Is NASA getting its mojo back?

Once again, a U.S. president wants to restore America’s space supremacy, this time by returning humans to the moon followed by missions to Mars and beyond. “There are echoes here of dented national pride following the Soviet Union’s pioneering launches of the Sputnik artificial satellite in 1957 and then the first man in space — Yuri Gagarin — in 1961,” said Doug Millard, space curator at the Science Museum in London.

The birth of NASA, 60 years ago today, was spurred on by the Soviets and would see the U.S. space effort soar in the ’60s to the dizzying heights of the greatest ever moment in human exploration, shift to traversing the solar system in the seventies and, after an embarrassing hiatus in its ability to launch humans, now once again try to rekindle the pride and awe that can only come when a human being plants a flag on a distant space rock.

Since Russia launched the Space Age with the “beep beep beep” of Sputnik’s telemetry, its missions, hardware and cosmonauts have been an insistent presence that can’t be ignored if you are to make sense of NASA’s journey from Earth to the stars.

Soon after the launch of the first artificial Earth satellite by the Soviets, the Defense Department responded by approving funding for Wernher von Braun and his Army Redstone Arsenal team to work on the first U.S. satellite Explorer 1, which was launched on Jan. 31, 1958. It had a scientific payload that discovered the magnetic radiation belts around the Earth (unknowingly, they had also been spotted by an instrument on Sputnik 2, the first satellite to carry a live animal, Laika the dog).

Sputnik also prompted President Dwight D. Eisenhower to sign NASA’s founding legislation, the 1958 National Aeronautics and Space Act, on July 29, 1958. “This led to the fractured U.S. space effort being combined and coordinated,” Millard said. Civilian space efforts were rolled into NASA when it opened for business on Oct. 1 of that year, notably the long-running National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, or NACA, with its $300 million in facilities along with around 7,500 employees, including many people who would star in the future moon landings, such as Gene Kranz and Neil Armstrong.

Most people trace the origin of Armstrong’s trajectory that led him to plant the first step upon the moon to May 25, 1961, when, just six weeks after cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin became the first man in space, President John F. Kennedy announced a bold plan for NASA to put an American on the moon, and to return him safely to Earth, by the end of the decade.

“In fact,” Millard said, “the origins of the moon program predate Kennedy’s speech by years.” The idea of a lunar mission was first officially aired at a meeting of NASA program planners in November 1959. Early the following year, Abe Silverstein proposed the name after perusing a book of mythology at home. The engineer who had come to NASA from NACA thought that the image of “Apollo riding his chariot across the Sun was appropriate to the grand scale of the proposed program.” The following month, NASA received a report from the Army Ballistic Missile Agency titled “A Lunar Exploration Program Based Upon Saturn-Boosted Systems.”

NASA’s first Administrator, T. Keith Glennan, who had an unlikely sounding background in Hollywood, had “fought to keep NASA small” and only envisioned a manned trip to the moon sometime after 1970.

“Glennan was, of course, appointed by President Eisenhower and reflected that administration’s approach,” said Bill Barry, NASA’s chief historian. “Eisenhower had warned of the negative influences of the ‘military-industrial complex’ at the end of his term as president. NASA was created in that context and there were mixed motivations for the administration: A desire to have a publicly-facing peaceful scientific space effort (that could also serve as a cover for space-based reconnaissance programs then in development), while curtailing the tendency of the ‘military-industrial complex’ to overdo the response to Soviet firsts in space.”

At the end of the Eisenhower administration, Glennan stepped down. His concerns about whether it made sense to engage in a crash program to get to the moon were swept away when the Kennedy administration took over in 1961. Though the primary impetus was of course geopolitical, there were multiple motivations for the political support in Congress and in the executive branch for Apollo, Barry said.

“Behind closed doors (mostly) President Kennedy made no bones about it — the goal was to ‘beat the Russians’ and the primary reason for that is that the legitimacy of the Soviet political system (both internally and externally) rested on their apparent leadership in the space race,” he said. “With dozens of new countries coming into existence in the wake of World War II, the U.S. needed to counter the impression that the Soviets had a better system for developing countries than we did.”

The first half of the ’60s would see America beaten in space again and again by their great rivals, under the leadership of the mysterious “chief designer” (revealed after his death in 1966 to be Sergei Korolev). In addition to Gagarin, the Soviets launched the first spacecraft to reach the moon’s surface (Luna 2), first woman in space (Valentina Tereshkova), first multiple crew (Voskhod 1) and carried out the first spacewalk (Alexei Leonov, albeit in an accident-prone mission marred by his ballooning space suit, a slow leak and malfunctioning automatic guidance).

