It seemed like a good idea at the time.

It was April 1961. The Soviet Union’s Yuri Gagarin had just become the first person to orbit the Earth. America’s nascent Mercury program had not yet launched a single astronaut into space. It would be more than a year until John Glenn would become the first American in orbit.

Until Gagarin’s flight there had been no U.S. government push to counter the Soviet space program. In October 1957, the unanticipated launch of the Soviet Sputnik – the first satellite to be launched into orbit by any nation – had sparked a wave of soul-searching by American commentators. But the U.S. government response had been measured and low-key.  President Dwight Eisenhower was uninterested in engaging in a costly public space race for which the prize would be little more than prestige.

By 1958 America had two space programs that were making steady and sustainable progress. One program was an Air Force research effort into hypersonic flight centered on the X-15 rocket plane while the second program was the newly-created National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s (NASA) Project Mercury – America’s first manned spaceflight project.  Money was tight and both projects were pushing the boundaries of technology, but both were progressing. Eisenhower had no interest in an expensive crash program focused on catching the Soviet Union that would inject a heavy dose of Cold War politics into aerospace research efforts.  At first, neither did President John F. Kennedy, who took office in January 1961. In the middle of his inaugural address, Kennedy even suggested that America and the Soviet Union might work together to explore space.

But Kennedy was taken aback by the large and overwhelmingly positive international response to Gagarin’s flight on April 12, 1961. He believed that a continuous string of Soviet space firsts – spectaculars, he called them – could significantly damage America’s standing around the world and would provide the USSR with a powerful advantage in the ongoing Cold War. Kennedy was a thoughtful and dispassionate politician, but he was a product of his times, which is to say he was an ardent cold warrior.

A Popped Cork

The U.S. space program had already experienced its own string of “spectaculars,” but they weren’t the kind of results that NASA and Kennedy were looking for.

On December 1957, two months after the Soviets succeeded in putting Sputnik into orbit, America’s first attempt at launching a satellite – Vanguard 1A – failed spectacularly when the rocket lost thrust shortly after liftoff. Having risen only four feet off the launch pad, the rocket fell back and exploded, throwing the satellite a short distance away where it began transmitting its beacon signal.

In November 1960, a similar accident occurred during a test launch of a Mercury-Redstone rocket – the vehicle that was slated to carry America’s first astronauts. With 500 invited guests watching in stunned silence, the rocket’s engine inexplicably shut down two seconds after liftoff. The vehicle had barely left the launch pad – its height was estimated at four inches – when the engine cut off and it slowly settled back down on the pad, balanced precariously on its now-silent engine. Reacting to the shutoff, the capsule’s automatic safety systems engaged. First, the capsule’s rocket-powered escape tower was jettisoned, blasting away from the capsule. Then, with rocket and capsule still teetering on the pad, the capsule’s parachutes deployed, draping the unsteady vehicle in shrouds of billowing nylon. In his 1979 book, The Right Stuff, Thomas Wolfe famously likened the event to a cork popping out of a bottle of Spumante.

Less amusing and decidedly more alarming was the failure of a Mercury-Atlas test launch on April 25 1961 – less than two weeks before the first manned Mercury flight would take place, though that flight would use a Redstone rocket.  Minutes after launch, the Atlas rocket malfunctioned and had to be destroyed, raining debris over the launch complex and nearby Cocoa Beach.

Changing the Narrative

Of course, America’s testing failures were public knowledge, while the Soviet program was shrouded in secrecy which hid errors, mistakes and other misfortunes from the public and, more gravely, from American intelligence agencies. In truth, NASA was not significantly behind the Soviets in any aspect of space exploration, though that was not clear at the time. But perceptions matter, and Kennedy wanted to change the common narrative that the USSR was leading the United States. He hoped that a NASA spectacular – the good kind – would re-establish American pre-eminence in science, technology, and engineering.

So, Kennedy asked NASA officials what milestone could America reach before the Soviets.  The answer: a Moon landing. Accordingly, on May 25, 1961 – twenty days after Alan Shepard became the first American in space – Kennedy publicly announced his goal of landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to Earth before the end of the decade.

Kennedy was prepared to pay for his vision. In July 1961, he submitted to Congress a new NASA budget that increased the agency’s spending authority by 89 percent and funded the start of construction of extensive space centers at Cape Canaveral and Houston. That was just the beginning. Congress followed the president’s lead and approved massive budget increases for NASA over the next several years. The agency’s budget, which had been a modest $500 million per year in 1960, reached $5 billion per year by 1965, fully 4.3 percent of the overall federal budget. Ultimately, Project Apollo would cost $151 billion (in 2010 dollars) and involve 400,000 workers.

