Book Review: After Apollo? Richard Nixon and the American Space Program

President Richard Nixon with the crew of Apollo 16, a mission he nearly cancelled. L to r: Charles Duke, NASA Administrator James Fletcher, Nixon, John Young, and Ken Mattingly. NASA Image via Wikimedia.

After Apollo? Richard Nixon and the American Space Program

By John M. Logsdon

Palgrave Macmillan

If there’s a president whose name is associated with America’s space program, it is John F. Kennedy, who in 1961 challenged NASA to land an astronaut on the moon and bring him home before the end of the 1960s. NASA famously complied, and in the decades that followed the end of the Apollo program in 1972, many people have lamented the state of America’s space program.

While Kennedy’s successor Lyndon B. Johnson saw to it that Apollo made it to the moon, something that happened six months after he left office, Johnson did nothing to advance the space program beyond that point. The big decisions about the future of the U.S. space program fell on Richard M. Nixon, and the space program from then to the present day has been the product of decisions made by Nixon, who was president from 1969 to 1974.

More than forty years after Nixon left office, there is finally a book that explores Nixon’s relationship with NASA and the decisions he made to proceed with a new human space program to succeed Apollo, the Space Shuttle. The book, After Apollo? Richard Nixon and the American Space Program, is by John M. Logsdon, the distinguished historian who wrote the best studies of Kennedy’s decision to go to the moon and who headed up George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute for many years.

For anyone who is interested in the history of the U.S. space program, this book is essential reading that contains many truths about the political environment presidents and other politicians face when deciding how much support to give to space exploration.

Nixon took office just as Apollo neared its lunar landing goal, and the pleasant duty of welcoming the astronauts home fell to Nixon. While Nixon admired the astronauts and the values they represented, Apollo was also a legacy of his great rival, Kennedy. After the success of Apollo 11, NASA had plans and equipment for nine more lunar landing attempts, and the story of how the last three missions were cancelled is told here in detail for the first time.

While a souring economy and aggressive budget cutters played their roles, some within NASA were concerned about the dangers the Apollo astronauts faced in their lunar flights. Nixon joined their ranks after the near-loss of the crew of Apollo 13 in 1970, and after three Apollo missions were cancelled, Nixon repeatedly called for the cancellation of the Apollo 16 and 17 missions out of fear of a space disaster in the election year of 1972.

With less than six months to go, Nixon allowed Apollo 16 to proceed because it would happen well after his upcoming trip to China, and Apollo 17 because it would take place after the election. For those many space enthusiasts who still decry the loss of Apollos 18, 19 and 20, this book makes chilling reading.

The fate of Skylab was also up for grabs, along with the shuttle and NASA itself, which was nearly converted to a general-purpose high-technology agency by the Nixon Administration.

The heart of After Apollo? is of course the shuttle, which Nixon announced on January 5, 1972. The story leading up to that decision is a complicated one, involving the attitudes of people at NASA, the Pentagon, and around Nixon. With the exceptional circumstances that led Kennedy to launch Apollo long past, public support for space exploration was low during Nixon’s time in office as Americans felt that Earthbound problems required more attention from their government. But one of those problems was a recession that hit the aerospace industry in California, a state that Nixon needed to win in 1972.

With an eye to NASA as a jobs program, Nixon approved the “full capability” shuttle promoted by the space agency. But to satisfy the goal of budget restraint while the shuttle was being built, the shuttle was not fully reusable, which greatly increased the shuttle’s operating costs long after Nixon left office. The Nixon-era political compromises that shaped the shuttle, including bringing the U.S. Air Force on board the program, also played roles in the loss of two shuttle crews in future years. The resulting program Logsdon termed a "policy mistake,” taking into account its many limitations, not least the shuttle's failure to lower the cost of flying into space.

The shuttle took nearly a decade to develop, and it flew for 30 years. NASA supported the shuttle concept with the idea that it would inevitably lead to construction of a space station in Earth orbit, which duly happened starting in 1998. The last space shuttle mission took place four years ago, and there is still no replacement vehicle for the shuttle. But the International Space Station still forms the heart of the U.S. human space program. This is still Richard Nixon’s space program.