However, in the wake of Korolev’s death, the momentum of NASA’s greatest rivals stalled. “The Soviet space effort would have had to go up a gear to get the moon and Korolev was probably the only person who could have pulled this off,” Millard said.

Heading to the moon

Meanwhile NASA learned how to put an astronaut in orbit around Earth in its Mercury program, starting with Alan Shepard in 1961, and then began to lay the means and the methods to overtake the Soviets with its two-astronaut Gemini craft, which was designed to perfect techniques such as long-duration human space flight, rendezvous and docking and space walking, all of which were necessary to accomplish a lunar mission. There were many other achievements too. During the final Gemini 12 mission in November 1966, rookie astronaut Edwin “Buzz” Aldrin took the first selfie in space during a spacewalk.

The follow up Apollo program almost never got off the ground. During the prelaunch test of Apollo 1 in 1967, Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee were testing the command module that sat atop the spacecraft. Just after 6:30 p.m., a voltage flicker was registered, caused by a spark in the highly pressurized, pure oxygen environment. Chaffee yelled: “We’ve got a bad fire! Let’s get out! We’re burning up! We’re on fire! Get us out of here!” White could be seen on the television monitors reaching for the hatch release handle. Seconds later, the transmission ended with a scream. All three died.

Despite this hammer blow, Aldrin with Armstrong would beat Leonov, who was being trained to fly a single cosmonaut lander to the powdery lunar surface. Their landing using the fragile Apollo 11 lunar excursion module Eagle was not without drama: Armstrong and Aldrin, aided by Mission Control, had to deal with communication issues, spotty radar data, various error codes and warnings and a worryingly diminishing fuel supply. But they made it.

Half a billion people around the world watched Armstrong’s televised image and heard him describe how he took “… one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” on July 20, 1969. With Armstrong, Aldrin spent 21 hours on the lunar surface as fellow crewmember Michael Collins orbited overhead.

The final Apollo mission to the moon was launched in 1972 and, in all, a total of 27 astronauts visited our neighbor, of which 12 landed. Among the many remarkable achievements of the Apollo missions was one of the most influential images in history — ‘Earthrise’, a photograph of the Earth and parts of the moon’s surface taken from lunar orbit by astronaut Bill Anders in 1968, during the Apollo 8 mission — and the most dramatic space rescue ever, the safe return of the crew of ill-fated Apollo 13 that had been crippled by an explosion 200,000 miles from Earth, thanks to extraordinary feats of improvisation on the part of Mission Control and the astronauts.

But even when Eagle touched down in 1969, other priorities were pressing down hard on the US government: conflict, poverty, racial unrest and rising economic inflation. Congress, President Richard Nixon and the American public increasingly turned their backs on the moon, as the mounting cost of the war in Vietnam and a growing budget deficit made ambitious lunar exploration plans increasingly difficult to defend.

In all, the great Apollo adventure cost around $25 billion in 1960s dollars. But its achievement was beyond measure. Every time I walk past the Apollo 10 Command module — “Charlie Brown” — where I work in the Science Museum, it strikes me that going to the moon feels even more difficult in 2018 than it did in 1969.

Space missions downshift

In the wake of the landmark Apollo program, America’s space program remained important, but scaled back. An investment of about 1 percent of the federal budget (or less) was deemed sufficient. NASA’s programs were eventually tailored to fit within that constraint, a tiny outlay compared with that on Social Security, defense or the infusion of money NASA received during the Apollo era.

The 1970s would see NASA make a transition between the visionary moon program of the ’60s to the Space Shuttle program of the ’80s. Milestones include the Skylab program in 1973, a workshop for astronauts inside the third stage of a Saturn V rocket; the twin Viking landers that beamed back the first analysis of the rust-colored soil that gives the red planet its nickname; and the Apollo-Soyuz flight in 1975 that saw astronauts and cosmonauts shake hands in orbit for the first time, the first glimmer of the relationship that today sustains the International Space Station.

While the Soviets focused on long-duration manned missions, the 1970s marked NASA’s golden age of planetary science. Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft rode atop powerful boosters from the coast of Florida to begin breathtaking journeys across the solar system. Pioneers 10 and 11 became the first to cross the asteroid belt between Mars and Jupiter, and Voyager spacecraft set out in 1975 on a grand tour of the outer solar system. Voyager 1 would pass a historic milestone when it became the first spacecraft to reach interstellar space.

