The Grandstands Are Emptying For the Race to the Moon

"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 earth."

--President John F. Kennedy, May 25, 1961

The words were inspiring but many a qualified scientist, even as he heard them, was moved to a vague unease. How could so rigid a time limit be set for so awesome a task? Still, the Russians had just put a man in orbit, and the disaster at the Bay of Pigs was embarrassingly fresh. A confident U.S. gesture seemed demanded by U.S. pride. "Three or four years ago, we had considerable worries about the Russians," remembers one space scientist. "Picking the man-on-the-moon program was a good choice. If we had settled for a lesser goal, they might have beaten us to it. This was the right thing to choose as the point for overtaking them."

Change in Time. Thus, the "race to the moon" began. The National Aeronautics and Space Administration raised its sights; Congress opened its pockets and poured all asked-for funds into NASA's outstretched hands. The U.S. space program sprouted like Jack's beanstalk, sucking up men and money at a prodigious rate, sending its tendrils into every state. Infant space industries grew overnight to monster maturity. Scientists and engineers flocked to space centers to find their pots of gold. There seemed no end to the bonanza. Before it was over, the moon race might cost $40 billion, but no one seemed to care.

Then, two weeks ago, President Kennedy addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations (TIME, Sept. 27), and unexpectedly challenged the Russians to cooperate in a joint assault on the moon. Why, after two years of rush-rush activity, the change in tune? Was the U.S. manned-moon project proving so unexpectedly difficult that Kennedy wanted help from the Russians in meeting its soaring costs? Or was Kennedy's offer part of a general cold war thaw?

Earlier offers of space cooperation got nowhere with the Russians, but recently Academician Anatoly Blagonra-vov, Russia's space front man, suggested to NASA that the U.S. and Russia should move into serious discussion of cooperation after more has been learned about the moon's surface. Did this mean that the Russians would soon attempt a "soft" instrument landing on the moon? U.S. spacemen would be relieved to know the answer. For though none of them wholly agree with British Astronomer Bernard Lovell, who thinks that the Russians are making no effort at all to put their cosmonauts on the moon, doubts do linger. Russian-American cooperation would at least end the nagging worry that the U.S. may be going for broke in a $40 billion race against an utterly indifferent opponent.

On every side, the President's offer stirred up more questions than it answered, and it nurtured a growing uncertainty about the enormous industry involved with space. Suddenly the U.S. public seemed unsatisfied with the stock answers--that everything is going splendidly, or that everything is classified.

Bristling Unknowns. Any re-examination of the manned lunar exploration project only reinforces the obvious: it is not the sort of effort in which a crash program is likely to justify the cost in either money or manpower. Some jobs do lend themselves to the crash approach; some complex tasks are indeed susceptible to all-out, crash attack. The wartime Manhattan (atom bomb) Project, which was attacked simultaneously in three different, expensive ways, was a world-saving success, but the basic physics of the atom bomb was well understood in advance, and nature was not likely to hold surprises that would force replanning. The moon project is of a different order; it bristles with unknown obstacles, many of them arranged in series, so that one must be cleared away before a decision can be made on a method for tackling the next.

Space itself is full of unevaluated perils. Until U.S. satellite Explorer I climbed into orbit in 1958, no one knew that the earth is surrounded by the Van Allen belt of deadly radiation. No one knows yet how the radiation fluctuates in position and strength, or the effect it may have on human bodies and brains.

Space beyond the belt has unknown perils too. Bright flares breaking out of the sun occasionally fill it with X rays, ultraviolet and erratically curving streams of high-energy particles. No one knows how to forecast these tempests in space, or how to keep them from killing unshielded spacemen. If manned lunar spacecraft must be protected by heavy shielding, the rockets that launch them will have to be made bigger, and this will cause change and long delay all down the line.

Another unknown that worries many scientists is the lunar surface. No one knows what the moon is made of, and no one can be sure what its surface is like after a 4-billion-year bombardment by sunlight, X rays, solar particles, cosmic rays and meteorites. The moon may be dust or solid rock, or something in between, like popcorn. It may be smooth or jagged all over. It may be radioactive or covered with highly reactive chemicals. It may have properties that do not exist on earth and that earthlings cannot imagine. A two-man spacecraft to land on this unknown surface is being built by Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corp., but if it had to be redesigned at the last moment, it could shatter the whole schedule.

Tricky Rendezvous. Other engineering ifs proliferate. The moon project as it is now planned includes a rendezvous in lunar orbit, during which a small spacecraft that has landed on the moon will soar up and mate with a main spacecraft orbiting overhead. The problems involved are all but incredible. No space vehicles have yet accomplished rendezvous, even in earth orbit with bases near by and massive, quick-witted computers on hand to do their navigation. The Russians may have at least attempted the trick, but the U.S. has not, and it will not even make its first try until the lagging Gemini program goes into full operation--which will not be before 1965.

Other unknowns lie in wait. If a new rocket engine fails to deliver a few percent of its planned thrust, the payload that it lofts into space must be lightened. Since every ounce is calculated with exquisite care, this means eliminating some piece of equipment, and little can be jettisoned without profound changes in the whole mission.

Unpleasant Habit. Aside from such unknowns that no one can now evaluate, the moon rocket's propulsion system threatens the most delay. Titan II, a two-stage military rocket, is giving trouble as a launcher for the Gemini capsule. It vibrates too violently for a manned booster, and if this unpleasant habit is not eliminated soon, the Gemini program will fall even farther behind. Since Gemini is the training tool for the vital rendezvous maneuvers, delay will slow the entire program.

