used for Apollo 11, workers are struggling to prepare Columbia, the nation's first operational space shuttle, for launch into earth orbit some time next year. Though plagued by financial crises and technical problems, the ship should be worth waiting for. The Apollo/Saturn system, towering some 360 ft. on the pad, was discarded or destroyed in each mission. By contrast, the shuttle is designed to make repeated journeys between earth and space.

NASA has no intention of letting Apollo 11's birthday pass unnoticed. In Washington, Armstrong, Aldrin and their stay-in-orbit partner Michael Collins will be reunited for a round of ceremonies, capped by a replay of the original moon walk late at night at the Smithsonian's National Air and Space Museum. In Texas another old Apollo hand, Christopher Kraft, the director of the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center, will preside at space-day ceremonies; he will open a temporary post office to cancel space-commemorative stamps for philatelists. At the Kennedy Space Center, a giant 5-ft. by 10-ft. birthday cake will be sliced up for visitors.

The hoopla is also taking a playful turn. Clear Lake, Texas, Houston's space suburb, is staging a series of parades, dances, wine tastings and baby contests (with the toddlers dressed in moon suits). At Cape Canaveral, moon buffs hope to form a 26-mile human chain along the beaches. The Dunes Hotel in Las Vegas will be the site of a show-biz bash called "America's Salute to the Astronauts"; any of them who turn up have been promised a flight to San Clemente, Calif., for a poolside lunch with former President Richard Nixon. At Chicago's Adler Planetarium, Apollo 15 Astronaut David Scott will unveil a moon rock, while New York City's Hayden Planetarium and St. Louis' McDonnell Planetarium are staging programs that include everything from learned discussions to loose-limbed disco.

Yet beyond these commemorations, the birthday is largely a nonevent. Outside the U.S., hardly anyone is taking note of it, except in some newspaper features here and there and a few broadcasts. The most ambitious: Italian state TV's special that its producers hope will include conversations with the cosmonauts aboard the Soviet Salyut 6 space station and the revelers in Washington, via links set up by the network's correspondents in Moscow and the U.S. capital.

How different it was a decade ago. On the momentous day when Armstrong and Aldrin touched down on the moon, all the world seemed to stand in awe. From Tokyo's Ginza to Piccadilly Circus in London, hordes of people followed the astronauts' progress. "How are they doing?" total strangers asked one another. People prayed for their safety, and countless babies were named Apollo. Millions of people clung to their radios and television sets, and newspapers broke out their largest type. Though beaten in the race to the moon, even the Russians joined in the worldwide chorus of acclaim, wishing the space travelers a safe homecoming. Rhapsodized Poet Archibald MacLeish: O silver evasion in our farthest thought-- "the visiting moon"... "the glimpses of the moon"... and we have touched you!

It was a heady time for Americans, and lunar fever seemed epidemic. Pan Am and TWA began accepting reservations for the first commercial flights to the moon; Barren Hilton, the hotel mogul's son, spoke of Hilton hotels in outer space. At Cape Kennedy (as it was then called after the slain President who had started it all), Vice President Spiro Agnew told cheering launch controllers that America's next great step should be a manned mission to Mars. Wernher von Braun, whose giant Saturn boosters had made it all possible, boldly predicted that in 1976 an American President might celebrate the country's Bicentennial aboard an orbiting spacecraft.

Yet even while Project Apollo continued, ultimately carrying twelve men to the moon's surface, the nation's thoughts turned elsewhere. The summer of Apollo 11 was also the summer of Woodstock and Chappaquiddick and the Manson murders. In the streets, demonstrators marched against the war in Viet Nam. Black anger was still simmering. From his sanctuary in Algeria, Black Panther Leader Eldridge Cleaver called the moon shot "a circus to distract people's minds from the real problems, which are here on the ground." Some intellectuals echoed that charge. In his book The Moon-Doggie, Sociologist Amitai Etzioni had charged that "we are using the space race to escape our painful problems on earth."

NASA did not always help itself. Its recruitment policies had created an image that seemed distinctly white, Waspish and Middle American; the trim, blue-eyed Armstrong could have stepped out of a Norman Rockwell painting. (In a sharp reversal since then, the latest group of 35 astronaut candidates includes six women and three blacks.)