The 1980s would see the final but partial fulfillment of a 1969 plan with the space shuttle, the world’s first reusable spacecraft to carry humans into orbit. “The original idea was to send humans to Mars from an Earth-orbiting space station supplied by shuttle craft,” Millard said. “Shuttle was the only survivor of this plan.”

Nine years after Nixon had announced the program to the nation, Space Shuttle Columbia took to the air on the 20th anniversary of Gagarin’s first spaceflight. Between that first launch on April 12, 1981, and the final landing on July 21, 2011, NASA’s space shuttle fleet — Columbia, Challenger, Discovery, Atlantis and Endeavour — flew 135 missions.

The shuttle’s record would be marred by two disasters. Challenger and its seven astronauts were lost Jan. 28, 1986, when a seal on one of its boosters failed and hot gas burned through the external tank, igniting the propellants and causing the shuttle to explosively break up a little over a minute into the flight. Then Columbia and its seven astronauts were lost on Feb. 1, 2003, when it broke up during re-entry on its 28th mission. That disaster was traced back to the launch, when a piece of foam insulation broke off from an external tank and damaged the orbiter’s left wing. When Columbia re-entered the atmosphere of Earth, the damage allowed hot atmospheric gases to tear through the heat shield and destroy the internal wing structure.

The global publicity for these failures were huge blemishes on the achievement of the shuttle program and a reminder of the unforgiving nature of space exploration. The overall statistics look impressive: in all, shuttles lofted 852 crew, orbited the Earth 21,152 times and clocked more than 1,334 days in space. They provided the means for the launch, recovery and repair of satellites, not least the Hubble space telescope, conducted cutting-edge research and helped to build the largest structure in space, the International Space Station. Overall, however, the shuttle program never lived up to its original promise, that a reusable shuttle would not only provide regular trips to space but also cut the cost of access.

Private companies take over

The end of America’s shuttle program would see a resurgence in Russia’s role. When the 30-year Space Shuttle program came to an official end as Atlantis rolled to a stop at the Kennedy Space Center at 5:56 a.m. on July 21, 2011, Russia’s venerable no-frills Soyuz spacecraft was left to fill the gap to service the space station. At that time, NASA’s ambition for human spaceflight would rest on the Orion crew vehicle — Apollo on steroids — which was first tested in 2014 and was destined for the deep-space part of NASA’s exploration portfolio.

Like any government agency, NASA is risk-averse and therefore leans toward expensive, bureaucratic missions. Today, it faces stiff competition. Alongside its government-backed rivals such as the European Space Agency, China National Space Administration and Indian Space Research Organization are several private companies, notably Blue Origin, run by Amazon billionaire Jeff Bezos, and SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk. The latter is perhaps the best known, having lofted its Falcon Heavy rocket in early February from NASA’s historic Launch Complex 39A at Kennedy Space Center in Florida, to place a Tesla car into the heavens and almost managing to bring all three of its component launch rockets back to Earth to save money (one crashed a few meters away from its drone ship landing pad).

The rise of private space ventures will mean the return of human spaceflight for the United States for the first time since the end of the shuttle program in 2011, when Boeing and SpaceX fly astronauts to the International Space Station in low Earth orbit. A recent assessment by the Government Accountability Office suggested certification of the private spacecraft may be delayed to December 2019 for SpaceX and February 2020 for Boeing.

At the end of April this year, after more than a year of delay and wrangling, NASA’s 13th administrator was finally appointed to lead the 18,000-strong staff of the organization. Jim Bridenstine, the first politician to get the job, is a former military pilot who flew missions in Iraq and Afghanistan and has taken a keen interest in shifting policy more toward using commercial satellite technology, an approach will likely guide him at NASA. At his swearing in, where he was welcomed by the crew of the ISS in a live link, Bridenstine declared: “NASA represents what is best about the United States of America.”

On May 24, Trump signed a second Space Policy Directive to reform and streamline the United States commercial space regulatory framework, a popular move in industry circles. The next month brought the third Space Policy Directive to make space more secure by seeking to reduce the growing threat of orbital space junk, managing space traffic more effectively by sharing relevant data, and tasking the Department of Defense to focus on protecting U.S. space assets and interests. The president also ordered Gen. Joseph Dunford, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to “immediately begin the process necessary to establish a Space Force as the sixth branch of the armed forces.”

