AIAA San Francisco Section Newsletter September 1993 "Apollo: Too Much Too Soon?": The Perils of Past Glories Brenda Forman Apollo was the civil space program's glory. It may also have been its curse. Heretical? Well, think about it. By achieving so much, so swiftly, Apollo created a poignant disconnect between technological and political feasibility. The Apollo engineers saw it as the first step in an increasingly wondrous expansion into space. And technologically, they were probably right. But politically, they were entirely wrong. Once we'd "won" the space "race," the political will even to maintain Apollo's accomplishments, much less to build upon them, vanished. Sad to say, it's been missing ever since. The consequence was what I call the "Apollo hangover" -- the long, steadfast refusal to admit that once we'd beaten the Soviets to the moon, the glory days were over, at least for a good long time to come, and that it was time to find other things to do so as to survive in a radically changed future. But that admission proved too painful to make. Indeed, a quarter-century later, the space program is still wrestling with it -- with what success, remains to be seen. It's hardly surprising that those who had created the triumph of Apollo could not accept the notion that what had sent us to the moon was not any great national urge to explore the solar system but instead the great national shock of Sputnik. The unhappy result, though, was that the Apollo hangover fed the tenacious hope that somehow, if we could just hang on long enough, just make enough compromises, just somehow survive, then eventually, Apollo would come again. Trying to keep the flame alight, NASA doggedly pursued large-scale, long-term, big-ticket efforts, most if not all of which would have been well within our technological grasp -- but only if they had been funded as realistically and stably as Apollo had been. When instead, budgets steadily shrank, the Apollo hangover forced the space program to make increasingly dangerous design and engineering compromises to fit its ambitious efforts into budgets increasingly inadequate to the scale and requirements of the undertaking. The sad history of the shuttle's development, culminating in the tragedy of Challenger, eloquently illustrates the costs of this doomed effort. Sadder still, we've done it all over again with the space station, a program by now so wounded by repeated cycles of underfunding and downsizing that the damage may be mortal. Meanwhile, the ripples have spread to drain support from everything else we have undertaken to do in space: planetary exploration, global monitoring, commercial programs, advanced technology research. A question has haunted me of late: Suppose that instead of Apollo's great burst of creativity and achievement, the space program had begun more modestly, more incrementally, focusing on small gains rather than rapid triumphs? The excitement level would certainly have been lower. We might not even yet have landed on the moon. (Indeed, without the galvanizing impact of Sputnik, we might not even have begun a civil space program until some years later.) But its subsequent advances might now enjoy far more stable support within the Congress and the American public. A lot less glamorous, in short, but a lot more viable. One recalls the Tortoise and the Hare. Which brings up the further question: If it is to survive, what should the space program focus on now? For make no mistake, folks, this is Adapt-or-Die Time. No matter what its past glories, the program must bow to political and budgetary necessities. If that means redirecting it in possibly less glamorous, but more politically salable directions, well, that's life. At least, it's politics. Columnists are in the business of personal opinion, so here's mine: I believe that survival lies in admitting that the great vision of Apollo -- moving outward from the earth into the solar system -- is not a viable model for the space program in theses financially worried times. Survival lies instead in turning the opposite directions and refocusing clearly and strongly on earth -- on communications, remote sensing, flexible and affordable launchers, and on technology interchange and cross-fertilization with the private sector. The guiding principle throughout must be clear-cut relevance to everyday applications and to the immediate concerns of daily life. The space program's fatal weakness today is that most Americans don't feel it has any relevance to their own lives on earth. That single, crucial missing ingredient threatens to undermine the program completely. But if we could create it, the result would be major rewards in political support. (Consider the fact that India -- a country about as poor as they come -- spends more per capita on its space program than any other country in the world, yet the program enjoys broad, firm support among the Indian people because it is tightly focused on earthside applications.) Can the U.S. civil space program grasp that truth? It is always painful to admit that past glories -- personal, institutional or national -- shall not come again. But we face a choice: cling to vanished glories and face a lingering, increasingly humiliating but no less inevitable death, or shed the Apollo hangover and reshape the program to speak clearly to everyday life on earth. There is sadness in that choice -- but there is also promise.