 Apollo was absolutely amazing. The inspiration of those videos of astronauts walking on the moon, the stunning close-ups of the moon, and the pictures of our Earth from space, it was incredible. Personally, it's propelled my entire career. The legacy of Apollo, on the other hand, is crippling. I kind of think Apollo may be sort of ruined spaceflight. Alright, I know tons of you guys are waiting to rage leave your comments already, even though I haven't started going into the details of this video. So, I would like to remind you guys that I am not just some person on the internet, I actually do hold a bachelor's degree with combined honors in history of science and technology, and a master's degree in science and technology studies, and I've written two books about the history of spaceflight. If you still want to leave your ragey comment before you hear what I have to say, go ahead, I'm gonna take a sip of water from my Apollo 11 glass. Alright, now that people have rage-quit the video before it even started, we can dig in. Let's start at the very beginning, and I don't mean Kennedy before Congress in May of 1961. I mean Press Secretary for the White House, John C. Hagerty, speaking to the country on television on July 29, 1955. On that day, he appeared before the nation and said, On behalf of the President, I am now announcing that the President has approved plans by this country for going ahead with the launching of small unmanned Earth-circling satellites as part of the United States' participation in the International Geophysical Year. For the average person in the mid-1950s, rockets and satellites and space travel was the stuff of science fiction. But for a handful of scientists who understood what could be gained from exploring Earth and space and the sun from outside our atmosphere, this was significant. The International Geophysical Year was an international program of cooperation between a host of nations that ran between July of 1957 and December of 1958. And satellites were the only way of studying geophysical phenomena and solar phenomena without atmospheric disturbance. This was significant for science. The news of America's intention to launch a satellite reached Soviet scientist Leonid Sedov at the Sixth International Astronautical Congress in Copenhagen, Denmark four days later. And he immediately held a press conference himself wherein he announced that the realization of the Soviet satellite project can be expected in the near future. So in 1955, we have Cold War adversaries the United States and the Soviet Union both announcing their plans to launch satellites as part of the I.G.Y. By announcing the American program first, Eisenhower, however unwittingly, fired the starter's pistol in the race to be first in space. Anti-communist sentiments being what they were in the mid-20th century, the average American saw Russia as a backwards nation of potato farmers, definitely not a threat. So imagine America surprised when the Soviet Union was the first to launch the promised satellite, sputnik on October 4th of 1957. Fear and worry were among the dominant American reactions, but for Lyndon Baines Johnson, then Senate Majority Leader, the reaction was scheming. LBJ realized that if he could leverage space and become the politician associated with shaping America's reaction to sputnik, he might be able to use it to launch himself to the presidency. In the months that followed sputnik's launch, while Eisenhower maintained his position that America's satellite program has never been conducted as a race with other nations, it was LBJ who pushed the National Aeronautics in Space Act through Congress. When Eisenhower signed the NAS Act, he effectively created NASA, which opened its doors on October 1st of 1958. So here's the first time we have to stop, take a little bit of a break, and grab some coffee out of my giant lunar mug that shows you where all the landings were when there's hot liquid inside it. Everybody looks at NASA's inception date, October 1st, 1958, as the day that America started looking at anything in space. But that's not true. NASA was formed with the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, or the NACA at its core. The NACA was formed in 1913, and in the 40-plus years between its inception and NASA's inception, it became the governing body, the leading body of all aeronautical research in the United States. Programs that the NACA worked on included the X-15, which gathered some of the first data on human factors and hypersonic flight in advance of the space age. So NASA didn't pop out of nowhere and suddenly have to do stuff in space. It actually had decades of research coming to bear on the problem of spaceflight that it now had to handle. If you'd like more on that story, you can check out my first book, Breaking the Chains of Gravity. The other thing we have to keep in mind here is that NASA was not created for the grand purpose of uniting all space goals in the country. It was created because politicians decided to make it. Okay, let's get back into the story. So NASA's official reason to be was to bring together all the space research such that America could be a leader in this new arena. The unofficial but real reason NASA was created was so that the Americans could get a guy up in space before the Soviets launched a communist. Figuring out how to get that guy into space was the space task group. This group of engineers charged with figuring out how to put somebody into space. But while the STG was trying to figure out basic orbital spaceflight, there were other people at NASA that were starting to figure out what the agency would do after achieving that goal. Because no one thought the Soviet Union would