The United States now prepares to call for a return of humans to the Moon by around 2024. What can we all expect to gain from such an expensive program? The loans and the regulations, including attorneys involved, is enormous. What did we get from the Apollo program, the first lunar mission program?
It will be quite helpful to look back at Apollo’s first lunar Mission program and ask what we obtained from it, besides around 850 pounds of Moonrocks and lunar soil interesting to geologists, but perhaps not to all taxpayers.
Below is the summary highlights of the payoff from Apollo.
What Was The Apollo program?
There was much more to it than Armstrong’s “one small step for man” and yet more than the following five Moon landings, any one of which would have been a gigantic achievement.
Apollo program began with the Gemini Program, which was entirely a technological warm-up for the Apollo Program. Gemini was the first real American space vehicle with propulsion, on-board computers, radar, and extravehicular activity (“spacewalk”) capability.
Ten human-crewed Gemini missions were flown, improving the operational and technological capability required for the following Moon program.
Nevertheless, the Gemini astronauts carried out several scientific experiments and practiced many space-flight techniques such as orbital rendezvous.
The Lunar Missions
The Apollo Moon missions are now in the history books. Nevertheless, there were two Earth-orbital missions, Apollo 7 and Apollo 9, that carried out operations such as multispectral terrain photography.
This utilizes mixtures of different light sources, such as ultraviolet and infrared, that expose things not seen using just visible light, like diseased trees or crops.
Although there was much more to the Apollo Lunar Program, first, the Apollo hardware was used for U.S. first space station, named Skylab, from 1972 to 1973.
The Skylab crew carried out many scientific experiments, such as orbital sea-surface radar, and operated a solar observatory with valuable results.
Later, in 1975, the Apollo space vehicle flew for the last time, carrying out docking and rendezvous with a Russian Soyuz spacecraft. This collective effort was at least one bridge across the political divide of the Cold War.
American Federal Budget
In essence, the Apollo Moon Program, correctly defined, was much more extensive than most people realize. Moreover, it was not enormously costly relative to the American federal budget of the day.
The different sub-programs stated cost a total of about $30 billion by the end of Fiscal Year 1975. And allowing for inflation, the same-year comparison may help: the F.Y. 75 NASA budget was USD 3.3 billion, and the F.Y. 75 Food Stamp Program USD 5.5 billion.
Here Are Some Outcomes of The Apollo Program.
What did we get for this USD30 billion? The historical term “spinoff” is often used, but this tends to trivialize the Apollo results. Nevertheless, here are some of the eventual outcomes of the Apollo Program.
First, President Kennedy’s 1961 proposal was realized that the primary motivation for sending a man to the Moon and back was political, not scientific.
At the time, Russia had a commanding lead in space flight and was a belligerent and expansive power in the Cold War. So, did the Apollo Program end the Cold War? Of course, it didn’t.
The United States Won The Space Race
Although no less than Nobel laureate Andrei Sakharov and two of his colleagues published an open letter to the Soviet authority in 1970, asking for a democratization of the USSR, explicitly citing the American lunar landing as proof of the supremacy of democracy. The Soviet Union did have a Moon program designed to put a man on the lunar surface, but as the world saw, the United States won the space race.
How Can Landsat Be Recognized as a Result of Apollo?
Even if the famous Apollo missions had never landed on the Moon, the Apollo program as a whole stimulated projects that discovered an enormous amount about our planet, Earth.
The earliest and one of the most fruitful of these projects was Landsat, agreed by even the most critical NASA doubters to have been an enormously valuable program. Exactly how can Landsat be considered a result of Apollo?
The Gemini Program
The answer reaches back to the Gemini Program, whose spacemen took hundreds of high-resolution color images of the Earth using 70mm cameras as part of the weather and terrain photographic experiments.
Yet in 1965, weather satellite images were familiar, but the Gemini pictures were stunningly better. Distributed widely, in magazines such as the National Geographic (distribution in 1966 some 6 million), they triggered interest in space snapshotting of the Earth’s surface, as seen from its atmosphere.
The Earth Resources Observation Satellite Program, EROS.
To shorten a long and complicated story: As stated by then-director of the U.S. Geological Survey, Bill Pecora, the value of the Mercury and Gemini photos, spurred the Interior Department to begin an Earth resources observation satellite program, EROS, in 1966.
After the interagency agreement, this introduced satellite became ERTS, the Earth Resources Technology Satellite, operated by Goddard Space Flight Center, and soon re-named Landsat. Thus Landsat was an outcome of the Apollo Program, as attested to by the head of another agency, not NASA.
Johnson Space Center
The Manned Spacecraft Center, now called Johnson Space Center, was developed for the Apollo Program. It was realized that much orbital survey of the Moon would be necessary for the Apollo lunar landings. Therefore, JSC launched a broad program of remote sensing, using airborne cameras and other devices, in preparation for the Moon landing.
This program soon triggered tremendous progress in remote sensing in general. The Gemini photography led to Landsat and shortly after its foreign equivalents such as France’s SPOT (Systeme pour l’Observation de la Terre).
The JSC remote sensing attempts were soon implemented successfully to the Moon. Still, they also spurred orbital survey techniques of the Earth, methods that have long since extended to many American and global programs. But this epoch in remote sensing owes much to the Apollo Program.
Skylab Was a Part of The Apollo Program
Skylab was a part of the Apollo Program and provided many remote sensing observations similar to those of Landsat. Nevertheless, one which was not identical was sea-surface radar altimetry. Skylab brought a radar that was aimed down towards the Earth’s oceans.
Furthermore, microwaves do not penetrate electrical conductors such as water or metals, and the radar return over oceans was from the ocean surface. They found that the Skylab radar over basins in the ocean floor, such as the Puerto Rico trench, really revealed a subdued replica of such depressions in the overlying ocean surface.
Over seamounts, the underwater volcanoes, the sea surface forms a slight hill. The ocean surface depression over the Puerto Rico trench is more than twenty meters (yards) deep.
Apollo Program Helped Examine Part of Earth Shrouded by The Oceans.
The reason for this unexpected discovery is that the excess mass of, for example, a seamount, draws the surrounding ocean horizontally towards it, therefore producing a slight bulge in the overlying ocean surface.
The opposing effect happens over a trench, which is a mass loss. The Skylab radar results triggered long-term and lasting ocean surface radar surveys, which have made possible accurate global maps of the seafloor inaccessible by any other method. Therefore Apollo, adequately defined, helped examine the part of our own planet shrouded by the oceans.
That’s it, thanks for reading this article. If you want to know more about the Apollo Program, then head over to this fascinating article: A Beginners Guide to Where Apollo Landed The Man on The Moon. (Including Pictures)
Don’t miss this historic takeoff on Saturday, May 30 at 3:22 p.m. EDT. SpaceX intends to fly its first astronauts into orbit since Elon Musk founded the company.
The 51st anniversary of the Apollo 11 mission to land the first man on the Moon will take place this summer 2020.