Logsdon began work on this book with some interviews while Nixon was still in office, and his work was enriched with some of the famous tapes from the Nixon White House that illuminate Nixon’s sometimes conflicting attitudes to space exploration. 

After Apollo? is in my opinion the most important work of space exploration history to appear in several years. As the United States begins to transition to the post-Nixon space program, policymakers and those interested in influencing them are well advised to read this book.

Canadian Astronaut Announcement Standard Operating Procedure

Last week to great fanfare the Canadian government announced that it was renewing its commitment to the International Space Station through 2024, joining the United States, Russia, Japan and the European Union in extending its involvement in the ISS beyond 2020.

During that time, Canada’s two remaining active astronauts, Jeremy Hansen and David Saint-Jacques, will each get a chance to fly to the ISS, one within four years and the other by 2024. "Selection of the CSA astronaut to fly first will be based on mission requirements, which will be discussed with ISS partners during the coming months,” a government news release said.

Both Saint-Jacques and Hansen joined the Canadian astronaut team in 2009 and underwent the two-year NASA training regimen for new astronauts. Saint-Jacques is a medical doctor and Hansen was a CF-18 pilot in the Royal Canadian Air Force, and the decision about who orbits first will probably relate to which skill set is in demand when a slot for a Canadian astronaut opens up.

Two years have gone by since Chris Hadfield returned to Earth from his historic turn as the first Canadian commander of the ISS, and Hansen and Saint-Jacques will have to wait their turns as flight assignments are doled out according to the size of the sponsoring country’s contribution to the ISS. Canada’s contributions to the ISS - the Canadarm2, Dextre robot manipulator and the rest of the Mobile Servicing System - play important roles in the maintenance of the station but only amount to a small fraction of the total cost of the ISS.

The two Canadian astronauts have the unenviable task of following Hadfield as the public faces of the Canadian Astronaut Program without having had the chance to fly themselves, and I have seen them carry out the repetitive public relations duties of astronauts with grace and good humour. That extended to last week’s announcement, when the Canadian Space Agency posted a Meme on its Facebook page making fun of the competition between the two men for the next Canadian flight to the ISS.

One question that the remains unanswered is how the two Canadians will make their journeys into space. Julie Payette was the last Canadian to fly on the shuttle, back in 2009 when she visited the ISS in the  middle of Bob Thirsk’s long-duration stay on the ISS. Thirsk and Hadfield got to the ISS on Russian Soyuz ferries, which continue to be the only way to get to the ISS. 

NASA and many U.S. lawmakers hope to shift the work of flying astronauts to and from the ISS to competing spacecraft built by Boeing and SpaceX under NASA’s Commercial Crew Development program. While both spacecraft are scheduled to start flying astronauts in 2017, funding restraints have already pushed that date back from the originally scheduled 2015 start date.

Last week’s announcement by the Canadian government was hardly surprising given our investment in the ISS up to this time and given the fact that a pullout by Canada would be highly embarrassing and highly contentious with Canada’s major trading partners. 

An election is approaching, and for a government known to wring every ounce of political credit out of everything it does, the publicity surrounding last week’s announcement that Canada is staying the course in space is standard operating procedure in Stephen Harper's Ottawa.

Fifty Years of Mission Control in Houston

NASA's new flight directors on the eve of Gemini 4 in 1965: (l to r) Glynn Lunney, Eugene Kranz, John Hodge and Christopher Kraft. NASA Photo.

This week NASA is marking fifty years since the flight of Gemini 4, the second crewed Gemini flight, which has gone down in history for the first spacewalk by a U.S. astronaut. Gemini 4 was a notable milestone for other reasons as well.

