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| Apollo 12 Command Module Yankee Clipper, on display at the Virginia Air & Space Center in Hampton, VA. |
15 years later I was one of the disillusioned geeky kids who had struggled through an engineering degree only to find that NASA wasn't hiring and lots of aerospace engineers were working in burger joints in southern California. On the early internet newsgroups we debated what had happened, what had gone wrong, why we weren't watching the first Mars landing on TV and building the ships in orbit that would take humans to the outer planets - just like in 2001 A Space Odyssey. In the early 1980s the end of the Apollo story was still playing out, but now that most of the people involved have retired and their books have been written its easier to piece together what happened.
What we forgot or didn't know in 1982 was how much NASA and the space program were really products of the Cold War. Scientific accomplishments were a way for a country to flaunt its technical and industrial abilities in a seemingly peaceful way while reminding everyone of their military strength. During WWII Russia suffered significant losses to the little bits of industry it had; launching Sputnik in 1957 and then Gagarin in 1961 demonstrated that Russia - under communism - had not only recovered from the war but had become as technically sophisticated as the western democracies. It also sent a subtle message to western militaries: a rocket that could put a man into orbit was capable of delivering an atomic bomb anywhere on the planet.
With the Soviets getting their name in the headlines and record books with a string of "space firsts" based largely on ICBM technology, the US had no real choice but to respond with something even more ambitious. It went beyond simple prestige: maintaining the perception of technical and military leadership translated into incredibly valuable geo-political influence. If such a highly visible demonstration of technology made the Soviets unsure of America's military capabilities, or pushed them to use up their more limited resources trying to compete in a space race, it could reduce the chance of a confrontation escalating to a nuclear war, which would make the space program a few billion dollars well spent.
We have all seen clips of President Kennedy's "we choose to go the Moon" speech, but the truth is Kennedy was not especially interested in space; he just asked his experts to come up with a flashy medium-term goal that would play to the strengths of the US, giving NASA time to catch up to and pass the Soviets. Going to the Moon required lots of engineering, but it didn't require any real breakthroughs - just lots of existing (and extremely expensive) technology. If there was one thing the US government was good at, it was spending massive amounts of money!
Kennedy would appoint James Webb as the NASA Administrator who would serve for most of the Apollo program, and he deserves much of the credit for getting the job done. Webb was an experienced Washington insider (and a WWII Marine pilot); he knew how the Federal Government worked and he knew the program's bottomless budget would make it a target for budget-cutters and political hangers-on. So he spent money as fast as possible - building facilities and buying equipment before they were really needed - to make it harder to cancel the project. He would quickly place contracts - spread among all of the major US aerospace companies - for components to build 15 Saturn V rockets, 12 of the smaller Saturn IBs (used for test flights to earth orbit) and a number of Apollo spacecraft and landers.
The budget for the entire US Apollo program, from 1959 to 1972 (including the Mercury and Gemini projects) was about $25B(illion) 1970 dollars. That's about $140B in 2015 dollars, but comparing dollar amounts across 40+ years can be deceptive - to get an idea of how much money that was lets stick with (approximately) 1970 dollars. Its tempting to take the $25B total spent on Apollo and divide by 13 years to get a little less than $2B a year, but the true cost is skewed by the fact that NASA spent very little until 1964, and was already winding things down by 1968. During its peak years NASA was spending about $5B per year, which is a reasonable guess at what it would have spent for the Apollo follow-on projects NASA was planning for the 1970s.
The entire US Federal Budget in 1969, the year of the first moon landing, was (ballpark numbers) $200B, with about $100B of that being spent by the military. Of that $100B in military spending, about $25B was the cost of the Vietnam war. In 1969, the US Gross Domestic Product - essentially the total of every working American's paycheck - was $1Trillion - or $1,000B dollars, so the US Government was taking (on average) 20 cents of every dollar out of everyone's paycheck as income tax, and of that 20 cents NASA was getting half a penny. Supporters of manned space flight often compare the $5B per year cost of Apollo to the much larger military budget or the GDP, but for a single civilian project $5B was a ridiculously large amount of money. For comparison, the Navy built its first Nimitz class nuclear powered aircraft carrier over the years 1968-1973 at a cost of $4.5B, so NASA was spending the equivalent of an aircraft carrier per year to get to the moon. And unlike an aircraft carrier with a 30+ year lifetime, that $5B was essentially gone - traded for a few 100 pounds of moon rock and some cool photos.
