The Economical Significance Of Space Exploration | Fight For Space

[Music] [Music] [Music] the area of manned space flight the budget request for follow is being reduced by 42.1 million dollars to 916.5 million dollars this reduction will be achieved by canceling the apollo 15 and 19 lunar missions redesignating the remaining apollo flights as apollos 14 through 17. [Music] everything is going smoothly here at the kennedy space center for the launch of apollo 17 man's last trip to the moon in the foreseeable future [Music] [Applause] three two one edition [Music] [Applause] [Music] 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 none will be so difficult or expensive to accomplish [Music] the average taxpayer is entitled to ask what's in space for me t-15 seconds guidance is 10 9 ignition sequence start 6 5 4 3 2 1 0 all engine run 32 minutes past the hour what does space light do for people it's a philosophical answer it's exploration it's the human spirit of going out there the great thing we want to know is where do we fit in there's two questions that trouble us all at some point in our life where did we come from and are we alone without the space program our economy would be hurled 50 years back into the past think of it for a moment gps weather satellites telecommunications the internet by the exploration of the moon or by landing on the moon and walking around that led to a space program which led to global positioning systems which led to so-called space assets which have affected everything the reason to explore space is that it can boost our economy period it boosts our economy because it changes the culture people think differently think about the future think about inventing things thinking about making a better tomorrow rather than just surviving the day you go over the hill you don't know what you're going to find and you're not going to go over the hill unless you're curious about it it transforms the intellectual outlook of a nation when a nation embarks in something bold and audacious such as going into deep space as it did in the 1960s today a new moon is in the sky a 23-inch metal sphere placed in orbit by a russian rocket here an artist's conception of how the feat was accomplished a three-stage rocket number one the booster in the class of an intercontinental missile its weight estimated at 50 tons the smaller second stage took over at 5 000 miles an hour and carried on to the highest point reached 500 miles up the artificial moon is boosted to a speed counterbalancing the pull of gravity and released you are hearing the actual signals transmitted by the earth circling satellite one of the great scientific feats of the age in 1957 sputnik was launched and if you ask me what drove the creation of nasa it was the launching of sputnik the public often thinks of sputnik as oh it's just an innocent little satellite that went beep it's part the curtains and you find out this was the shell of an intercontinental ballistic missile that had been hollowed out and a radio transmitter put in the head that's what was flying over our heads in america on october 4th 1957. spooked us to no end no one said oh the frontier of exploration is breached no it was the soviet union has the new high ground they are our sworn enemy we can't look bad in front of them we've got to do it too we need an agency to take care of this a year later nasa was founded this special report brought to you by nasa the national aeronautics and space administration what we had was something that had come out of a very can-do spirit it came out of the the spirit of winning world war ii it came out of the technology burst that was going on around the world at that time it came out of the imaginations of people like bernard von braun and willie lay and walt disney in our modern world everywhere we look we see the influence science has upon our daily lives now here's a model my design for four stage orbital rocket ship it came out of the inspiration of people like arthur c clarke and robert heinlein and isaac asimov and silverberg and all the great science fiction writers of the time who were inspiring children and all kinds of people in that realm and then we had the spark that ignited that passion into a fire that was sort of sputnik people said what happens if there's a hydrogen bomb orbiting head if the russians have the high ground then we could be out maneuvered in the next war the united states too promised to launch an earth satellite but in our satellite program we americans got badly bogged down why what happened we had the money the resources and the scientific know-how unfortunately a series of wrong decisions led us to frustration and failure this order went out to the armed services let me read it to you recent news stories which have described certain projects as space flight projects have resulted in unfavorable reaction at department of defense and congressional levels in any speeches or public releases planned by you or your staff avoid the mention or the discussion of space space technology and space vehicles and so by the summer of 1957 space had become a forbidden word in washington in totally realistic terms von braun could have had us there in 1950 we need to understand we would have launched a satellite in 1950 the reason we did not is because we didn't wish to panic set him and after that people said okay let's regroup let's do something it was your patriotic duty to become a physicist the chemist the mathematician it was for america and for freedom that people said yes i want to become a cold war here for for freedom and for liberty the history of human reaction to the threat of death knows no bounds and knowing no bounds includes birthing an entire space program for the purpose of showing the world that we will not be bested by evil godless communists such was the mood and the attitude in the 1950s man had his first great success in space when the russians pushed a man across the threshold he was yuri gagarin the astronaut the russians lionized as the first to orbit the earth it was the propaganda coup of the year right here [Applause] but why some say the moon why choose this as our goal and they may well ask why climb the highest mountain why 35 years ago fly the atlantic why