APOLLO 17 THE LAST VOYAGE OF AN EPOCH-MAKING PROGRAMME

Press, Volume CXII, Issue 33092, 6 December 1972, Page 18

APOLLO 17 THE LAST VOYAGE OF AN EPOCH-MAKING PROGRAMME

(Reprinted from "Newsweek" by arrangement)

Fittingly enough, the last flight of the Apollo programme will be the most spectacular. For the launch will be the first ever made at night, and the trail blazed by the arcing, eastward flight of the Saturn 5 rocket will be visible, weather permitting, to spectators as far away as Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, and Havana.

The Apollo 17 flight promises to attract the biggest audiences of any moon shot since Neil Armstrong’s first landing three years ago. Millions will view the launch from the V.I.P. stands at Cape Kennedy and all along the Florida beaches. Other thousands will watch from cruise ships and yachts; and the television audience, largely apathetic during most recent Apollo trips, is expected to be enormous. The reason is clear: Apollo 17 is not only the last of the series, it is certainly the last United States manned moon landing of the decade—and quite possibly of the century.

Vast project With the exception of the World War II Manhattan Project that produced the first atomic bomb, the world has never seen a project as vast, as expensive (total cost of the Apollo missions: $U524,000 million), as psychically inspiriting, at least to some, or as hotly controversial as the one now coming to an end in Florida. The Apollo programme literally cheated the sprawling complex that is Cape Kennedy; it made a world scientific capital out of the oilrich Texas city of Houston; and the rocket research connected with the programme put the little town of Huntsville, Alabama, indelibly on the map. But perhaps precisely because the Apollo programme did spend so much money, use so many resources and provide such spectacular drama, there have always been nagging doubts about it. Critics question whether the whole thing was really worth it, whether the money might not have been more profitably spent on more immediate needs—in short, whether the Apollo programme might not have been too overwhelming a response to the challenge, coming as it did at the

height of the cold war, which provoked it in the first place. U.S. shocked

It was just 15 years ago this autumn that the Soviet Union's Sputnik 1 shocked the United States to its soul. The response of the Eisenhower Administration was a programme to develop a powerful rocket—the Saturn 1— and a commitment to the Mercury programme of oneman flights. During the first months of his presidency. John F. Kennedy supported this cautious approach, but then the orbital flight of Yuri Gagarin in 1961 impelled him to make the moon the next United States goal, and the Apollo programme was designated to reach it. For the first six years, while the Mercury and Gemini series of flights established United States equality with the Russians in space, the Apollo programme struggled on through protracted technological debates on how to reach the moon, backbiting among top officials, disputes with contractors on their performance, and finally the disastrous 1967 launch-pad fire that killed astronauts Virgil Grissom, Edward White and Roger Chafee. It was the agency’s response to the tragedy — redesigning the Apollo craft and tightening its construction procedures—that ensured the phenomenal run of Apollo successes from the earth orbital flight in October, 1968, to the moon landing itself ten months later.

By the time that Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin stepped forth on the moon. National Aeronautical and Space Administration (N.A.S.A.) officials were confidently planning nine return flights to the moon, and even permitting themselves visions of manned missions to Mars, possibly in the 1980 s. But those hopes were soon dashed by economics. Even stricter budgetary limitations forced

cancellations of the last three planned Apollo flights. The space agency’s own budget declined to barely more than SUS3OOO million a year, a drastic reduction from the peak of SUSSOOO million hit in 1967. N.A.S.A. far from dead But even with the end of the Apollo programme, the United States programme is far from dead. In 1975, N.A.S.A. plans to launch two unmanned spaceships, to be known as Vikings, that will deposit capsules containing scientific experiments on the surface of Mars. The most likely date for the softlanding: July 4, 1976. Other unmanned probes are being readied to study the increasingly familiar environs of Venus, along with the totally unexplored regions around the giant planets Jupiter and Saturn, whose orbits lie 400 million and 800 million miles farther from the sun than earth’s.

Limited manned spaceflight will also survive the Apollo programme. Next year, the space agency will launch its Skylab programme ■ of 28 and 56-day flights : in earth orbit. Skylab’s pur- ' pose is to study man’s ! reactions to long periods of ! spaceflight and to carry out ! scientific experiments in a region free of the earth’s atmosphere and gravity. If the schedule holds, United States astronauts will be flying for 140 days in 1973 — more than in any other year. Two years later, the much-heralded joint flight of United States astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts is due to take place. Then 1978 should see the inaugural flights of the space shuttle. But for the immediate future, the space agency will have to operate without the driving vision of the specific goal that the moon landing provided for the Apollo programme. “I think the country benefited from the goal of reaching the moon in the 19605,” says the N.A.S.A. administrator, James Fletcher, “but I don’t think the country would tolerate another 10-year space goal just yet. Now’ we must show how the programme benefited the American people.” Already, some of the answers are beginning to emerge. For. scientists, of course, the exploration of the moon has been its own reward, and the detailed picture of lunar evolution provided by Apollo has already led to a much better understanding of the earth itself. Technological strides Technology also has taken great strides as a result of the Apollo programme. Many devices developed to cater to the unique needs of men in space are now being used, in modified form, for the benefit of earthbound consumers. Paralysed patients, for example, can control their wheelchairs or turn the pages of a book by operating a switch with their eyes. Commercial aircraft are now finished with a heat-insulat-ing paint that greatly reduces the hazard of fires. Supermarkets are preparing to offer their customers “instant rice” that swells and softens on the addition of tap water. And neurosurgery patients at Mount Sina Hospital in New York are routinely equipped with adaptations of Apollo space suits that overcome the potentially fatal drop in body temperature they might experience during long operations. Just as important is the technological expertise N.A.S.A. itself has developed as a result of Apollo. “N.A.S.A. knows more about systems than anyone,” says the Presidential science adviser, Edward E. David, “and systems are the essence of our transportation problems and solutions.” Thus, as Eugene Ceman, Harrison Schmitt and their colleague Ron Evans prepare to begin the farewell journey of Apollo, the space agency finds itself without a great mission in space, but with plenty to offer down on earth. But for the moment, the predominant feeling in the agency seems understandably to be one of wistfulness. “For me,” said the administrator, James Fletcher last week, “the last Apollo lunar landing brings a feeling of regret, almost nostalgia. This might be man’s greatest achievement, and here we are calling it quits. Speaking as an economic man, I know it’s the right thing, but emotionally I still have qualms about it.”