be there first, even though, you know, Sputnik kind of surprised everybody. NASA's thinking was we'll get a person up and then we'll start laying the foundation for a long-term spaceflight program. Eventually, sometime after 1970, we'll go to the moon. That lunar program was very sketchy at the time, but it was already starting to take shape. Engineers had already figured out that a blunt body was probably going to be the easiest for spaceflight, at least in the near future. So figured that that would be the lunar vehicle as well. It also knew that it would need a very specific guidance and navigation program. It would need a very advanced engine that could fire and re-fire in space. It would also need the life support and basic power capabilities to keep a crew of three people alive for two weeks. Two weeks, because that's the time it takes to go to the moon, and three people because then you don't have a deadlocked decision. Wrapped up in this early planning was the idea that that mission would go straight to the moon. As one giant rocket land upright, at which point it would be ready to launch off the moon's surface and come back. That's a mission mode called direct ascent. Just go straight to the moon, land, fly straight back home again. However, that came with the challenge of building a giant rocket called NOVA. So an alternate position was Earth orbit rendezvous. Basically, launch that same big upright spacecraft in pieces, and then build it in Earth orbit. That could be done on smaller rockets, but of course then you have to figure out how to actually build something in space, which was not something NASA knew how to do at the time. But in 1959, this is so far ahead that it's all conceptual anyways, we don't need to make any firm decisions. Flash forward to April 12, 1961, and lo and behold, the Soviets do it again. Yuri Gagarin becomes the first human not only to go into space, but to orbit the Earth. At the time, all NASA could do with the redstone rocket and the mercury capsule was a pop-gun suborbital shot. So NASA is starting to fall even further behind. Gagarin is just the latest in a long series of Soviet firsts. At a press conference later that afternoon, JFK admitted he was tired of being beaten by the Soviet Union and added the news will be worse before it is better, and it will be some time before we catch up. Well, the president was speaking to the press. House Speaker Sam Rayburn addressed the House of Representative Committee on Science and Astronautics with a proposed amendment to the National Aeronautics and Space Act, the act that had created NASA. He suggested that they install Vice President, now Vice President, Lyndon Johnson as chairman of a new space council. The motion passed and LBJ became the decider. He would be the one telling Kennedy what to do in space. Kennedy would be announcing everything but LBJ would be the one meeting with NASA and passing his recommendations on to the president. This was great for Kennedy because if it all went well he could take credit. If it all failed, he could blame LBJ as the advisor. It wasn't long before JFK leaned on LBJ and his new capacity as head of the space council. After Gagarin's flight, days later, Kennedy suffered another embarrassment with a failed invasion of the Bay of Pigs and he needed to save face. So he looked to space as something that could maybe turn everything around for his presidency. On April 20, the president sent the Vice President a memo. Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets in a laboratory in space or by a trip to the moon or by a rocket to land on the moon or by a rocket to go to the moon and back with a man? Is there any other space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win? Eight days and many meetings with NASA managers and presidential science advisors later, LBJ made his recommendation to JFK in another memo. As for a man trip around the moon or a safe landing in return by a man on the moon, neither the U.S. nor the USSR has such capabilities at this time as so far as we know. The Russians have had more experience with large boosters and with flights of dogs and men. Hence, they might be conceded a time advantage in circumnavigating of the moon and also a man trip to the moon. However, with a strong effort, the United States could conceivably be first in those two accomplishments by 1966 or 1967. Kennedy famously took Johnson's advice and asked Congress to fund a manned lunar landing mission on May 25th of 1961. If we are to win the battle that is now going on around the world between freedom and tyranny, the dramatic achievements in space which occurred in recent weeks should have made clear to us all the impact of the adventure on the minds of men everywhere. I therefore ask the Congress above and beyond the increases I have earlier requested for space activities to provide the funds which are needed to meet the following national goals. First, I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal before this decade is out of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth. No single space project in this period will be more impressive to mankind or more important for the long-range exploration of space and none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish. Kennedy knew full well that he would probably not be in office by the time the moon landing happened but it didn't matter. He did something beautiful. Man, moon, decade. Three terms that everyone can understand. The moon is right there, we can see it. We all have a sense of what a decade is and we all know what a human is. Congress, as we know, agreed and Apollo was off to the races. We often take May 25th of 1961 as the day Apollo started