Moon Shots: Astronaut Harrison Schmitt standing next to boulder during third EVA of Apollo 17, NASA's final manned mission to the moon.
Image: NASA
"There's a reason we've never gone back to the moon," teases the poster for the new horror sci-fi flick "Apollo 18." The movie claims to reveal decades-old footage of astronauts on a secret mission two years after Apollo 17 — the last real expedition to the moon — flew in 1972. (Without giving away anything that isn't in the trailer, lunar aliens apparently share some blame for our 40-year absence from the moon.)
In actuality, NASA did prepare for Apollos 18, 19 and 20. But these missions were scrapped amid budgetary concerns and a decline in public interest.
"The whole world was glued to Apollo 11," said David R. Williams, planetary curation scientist at the NASA Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Maryland. "But by the time they got to 16 and 17, the general public just really wasn't that interested anymore." [Lunar Legacy: 45 Apollo Moon Mission Photos]
Even before Apollo 11 — the first lunar landing in July 1969 — the government had already axed the program's loftier ambitions. Planners had envisioned Apollo leading to a lunar base, for instance, and a manned mission to Mars was entering the conversation.
"There could've been a much more protracted program with a lot more interesting hardware and complex missions," said David S. F. Portree, manager of the Regional Planetary Information Facility for the U.S. Geological Survey'sAstrogeology Science Center in Flagstaff, Ariz. Portree has written historical texts for NASA and blogs at "Beyond Apollo."
Establishing a lunar colony
The Apollo program originally called for 10 moon landings — Apollo missions 11 through 20. NASA even selected landing sites for 18, 19 and 20. (After the near-disaster of Apollo 13 and later cancellations, administrators shuffled the sites around. Apollo 15, for example, landed at the Hadley rille, a channel-like valley near the Mons Hadley mountain, where Apollo 19 would have visited.) [Could NASA Launch a Secret Moon Mission?]
"The general idea was to more or less repeat Apollo 17 for three other locations to really get the moon mapped out," Williams said.
The nixed Apollo missions, like their predecessors, would have further examined the lunar environment by returning more rock samples to Earth and conducting new experiments. Instruments would have studied the moon's surface radiation and dust levels in detail in order to lay the groundwork for an eventual laboratory.
"The main point of a good number of these experiments was to determine what the long-term lunar environment would be if you wanted to put a base there," Williams said. "The idea was after Apollo they were going to build a semipermanent habitat there and have a crew of astronauts maybe stay for a few weeks [at a time]."
Apollo bites the dust
Instead, the Apollo program wound down in the early 1970s and segued into Skylab. This space station remained aloft from 1973 to 1979 and was serviced and staffed by astronauts in Apollo modules. The last official Apollo mission — the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, a joint effort with the Soviet Union — saw the docking of an Apollo and a Soyuz module in 1975.
These missions came about under the Apollo Applications Program (AAP), the successor to Apollo. "The Apollo Applications Program was meant to blueprint what NASA would be doing in the years that would follow after the initial landings," Portree said.
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16 Comments
Add CommentWhat if Wells Fargo still ran its stagecoach lines. Imagine the potential progress...one could probably get from Chicago to San Fransisco in only 5 days.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhat if...what if...so what?
and what if you had never left that comment...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI think the imagination was left with nothing to work with in those early days. The space and moon shots were all about the same and lacked much pizzazz after the initial "Wow, we're leaving planet earth" and "Wow, we're walking on the moon". There were other things of much more earnest interest.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe thing that really makes me mad is that our budget priorities are all screwed up. NASA was "punished" for Apollo 1 in a fit of short-sighted rage. On top of that, what did all the billions of dollars we threw at the Vietnam Conflict buy us that a Moon base couldn't (or even ten moon bases given the dollar amounts?). Nixon cut Apollo short just because of his ego, and we all know how his personal traits would lead to his eventual downfall for Watergate.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFast forward to our day and the bailout of the Financial Sector could have funded 2 or 3 Mars missions or an entire fleet of Asteroid Rendezvous missions. Yeah, the banksters paid over 95% of it back, but as soon as the non-innovators on Wall St need a cool $800B, the purse flies right open, but when NASA needs a fraction of that to change the course of human history and cement the U.S.'s leadership in the world, we get a bunch of whining and bellyaching about deficits. Do these people even realize that they're A PART OF HUMAN HISTORY and we will either colonize space or perish on this planet according to their decisions?
Considering the sorry record of malfeasance, mismanagement, waste and destruction, do you really think it would be a good idea to free humans from Earth to despoil OTHER habitats and planets???