The 1969 Federal budget actually balanced - the IRS collected as much in taxes as the government spent (officially there was a 0.3% surplus). That means the U.S. could technically afford the Space Program and the Vietnam War - the government was not (as I had thought) printing money to pay all those soldiers and contractors and NASA engineers - at least not yet. But that extra $30B a year in government spending ($25B for the war and $5B for Apollo) was being pumped into factories producing tanks and bombs and moon landers instead of pickup trucks and TV sets. It created a situation where there was a shortage of consumer goods, which pushed prices up, and a shortage of labor that pushed wages up - a perfect storm for an inflationary spiral that coincidentally started in 1965 - the year that troop levels in Vietnam jumped and James Webb started buying moon rockets. The US economy could have absorbed the cost of Apollo by itself, but added on to the cost of the Vietnam War it became the straw that broke the camel's back: 1969 would be the last Federal surplus for nearly 30 years.
Lets rewind a bit. By 1966 the shine had already worn off the space program. The public had lost its initial enthusiasm and Congress was already tired of paying for it. While the public was all for the idea of space exploration in general, everyone could think of other things that were more deserving of all that money. Sure, NASA was still popular with the 8 year old crowd, but when it came to entertainment value Star Trek had the real thing beat six ways from Sunday and it didn't cost tax payers a dime.
Most of the folks at NASA were too busy building rockets and spacecraft to worry about public opinion. The Gemini program was in full swing, launching a mission every 2-3 months to train the new batch of moon-bound astronauts and work out the techniques and procedures (like on-orbit rendezvous and docking) required for the moon missions. Saturn I rockets were being flown with mocked up Apollo capsules to test hardware and gather data on reentry. Engineers were working out the last design and manufacturing problems with the new Saturn V and Apollo spacecraft. Kennedy had called the shot - "to go to the Moon in this decade" - and James Webb took that date very seriously; he knew that worrying about what came next, and trying to do too much, could easily derail that goal.
But Apollo was too big, and the lead times were too long, to not give some thought to the future. Assuming there was a moon landing sometime in 1969, on January 1st, 1970 there would still be 400,000 NASA employees and contractors expecting to meet the next decade with a job. Long before 1970 there had to be new programs to take to Congress to fund the groundwork for whatever came next. As early as 1965 there were a few top-level managers and engineers planning what would come after that historic landing.
Most of the fleet of big and small Saturn rockets had been bought as insurance against design problems and accidents. Through a combination of passionate engineering, extensive ground testing and sheer luck the Saturn V proved to be surprisingly error-free right out of the box; after just two test flights it was declared "man-rated" and on its first manned launch it sent Apollo 8 on a fly-by of the moon. If all went as planned, and surprisingly it would, only 6 of the 15 Saturns would be used getting to the first landing, leaving 9 Saturn Vs for follow on missions.
Conspiracy theorists use the seemingly miraculous early success of the Saturn V as proof that it was faked, ignoring the fact that the Saturn V was an evolution of the Saturn I that had been flying since 1961. Still, Apollo 8 was a huge gamble, motivated by CIA information that the Soviets were about to attempt a moon mission early in the coming year.
Of course there would be more than one mission to the Moon, but the thinking was there was no reason to immediately fly 9 more identical lunar missions. The expectation was that there would be a continuing series of missions to the moon, and NASA would buy more Saturn Vs (or even more powerful rockets) going forward. But a Saturn V could lift a lot to orbit, so there were lots of ideas for other kinds of missions bouncing around NASA to fill up the launch calendar of the 1970s. In 1967 a few NASA big-shots put together the Apollo Applications Program, a sort of plan-for-a-plan that identified a number of projects, both in Earth orbit and additional lunar missions. The AAP was intended to use up the remaining Apollo hardware and justify the purchase of another batch of Saturn rockets (projections were for an ongoing launch-rate of 6 Saturn Vs and 6 Saturn IB's per year).
And what exactly was the Apollo Applications Program? Despite being authored by some of the smartest people at NASA, AAP was basically a collection of ideas taken straight from 1950s science fiction: space stations and space telescopes and lunar bases, running experiments, making astronomical and solar observations, and lunar sample and return on a grand scale.
