The Apollo 11 Moon landing in July 1969 was a huge feat of human endeavor, engineering, and science. It was a moment that the world had been waiting for. 2021 is the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landings. Since then, just 12 men have walked on the lunar surface in six missions covering a period lasting less than three years.
At its peak, the Apollo project employed over 400,000 people in some 20,000 businesses and universities with a total cost adjusted to 2019 figures of around $145 Billion.
Why did we stop going to the moon?
So, after all the work money invested, why did our interest in it drop like a stone in a vacuum, and what were the real reasons why we stopped going to the moon. Today Apollo is seen as a groundbreaking episode in our scientific understanding and technological abilities. In just over 60 years, we’ve gone from the Wright brothers’ first powered flight to Neil Armstrong stepping onto the lunar surface.
Apollo program was not only the culmination of the space race, but it was also the last great manned adventure in a century where we’d climbed the highest mountains, gone to the deepest parts of the oceans, and explored the farthest reaches of the Earth.
41% of people said that the Apollo program was worth it
As time goes by, the approval rating of the Apollo missions has gradually increased. In 1979 41% of people in an NBC poll said that Apollo was worth it. By 1999 twenty years later, it was 55%.
In an increasingly uncertain world, the mystique of Apollo and our nostalgic look back at this period of history when anything seemed possible has only been heightened by the recent loss of some of those original pioneers like Neil Armstrong, the first man on the moon, and Gene Cernan the last man on the moon.
The Apollo project championed by Kennedy
But it wasn’t always this way. In fact, at the time when President Kennedy championed Apollo, many scientists were opposed to it, saying, but it would divert money from other projects. The top military opposed it because it would take away many of the best scientists from working on aerospace and missile technology.
And community leaders were opposed because they believed the huge amount of money would be better spent on education, poverty, and healthcare.
Many reasons as to why we stopped going to the Moon
There are many reasons why we stopped going to the moon. The increasing involvement in Vietnam from 1968 to 75 and the budget cuts that followed. The Cold War’s gradual thawing and the growing belief that money could be better spent here on Earth Rather than in space.
But there are two reasons which trumped all the others and to find out what those were. You have to go back to Kennedy’s speech to Congress in May 1961 and the circumstances under which he made it.
The Sputnik achieved impressive milestones in space
In November 1960, John F Kennedy had been elected president of the USA when the Soviets had been achieving impressive milestones in space. They had taken the lead with Sputnik in 1957, the first satellite to orbit the Earth.
They’d orbited the moon, photographed its far side with Luna 3 in 1959, and then on April 12, 1961. To top it all off, they put the first man into orbit, Yuri Gagarin. All this was a huge propaganda success for the Soviets and too many of the American public.
Who was the first American in space?
And those in the West really did seem like the U.S. was losing the space race and, by default, the Battle of ideologies even though Alan Shepard became the first American in space just three weeks later.
Kennedy had to do something. So on April 20, 1961, he sent a memo to vice president Lyndon B Johnson asking him to see what space programs could allow u.s. to catch up and overtake the soviets after meeting with NASA. He came back a week later with three suggestions all based on using the early Apollo program.
Apollo had been conceived in 1960 under Eisenhower as a follow-on to Project Mercury but would carry three astronauts rather than Mercury’s one and have much larger rocket stages, which would later become the Saturn V with a range that would extend as far as the moon. However, at the time, it still didn’t have any well-defined goals.
A Manned Orbit Around the Moon
The first of the proposals was to build an orbital space station, but NASA believed the Soviet leading heavy rockets would mean they would achieve that in the not-too-distant future. The second was a manned orbit around the moon. Again this was believed to be a goal that the Soviets could also do.
They had already orbited the moon with their unmanned Luna 3 probe, so it wouldn’t be a massive leap for them to make a human-crewed mission. The third option was a human-crewed mission to land on the moon. This was something but NASA thought the Soviets would have a problem doing, and they had shown no signs of wanting to do.
A Manned Moon Landing
It was also far enough off into the future, but it would be likely that the U.S. would achieve it first. Kennedy was initially skeptical of a human-crewed moon landing due to the enormous price tag, which was estimated to be nine billion dollars for the next five years up to 1966 in 2018. Money bets around about 70 billion dollars. Still, it was the only option that would have the prestige and the impact that Kennedy was looking for, it was big, and it was bold, and it would send a signal to the world that America was the preeminent leader in space and technology.
Although it’s believed by many that Kennedy was a big supporter of space and that this was the reason for the Apollo initiative, in a transcript of a meeting between himself and the NASA Administrator James Webb in April 1962, which was released in 2001, he clearly states that he is not really that interested in space.
Putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade
He’s only doing it because of the progress of the Soviets and Yuri Gagarin’s flight just a few weeks earlier. On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy announced his goal of putting a man on the moon by the end of the decade.
It’s also been suggested, but it was to help make up for the humiliation of the disastrous U.S.-backed invasion of Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, which also happened under his administration.
And so when he made his speech to Congress on May 25, 1961, and said the following “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieve the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth” he quite literally meant one man.