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisTo me the sad part wasn't that the Apollo program was squashed but that it wasn't replaced with anything that truly utilized what we had learned and which would reach towards making our getting to space an industrially economic reality. We tend to ignore that the reason we use the rockets as we do is not because we couldn't engineer larger and more appropriately scaled rockets that could have lowered the cost of getting to space exponentially, but rather we were already in possession of a technology that could 'do the job' though it was so expensive only the military and a well funded NASA could afford the access to space, which was fine with them. So yeah, budgets played a part but so did our leaderships inabilty to see how the long game of using ballistic missiles in the context of the military's vision of space as the high ground was going to keep the program too expensive for industrial development. We already know how to manoeuver in space and how to negotiate the conditions, but we come up with ideas for 'smaller, faster, and alas even more expensive in the long run' as viable solutions. Maybe it's because our leadership sees spending in space, as it sees all spending, as a pork barrel for the congress who dole it out within their home districts to ensure re-elections.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf there's any good news out there in space development it seems to be that the Russians are screwing up the re-supply launches, we may abandon the ISS, and Elon Musk and Bert Rutan are looking like they could be holding the key to wide scale industrial access to space where as it has been said many times, "it's raining soup'. We need a bucket that can harvest the abundance of energy and resources out there...let's hope it's soon.
@geojellyroll "What if Wells Fargo still ran its stagecoach lines."
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThere's a presumption that comments are relevant and intelligently contributory. Didn't get that memo?
Hey Jellyboy, I see you've created quite a following! Congrats!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThe Space program has been in a state of malaise to the point that we now can't place an astronaut into space under any circumstances. We now have to pay the Russians to deliver/retrieve whatever to the ISS. The USA has lost the technological advantage we once had. We have become short sighted and lack the will to plan and carry it through.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEither move forward or languish in despair... Or let China show us where the door is! Wake up!
I worked as a photographer at NASA-MSC on the Apollo program. I think the program was irredeemably flawed because the costs were so great, because we were in a break-neck race with the Russians to get there first. There was also a difference among the technical people regarding the value of manned vs. unmanned missions. During my time there, NASA spent more on photography for public relations than it did on documenting scientific research.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisApollo was canned at the right time and the Shuttle was canned 2o years after it should have been. These projects morph into bloated bureaucratic make-work projects. Once the government 'gets into' the Shuttle, or a war, food stamps, corporate subsidies or 'whatever' the justfication for funding becomes political and the original purpose is secondary.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDid you all miss the article about science and politicians from yesterday?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://blogs.scientificamerican.com/guest-blog/2011/08/31/can-politicians-be-trusted-with-science/
Having one person in charge can result in disastrous consequences for programs like this. However, it is all cost benefit, how much more benefit would have been derived vs cost, but since we can probably say the money saved was going to fight a "non war" war, it is easy now to make the choice.
What bothers me is Lockheed Martin or Boeing had a space plane on the drawing boards. These were dropped when sputnik was put into orbit. Then we followed that with putting men in sardine cans. Bad move. Now we are back into designing space planes. We lost 50 years.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIts a sad fact that the moon missions were not a product of scientific advancement as much as it was the "political cause" that justified JFK's call to put a man on the moon as a reaction to the possibility of Soviet militarization of space.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSince the 1990's, the DOD makes more launches into space than NASA. The official US policy is that space should not be militarized, but it is exactly what we have been doing. As China now advances in space, it would be naive to ignore the prospect of China's military goals.
It seems the best science in the US is gobbled up by or initiated by DARPA. The days of NASA spin offs to commercial enterprises for the betterment of public good are in DARPA's rear view mirror. Technological advancements are happening in many other countries now. The US is no longer the world leader, except of course, in weaponry.
I for one do not want to see a moon base in this context. A moon base should be for society's benefit, for mankind's greater good, for scientific achievement, for the advancement of knowledge; not for manning an offensive laser base, or cloaking weapons.
Mankind has an innate drive to question and to explore. A manned trip to Mars is inevitable. Will it be privatized exploration, public oriented advancement, or military superiority?
Such as Watergate.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI teach college students for whom the Apollo Program is distant history. They have not had the opportunity to be inspired the way the baby boomer generation was inspired by astronauts orbiting the Moon on Christmas Eve and walking on its surface. They have not shared in the thrill of exploration. This is perhaps the greatest losss of all.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI recently published novel, Sputnik's Child, which explores the events that shaped the ideas and lives of the baby boom generation and laid the groundwork for an age of technology and its challenges. (www.sputnikschild.com) In reserching this book, I was again uimpressed with the enormous influence that the Apollo Program had on our generation and the Age of Technology. Even though we are currently living through a golden age of space exploration by unmanned missions, these scientific discoveries are not inspiring children the way we were inspired by the exploration of space.
What if NASA's Apollo Program had not been cancelled? We will never know what could have been accomplished had generations of young explorers been inspired the way we were by Apollo.