The muscle of the actual moon voyage will be the F-l engine now being developed by North American Aviation, 'Inc. Each F-l will have 1,500,000 lbs. of thrust, and a cluster of five will lift the great moon-bound rockets off the ground. But the F-l also vibrates, sometimes so violently during static tests that it threatens to explode. North American believes that the trouble will soon be licked, but this is a lonely confidence.

The upper stages of the moon rockets will burn liquid hydrogen, and the rocket manufacturers who work with the stuff claim that they will soon have it under control. But no hydrogen-burning engine has yet flown, and skeptics abound who believe that this tricky and touchy fuel will cause disastrous difficulties before it is tamed.

Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory is admittedly far behind in its campaign to explore the moon's surface by means of unmanned Ranger spacecraft. Of the five Rangers launched so far, none has worked well enough to send back useful information. J.P.L. blames a good part of the failure on the heat treatment given the Rangers to prevent them from contaminating the moon with earthly microorganisms; but whatever the "cause, the delay is already on the books.

In Limbo. When high NASA men are asked whether they will meet their 1970 date with the moon, they still express perfect confidence--provided, of course, that Congress continues to give them all the money they need. Their abiding fear is that funds will be cut off as soon as the program ceases to be a race against the Russians. Even before the President made his offer to the Russians, even before NASA spokesmen began to echo the boss and say that cooperation is a good thing, Congress had begun to pare NASA's budget request ($5.7 billion for fiscal 1964). Now deeper cuts are likely. Says one high NASA official: "At the moment, our whole funding operation is in limbo."

The situation is not in as critical a condition as that. As Chemical and Engineering News pointed out last week, space contracts have become an important part of the political pork barrel. "Legislators are caught in a serious political-economic squeeze. More than 90% of the space budget goes to nongovernment contractors, many of them in states and congressional districts so dependent on space contracts that their entire economies would suffer if these contracts were canceled or deferred."

Goat Glands for Houston. One of the chief beneficiaries of NASA largesse is California, and last week its Congressmen were scurrying around Washington in anguished alarm. "We were already in trouble," said one, "but this will make it harder for us to get funds." Houston, where NASA's $200 million Manned Spacecraft Center worked a goat-gland miracle on local real estate values, is equally threatened.

NASA's abundant cash, distributed by its politically savvy chief, James E. Webb, may keep the moon project in funds in spite of its threatened loss of appeal as a U.S. v. Russia horse race. But when space officials put aside their worries about getting money out of Congress, they admit that the moon project has slipped a little, and may slip more. Along with all its scientific and engineering troubles, it has a vital problem of personnel. One man, one savvy administrative expert such as the Navy's Admiral William F. ("Red") Raborn, who sent the all-important Polaris missile to sea, has yet to be found to keep all the moon men working productively in harness.

Man the Symbol. There is another sort of personnel problem too. Scientists not directly concerned with manned space flight are almost unanimous in their conviction that the U.S. reach for the moon has been hampered by the insistence on sending men along. "Man as a mechanism is superfluous," says one such space expert. "My prediction is that unmanned systems will pick up all the scientific information about the moon, both before and after man gets there." At best, these anti-humans consider man essential for a nonscientific reason. "The pilot has little to do but represent humanity," says one of them. "The Russians know that you have to put somebody in space with whom you can identify, so they send up a farmer's son. He doesn't do a darned thing, but he's there. It's inherent to the concept of conquest that man be a part of it."

If the U.S. and Russia do manage to cooperate in space, they will have a hard time deciding what astronauts and cosmonauts to send along as symbols. Perhaps the decision will be to send a mixed crew; perhaps the decision will yet be to send no crew at all. Another fruitful way to cooperate would be to mate burly Russian boosters to sophisticated U.S. spacecraft. Even exchanges of already gathered data would be valuable. The Russians know most about the effect of continued weightlessness on the human organism, while the U.S. knows most about conditions in space.

Many skeptics believe that the Russians will never cooperate in a meaningful way; to do so would require revealing too much about their military missiles and their rumored plans to put a large manned space station into orbit. One Pentagon faction insists that the main Russian space effort has always been military, and that the U.S. is risking disaster by putting top emphasis on nonmilitary space exploits.

Just what the U.S. military would do in space is not entirely clear. Aside from sophisticated surveillance satellites, there seem to be few military space projects that appeal to such tough-minded civilians as Secretary of Defense Mc-Namara. An orbiting atom bomb might scare some people as it swept over their countries; but if it were called down on an enemy city, it would be no more destructive than a single ballistic warhead. It would be vulnerable too, for its orbit could be calculated and small atom-armed rockets could be shot up to wreck it. Orbiting military posts and stations on the moon would have even less utility. Objective military scientists believe that there may be some reason for an Air Force capability of maneuvering in nearby space a few hundred miles above the earth, but they feel little urgency about the need to get the military out to the moon and planets.

Empty Grandstands. The full effect of President Kennedy's offer cannot yet be determined. At the very least, it may take some of the tenseness out of the race. The U.S. may change its pace; it may begin to make haste toward the moon in a more orderly and economical style. Says one frank space scientist: "This winning stuff, this getting there first, has lost its edge. The grandstands are emptying. Now the time has come to ask who did the most sophisticated thing. Not who went to Africa first, but who picked up the diamonds."

The President's two-year-old decision to shoot for the moon marked a mile stone on the U.S. road into space. "That decision," says a high-ranking Government scientist, "was part of the rebuilding of our national posture. If we had to make it again, most of us would do it." But the President's offer to the Russians changed that posture and canceled all previous assumptions. Now the whole program is up for scrutiny.

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