When astronauts Jim McDivitt and Ed White began their flight on June 3, 1965, it was the first to be controlled from the brand new control centre at Houston, Texas, built as part of what is today known as the Johnson Space Center. Previous flights, including the pioneering Mercury flights and the three-orbit Gemini 3 mission earlier that year, had been controlled from a control room near the launch site at Cape Canaveral, Florida. 

The control centre in Houston incorporated the latest advances in computers, and included monitors that allowed individual controllers to better keep track of what was happening on board the spacecraft. 

The detailed concepts for the new control centre and NASA’s worldwide tracking network were developed with the help of many of the Canadian and British engineers who had come to NASA in 1959 after losing their jobs when the Canadian government cancelled the CF-105 Avro Arrow. 

Members of this group, including John Hodge, Tecwyn Roberts, Dennis Fielder, George Harris and John Shoosmith, helped design the new control center under the supervision of the legendary Christopher Kraft, NASA’s original flight director and later director of JSC. 

Kraft and others gave Roberts a great deal of credit for the design of the new control centre, which included two separate control rooms surrounded by a number of ‘back rooms’ staffed by management and other specialized personnel. Roberts, who was born in Liverpool of Welsh descent, was the original flight dynamics officer in the Mercury Control Center with the responsibilities of keeping track of the spacecraft at all times and of preparing for upcoming maneuvers. 

In the design of the the new Mission Operations Control Rooms, Roberts incorporated a flexible setup that set the stage not only for the Gemini flights of 1965 and 1966, but also the Apollo flights which were due to launch in the near future. Indeed, the original setup of the mission control rooms stayed in place through much of the shuttle program until a major makeover took place in the late 1990s. 

Before Gemini 4, only one American flight had lasted longer than six orbits - the 22-orbit, 34-hour-long flight of Gordon Cooper that closed the Mercury program in 1963. In every flight up to Gemini 4, Kraft had sat at the Flight Director’s console the whole time, except for the overnight shift on Cooper’s flight, when his deputy, former Avro engineer John Hodge, was in charge.

Gemini 4’s four days in space meant that round-the-clock flight operations would become the norm in the new control centre, and so just before launch, Kraft introduced the new team of flight directors that included himself, Hodge, and newcomers Eugene Kranz and Glynn Lunney. 

All would play key roles in the years to come in Gemini and Apollo. Kranz was on console when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon, and he became even more famous for his work organizing the rescue of the Apollo 13 mission. Hodge, who had come to Avro Canada from England, was flight director for Gemini 8 when its crew of Neil Armstrong and David Scott faced America’s first crisis in spaceflight when their spacecraft spun out of control due to a short circuit.

But in June of 1965, the first historic event to be controlled from Houston was Ed White’s spacewalk on the third orbit of Gemini 4. White's spacewalk lives in memory thanks to the spectacular photos taken by McDivitt of the event. 

Like the Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov, who had walked in space in March 1965, White encountered problems returning to his spacecraft. But once back inside, he and McDivitt flew on for four days and served notice that the United States would soon overtake the Soviet Union in the 1960s space race. 

The Hubble Space Telescope at 25

NASA Administrator Charles Bolden - who as an astronaut was on the crew that carried the Hubble Space Telescope into orbit in April 1990 - presides over a NASA awards ceremony honouring the people of HST at the National Air & Space Museum, Washington, on April 24, 2015. Chris Gainor photo

I have been on an extended research trip in the United States gathering information for a book on the history of the Hubble Space Telescope since its launch 25 years ago.

The trip began with the celebrations in April in Washington, D.C., and Baltimore, Maryland, marking the anniversary of Hubble's launch on board the shuttle Discovery. During those celebrations, many good things were said about how Hubble overcame its early problems and delivered a trove of knowledge that has upended our view of the universe we live in. 

There is very little I can add to those statements, except to point out the exceptional nature of Hubble's quarter century of service. A handful of space vehicles have lasted longer than Hubble, most famously the Voyager spacecraft that flew by the outer planets of our solar system in the 1970s and 1980s and now are sending back data from the fringes of the solar system, including the famous image of Earth as a pale blue dot almost lost in the glare of the Sun. Other spacecraft have like Hubble also been serviced by astronauts.