The presidential challenge energized the news media and the nation, while the subsequent infusion of cash energized NASA. Suddenly, a program that had been quietly plodding along in relative obscurity was one of the highest priorities of the federal government. Kennedy made his intentions explicit in a November 1962 meeting, when he told NASA officials that the Moon landing was to be NASA’s top priority, and, along with defense, one of the two top priorities of the federal government.

Kennedy’s goal was ambitious yet achievable, and success would overshadow all the earlier Soviet ‘spectaculars.’  It was the quintessential Cold War program – technologically challenging, hugely expensive, and focused on short-term results rather than any long-range strategic vision.

What Could Possibly Go Wrong

While NASA met Kennedy’s goal – Apollo 11 landed on the moon on July 20, 1969 – the unintended consequences of making the program a centerpiece of the Cold War were dispiriting. And throughout the Cold War, there were always unintended consequences.

Flush with cash, backed by the president, popular with Congress and the public, NASA was unprepared for its new role as a Cold War standard bearer. Everything about the organization changed overnight: its budget; its management practices; the size of its workforce; its public profile; its political importance; and most importantly, the relentless pressure to meet deadlines. The technological challenges of lunar landings remained, but now they were accompanied by the need to learn an entire new way of operating.

Drafting NASA to serve on the front lines of the Cold War fundamentally and irrevocably changed the agency and America’s manned space program.  With virtually unlimited resources the agency was willing to tolerate a greater level of waste and inefficiency. Under intense pressure to meet deadlines the agency accepted a higher level of risk for astronauts. With a total commitment to a lunar landing, the agency had no time for long-range strategic thinking. Through no fault of its own, NASA had traded a methodical and sustainable long-term approach to space exploration for a mad dash to an artificial and arbitrary finish line.

The Politics Changed

By linking its program to Cold War politics, NASA became vulnerable to changes in the political situation. If national priorities shifted, the agency might find itself adrift. Which is exactly what happened.

By 1963, the Cold War landscape had changed significantly. Appalled by the terrifying ease with which the United States and the Soviet Union had stumbled to the brink of nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962, Kennedy was looking for a way to reduce tensions with Russia. In June 1963 he re-opened negotiations with the USSR to ban nuclear testing. The Test Ban Treaty would be signed in August of that year.

On June 10, 1963, Kennedy gave a speech titled “A Strategy of Peace” at American University in which he earnestly suggested ways that America and the Soviet Union could improve relations and lower the risk of nuclear war. He was clearly looking to defuse the Cold War.

With the political importance of the space program fading, Kennedy and Congress were growing concerned about the cost of Apollo. While generally popular, the program had faced criticism for years about the share of government funds it was consuming. Democrats and Republicans believed that there were more pressing needs for federal funding than a wildly expensive race to the Moon. In 1963, Congress had cut NASA’s budget by 10 percent, a harbinger of much more severe cuts to come.

On September 20 1963, Kennedy spoke before the United Nations General Assembly on the need to reduce tensions. He proposed several areas where the US and USSR could cooperate, including, “… joint efforts in the regulation and exploration of space. I include among these possibilities a joint expedition to the Moon.”

Kennedy’s call for a joint US-Soviet space program stunned Congress and NASA. The space agency was already struggling to manage the huge number of contractors involved in the program. Bringing in the Soviets would multiply the project’s difficulty, NASA officials told Kennedy. The Soviets themselves showed no interest.

Kennedy didn’t give up on the idea, and in November 1963 he directed NASA administrator James Webb to prepare a plan for cooperation in lunar landing programs. Before the end of the month, however, Kennedy was dead, assassinated in Dallas. Overnight the Apollo program became a memorial to the slain president, and changes to the program or cuts to its budget became unthinkable.

So, Apollo continued on as before, a high-visibility, crash program that was overwhelmingly focused on meeting an unrealistic schedule.

 Safety Wasn’t Job One

NASA technicians and Apollo astronauts recognized the risks involved in pushing the program’s pace. Author George Leopold, in his 2016 biography of astronaut Gus Grissom, described the lethal impact of NASA’s fixation on Kennedy’s end-of-decade target as “Slipshod engineering, distracted management, poor quality control, (and) inattention to test data…”

According to Leopold, the pace and scale of the Apollo program, “… outpaced the ability of engineers and managers to keep up with details of arguably the largest technological endeavor since World War II.” The level of risk that NASA tolerated during Apollo far exceeded the level accepted during the Mercury and Gemini programs.