In 1961 John F. Kennedy had committed the nation to landing a man on the moon in order to snatch back from the Soviets the glory they had won by sending up the first Sputniks and the first manned spacecraft (Moscow also sent the first and so far the only woman into space). Recalls Director Bruce Murray of Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory: "We didn't go to the moon for science. National prestige and strategy were the reason."

Then, as the first flush of Apollo excitement dwindled, came a public reassessment. NASA was forced to justify its efforts in terms of practical benefits. What good does getting to the moon do us, many Americans asked. For such questioning NASA was quite unprepared. "All of a sudden," says Space Agency Planner Jesco von Puttkamer, "Apollo was subjected to a cost-benefit test. Since it was not designed for that test, it failed."

The new skepticism was contagious. President Nixon, who had called the flight of Apollo 11 "the greatest week since the Creation," suddenly squelched all talk of large new space undertakings, like a manned Mars mission. Nor were moon rocks considered enough of a payoff any more, even though they were opening new vistas of understanding about the origins and history of the solar system. The order went out: the space program had to produce direct earthly benefits. At White House instigation, the last three lunar landings, Apollo 18, 19 and 20, were scrubbed. NASA's budget slipped from $5.25 billion in 1965, when some 400,000 people were working on the space program, to 3 billion inflation-shrunken dollars in 1974. Engineers and technicians were fired in droves. Around Cape Canaveral, whose original name was restored after Project Apollo went into eclipse, FOR SALE signs sprouted like weeds.

Even the space agency's scientific efforts came under fire. To the distress of planetary researchers, NASA abandoned the so-called Grand Tour, a flyby of Jupiter and the planets beyond that was literally a once-in-a-lifetime shot; the outer planets would not again be properly lined up for such a mission for nearly another two centuries. NASA also dropped immediate plans for setting up a permanent space station, where teams of scientists could live for a year or more in almost 2001 -style comfort.

Though many projects were slashed or eliminated, space officials busily continued the program of planetary exploration, sending probes on reconnaissance trips inward toward the sun, past Venus and Mercury, and out toward Mars, Jupiter and beyond. Two Pioneer spacecraft even carried golden plaques showing an earth couple, so that if any extraterrestrial beings intercepted the ships, which were ultimately destined to leave the solar system, they would have a clue to the earth's dominant life forms.

Despite Von Braun's prediction, the space agency failed to send a President into orbit for the Bicentennial. But it achieved something almost as spectacular, the landing on Mars in 1976 of two life-hunting robots called Viking. (Their message, alas, is that despite the famous "canals" and what seemed like seasonal color variations, the Red Planet appears lifeless.)

Perhaps most important of all in light of the new concern with the earth itself, NASA launched four new environmental satellites dubbed Landsats. Swinging around the globe in north-south orbits that skirt the polar caps, these unmanned observatories keep a periodic watch on different areas of the earth as it spins under the satellites. By comparing photographs of the same region taken at different times, scientists can spot changes in crops, detect pollution, locate new sources of drinking water and perform other valuable kinds of earth watching.

Continuing its program of manned space exploration, NASA also made ingenious use of castoff Apollo hardware to create Skylab. Despite a troubled beginning and now its embarrassing demise, the giant space station represented another great leap. In 1973, three teams of astronauts occupied the station in rapid succession, one remaining aloft for 84 days. That record was not beaten by the Russians until 1978. More important, it proved to all doubters--and there were many--that humans could live and work together in space for long periods, conquering both isolation and the physical effects of weightlessness, such as weakening of the muscles, loss of height, reduction in red blood cell production and slowing of the heartbeat. Largely because of diet and exercise, these conditions disappeared soon after the astronauts returned to earth.

For all the competition with the Russians to reach the moon, NASA showed that it could cooperate with them as well. In 1975, in what was a last hurrah for Apollo, the space agency launched a command module emblazoned with the Stars and Stripes to hitch up briefly with a Soviet Soyuz displaying the Hammer and Sickle. This celestial handclasp between old adversaries involved more politicking than space exploration, but it did set an important precedent for future cooperation in the cosmos as well as on earth. Indeed, although the U.S. and the Soviet Union have jousted over many other issues, they have appeared united at international parleys on space.