But no spacecraft has come close to Hubble in terms of being so transformed during its lifetime of service. After Hubble was launched in 1990, five teams of shuttle astronauts repaired aging equipment on the space telescope and changed out instruments so that the instruments in use today - some installed during the most recent shuttle servicing mission in 2009 - are vastly more powerful than Hubble's original set of instruments.

Since the end of the anniversary celebrations, I have been searching archives for documents and interviewing the people who have worked on Hubble. 

One perceptive comment that has stood out in my mind from this research trip comes from Frank Cepollina - the Goddard Space Flight Center engineer whose brilliant team created the equipment that the shuttle astronauts used to service Hubble and other satellites. "Hubble isn't great because it's serviceable," Cepollina said. "It's great because you can apply Moore's Law every three or four years."

Moore's Law refers to the spectacular growth in computing power predicted by a founder of the computer chip maker Intel fifty years ago. Hubble instruments use computing power and particularly CCDs, charge-coupled devices that have replaced film for gathering images and other light-generated data. The CCDs on board Hubble today are vastly more powerful than the originals from the late 1980s, thanks the explosive enhancements in the power of transistors and computer chips, including CCDs.

Of course, Cepollina's statement will no longer apply, because no further servicing missions are in prospect for Hubble now that the shuttle has been grounded. But some like Cepollina are still working for the day when the new generation of crewed spacecraft being developed in the U.S. can pick up where the shuttle left off in terms of servicing and repairing satellites.

In the meantime, Hubble continues its work of imaging the universe and analyzing the light that comes from it. Astronomers still have to winnow down the requests for observing time, and new uses for Hubble are still coming from astronomers from around the world.

Much of what was said at the anniversary celebrations were things we have already heard before. Perhaps the most important but least publicized words came at a symposium held that week at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore. There scientists young and old from many countries discussed what Hubble has taught them and expressed their hopes about the knowledge that could emanate from the space telescope in the coming years. 

As a non-scientist, a lot of what was said was beyond my understanding. But some of the astronomers there assured me that they didn't understand everything either. It will be interesting to see what comes out of that symposium as new ideas to probe the universe turn into new data.

Sadly, these expressions of the brilliance humans are sometimes capable of were overshadowed a few days later when riots and protests took place in Baltimore just a few miles away from the Space Telescope Science Institute, a sharp reminder that humanity still has a great deal to work on in terms of improving life on Earth.

Canada Moves Ahead on Two Astronomy Projects

Prime Minister Stephen Harper announces Canadian contribution to TMT with astronomers, including RASC President James Edgar (right).

I have often had occasion to criticize Stephen Harper’s Conservative government, but here they get a bouquet for two recent announcements that are good for Canadian astronomy.

Earlier this week, the prime minister announced that Canada will contribute $243.5 million over the next ten years to take part in the Thirty Meter Telescope, which will be the world’s largest telescope. TMT is planned for construction on the summit of Mauna Kea volcano in Hawaii, the northern hemisphere’s prime site for telescopes.

Canada will be joining the United States, Japan, India and China in TMT, and our contribution will be very high profile. The telescope will be enclosed inside a twenty-two-storey-high building designed and fabricated by Dynamic Structures Ltd of Port Coquitlam, B.C. The telescope itself will use adaptive optics to reduce the effects of the Earth’s atmosphere on seeing, and allow the telescope to view distant galaxies and planets orbiting other stars.

Canada has long been a part of the TMT project, but a formal commitment of funds by the Harper government had been long delayed, causing anxiety about whether Canada was actually on board. But with an election coming over the horizon, the announcement could no longer be held up. 

This week’s announcement is notable because of the personal participation of Prime Minister Harper. While Canadian prime ministers were involved in long-ago decisions like the one a century ago to build the Dominion Astrophysical Observatory in Victoria, they have not been seen at astronomical facilities. 