What NASA really wanted, and knew Congress would never pay for, was a Mars landing. As early as 1951 those wacky guys at the Los Alamos National Lab that brought us the atomic bomb had been working on a nuclear powered rocket; by the early days of Apollo they were fairly far along. With a tiny fraction of NASA's budget in the 1960s they would develop a viable rocket engine with the idea of using it as the third stage of a stretched and upgraded Saturn V that could deliver serious tonnage to the Moon and put Mars in reach, but at a cost that would dwarf Apollo. One of the less obvious goals of AAP was to quietly lay the ground work for that Mars mission until a more agreeable Congress was seated, presumably when the Vietnam War was over.
The problem with the AAP was that all of those aging science fiction stories it was built on had missed the mark. Before space probes actually visited Mars and Venus, sci-fi writers had expected them to be at least somewhat habitable and had set all sorts of adventures on those worlds, when in truth living there would require a man-made environment much like a space station. The stories had also failed to predict computers and telemetry and reliable solid-state electronics, and assumed that humans would be needed to flip switches and replace vacuum tubes and pick up rocks. By the late 1960s - thanks largely to technology developed for Apollo - practically all of those tasks could be handled by simple robot hardware without the added cost and complexity of keeping a human alive in the harsh environment of space.
Even with nuclear rocket engines, a trip to Mars will take months, for a handful of astronauts squeezed into a spacecraft about the size of a nice Winnebago. Kubrick's 2001 was one of the few 1960s era science fiction movies to accurately capture the cramped, slow moving feel of space flight, and audiences - at least the ones not getting stoned for the psychedelic sequence at the end - found it boring. Science fiction had made space travel exciting in a way that NASA could never deliver, and without public support their AAP was going nowhere.
What actually happened was a series of unfortunate and tragic events. Just days after NASA asked Congress for $500M to start work on AAP, the Apollo 1 fire would claim the lives of astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee. While the fire is often seen as a sign of shoddy engineering and poor management at NASA, such a disaster was not unexpected given the complexity of the systems being developed; many more test pilots had died developing military aircraft during the 1940s, 50s and 60s. But the fire was a handy excuse for Congress to slow spending on new things, which would inevitably slow the spending on future projects.
At about the same time President Johnson, a strong supporter of NASA, decided not to run for re-election. Johnson had escalated the Vietnam war and understood he would never be re-elected; stepping down at least gave the Democrats a chance with another candidate (then vice president Hubert Humphrey). Weary with handling the fallout of the Apollo fire and faced with the certainty of a new president, Webb decided to step down as NASA Administrator before the coming inauguration to make it easy for the next president to appoint a replacement. Webb would discuss his resignation with Johnson in the fall of 1968, just before the election and just days after manned Apollo missions resumed; somewhat surprisingly, Johnson would make Webb's resignation effective immediately.
Again, the conspiracy theorists point to Webb's sudden resignation as proof of something shady. In his own words Webb says he was one of the first to know of Johnson's decision not to run, and he had told Johnson they "would go out together". Johnson probably realized whoever he appointed as interim would still be there when the push for the moon occurred in the first half of 1969, and decided to put a replacement in the saddle to gain experience as quickly as possible.
Thomas Paine would fill in as acting Director of NASA, and eventually be confirmed by Congress the following year, after President Nixon took office and during the first few Apollo landings. Nixon most likely left Paine in place rather than risk disruption just as the last few moon missions were playing out; the new president had already convened a panel of experts who had recommended winding down manned space in favor of cheap robotic missions. NASA funding in 1972 was about 70% of its maximum in 1965, but there would be no significant increase for the next 10 years while the inflation of the 1970s effectively cut those dollars in half.
Paine was enthusiastic but he was not politically shrewd in the way Webb had been; he had no success convincing the Nixon government to authorize any new manned programs. Instead NASA was given enough money do a few more more moon landings to use up the existing hardware. After a year and a half fighting in vain for new projects, Paine realized his real job was to quietly turn out the lights at NASA; instead he would resign and return to a job in industry.
Under Paine's successor, James Fletcher, NASA managed to salvage one of the most basic projects from the AAP, an idea for a simple space-station built in an empty Saturn V third stage, an idea that would turn into Skylab - but fitting that into the budget required scrapping the last three planned moon missions (which may have been scrapped anyhow). In the 1970s NASA would try to make space flight more economical by building a reusable spacecraft, an idea that would eventually become the Space Shuttle. Originally the Shuttle had been imagined as just one piece of a Space Transportation System that would include reusable spacecraft that stayed in space, moored at a space station, carrying astronauts from orbit to the Moon and beyond just like in Kubrick's movie, but again there was no political or popular support for effectively doubling or tripling NASA's budget to get beyond Earth orbit.