Like its immediate predecessors, the Carter Administration has been lukewarm to space. Only last year, on the occasion of the space agency's 20th anniversary, it issued a declaration that dampened enthusiasts who think of space in terms of what Princeton's visionary physicist Gerard O'Neill calls the High Frontier, a place where mankind can establish permanent settlements, using sun power for fuel and mining the moon and the asteroids. Said the White House coldly: "It is neither feasible nor necessary at this time to commit the United States to a high-challenge space engineering initiative comparable to Apollo." Even so, the President has shown considerable interest in the prospects for the space shuttle.

That support comes none too soon. As Aerospace Engineer Jerry Grey explains in his intriguing new insider's history of the space program, Enterprise, the shuttle has presented as many political problems as technical ones ever since its conception in the 1960s. Denounced as a "senseless extravaganza in space" by Vice President Walter Mondale while he was still in the Senate, the shuttle created such a furor that NASA was repeatedly forced to compromise its design. In the present version, the orbiter looks much like a bloated DC-9. It will rise vertically off the pad on the back of a large cylindrical tank containing liquid propellants used to power two booster rockets attached to its sides. At an altitude of about 28 miles, the spent rockets will be dropped by parachute into the sea, where they can be recovered and towed back to shore for another launch. But the big tank will be carried almost all the way up, then cut loose. Tumbling end over end, it should burn up in the atmosphere, although a few pieces may plunge into the ocean. Finally the shuttle continues to fire its own engines to ease itself into orbit at elevations of 115 to 690 miles, typically 175 miles.

Circling the earth with as many as seven people aboard, the ship should be able to do everything from parking and repairing satellites to conducting zero-g experiments and space manufacturing. One early project: the orbiting of a giant remote-controlled telescope. High above the obscuring atmosphere, it will give astronomers sharper views of the heavens than any mirror on earth. Europeans, for their part, are contributing a space lab that will be carried up by the shuttle and act as a scientific workshop.

Indeed, NASA is busily renting out payload space. For $10,000 its salespeople are offering a "Getaway Special," a package for research experiments involving less than 200 Ibs. and measuring under 5 cu. ft. Two early takers: Film Makers Steven Spielberg and Michael Phillips (Close Encounters of the Third Kind) for a project that they are still keeping secret. Eventually the shuttle may be used for far bolder enterprises: assembling solar power satellites that can collect the sun's rays and beam that concentrated energy down to earth; erecting giant antennas that could revolutionize global communications; and putting together still other spaceships that can carry cargo and people to higher orbits, to the moon or beyond.

The shuttle is also the first NASA spacecraft to have a military role. Though the Pentagon is paying about a sixth of the shuttle's cost, or $1.5 billion, it is not saying much about its plans. But these are not too hard to figure out. To control the military "high ground" of the future, the shuttle will not only launch satellites but track down others, nudge up to them and disable them if they present a threat. All of which may explain why the Soviets, who apparently have their own capacity to hunt down and kill satellites, have complained bitterly about the shuttle's military potential.

Yet before Columbia or any of the three other orbiters that Rockwell International is building for NASA can undertake such projects, major problems must be overcome. One difficulty: finishing the laborious job of affixing 40,000 or so silica foam tiles to the orbiter's outer skin. These shield it from the blazing temperatures (nearly 3,000DEG F) that the ship will encounter when it re-enters the atmosphere and glides to a landing at either the Kennedy Space Center or Vandenberg Air Force Base in California. A more serious difficulty: ironing the bugs out of the shuttle's main rocket engine, which has failed to perform up to specifications and blew up at least once during ground testing. NASA Administrator Robert Frosch has told Congress that this obstacle should soon be overcome. If so, the shuttle may fly by next July.

That may be more than a year behind schedule, and certainly much too late for Apollo 11 's birthday party. But in contrast to the end of Skylab, it should be a fitting follow-up to that memorable first step a decade ago. qed

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