This week’s announcement took place at the Gordon M. Southam Observatory alongside the planetarium in Vancouver, and Harper appeared with Canadian astronomers, including James Edgar, the President of the Royal Astronomical Society of Canada. Such recognition for Canada’s premier organization for amateur astronomers is also a new and positive development.

The TMT announcement follows a more modest announcement in late March that the Canadian Space Agency is increasing Canada’s contribution to the James Webb Space Telescope, the successor to the Hubble Space Telescope that is due for launch in 2018.

While Canada was not formally involved in Hubble, many Canadian astronomers have used the space telescope. On JWST, Canada is contributing its fine guidance sensor and a spectrograph that will seek out the most distant objects in the universe. That translates to more than $160 million in Canadian space spending, including $2.6 million announced in March that will help the Canadian contractor Com Dev International integrate its components into JWST.

Both these announcements mean research opportunities for Canadian astronomers, who stand at the front ranks of world astronomy. They also mean jobs for the people designing and fabricating the building for the TMT and the instruments on JWST. 

 

Celebrating 50 Years Since the First Flight of Gemini

Gemini 7 as seen from Gemini 6, December 15, 1965. NASA photo

Last week marked the fiftieth anniversary of the first walk in space, performed by the Soviet cosmonaut Alexei Leonov from the Voskhod 2 spacecraft. That week in 1965 also marked a turning point in the 1960s space race that is largely forgotten today but remains vivid to me.

Leonov's space walk was the last of the string of unbroken Soviet 'firsts' in space that began with the 1957 launch of the first artificial satellite of the Earth, Sputnik. The first animal, the first man and the first woman in space were all Soviet. Rockets from Russia were the first to hit the Moon, to see the Moon's far side, and the first to go into orbit around the sun. Soviet cosmonauts had flown longer and higher than American astronauts, and the first three-member and two-member crews were Soviet. 

As a youngster seeing the grainy newspaper photos of Leonov flying in space that mid-March weekend a half century ago, I wondered when U.S. astronauts would reply to the latest Russian feat. It had been nearly two years since the last U.S. astronaut had flown, and there was no internet, spotty newspaper coverage, and only two television channels. Then the local TV guide arrived, promising coverage of the first crewed flight of a new American spacecraft called Gemini that could carry two astronauts.

Soon it was March 23, and I got up early to watch Walter Cronkite live from Cape Kennedy describe the launch of Gemini 3, which carried Mercury veteran Virgil I. "Gus" Grissom and John W. Young, the first of a new group of astronauts, into space for three orbits. 

Three orbits was just five hours - no more than John Glenn had flown three years earlier. But Grissom and Young were the first astronauts to change the orbit their spacecraft was travelling in. And their flight opened the door to nine more flights by Gemini spacecraft over the next twenty months that would give America the clear lead in the race to the Moon, a lead that it would never relinquish.

The next Gemini flight included America's first space walk and then was followed by flights of up to two weeks in length that broke Soviet endurance records and proved that astronauts could live in weightlessness for the time it took to get to the Moon and back. Two Gemini spacecraft became the first to rendezvous in space. In 1966, Gemini spacecraft chased, caught and joined up with Agena rockets, and Gemini astronauts found out how hard it was to work in space. The final Gemini flight in November 1966 showed how the earlier difficulties encountered by spacewalking astronauts could be overcome.

Along the way, Gemini saw target vehicles explode during launch, a Gemini crew calmly sit through an emergency launch vehicle shutdown on the launch pad, and two astronauts named Neil Armstrong and David Scott survive America's first emergency in space when their Gemini 8 spacecraft spun out of control. Both went on to command trips to the Moon.

The skills that served American astronauts and the soon-to-be-legendary flight control teams in Houston during Apollo were honed during the Gemini program.

Today Gemini lives in the shadow of the Apollo flights that followed. 

Years later, I would discover an important fact about Gemini that had almost been lost. The Gemini spacecraft was designed by a Canadian aerospace engineer named Jim Chamberlin.