In hindsight, nothing went wrong - NASA accomplished exactly what it was intended to do. The moon landing once and for all eliminated the perception of the US as a purely blue-collar nation of shop keepers and factory workers. Apollo made it clear that America's incredible industrial capacity was backed up with engineers and scientists that were as good (or better) than the technical strongholds of England and Germany. High paying engineering and science jobs were created in southern US states, giving an economic boost to some of the least developed parts of the country.
And as expected, the Soviets poured huge amounts of scientific talent and industrial resources into the race to the Moon. The Soviet space program had a reputation for doing more with less than NASA's gold-plated way of doing things, but they had to: during the 1960s the Soviet GDP was about 1/10th the size of the US GDP. The Soviet space program put a much bigger dent in the standard of living of the Soviets than NASA ever did in the US. Built on a shoestring, the Russian N-1 moon rocket (their Saturn V equivalent) attempted to use a large number of small, relatively cheap rocket engines, with limited testing - resulting in 4 fairly spectacular test-flight failures before they gave up on a lunar mission of their own.
NASA is often criticized for being wasteful with money. During the Apollo era that was intentional: NASA had the luxury of trading money for time. Making the Saturn V first stage recoverable might have saved $100M per launch, but would have added a year or two to the design and testing; letting the rocket fall into the Atlantic made more sense when the only goal that mattered was a 1969 moon landing. Since the Apollo years, NASA has learned to work at least a little more efficiently and has managed to continue doing important - if not quite sexy - R&D work long after the bloom has left the rose. While the Space Shuttle failed to deliver on cheap access to orbit, the Shuttle era - the 1980s and 90s - gave us a taste for the commercial value of space-based services such as earth observation, GPS, and phone and data service anywhere on the planet, and that has driven demand for commercial launch providers. If NASA is ever truly asked to send a manned mission to the Moon or Mars, they will almost certainly make use of the high-performance engines developed for the Shuttle and the life-support technology perfected on the International Space Station.
Today NASA has a plan to get to Mars sometime around 2035 (don't get excited, this is not the first or even the second version of the plan). This latest plan uses Space Shuttle technology and leftover parts to build a new heavy-lift launcher that looks a lot like a Saturn V, to launch a spacecraft that looks a lot like an Apollo CSM. Getting to Mars in a reasonable amount of time (the longer it takes, the harder it is to keep the crew alive) will most likely require a nuclear rocket, like the one the AEC developed in the 1960s. Oh the irony...
The actual Mars mission in this hypothetical plan requires 8 launches (!!!) of the new heavy-lifter to assemble the spacecraft in Earth orbit before it heads off to Mars. I suspect reality will be quite a bit different than this plan, for the simple reason that it always has been. Not surprisingly, the cost of this new heavy lifter is (adjusted for inflation) about the same as a Saturn V. With 8 launches, plus all the engineering of the new spacecraft, a single Mars mission will be in the ballpark of the cost of the entire Apollo program. Stretching that out over 20+ years makes it look affordable, but really only makes carrying it out riskier, since you can't rely on Congress to keep their funding promises longer than a presidential election cycle.
If NASA is serious about getting to Mars, they need a plan to go from zero to landing in at most 6 years, at a cost of about $5B (today dollars) per year (on top of the $4B they're spending to keep the ISS in orbit). And even if NASA is serious about a permanent Mars base, they should stop talking about it, because it makes no points with Congress who simply see a base as a way of being held hostage for future space funding.
Which sounds defeatist, but only because that is how the last 70 years of science fiction have prepared us to think about man-in-space. Instead consider that Elon Musk's Falcon Heavy launcher is expected to put 53 tons into orbit for the low-low price of $100M. That's today's horribly inflated dollars - not the 1960s dollars that paid for Apollo. This is unbelievably cheap by current standards (if it was anyone besides Musk, I would put no faith in that prediction). 50 tons is a fully loaded jetliner with 100 passengers (no, you can't fly a 737 to orbit and back, but I'd expect a spaceplane carrying a similar number of people to weigh a similar amount), or a small space station. Suddenly passenger fare to orbit is in the realm of $1-2M, and a private space station is in the $500M range. Sure, at these prices only Silicon Valley billionaires will be going to space, but there are enough of them to pay the bills and drive demand while the next generation of technology is developed so mere mortals can get to orbit for the cost of a vacation to Europe.
