Requiem for Apollo

When Kennedy made his audacious commitment to put a man on the moon and bring him back safely home on May 25, 1961, I was preparing to enter the missile part of the Air Force, into what we were already beginning to call the “Space Program”.

I was stationed at Langley AFB, VA, which was the headquarters of the agency still called NACA, the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, the forerunner of NASA which had already been renamed in 1958, but most of the signs had still not been changed.

Some of the initial “astronauts” were already on Langley in the early 1960s, and were slowly becoming reasonably well known, although there was a considerable air of uncertainty back then - were they actually going to fly in space or not? Nobody really knew for sure. It would probably happen sometime, but maybe not for many, many years. Sputnik had already made its trip, and Gagarin had flown his orbit in April of 61, though so this air of uncertainty was balanced by the strange feeling that there were great forces already in process that ultimately could not be controlled.

The Mercury astronauts had a different mission than the rest of us but they spent as much time away from Langley as we flight crew members. From time to time we met them and would encounter them on the base. Once I remember letting my wife out of the car on a rainy afternoon at the Officer’s Club and she walked under a canopy to the main door, where it was opened for her by John Glenn, Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Alan Sheppard. They exchanged a word or two, waved at me, and she entered. Big deal? Not nearly as big as it seems today.

I met Gus Grissom on several occasions, once at the BX while buying a birthday card for my sister-in-law. I got a card with a picture of the moon and a statement about it. I asked Gus if he would also sign it, and he did so with great enjoyment.

After Kennedy’s commitment though, everything began to change. Everything. NASA was now crushed under the flow of money falling into and upon its projects. More and more work was transferred from Langley and Wallops Island to Canaveral, a spot picked out for NASA the year the Civil War ended, by one of their first "pioneers", Jules Verne.

Then Kennedy was assassinated. Right after that I was assigned to the Titan II missile program. Space was now the coming attraction for both military and commercial activities, and I was getting in on the ground floor. There was only one little cloud in my sky and it was far, far away, off in one of the most beautiful places on any planet, Vietnam. It was still officially at peace, but the French had been defeated in the re-imposition of their colonial rule after W.W.II, and now we were nosing around there with "advisors". The deaths of Earthquake McGoon and, nineteen days later, Robert Capa in Vietnam were ominous warnings that it could really turn out to be very, very bad. Both Apollo and Vietnam would continue to grow, eventually competing for the same dollar.

There is no way to prove that Vietnam spending had any effect upon the Apollo program or any follow-on space related projects, but there was a continual competition for money. A new unease with the American government developed because of problems with both the war and the civil rights movements and that remains with us today. One of the stories totally lost in all of this competition for money and talent was the American Space Program. Vietnam came first, Civil Rights also came first. Then came Apollo. Once man walked on the moon, the importance of the space program ended. Any hope for a continuing American presence in space would have to be deferred for many, many years. America was engrossed in short-term objectives, another war it couldn’t escape from, and long neglected obligations here at home.