Astronaut Wally Schirra was concerned about crew safety, the inability to fix problems, and the tight schedule while NASA flight director Chris Kraft said, “We were willing to put up with a lot of poor hardware and poor preparation in order to try to get on with the job. And a lot us knew that we were doing that.“

Grissom, wrote Leopold, was especially concerned about the poor workmanship and poor design of the Apollo 1 capsule that he was to ride into space. Grissom and his crew spent months working with representatives of the spacecraft manufacturer to identify and repair problems with critical systems.

On January 27 1967, Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chafee were killed when fire swept through their spacecraft during a launch rehearsal test. An extensive NASA review of the accident identified the cause of the fire and analyzed the entire Apollo program and its management. As a result of the fire, NASA created an Office of Flight Safety, independent of flight program management. The Safety Office would review all aspects of design, manufacturing, test and flight from a safety standpoint.

Despite a delay of twenty months, during which NASA re-designed the Apollo command module and implemented numerous safety procedures, the agency met Kennedy’s goal when Apollo 11 landed on the Moon in July 1969.

We’re here. Now what?

By providing a clearly-defined goal and nearly unlimited resources, Kennedy’s involvement was critical to NASA’s short-term success. But by focusing so narrowly on the goal of a Moon landing before 1970, NASA traveled down a dead-end path.

Apollo’s hardware, procedures, processes, and management practices were optimized for landing on the Moon as quickly as possible. Once that was accomplished, the agency found itself adrift. Budgets were slashed, no further direction was provided by the White House, and the agency was saddled with a vast and expensive network of facilities and suppliers.

Within a year of Apollo’s historic mission, President Nixon canceled the final three planned Apollo moon landings. Between 1969 and 1972, twelve Americans walked on the moon. No American has gone beyond low earth orbit since.

NASA proposed to follow Apollo with a program to build a large space station to support an eventual manned mission to Mars. But funding for such a project was never seriously considered. NASA’s budget was cut to less than $3.5 billion per year, 25 percent of the share of the federal budget that the agency had enjoyed previously.

Without the urgency of a Cold War mission, NASA was forced to compete for funding with hundreds of federal agencies and programs. And so far, they haven’t done as well as they would like. From time to time ambitious programs to return to the Moon or explore Mars have been proposed, but none have come to fruition.

Had Apollo not been transformed into a Cold War asset, NASA’s manned spaceflight program would likely have continued on a slower, less expensive, more sustainable path that might have included additional exploration of the Moon, construction of a series of increasingly complex space stations in Earth orbit to master the skills needed to live and work in space, establishment of permanent colonies on the Moon, and preparation for manned missions beyond the Earth-Moon system.

April 23, 2020

For more information see:

Fishman, Charles; One Giant Leap: The Impossible Mission That Flew Us to the Moon; Simon and Schuster; New York; 2019.

Leopold, George: Calculated Risk: The Supersonic Life and Times of Gus Grissom; Purdue University Press; West Lafayette, IN; 2016.

Logsdon, John M.: John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon; Palgrave Macmillan, New York; 2010.

Logsdon, John M. “John F. Kennedy’s Space Legacy and Its Lessons for Today.” Issues in Science and Technology 27, no. 3 (Spring 2011).  https://issues.org/p_logsdon-3/  Retrieved 7.24.2019.

Wolfe, Thomas; The Right Stuff; Farrar, Straus, Giroux; New York; 1979.

Achenbach, Joel; How Did NASA Put Men on the Moon: One Harrowing Step at a Time: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/2019/06/19/how-did-nasa-put-men-moon-one-harrowing-step-time/?utm_term=.dabb26a16abf&wpisrc=nl_most&wpmm=1   Retrieved 7.21.2019.

Glass, Andrew; JFK Proposes Joint Lunar Expedition With Soviets, Sept. 20, 1963; https://www.politico.com/story/2017/09/20/jfk-proposes-joint-lunar-expedition-with-soviets-sept-20-1963-242843  Retrieved 4.21.2020.

Grush, Loren; Apollo Was NASA’s Biggest Win, But Its Legacy is Holding the Agency Back; https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/16/18663190/apollo-11-legacy-nasa-artemis-program-deep-space-human-exploration   Retrieved 7.21.2019.

Kennedy, John F.; Address Before the 18^th General Assembly of the United Nations, September 20, 1963: https://www.jfklibrary.org/archives/other-resources/john-f-kennedy-speeches/united-nations-19630920   Retrieved 4.20.2020.

Petty, Chris: Apollo, I Still Love You, but…; https://thehighfrontier.blog/2016/01/25/apollo-i-still-love-you-but/   Retrieved 7.26.2019.

Wall, Mike; Space Race: Could the U.S. Have Beaten the Soviets Into Space? https://www.space.com/11336-space-race-united-states-soviets-spaceflight-50years.html  Retrieved 4.16.2020.