does rice play texas we choose to go to the moon we choose to go to the moon [Applause] we choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy but because they are hard because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills because that challenge is one that we're willing to accept one we are unwilling to postpone and one we intend to win at the time that president kennedy made his speech we had never been to orbit uh just a little bit over a week before the kennedy speech to the u.s congress we had launched alan off and the shepard has started we'd never been to orbit and we were challenged to beat the russians to the moon so to a great extent that initial challenge was one that i believe was geopolitical but it also had the economic benefit to basically generate the enthusiasm and the passion within the american public [Music] the spur to education very very important i think that's almost as significant as our actual flights themselves because it gave all the young people something to look forward to an excitement something that they could live up to every day i meet people now in their 50s who said look when i was a little kid you know you inspired me to become an engineer or become a scientist and become a doctor and that gives me sort of a sense of satisfaction that i was in a program that helped other people form good careers i think one of the greatest moments of the last century in the space program was the flight of apollo 8 i was on that flight at the time that we did it i don't think we fully understood the significance of the very first flight to the moon the whole 240 thousand miles we were the pathfinders we didn't land but we checked the navigation they checked the communication circled the moon and looked at the far side the side that we never see from the earth [Music] [Applause] [Music] we brought back with us a photograph of the earth from the moon we called earthrise which i think in just one picture told us how insignificant we all are here on earth the earth is merely a small planet that just so happened to be at the right distance and the right mass to sustain life going around a rather normal star and that star is in the outer edge of a galaxy called the milky way just one of millions of galaxies in our universe and maybe just for a small amount of time in december of 1968 everyone kind of felt a closeness that we had not felt before for the first time in history today man got a long-distance live view of the planet he lives on transmitted and described by the first three human beings to travel to the moon the apollo 8 astronauts sent back those pictures this afternoon and we'll have more along with the full story later in this broadcast i think what happened was kennedy wanting to demonstrate to the soviets that we were the biggest bad as kids on the block that our technology will kick your technology's ass anytime and it worked and it was glorious but it wasn't sustainable because it was a crisis project if it was actually about exploration and about the scientific frontier being pushed outward if it were actually about that maybe we would have had a scientist on the first mission to the moon but no there was no scientist on apollo 11 nor on apollo 12 or apollo 13 or apollo 14 or apollo 15 or apollo 16. the first scientist was on apollo 17 and apollo 17 was the last mission to the moon there was not a statement made that we're going to go to the moon and establish a human community we're not going to go to you know the moon and then on to mars we're not going to go do this and then that it was simply we're going to put a human being on the moon and we achieved it do you wish that the first apollo mission hadn't reached the moon whether we hadn't gone onto mars and then to the nearest star that's like saying you wish that you still operated with scalpels and sold your patients up with cat gut like your great great great great grandfather used to ever since the time of sputnik and president kennedy i think our dedication to the space program has been high higher than most countries and i feel like probably over the past decade it's weighing significantly i feel like we should be doing more in space because i think there's a lot of learning to be done as far as vaccines and a lot of things that can help the american people even though it's not a sexy program like it used to be with the moon landing i think it's more important now than it has been in decades i know that it's not really doing much anymore since the space shuttle program was closed down so i don't know what they're up to be cool if they were doing something soon you know when i see them building robots you know to go on mars or i see what the rover and curiosity and opportunity and spirits are doing we basically just it excites me to know that we're doing that to me a culture that's not doing that is stagnant and a culture that is doing that is progressive and moving forward in a positive direction back in the 60s when we first you know when the space program was in full swing i fully expected us to have colonies on the moon by this time where are they um i'm disappointed to see that there that we're that we're not putting more effort into something like that i think it's just absolutely essential that that we maintain this program and advance it all those who think it's a problem that we haven't been outside of low earth orbit for four decades can only say so because they think that going to the moon was the first step of this great adventure where we explore space and somehow we've failed on the expectations we had for ourselves but once you realize we went because we were at war [Music] and then they're not going to the moon they're not going to mars and the cold war is over what's your motivation the moon a lonely world in the absence of man but here we have left our mark a signature attesting a legacy to future generations [Music] we stood on the shoulders of giants and touched the moon the decision of what to do after apollo was driven by a desire to limit nasa's spending to only a fraction of what it had been at the height of the apollo program and in order to reach that lower budget uh you couldn't continue to use saturn five they were too expensive per launch so the program