Chamberlin, born in Kamloops B.C. one hundred years ago and raised in Toronto, had been chief aerodynamicist for the highly advanced but ill-fated CF-105 Avro Arrow. When the Arrow was cancelled in 1959, Chamberlin led the team of 31 Canadian and British engineers who went from Avro to the National Aeronautics and Space Administration in the United States. First, he brought his badly needed aircraft production experience to NASA's Mercury spacecraft that carried America's first astronauts into space.

In 1961 Chamberlin began work on what was supposed to be an advanced Mercury spacecraft capable of carrying two astronauts. Instead he proposed major changes that led to the creation of the Gemini program, and Chamberlin became Gemini's first program manager.

Although the new spacecraft resembled Mercury, it contained many improvements that made it easier to build, service and fly. U.S. astronauts of the time said Gemini was their favourite spacecraft. While Mercury was the Model T, Apollo an SUV and the shuttle a large truck, Gemini was the sports car of American spacecraft.

I learned about Chamberlin's work while researching my first book Arrows to the Moon. Although Chamberlin was removed as Gemini program manager before the spacecraft flew, he was recognized by NASA and many leaders of the U.S. space program for his work creating Gemini, and later for  his contributions to Apollo and the space shuttle prior to his death in 1981. 

After I wrote Arrows to the Moon, I have heard a great deal about what most Canadians consider to be the sad story of the Avro Arrow. But I think there's a happy ending - the Avro Arrow had an offspring called Gemini. 

Jim Chamberlin in the 1960s.

2015: The Year of the Dwarf Planets

Dawn image of Ceres taken February 19, 2015 from a distance of 46,000 km. NASA image

Today a NASA spacecraft called Dawn settled into orbit around the gigantic asteroid Ceres, having already sent back intriguing photos of the cratered body.

Ceres, which is about 950 kilometres in diameter depending on where the measurement is taken, was discovered in 1801 and for a time was thought to be the widely rumoured planet that was supposed to orbit between Mars and Jupiter. Instead Ceres became known as the greatest of the asteroids, most of which lie in a belt between the two planets.

Ceres is no longer an asteroid - today it's classified as a dwarf planet. It gained that distinction as part of the more controversial decision made in 2006 by the International Astronomical Union to designate Pluto a dwarf planet rather than a full planet. But back to Pluto in a minute.

As Dawn has drawn closer to Ceres, it has revealed the once mysterious face of this body, including its many craters and unusual bright spots, including two right next to each other in the same crater. When looking at these bright spots, it must be remembered that Ceres is actually a fairly dark body and the brightness of the spots is just relative to the darkness of the rest of Ceres' surface. 

The Dawn spacecraft, which is equipped with an ion propulsion system, was launched by NASA  in 2007 and on its way to Ceres paused at the giant asteroid Vesta for 14 months. In a few weeks, Dawn will lower its orbit around Ceres and deliver even higher resolution photos of this dwarf planet.

By then other NASA scientists should be looking at images that will bring Pluto into focus for the first time. The New Horizons spacecraft, launched nine years ago, is closing in for its July 14 flyby of Pluto. Already New Horizons is sending back photos that match the resolution of the best photos of Pluto available so far from the Hubble Space Telescope. The latest New Horizons photos show Pluto and three of its five known moons. 

Just as Dawn is revealing the face of Ceres, New Horizons will unveil Pluto and its moons, starting with its largest moon Charon. Dawn's findings will help reveal how the solar system was formed, and New Horizons will, in the words of co-investigator William McKinnon, give us our first glimpse at the solar system's "third zone," the dwarf planets inhabiting the Kuiper Belt on the fringes of oursolar system. 

Astronomers have discovered more than 200 objects in the Kuiper Belt, and with Hubble's help, New Horizons will be directed toward another Kuiper Belt object after it passes by Pluto this summer.

So keep an eye out for the images and other data coming to us from Dawn and New Horizons. 2015 is going into the books as the Year of the Dwarf Planets.

1996 Hubble Space Telescope Images of Pluto. Space Telescope Science Institute image