In 1960 an explosion at the Soviet Union’s Baikonur launching complex killed hundreds of people. Rather than halt their program to investigate the disaster and implement safety features to prevent a re-occurrence, the Soviets pretended the incident never happened and kept it a secret for decades, even from the families of the victims.

That attitude towards crew safety is just one of the cultural and operational differences between the Russian space program – a continuation of the Soviet program – and NASA, according to Scott Kelly, an American astronaut who spent a year in space aboard the International Space Station (ISS) in 2015-2016. Kelly chronicled his mission in a memoir titled, Endurance: A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery.

Kelly’s book details his career and his year-long mission. Having trained as a Navy pilot to fight the Soviet military, he was especially attentive to the operational and cultural differences between U.S. astronauts and the Russian cosmonauts that he lived with aboard the station.

Throughout his flight – and for several years prior – Kelly worked closely with Russian cosmonauts and technicians. During this period he learned to adjust to the different ways of operating and the differing philosophies of the American and Russian space agencies, including their attitudes towards crew safety.

NASA’s safety rules routinely delay or scrub launches right to the final moments of the countdown, Kelly wrote. American astronauts were never certain that they were going into space until the rocket engines ignited. Not so for the Russians, who “haven’t scrubbed a launch after the crew was strapped in since 1969.”

Kelly also described differences in the ways NASA and the Russians designed and procured equipment. Though robust and dependable, Russian equipment is often less technologically advanced than U.S equipment, as the Russians highly value efficiency and low cost. Kelly cites the Soyuz capsule – originally designed in the 1960’s and still in use today in updated versions – noting that it is cheap, simple, and reliable. The Russian Progress resupply vehicle, which brings food, spare parts and other needed components to the ISS, is another example. The vehicle is very similar to the Soyuz, he writes, “because the Russians never create two designs when one will do.”

As an astronaut, Kelly piloted two space shuttle missions (STS-103, Shuttle Discovery in1999 and STS-118, Shuttle Endeavour in 2007) and completed a five-month mission on the International Space Station (October 2010 – March 2011). In 2012 he and a Russian cosmonaut were selected to spend a year aboard the ISS as the subjects of a study on the effects of long-duration space flight. Kelly’s year in space lasted from March 2015 until March 2016. During his career he spent a total of 520 days in space. Remarkably, Kelly’s twin brother, Mark, is also an astronaut.

But Kelly‘s career almost never got off the ground. As a college freshman he was hardly the over-achieving honor student/Eagle Scout that is typical of American astronauts. He was, in fact, a poor student who was, in his words, “A directionless, undereducated eighteen-year-old with terrible grades.” But Kelly never lacked intelligence, and when he found direction he responded with energy and discipline. During his first semester at college he read Thomas Wolfe’s account of NASA’s Mercury program, The Right Stuff and he became hooked. “I felt the power of those words washing over me,” he wrote. “I felt like I had found my calling.”

Newly dedicated and driven, Kelly earned a Navy officer’s commission and was selected for flight school. Like a film character from Top Gun, he became the best of the best, flying F-14 fighters off the crowded decks of aircraft carriers. Later, like the seven Mercury astronauts whom Wolfe chronicled, he became a test pilot – the best of the best of the best. Finally, he was selected by NASA to become an astronaut – the best of the best of the best of the best.

The International Space Station was designed and built by a 15-nation coalition, including the United States, Russia, and the space agencies of Europe, Japan, and Canada. The ISS has been continuously inhabited since November 2000, and by now more than 200 persons from sixteen nations have visited it.

While Kelly calls international cooperation the highlight of the ISS program, station operations are not as international as you might think. The station consists of multiple modules and is roughly divided into two segments: the Russian segment, where the Russians live and work; and the U.S. segment, where everyone else lives and works. In addition, each astronaut or cosmonaut works directly for his or her own space agency, rather than for some international space organization. Thus, ISS crew members work on their own national experiments, follow a daily schedule prepared by their own national space agency, eat food supplied by their own nation, and speak with their flight controllers on their own national communications system.

The different nationalities cooperate with each other, and share resources when necessary, but they are more neighbors than co-workers, albeit neighbors in an alarmingly dangerous neighborhood that requires constant vigilance, near-total trust, and frequent cooperation just to stay alive. And for all the national differences that are observed, Kelly reminds us that the ISS, “is the longest peaceful international collaboration in history.”

Despite significant cultural differences, Kelly writes that American astronauts and Russian cosmonauts work well together. “We make an effort to learn about and respect one another’s cultures, and we have agreed to carry out this huge and challenging project together, so we work to understand and see the best in one another.”

