Life After Apollo

I just finished reading Apollo 11 Owner’s Workshop Manual by Christopher Riley and Phil Dolling. I received the book as a Christmas present from my youngest son. This is a book that I never would have purchased for myself because my current interests and stack of reading material have nothing to do with NASA or government space programs. However, my son’s choice of a Christmas gift hit a responsive chord on multiple levels.

First, the book is excellent. It is a technically oriented recap of the US effort to be the first nation to land a man on the moon within the timeline set by President Kennedy. The hardware development programs and integration of the systems that allowed the US to land a man on the moon in 1969 are covered in very good detail in the book. The development and service history of the Saturn V rocket, Service Module, Command Module and Lunar Module are well defined. The successes and failures during the program are well documented. If you are interested in reviewing the history of one of mankind’s greatest technical achievements this book is for you.

I had completed my freshman year as an Aerospace Engineering major at Georgia Tech and about a month away from my 19 birthday in July 1969 when Apollo 11 Commander Neil Armstrong took his first steps on the moon. Since my summer job required that I get up very early in the morning my parents woke me up so I could watch the moon landing TV coverage.

As a baby boomer I was a kid of the space age. My favorite books as a child and adolescent included the Tom Swift Jr Adventures and Tom Corbett Space Cadet series. These books were so meaningful to my young life that I have them in my home office more than 40 years after the moon landing. During my teenage years I watched every hour of network TV coverage of the space program that it was possible for me to watch.

During the spring of my senior year at Georgia Tech I had to make a choice between accepting one of my offers to go to graduate school or accept a job offer to go to work with McDonnell Douglas Astronautics Company – East (since purchased by Boeing) in St. Louis. I decided to move to St. Louis and become an entry level rocket engineer. My career goals in the spring of 1972 were to work on the Space Shuttle program, the Space Station program and hopefully a manned mission to Mars.

The first project I worked on when I reported to McDonnell Douglas was a NASA sponsored study of design options related to the Space Shuttle Orbit Maneuvering System. I began my career as a rocket engineer of sorts. NASA was evaluating proposals for design and construction of the Space Shuttle orbiter during the first days of my professional career. Rockwell International won the contract. After two years in St. Louis my career and life plan changed direction.

In 1982 I returned to the space industry when I joined American Satellite Company, an early leader in the satellite communications segment of the broader space industry. Instead of working on the Space Shuttle, Space Station and other projects I spent the next twenty plus years working for satellite communications companies.

Several years ago my life focus changed again. I now care more about economics, government policy, international finance and politics than I do about space programs or space related businesses.

Not long ago the Space Shuttle program came to an end. A program that was just beginning when my career was beginning has come to an end. The International Space Station continues to operate but hasn’t reached the potential that was envisioned years ago. The greatest space program success since Apollo is the Hubble Space Telescope. Hubble has delivered incredible amounts of new information about the universe and allowed mankind to learn more about how our universe has evolved since its beginning. Further manned exploration of the moon and travel to Mars are decades in the future, perhaps beyond my life time.

NASA is trying to determine what its manned space program should be for the coming decades. There is no obvious mission that our nation can rationally support. The US is effectively bankrupt and a space program of the scope of Apollo is simply not affordable or makes sense as a national spending priority. I believe that NASA should bring its manned space program to an end when the International Space Station reaches its end of life. There is no fundamental reason for the manned space program to continue.

Since I am much closer to the end of my life than the beginning I hope that the US can restructure itself politically and economically and restore itself to health before too many years pass by. Today, the US is a very sick nation that has veered far off a rational development path.

I also hope that some young person will find new science that can be converted into new technology that will make space flight more affordable and far less risky. I am hopeful that the dreams of a young man reading about the adventures of Tom Swift Jr and Tom Corbett will eventually be realized by future generations.

“That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.” said Neil Armstrong from the Sea of Tranquillity. Hopefully, our nation and the world will make more giant leaps at some point in the decades ahead.