Cheap commercial launches to orbit have the potential to change the assumptions NASA's current Mars plan was built on. NASA can concentrate on building a Mars spacecraft and a less ambitious heavy-lift rocket to put it in orbit, and then SpaceX can deliver the tons and tons of reaction mass, fuel, oxygen, food, water, and eventually the crew, for less than it would cost NASA to design and build multiple Saturn class rockets. I don't know how likely it is that will happen, but at my age I think its my only hope of seeing a Mars landing while I still have enough brain cells left to appreciate it. I'll remain hopeful...
Lets rewind a bit. By 1966 the shine had already worn off the space program. The public had lost its initial enthusiasm and Congress was already tired of paying for it. While the public was all for the idea of space exploration in general, everyone could think of other things that were more deserving of all that money. Sure, NASA was still popular with the 8 year old crowd, but when it came to entertainment value Star Trek had the real thing beat six ways from Sunday and it didn't cost tax payers a dime.
Most of the folks at NASA were too busy building rockets and spacecraft to worry about public opinion. The Gemini program was in full swing, launching a mission every 2-3 months to train the new batch of moon-bound astronauts and work out the techniques and procedures (like on-orbit rendezvous and docking) required for the moon missions. Saturn I rockets were being flown with mocked up Apollo capsules to test hardware and gather data on reentry. Engineers were working out the last design and manufacturing problems with the new Saturn V and Apollo spacecraft. Kennedy had called the shot - "to go to the Moon in this decade" - and James Webb took that date very seriously; he knew that worrying about what came next, and trying to do too much, could easily derail that goal.
But Apollo was too big, and the lead times were too long, to not give some thought to the future. Assuming there was a moon landing sometime in 1969, on January 1st, 1970 there would still be 400,000 NASA employees and contractors expecting to meet the next decade with a job. Long before 1970 there had to be new programs to take to Congress to fund the groundwork for whatever came next. As early as 1965 there were a few top-level managers and engineers planning what would come after that historic landing.
Most of the fleet of big and small Saturn rockets had been bought as insurance against design problems and accidents. Through a combination of passionate engineering, extensive ground testing and sheer luck the Saturn V proved to be surprisingly error-free right out of the box; after just two test flights it was declared "man-rated" and on its first manned launch it sent Apollo 8 on a fly-by of the moon. If all went as planned, and surprisingly it would, only 6 of the 15 Saturns would be used getting to the first landing, leaving 9 Saturn Vs for follow on missions.
Conspiracy theorists use the seemingly miraculous early success of the Saturn V as proof that it was faked, ignoring the fact that the Saturn V was an evolution of the Saturn I that had been flying since 1961. Still, Apollo 8 was a huge gamble, motivated by CIA information that the Soviets were about to attempt a moon mission early in the coming year.
Of course there would be more than one mission to the Moon, but the thinking was there was no reason to immediately fly 9 more identical lunar missions. The expectation was that there would be a continuing series of missions to the moon, and NASA would buy more Saturn Vs (or even more powerful rockets) going forward. But a Saturn V could lift a lot to orbit, so there were lots of ideas for other kinds of missions bouncing around NASA to fill up the launch calendar of the 1970s. In 1967 a few NASA big-shots put together the Apollo Applications Program, a sort of plan-for-a-plan that identified a number of projects, both in Earth orbit and additional lunar missions. The AAP was intended to use up the remaining Apollo hardware and justify the purchase of another batch of Saturn rockets (projections were for an ongoing launch-rate of 6 Saturn Vs and 6 Saturn IB's per year).
And what exactly was the Apollo Applications Program? Despite being authored by some of the smartest people at NASA, AAP was basically a collection of ideas taken straight from 1950s science fiction: space stations and space telescopes and lunar bases, running experiments, making astronomical and solar observations, and lunar sample and return on a grand scale.
What NASA really wanted, and knew Congress would never pay for, was a Mars landing. As early as 1951 those wacky guys at the Los Alamos National Lab that brought us the atomic bomb had been working on a nuclear powered rocket; by the early days of Apollo they were fairly far along. With a tiny fraction of NASA's budget in the 1960s they would develop a viable rocket engine with the idea of using it as the third stage of a stretched and upgraded Saturn V that could deliver serious tonnage to the Moon and put Mars in reach, but at a cost that would dwarf Apollo. One of the less obvious goals of AAP was to quietly lay the ground work for that Mars mission until a more agreeable Congress was seated, presumably when the Vietnam War was over.
