A Ghost Town of Gantries

Few crusades in history have ignited a nation's imagination and determination more than the U.S. goal set in 1961 by President John Kennedy "of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth " by the end of the decade. Yet less than five years after that seemingly impossible mission was accomplished, the Apollo program is ended, and there are no plans for Americans to return to the moon in this century. TIME

Correspondent David Lee, who covered the moon landings in the '60s, recently revisited Cape Canaveral and the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. His report:

Florida's briny ocean winds ceaselessly whine through the deserted tower on Cape Canaveral's Pad 14, where John Glenn rocketed into space on Feb. 20, 1962, to become the first American to orbit the earth. The spindly tower sways under the gusts, and bits of rusting steel are flecked into the jumble of weeds and decaying cables entwined around its feet.

On the beaches near by, where thousands once stood to cheer man's reach to the moon, loggerhead turtles have taken over again. Rattlesnakes sun themselves on the empty launching pads lining the cape. Small white-tailed deer dart into clearings to feed, and bull alligators bellow in vain for the battalions of space workers who used to feed them marshmallows and jelly doughnuts. On Pad 19, from which Gemini astronauts rose on ten missions to perfect the techniques of rendezvous and docking, the bright orange tower lies useless, flat on its back. The once-gleaming white room where Gemini spacemen had their last look at earth before liftoff now houses wild rabbits.

A desolate plot of weeds was once the Saturn I complex, the scene of the space program's worst disaster: a flash fire that on Jan. 27, 1967, cost the lives of Astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee, and came very close to fatally dampening national enthusiasm for space flight as well. Recently, launch towers and other equipment at the complex that cost $68 million were sold as scrap for $15,000.

Corridors to Nowhere. At the space center in Houston, now renamed after Lyndon Johnson, the room where Neil Armstrong slept during his quarantine after man's first moon landing on July 21, 1969, has been turned into a commissary storeroom for ketchup and cookies. The massive lunar receiving laboratory, designed to analyze the 838 lbs. of rocks hauled back from the moon, has been dismantled and turned into a medical research laboratory. The seven ultraviolet showers built to cleanse astronauts and technicians of unknown moon bugs are now stainless steel corridors leading nowhere.

The reason for the ghost-town appearance at both space installations is all too obvious: the adventure that riveted the attention of the world for more than ten years is over. NASA'S budget dropped from a peak of $5.9 billion in 1966 to some $3.2 billion this year. Only five of 42 launch pads built at Cape Canaveral are still in use--mainly to launch unmanned communications and exploratory satellites, including the

Mariner 10 spacecraft that last week passed close to the planet Mercury. Employment at the Kennedy Space Center alone has dropped from 26,600 in 1967 to less than 10,000 now.

The declining momentum shows strikingly in Florida's Cocoa Beach, the town that space built. Five years ago, eager tipplers stood four deep at the bar in spots like Ramon's and The Surf during the Friday afternoon happy hours. The drink of the day was a vicious concoction called a "moonshot" (two-thirds 151-proof dark rum and one-third vodka mixed with cream). Now the drinking ranks are older and sparser, and it is difficult to find a bartender who remembers how to mix a moonshot.

Veterans of the early launches have developed a nostalgia for, well, the good old days of the space age. "It was so freewheeling in the early days," says a onetime NASA engineer. "We made design changes right on the pad and let the home office know about it later. Anything to get the bird away. Now it's all so stylized. It used to be shirtsleeves and sweat. Now it's gray flannel."

Spiritual Drive. The only firmly scheduled return of man to space is next year's joint U.S.-Soviet mission. In preparation for that three- to five-day, linked-up swing round the earth, Russian space technicians and cosmonauts are frequent visitors to NASA these days. Though the docking of superpower space travelers will doubtless provide a compelling symbol of peaceful cooperation between nations, space buffs are inclined to view it as a political rather than a piloting event.

Beyond next year's mission lies the $5.1 billion U.S. space shuttle--a recoverable crossbreed of spacecraft and airplane designed to ferry men, equipment and satellites back and forth between earth and orbit. One of the few signs of future activity at Canaveral is the line of surveyor stakes laid out for a new three-mile runway to land the shuttle on its returns to earth. But the first shuttle is not expected to be launched until around 1979--an eon away in spacemen's terms. Meanwhile, the hulking, $117 million Vehicle Assembly Building, which covers eight acres, seems destined to become the world's most expensive warehouse. Besides equipment for the U.S.-Russian flight, it now houses only the unused spare parts of previous programs--vehicles and rocket stages built for four Saturn spacecraft.

Looking back on the incalculable human effort represented in such hardware, Johnson Space Center Director Christopher Kraft says: "The challenge of the space program furnished a spiritual drive that brought this country together in a way we have not experienced in peacetime since the early exploration of the land we live in. Now we can only hope to find something else to provide that kind of inspiration and leadership." Wherever that next challenge lies for this generation of Americans, it clearly is not in space.

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