but it really wasn't. NASA didn't make the recommendation and LBJ didn't pass on the recommendation out of nothing. NASA knew that it was feasible to get to the moon within the decade so it obviously had some preliminary background knowledge. Remember all that NACA stuff that it brought to bear when NASA was created? It wasn't like this was just the start date and everything started here. So when we eventually say it happened very fast in nine years, it did but it wasn't starting from absolutely nothing. We had a bit of an idea of what we were getting into before NASA started really laying the foundation for the Apollo program. When Kennedy put NASA on the path of the moon he didn't exactly hand the agency a user manual. In fact, NASA literally had to write all the user manuals as the program developed. There was so much that NASA had to figure out and the first one that it had been playing around with but hadn't made a decision on was how, otherwise known as the mission mode decision. We already looked at direct ascent and Earth orbit rendezvous but both of those required different spacecraft to actually settle on a mode. It couldn't contract out building the spacecraft because the contractor had to know what it was building. To complicate matters, in late 1961 a new mission mode was presented. Lunar orbit rendezvous. Lunar orbit rendezvous basically simplified the mission by lightening the spacecraft at the top of the stack. It would actually land on the moon by not having it all land on the moon. Lunar orbit rendezvous took advantage of the weight saving from leaving the heaviest element of the spacecraft, the command service module, aka the gas tank, in lunar orbit while landing with a specific little landing bug. That bug could be too staged, such that the upper stage could use the descent stage as a launch pad. Therefore, taking out the complication of landing a rocket upright and having the crew somehow ready it for a launch on the moon. NASA announced that it would go with lunar orbit rendezvous on July 11th, 1962. But it didn't fully commit to it until October of that year. That's over a year and a half figuring out the mode. After the mode decision was made in late 1962 could NASA really start digging into actually building all of the pieces of the spacecraft. But there was something else that came up in 1962. The Gemini program. NASA realized that it had a lot to learn about living and working in space, not to mention there was going to be a lull between Mercury and Apollo. So it created the interim program Gemini that would figure out all the technical things of Apollo, just in a different spacecraft. As NASA really started diving into the Apollo program this sheer magnitude became visible. Every piece of the spacecraft was built by a different contractor. That goes for the spacecraft and the rocket. And they all had subcontractors. And you start to see how many places were involved in building Apollo. North American aviation in Downey, California built the command service module and the second stage of the Saturn V, the S2. Brumman in Bethpage, New York built the lunar module. Boeing in Seattle built the first stage of the Saturn V, the S1C. Douglas aircraft in California built the S4B stage of the Saturn V. The rocket's development was done out of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, a center built in 1960 for this purpose. The Stennis Space Center in Mississippi was built to test the rocket stages. The Michoud facility in Louisiana was run by Marshall and was built to assemble the Saturn V. In the early days of Apollo, NASA moved mission control from Florida to Houston, Texas in a political move. This was where all the human spaceflight activities would center. Very quickly, Apollo gave birth to this massive spaceflight industrial complex that touched every corner of the country. All this was happening. And JFK didn't care about space. He didn't care about science. He didn't care about exploring what was beyond our planet. He didn't even care about exploring the moon. All he cared about was landing there first to beat the Soviet Union. He told NASA Administrator Jim Webb on November 21st of 1962 that the moon landing was important for political reasons, international political reasons, adding that it was a race whether they liked it or not. As Apollo's budget ballooned in 1963, JFK became increasingly concerned that Apollo would be little more than a boondoggle that would ruin his legacy. So he brought his concerns to Jim Webb. On September 18th, 1963 he asked, Do you think the lunar, the man landings on the moon is a good idea? Webb said yes, but Kennedy just didn't feel like it was worth pursuing. He wanted to end Apollo before it ended his good standing as president. So before the 18th General Assembly of the United Nations on September 20th, 1963, Kennedy called for Apollo's cancellation and replacement by a joint U.S. Soviet mission to the moon that would foster peace and cooperation instead of competition. A little more than two months later on November 22nd, 1963, JFK was shot and killed during a motorcade in Dallas, Texas. LBJ was sworn in as president that same day. We never talk about the fact that Kennedy tried to cancel Apollo, and I don't know why. That's so significant that he called to cancel Apollo, that he started laying the foundation for joint U.S. Soviet mission, whether or not that would have happened, that he started putting that idea out into the public before his assassination is very important for understanding how Apollo became what it was. After JFK's assassination, the moon landing took on a very different role. It was no longer just a politically motivated scientific goal. Now it had an