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| One of the more interesting items at the Neil Armstrong Museum: classic SciFi of the 1960s, taken on a 1995 Space Shuttle Mission by Astronaut Janice Voss. |
Even with nuclear rocket engines, a trip to Mars will take months, for a handful of astronauts squeezed into a spacecraft about the size of a nice Winnebago. Kubrick's 2001 was one of the few 1960s era science fiction movies to accurately capture the cramped, slow moving feel of space flight, and audiences - at least the ones not getting stoned for the psychedelic sequence at the end - found it boring. Science fiction had made space travel exciting in a way that NASA could never deliver, and without public support their AAP was going nowhere.
What actually happened was a series of unfortunate and tragic events. Just days after NASA asked Congress for $500M to start work on AAP, the Apollo 1 fire would claim the lives of astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee. While the fire is often seen as a sign of shoddy engineering and poor management at NASA, such a disaster was not unexpected given the complexity of the systems being developed; many more test pilots had died developing military aircraft during the 1940s, 50s and 60s. But the fire was a handy excuse for Congress to slow spending on new things, which would inevitably slow the spending on future projects.
At about the same time President Johnson, a strong supporter of NASA, decided not to run for re-election. Johnson had escalated the Vietnam war and understood he would never be re-elected; stepping down at least gave the Democrats a chance with another candidate (then vice president Hubert Humphrey). Weary with handling the fallout of the Apollo fire and faced with the certainty of a new president, Webb decided to step down as NASA Administrator before the coming inauguration to make it easy for the next president to appoint a replacement. Webb would discuss his resignation with Johnson in the fall of 1968, just before the election and just days after manned Apollo missions resumed; somewhat surprisingly, Johnson would make Webb's resignation effective immediately.
Again, the conspiracy theorists point to Webb's sudden resignation as proof of something shady. In his own words Webb says he was one of the first to know of Johnson's decision not to run, and he had told Johnson they "would go out together". Johnson probably realized whoever he appointed as interim would still be there when the push for the moon occurred in the first half of 1969, and decided to put a replacement in the saddle to gain experience as quickly as possible.
Thomas Paine would fill in as acting Director of NASA, and eventually be confirmed by Congress the following year, after President Nixon took office and during the first few Apollo landings. Nixon most likely left Paine in place rather than risk disruption just as the last few moon missions were playing out; the new president had already convened a panel of experts who had recommended winding down manned space in favor of cheap robotic missions. NASA funding in 1972 was about 70% of its maximum in 1965, but there would be no significant increase for the next 10 years while the inflation of the 1970s effectively cut those dollars in half.
Paine was enthusiastic but he was not politically shrewd in the way Webb had been; he had no success convincing the Nixon government to authorize any new manned programs. Instead NASA was given enough money do a few more more moon landings to use up the existing hardware. After a year and a half fighting in vain for new projects, Paine realized his real job was to quietly turn out the lights at NASA; instead he would resign and return to a job in industry.
Under Paine's successor, James Fletcher, NASA managed to salvage one of the most basic projects from the AAP, an idea for a simple space-station built in an empty Saturn V third stage, an idea that would turn into Skylab - but fitting that into the budget required scrapping the last three planned moon missions (which may have been scrapped anyhow). In the 1970s NASA would try to make space flight more economical by building a reusable spacecraft, an idea that would eventually become the Space Shuttle. Originally the Shuttle had been imagined as just one piece of a Space Transportation System that would include reusable spacecraft that stayed in space, moored at a space station, carrying astronauts from orbit to the Moon and beyond just like in Kubrick's movie, but again there was no political or popular support for effectively doubling or tripling NASA's budget to get beyond Earth orbit.
In hindsight, nothing went wrong - NASA accomplished exactly what it was intended to do. The moon landing once and for all eliminated the perception of the US as a purely blue-collar nation of shop keepers and factory workers. Apollo made it clear that America's incredible industrial capacity was backed up with engineers and scientists that were as good (or better) than the technical strongholds of England and Germany. High paying engineering and science jobs were created in southern US states, giving an economic boost to some of the least developed parts of the country.