Apollo project was a political goal
The mission would be to get a single astronaut to land on the moon, plant the U.S. flag, and then return home. To Kennedy, Apollo was a political decision to achieve a political goal. This was to demonstrate to the rest of the world and those developing nations that were still struggling with their future political paths that the technological and organizational power of the United States, and therefore democratic capitalism was superior to soviet-style communism.
Although this was an out-and-out race to beat the Soviets, Kennedy tried to back out of his commitment by offering to share the moon mission with the Soviets twice, once in a private meeting with Nikita Khrushchev in June 1961 and again in the United Nations speech in September of 1963.
Over time Apollo was fleshed out
But they declined the offer, and after Kennedy’s death, the proposal was dropped by both sides. It would take the Soviets a further three years before they took their own moon mission seriously, and by then, they’d fallen well behind.
And the technical challenges of the N1 rocket would delay and ultimately end their manned lunar ambitions. Over time, Apollo was fleshed out from a single person landing to a series of ten, although it became almost a living memorial to him after Kennedy’s assassination.
Apollo 1 accident
Even after the Apollo 1 disaster that killed the three crew as they were doing a pre-flight test, there was the determination to carry on and keep his vision alive. This also highlighted the danger that the mission could fail somehow, and they were quite literally flying into the unknown.
Although most of her systems had been tested and previous missions had been flown around the moon, the lunar lander’s development took much longer than expected. The landing of Apollo 11 and the ascent back from the lunar surface was something that could not be simulated accurately on Earth.
If Apollo 11 was stranded on the Moon
If something went wrong at that point, there was the genuine danger that the crew would be stranded on the moon. This set up Apollo 11 as the grand finale of the space race between the U.S. and the Soviets, with all the nail-biting moments right up until the end.
Although the Soviets tried to upstage Apollo by landing a remote-controlled Lunokhod rover on the moon in February of 1969, the rocket failed at launch. But this was kept a secret for many years, and it would be February 1970 when the replacement Lunakhod caught one officially landed.
Apollo 11 put the US flag on the Moon
But Apollo 11 did make it to the moon, and after the crew landed and planted the U.S. flag on the lunar surface. They stayed for a total of 21 hours and 36 minutes before setting off and returning home safely, and that was it.
The race was won. The U.S. had done it, they have beaten the Soviets, and they landed a man, or in this case two, on the moon and returned them safely back home, just as Kennedy had stated of Congress back in 1961. Although there were nine more Apollo missions in the pipeline, Apollo 11 was the main goal.
All the missions after it effectively filled in the missing pieces to do the science and make use of massive infrastructure and investment but had been made to get Apollo 11 to the lunar surface.
Apollo was a political project
However, Apollo was a political project to showcase the U.S.’s power and the free market system. There was no plan to carry the science on, colonize the moon, make a permanent lunar outpost, or even return to the moon, in fact, like so many other major events that have happened since there was no grand plan of what would happen after the initial Apollo missions.
This rather ill-defined conclusion to Apollo was pointed out at a time, but no one that the highest levels took much in the way of any action. After the initial adulation dies down, the dullness sets in even though more missions are planned, a been there, seen it, done it type of attitude becomes prevalent among the public.
What was front-page news worldwide is relegated to the back pages or not even reported in many countries? Interest from both the public and the government drops dramatically, and the knives are out for NASA as budget cuts become ever deeper.
Cut back’s after Apollo 12
By January 1970 and after Apollo 12, NASA announced that it would cut back 50,000 more jobs from its 190,000 strong workforces, which was less than half of its 1960 high of 400,000. Apollo 20 would be canceled, and its Saturn 5 would be used to launch Skylab itself, made from the upper stages of a Saturn 5 rocket. Out of all the following missions, only Apollo 13 really stands out, but for all the wrong reasons, it brought back the drama of whether they or won’t make it.
Apollo 17 last one to the moon
There were calls to end the program after Apollo 13, but NASA didn’t want to go out on a failure, so it was announced that they would be cutting out missions 18 and 19 and condensing their most important goals Apollo 17, which would become the last one.
With this ending, NASA was left in a strange place, Skylab was a stopgap measure to make a space station but using leftover Saturn 5 parts, and the shuttle was all that was left of a space transportation system that would have taken men back to the moon and on to Mars.
It would now be for low-earth orbit missions only. Basically, it will be a space truck moving men and equipment to and from orbit. But neither Skylab nor the shuttle had that wow factor of the Apollo 11 mission.
The much hoped-for giant leap for humankind will be limited to a few hundred miles above the Earth, and as such, we no longer needed with massive rockets capable of returning to the moon all the infrastructure to build and launch them. The moon became a footnote in space history for the next 50 plus years as robotic probes took over the job of exploring the solar system.
The Economist
It’s only in the last few years that we’ve seen anything that resembles those ambitious goals of the 1960s, but even then, they are on a scale much smaller than before. And so it’s with some irony that the publication The Economist pointed out that Apollo was the program chosen to take on the Soviets to prove that the free-market system was better than the centralized government control of the Soviets.
Yet, it took a massive amount of American public resources, money, and centralized government organization to achieve it. So were we right to leave the moon after Apollo, or should we have continued maybe with Soviet and other foreign cooperation as we have done with the International Space Station?