devolved back into a low earth orbit program senator edward kennedy urged today that spending on the space program be cut back after the goals set for exploring the moon have been achieved senator kennedy said a substantial portion of the space budget should be diverted to what he called pressing problems here at home going into outer space is very expensive it costs ten thousand dollars to put a pound of anything just into near earth orbit that's your weight in gold now to put you on the moon cost about a hundred thousand dollars a pound and to put you on mars will cost over a million dollars a pound that is your weight in diamonds back in the 1960s the great superpowers didn't care spending so much money on the space race because it was a matter of national pride and national security but now that the cold war is over the great powers are not willing to spend so much of their national treasure because national pride and national security are no longer at stake imagine if you and i climbed in a plane right now and wanted to fly to new york city and back and along the way all of its pieces are going to be thrown away so that when you arrive in new york if you make it at all you'll arrive in a little capsule and land now the only way you get to come back is for them to rebuild the entire rocket upon which that original capsule stood climb in it and fly back and by the way you're going to throw all the pieces away again what that pretty well assures you is that very very few people are going to make that trip [Music] if all goes according to schedule scenes like this a reusable space shuttle making its final approach to land will be a common sight beginning next fall the space shuttle was promised to us in the 70s as a vehicle that would fly over 50 times a year the shuttle was going to bring the cost of going into orbit down to 100 a pound it looks like a jet plane will lift off like a rocket and will return like a glider commuting to space every two weeks is the plan if you measure it by that metric the program was a complete and utter failure the basic drivers were low-cost reliable reusable let's call it a space bus that was the motivation 1969 a bus up and down under all conditions at the shuttle program did not turn out the way it was supposed to it's supposed to be 10 million of flight and ended up 1.2 billion of flight so you know we missed by 1200 times over the shuttle's kind of all things to all people originally from nasa's point of view it was going to be a supply vehicle to go to a large space station and nasa in 1969 proposed building the space station and having it supplied by the shuttle the nixon administration decided not to approve a station and so the rationale for shuttle had to be kind of reinvented and it became a launch vehicle for everything that's the theory of dr john logsdon a george washington university political science professor who has written extensively on the space program for the last dozen years nasa got used to the luxury of the extra money the public attention the uh importance to the general public that came with apollo and the excitement and the challenge and wanted to do it again what do we need a space shuttle floor or a space station well some people said that we need a space station to be the terminus for the space shuttle well then why do we need a space shuttle to be the way to reach the space station now i think that's a bit circular isn't it you know at first you look at the space frame oh that's so cool the space shuttle that's amazing you know this is great and then you really look at it and you realize hold it they're not going anywhere they're not doing anything john logsdon says the shuttle could turn out to be a classic mistake it's a pretty good space truck for taking things up and down but for doing anything once you're in orbit say it's it's a very inflexible and underpowered vehicle the shuttle is the most complex space vehicle man has ever built it is a result of nine years of compromise negotiation and cost overruns soon we'll begin to find out if it was all worth it john dance nbc news at kennedy space center so the shuttle was designed to be reusable and and therefore much less expensive in the end there was no way to maintain the flight rate that was projected for it it just didn't work out that way because it was too complex too expensive and then we had the accidents is the worst disaster in the history of the american space program and president reagan has declared a week of mourning for the seven astronauts five men and two women who lost their lives on their way into space this morning yeah the challenger really changed everything it was one of the it was a priority in the nation to get every payload onto the shuttle to get its usage up to make sure its um utilization was as high as it could be there was a lot of attention focused on it it was a terrible tragedy replayed over and over again on television and there had sort of been a feeling in the space community that if there was a tragic accident with a shuttle it would never fly again there was 32 months i think it was before another space shuttle flew but there were changes considerable changes to the nature of the space shuttle program after that for example originally the shuttle was going to be launching just about every satellite that the united states wanted to put up instead they said that no you only are going to use this for things you really need to have people involved in if you can just launch it on a rocket launch it on a rocket you don't need to launch it on the space shuttle to take these highly skilled amazing people called astronauts and put them in charge of driving this truck around in circles in orbit instead of doing something really exciting and important you know that that's where the problems came from and that came from a lack of leadership uh down the street from nasa you know in congress and in the white house the shuttle did mature us though it was so difficult new sciences new technology so difficult to operate it made us good we had to be good to operate that system well at the end of the shuttle program we are a massively good space faring nation we're the u.s now we're fantastic now we are good now we're excellent in the space