And as expected, the Soviets poured huge amounts of scientific talent and industrial resources into the race to the Moon. The Soviet space program had a reputation for doing more with less than NASA's gold-plated way of doing things, but they had to: during the 1960s the Soviet GDP was about 1/10th the size of the US GDP. The Soviet space program put a much bigger dent in the standard of living of the Soviets than NASA ever did in the US. Built on a shoestring, the Russian N-1 moon rocket (their Saturn V equivalent) attempted to use a large number of small, relatively cheap rocket engines, with limited testing - resulting in 4 fairly spectacular test-flight failures before they gave up on a lunar mission of their own.
NASA is often criticized for being wasteful with money. During the Apollo era that was intentional: NASA had the luxury of trading money for time. Making the Saturn V first stage recoverable might have saved $100M per launch, but would have added a year or two to the design and testing; letting the rocket fall into the Atlantic made more sense when the only goal that mattered was a 1969 moon landing. Since the Apollo years, NASA has learned to work at least a little more efficiently and has managed to continue doing important - if not quite sexy - R&D work long after the bloom has left the rose. While the Space Shuttle failed to deliver on cheap access to orbit, the Shuttle era - the 1980s and 90s - gave us a taste for the commercial value of space-based services such as earth observation, GPS, and phone and data service anywhere on the planet, and that has driven demand for commercial launch providers. If NASA is ever truly asked to send a manned mission to the Moon or Mars, they will almost certainly make use of the high-performance engines developed for the Shuttle and the life-support technology perfected on the International Space Station.
Today NASA has a plan to get to Mars sometime around 2035 (don't get excited, this is not the first or even the second version of the plan). This latest plan uses Space Shuttle technology and leftover parts to build a new heavy-lift launcher that looks a lot like a Saturn V, to launch a spacecraft that looks a lot like an Apollo CSM. Getting to Mars in a reasonable amount of time (the longer it takes, the harder it is to keep the crew alive) will most likely require a nuclear rocket, like the one the AEC developed in the 1960s. Oh the irony...
The actual Mars mission in this hypothetical plan requires 8 launches (!!!) of the new heavy-lifter to assemble the spacecraft in Earth orbit before it heads off to Mars. I suspect reality will be quite a bit different than this plan, for the simple reason that it always has been. Not surprisingly, the cost of this new heavy lifter is (adjusted for inflation) about the same as a Saturn V. With 8 launches, plus all the engineering of the new spacecraft, a single Mars mission will be in the ballpark of the cost of the entire Apollo program. Stretching that out over 20+ years makes it look affordable, but really only makes carrying it out riskier, since you can't rely on Congress to keep their funding promises longer than a presidential election cycle.
If NASA is serious about getting to Mars, they need a plan to go from zero to landing in at most 6 years, at a cost of about $5B (today dollars) per year (on top of the $4B they're spending to keep the ISS in orbit). And even if NASA is serious about a permanent Mars base, they should stop talking about it, because it makes no points with Congress who simply see a base as a way of being held hostage for future space funding.
Which sounds defeatist, but only because that is how the last 70 years of science fiction have prepared us to think about man-in-space. Instead consider that Elon Musk's Falcon Heavy launcher is expected to put 53 tons into orbit for the low-low price of $100M. That's today's horribly inflated dollars - not the 1960s dollars that paid for Apollo. This is unbelievably cheap by current standards (if it was anyone besides Musk, I would put no faith in that prediction). 50 tons is a fully loaded jetliner with 100 passengers (no, you can't fly a 737 to orbit and back, but I'd expect a spaceplane carrying a similar number of people to weigh a similar amount), or a small space station. Suddenly passenger fare to orbit is in the realm of $1-2M, and a private space station is in the $500M range. Sure, at these prices only Silicon Valley billionaires will be going to space, but there are enough of them to pay the bills and drive demand while the next generation of technology is developed so mere mortals can get to orbit for the cost of a vacation to Europe.
Cheap commercial launches to orbit have the potential to change the assumptions NASA's current Mars plan was built on. NASA can concentrate on building a Mars spacecraft and a less ambitious heavy-lift rocket to put it in orbit, and then SpaceX can deliver the tons and tons of reaction mass, fuel, oxygen, food, water, and eventually the crew, for less than it would cost NASA to design and build multiple Saturn class rockets. I don't know how likely it is that will happen, but at my age I think its my only hope of seeing a Mars landing while I still have enough brain cells left to appreciate it. I'll remain hopeful...
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