emotional element, and all of that fell on LBJ. LBJ couldn't have canceled Apollo if he wanted to. Not only had his name become synonymous with space after pushing the NASAC through Congress and doing so much to stay in the headlines as the politician who had his finger on the pulse of America's reaction to an interesting and exciting realm. He couldn't let Kennedy's legacy die. He had to see it through. There was no way Apollo was not going to get funded all the way through. And now, for NASA, it wasn't just fulfilling a goal. It was honoring the fallen president's legacy, and that is extremely powerful. Honestly, I would say that JFK's assassination played a significant role in Apollo's success. It's no stretch to say that the 1960s were an incredibly turbulent decade. LBJ inherited a very messy country from JFK. He worked really hard to free Americans from poverty and racial injustice by introducing programs like Medicare, Medicaid, Head Start, and Job Corps, all designed to give Americans a helping hand rather than a handout. He pushed the Civil Rights Act through Congress that prohibited racial discrimination, but racism remained a prevalent problem nationwide. He also inherited Kennedy's commitment to stopping the spread of communism in Asia and soon found America in a full-scale war against the Viet Cong in Vietnam. Against this backdrop of social unrest, NASA remained in its own little bubble laser-focused on getting to the moon, and it looked like it was taking great strides and going to make it. The Gemini program taught NASA so much about living and working in space, it solved a lot of problems ahead of Apollo. And it could do that because Johnson was making sure the space agency got the funding it needed. In 1966, NASA reached a peak of funding. That year, it got close to 4.4% of the national budget. But it looked like it was money well spent. As 1967 dawned, NASA was poised to start manned Apollo missions. It had plenty of time to get to the moon by the end of the decade. But then disaster struck again. On January 27th, 1967, the Apollo 1 crew was killed in a fire during a pre-launch test, the Plugs Out Test. It was thought to be routine, but this test ended in tragedy. From what surprising move, Johnson actually allowed NASA to head up its own accident investigation. And to be fair, NASA did take a very good, hard look at itself. The silver lining of the Apollo 1 fire was that it happened on the launch pad and not in space. They spent NASA and North America and were able to take apart Apollo 1 and really understand what had happened to the spacecraft. The result of the exhaustive investigation was that NASA found as many problems with spacecraft as it did with the management that had allowed problems to crop up in the first place. The result was a much better, much safer Block 2 spacecraft, as well as a culture that put safety above everything else. The agency recovered amazingly quickly. In 1968, a year marked by civil rights rallies, feminist demonstrations, and anti-war protests, NASA launched the unmanned Apollos 4, 5 and 6 to prove the technology was ready to go. In October, 21 months after the Apollo 1 fire, Apollo 7 marked NASA's return to manned spaceflight with a simple orbital test of the command service module. That was Apollo 7. In December, it launched Apollo 8 to the moon with another command service module. The lunar module was falling badly behind schedule, but the mission nevertheless proved the mothership was up to the lunar journey. When 1969 dawned, NASA seemed charmed. In March, Apollo 9 tested the command service and lunar modules on a simulated landing mission in Earth orbit. In May, Apollo 10 ran through a full landing dress rehearsal stopping just short of the lunar surface. Apollo 11 was slated for the first lunar landing attempt in July, with Apollo 12 on deck for November launch, a backup window within the decade. As we know, Apollo 11 fulfilled Kennedy's goal on July 20, 1969. From our modern standpoint, we romanticize Apollo. It was an incredible program where in NASA, its contractors and subcontractors, 400,000 people developed the technology to land a man on the moon and return him safely to the Earth in just nine short years. Not only that, but we did it six times with Apollo's 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, and 17. We forget that NASA had been thinking about a lunar landing for years before Kennedy made it the agency's main focus. We ignore that both NASA and Apollo were created to save face against the Soviet Union in the Cold War, and that the space agency had a war-level budget as a result. We imagine Apollo as this wondrous program that inspired a generation, but forget that amid the chaos of the 1960s, close to 60% of Americans opposed the excess spending on Apollo when there were more immediate issues to solve at home. Apollo could not have happened without the social and political milieu that allowed it to exist, and yet we talk about it without that context all the time. Instead of changing the way we think about spaceflight and how it should be in the post-apollo world, we say, if we were able to go to the moon in nine years, why aren't we back? Why aren't we on Mars? Why aren't we here or there? Apollo, in short, has given us such unrealistic expectations of what spaceflight could and should be, because the perfect storm that allowed the moon landing to happen in July of 1969 can never happen again. Since Apollo, we just haven't had the national urgency driving space exploration, nor have we had the massive budgets we need to facilitate these kinds of programs. Compare the agency's 1966 4.4% of the national budget with the 0.5% it gets now, and yet somehow NASA's identity