But Russian attitudes about sharing information take some getting used to. Russian cosmonauts have lower base salaries than American astronauts, wrote Kelly, but the Russian Space Agency pays cosmonauts a significant bonus for each day they are in space. However, if the Space Agency determines that a cosmonaut made a mistake, they decrease the cosmonaut’s bonus. Thus, there is a tremendous incentive for cosmonauts to withhold information about problems or other issues from their own Mission Control personnel. This is especially dangerous because Mission Control has access to thousands of engineers, technicians and other specialists who understand every component of the ISS. Their knowledge is critical to keeping the ISS operating and the crews safe.

Similarly, Russian training is more detailed than comparable U.S. training, but the reason is not necessarily to ensure that cosmonauts are safer or better trained. Instead, writes Kelly, training serves to protect the trainers from blame in case of an accident or failure. “Everyone involved in training needs to certify that the crew was taught everything they could possible need to know. If anything should go wrong, it must then be the crew’s fault.”

Cosmonauts also are encouraged to avoid responsibility for mistakes. To be certified for flight, cosmonauts must pass a difficult oral exam. But once their performance is graded, cosmonauts have an opportunity to contest their grades, and they do so by attempting to minimize and avoid responsibility for any mistakes they made on the exam.

While the ISS orbits silently above our heads, it is easy to discount the difficulty and danger of spaceflight. But that’s a luxury not available to astronauts or cosmonauts. As a reminder, during a nine-month period that included the start of Kelly’s mission, three resupply vehicles were lost during missions to the ISS, including two in a row. Fortunately, none carried passengers, but the Soyuz rocket that failed on a Russian supply mission is the same type of rocket used to bring cosmonauts and astronauts to the ISS and the SpaceX rocket that failed is the same model rocket that NASA will use to transport astronauts in the future.

On his first spacewalk outside the ISS, Kelly was shocked to see the extent of damage to the exterior of the station. Fifteen years exposure to micrometeoroids, orbital debris and the sun have left the station pitted and scarred. At one point during his year on the ISS, Kelly and two Russian cosmonauts were forced to take refuge in the docked Soyuz capsule – a Soyuz capsule is always docked at the station to serve as a ‘lifeboat’ in case of a catastrophic accident – when an old satellite was detected approaching the station and there was no time to maneuver the ISS away from it. Orbiting earth in the opposite direction as the station, the impact speed would have been 35,000 miles per hour, and a collision would have instantly destroyed the ISS, and in all likelihood the Soyuz capsule.

For a full account of his ISS mission, see Scott Kelly’s book: Endurance; A Year in Space, A Lifetime of Discovery.

 

top image: Scott Kelly aboard the International Space Station. (NASA photo)

January 8, 2019

Had an opportunity today to spend an hour or so inside a Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI) machine.

If you haven’t had one, an MRI might sound futuristically high-tech, like the handheld medical scanners on science fiction shows.  And while an MRI will provide high resolution images of the internal structures of your body, in reality, an MRI is more like your mom’s washing machine than Dr. McCoy’s tricorder.

MRI scanners use a combination of magnetic fields and radio waves to produce detailed images. That’s pretty cool, and the images are remarkably helpful, but magnetic fields and radio waves aren’t exactly cutting-edge technology.

To be scanned, you lie inside the MRI machine, which is shaped like a large tube. Before you are inserted in the machine, you get earphones to listen to your choice of music. The first time I did it, I figured the music was to relax people who might be a little nervous about being confined in a space so tight that you cannot roll over.

Once they turned on the MRI, though, I realized that the music is really a failed attempt to drown out the alarmingly loud clanging and rattling of the machine. I am not sure how they generate the magnetic fields, but it sounds like it might involve two or three primates banging on metal trash cans. When they started the classical music I selected, I thought it was too loud.  Once the MRI began rocking and rolling, though, I couldn’t even hear the music. Next time, it’s heavy metal.

Still, the images were quite helpful, and as far as I know no parts actually flew off the MRI scanner while I was in there.

November 19, 2018

A heartfelt post from U.S. astronaut Leland Melvin, who is also a former NFL player. The post is a little long but it makes several significant points, including the disheartening willingness of the president and his administration to validate and encourage white supremacist extremists; the value of taking an “Orbital perspective” which recognizes Earth as a fragile and threatened home that we all share regardless of artificial and transient political boundaries; and the critical responsibility of a president to unify the nation through dignified, compassionate, and respectful behavior.

“Looking back at our planet from space really helps one get a bigger perspective on how petty and divisive we can be.”

September 24, 2017