Meanwhile, NASA is working on its own super rocket, the Space Launch System, SLS, which would be the most powerful ever designed. So far, the agency has spent around $10 billion on the development of the SLS, which will come in several flavors — Block 1, Block 1B and Block 2 — optimized for carrying astronauts, cargo or both, along with versions that carry a more powerful upper stage of the rocket for deep space exploration.

The first SLS — a Block 1 carrying an unmanned Orion spacecraft and 13 tiny, boxy satellites called “CubeSats” — is scheduled to lift off at the end of next year or the beginning of 2020 from Launch Complex 39B at Kennedy. This pioneering rocket with its lift-off thrust of 8.8 million pounds will be tested to see if it can go farther than any previous mission, a flexible and evolvable launch vehicle able to meet the most challenging deep space crew and cargo needs. The first crewed Orion flight is expected by 2023.

While the launch of a Falcon Heavy costs about $100 million, the launch of the SLS is expected to cost well over $1 billion because it has to be safe enough to carry astronauts and reach deep space, 1,000 times farther away than low-Earth orbit.

The Falcon Heavy and other launchers mean that NASA has private companies to compete with. “In effect, the U.S. now has an internal space race between the private and public launch vehicle sectors, perhaps just the boost the U.S. program needs,” Millard said. Equally, NASA can now buy access to space more cheaply than ever.

Private companies also have a greater willingness to take risks. When a pilot was killed in a test flight of Virgin Galactic’s prototype space tourism rocket, it was a tragedy. But if, for example, a NASA astronaut had a fatal accident during a spacewalk from the government-backed International Space Station, it would be marked by national mourning.

Even prominent opponents of costly human spaceflight, such as the U.K. astronomer Royal Lord Rees, believe that the lower price, high risk, high reward missions of the kind that only a private corporation would undertake are the way forward. They would not depend on traditional “right stuff,” but space adventurers more in the mold of the Austrian skydiver and daredevil Felix Baumgartner. As Rees puts it, “Elon Musk hopes to die on Mars, but not on impact, and I think he might make it.”

NASA is continuing its preparations to boldly go farther into space than ever before. The agency has been studying an orbital outpost concept — the Gateway — to be located in the vicinity of the moon with U.S. industry and the International Space Station partners. NASA is already planning to procure the power and propulsion unit and, as part of the fiscal 2019 budget proposal, and aims to build the Lunar Orbital Platform-Gateway in the 2020s.

What does former Apollo command module pilot Al Worden, one of the 24 people who has flown to the moon, make of Trump’s announcement to go back? “I think it is time for our president to challenge the agency to do something great again and provide the funds to accomplish it,” he said. “However, I am not sure going back to the moon is the answer. We have been there, so just going back is not such a big deal. Unless, of course, the idea is to live for extended periods there to understand the challenges we will have on Mars.”

And while he believes that NASA “has the manpower and smarts” to deliver the president’s vision, he is not so sure the funding is there. Nor does he think that private companies provide the answer. “They are driven by profit, and the long-range projects are going to be expensive. … I don’t see how a private company can reach out as far as needed and do the job safely.”

Though it took Cold War rivalries to put the first man on the moon, Worden believes it’s going to take cooperation between the world’s space-faring nations if we are going to venture on to Mars. “The only way we are going to go to Mars and be successful is to do it as a cooperative program with other countries. The cost will be staggering and no one country can do it alone. A pooling of resources will be necessary in my opinion.”

Worden is not alone in thinking this way. When I have had the chance to talk to his fellow Apollo astronauts they have said the future lies in cooperation, not competition. That was the verdict of Jim Lovell, commander of Apollo 13, and of Aldrin, who told me that rivalry “would make it very, very messy. … We must come together.”

A NASA spokesman said all options remain open.

“To achieve the goal to extend humanity’s presence in the solar system will require the best research, technologies, capabilities and contributions from the U.S. private sector and international partners. There will be an opportunity for a wide range of rockets to play a role in our future exploration endeavors. We are developing a flexible deep space infrastructure to support a steady cadence of increasingly complex missions that strengthens American leadership in space.”

The president wants to see a flag planted by a human on another world, and there is no doubt this will be a global event. But in the longer term, and in adventures beyond the moon, will that flag represent everyone here on Earth, a coalition of governments, one nation or even a single buccaneering individual?

Roger Highfield is a science author, a director of the Science Museum in London, and a visiting professor at the University of Oxford and University College London.