is still wrapped up in Apollo. Its value, perceived mostly by the average person, has become so wrapped up in human spaceflight but not just that of flagship human missions. We have this notion that spaceflight matters when the human is central. Presidents are not immune to the influence of Apollo when it comes to laying out space policy, and many have sought to have their own Kennedy moment. On July 20th of 1989 George Bush Sr. announced the Space Exploration Initiative, a program that would see construction of the space station of freedom, a permanent base on the moon, and a manned mission to Mars by 2019. Again, urgency was missing. Congress balked at the $500 billion price tag and the program was never implemented. In 2004, George W. Bush Jr. called for a man returned to the moon by 2020 to lay the foundation for a manned mission to Mars and also directed NASA to finish the International Space Station and retire the space shuttle by 2010. This prompted NASA to launch the Constellation Program, the Orion spacecraft, the lunar lander Altar, and the Aries 1 and Aries 5 launch vehicles. Urgency was still missing and Constellation fell victim to another challenge in space, changing administrations. Barack Obama cancelled Constellation in 2010, two years after taking office. But cancelling a major program isn't always that simple. That spaceflight industrial complex that Apollo created is still in place today. Each of the NASA centers and the contractors tied to the agency rely on space contracts to create jobs and drive local economies. To protect their constituents, congressmen presented NASA with a compromise. Cancel Constellation but keep the big rocket and the jobs of everyone building it. We got the space launch system out of the deal. We'll rock it without a firm goal that sometimes called the Senate Launch System. This year, Donald Trump's administration has tried, again, to reignite a big program. Vice President Mike Pence made the statement, at the direction of the President of the United States, it is the stated policy of this administration and of the United States of America to return American astronauts to the moon within the next five years. The next step would be a permanent lunar base that could facilitate a mission to Mars. The problem is, there's still no urgency and the timeframe is completely unrealistic. Another problem with Apollo-inspired programs, they're long. Kennedy knew he likely wouldn't be in office when Apollo landed on the moon. Presidents now will start programs and try to get it done within their administration but it's so unrealistic. What would have to happen for a big program on the scale of Apollo would be for President to start something in office that somehow could survive multiple administrations. Whether there are international contracts like with the International Space Station or with private companies like SpaceX and Blue Origin. The reality is we're not embroiled in a Cold War. We do not need to prove our technological might against an adversary right now. There's nothing driving our need to do these big scale crash programs like Apollo, nor are they necessarily what we should be focusing on. These crash programs are single purpose. Apollo couldn't really do much else aside from go to the moon. There were some considerations about actually using it to go to Venus and Mars with the Apollo Applications Program but obviously that never happened. What would make so much sense would be to start laying a solid foundation for long term human exploration. But maybe it doesn't even need to happen now. Maybe we need to understand more. To learn more with robotic spaceflight before we start sending humans to Mars because there's still a lot of challenges. Space is hard. Everything takes a long time. And honestly everything in space is trying to kill you. Why are we rushing? We don't need to keep the speed of Apollo. We don't need to keep looking at that model. What we should retain from Apollo is the excitement, is the inspiration, is the wonder of that program that will keep people excited about spaceflight and space exploration for generations to come. What we shouldn't do is try to replicate these fast programs for the sake of replicating these fast programs. Apollo was amazing. What made it happen and what made it amazing can never happen again. So instead of trying to recreate it we should create something new and let Apollo stay in the past. All right. That is my super long op-ed and my own personal feelings about the legacy of Apollo. What do you guys think? Aside from telling me that I don't know what I'm talking about because I know those comments are going to dominate this feed immediately. Let me know what you think we should be saving from Apollo. How we should remember it. What we should do. What we should do for the next generation because that's what matters. We can't just keep going over it again. I know I do that as an historian but when we're looking at planning, long-term spaceflight in the future we need to start changing the way we look at space. What do you guys think we should be doing next? Let me know all of your thoughts in the comments below. And of course guys I do have the full much more eloquent written piece that goes along with this on my blog Over at Discover and be sure to check it out if you would like to go into a bit more detail. Alright guys, happy Apollo 11 landingversary. I hope you're all doing something appropriately spacey tonight and you know most nights because who doesn't want to celebrate the insanity that was going to the moon because let's be honest they went to the moon and that's crazy and awesome. Thank you guys so much for watching and I'll see you next time.