fair in business the difficulty of the shuttle made us good but after that space station was a massive strategic error [Music] skylab was the first test of our ability to endure weightlessness and astronauts found that they could effectively work exercise eat and sleep in their temporary home more recently the space shuttle has allowed us to fly into orbit conduct our business and return in addition to providing a laboratory for carrying out experiments in microgravity the shuttle has also benefited us commercially and scientifically through the deployment and capture of satellites but the shuttle was designed with a larger goal in mind to transport astronauts and materials to a proposed base a permanent manned space station [Music] space station was nasa's primary objective after apollo that's what nasa hoped to get approved was a 12-person space station launched by saturn 5 and supplied by the shuttle in the 69-70 period the white house did not approve that program and instead we went ahead with the space shuttle but the shuttle was designed to launch modules of the space station it was clear in 1971 or 72 that once the shuttle started flying nasa would go back and ask approval to develop the space station and indeed they did that 1983 and finally president reagan announced approval space station in the state of the union address in january of 84. tonight i am directing nasa to develop a permanently manned space station and to do it within a decade despite problems with recent missions nasa is still pushing hard for a permanent space station someday many scientists and politicians say it is not clear what purpose the space station is supposed to serve we're doing it backwards we're saying we're going to have a station and by the way what can you do if you have a station yes it costs 100 billion dollars yes it's a cooperative effort of many nations but a lot of the space station i think was wasteful because the science done on the space station was actually minimal skylab 73 was a massively successful space station already had 200 experiments built in all those things matured us in terms of on-orbit space ops and long-term space flight we already did that so i'm not criticizing space station what i am saying is what does space station do for the man on the street they don't know go out and ask them um i honestly don't know and they make no effort to like tell normal people so i mean i don't actually i don't know what's going on at all you know i really don't know what they're doing they don't really say anything all you hear is they bring supplies back and forth so i mean what what is the object of it i have no idea what they'd be doing up there honestly i i don't pay that much attention to this kind of stuff unfortunately if you have a program which costs 150 billion and you ask the person on the street what are you getting for this and they don't know you've missed the vision sir we actually didn't finish building the space station until 2010 it was supposed to be done in 1994 well it did in fact basically suck the life out of the human space flight program for 25 years and so it was very hard to get approval for new things going forward not that people didn't try we must commit ourselves anew to a sustained program of manned exploration of the solar system and yes the permanent settlement of space as george h.w bush came into the white house he indicated he wanted to do something to revitalize the space program and his advisers prepared for him an announcement called the space exploration initiative back to the moon on to mars this time to stay great stuff but nasa came back with a program to do it in 30 years that involved building floating space ports and and giant interplanetary spaceships and all kinds of things that were never going to happen and of course the architecture meant you'd have to have a launch system and you'd have to have all the other pieces of what it would take to do an entire mission to the surface of the moon and go on to mars we total up all those assets necessary over a 20-year period and the total was 500 billion dollars well that figure got leaked to the to the hill and the way the hill looks at money is 500 billion dollars with a b is in like today's money and so it was dead on arrival they never bothered to look at it let me introduce to you our speaker for this afternoon robert zubrin from martin marietta astro he's a senior engineer there on the moon and mars initiative missions work that martin marriott is doing robert come talk with us marsdirect is a plan for sending humans to mars with present-day technology it's a plan that could be implemented within eight years of program start this was developed by myself and another engineer named david baker while we were working at the martin marietta astronautics company circa 1990. [Music] what baker and i did was design a plan that will allow us to do a human mars mission in just two launches of a saturn v heavy lift booster okay like the one we use during apollo [Music] and before you know it you've created the beginning of the first human settlement on a new world there's nothing in this that is beyond our technology around 1993 mike griffin was appointed associate administrator for exploration and he liked mars direct he had us go back to johnson space center and talk to them again with this time the people at headquarters telling them that they had to listen and they listened and they came up with a variant of mars direct as their new mars mission plan and according to their analysis it cut the cost of a human mars exploration program by a factor of eight okay now unfortunately by then clinton was in office and he wasn't interested so he told them to just shut up okay um you know but the the problem is is that we've never had a situation where both nasa and the administration were on board at the same time except during apollo my name is michelle stellhorn i am a teacher in the gifted education program of the rockwood school district and i teach a unit called mission to mars and we cover the congressional space debate and the importance and future of space exploration do you want to be an astronaut um no because i like earth and i want to stay on it but i think that space exploration is really cool it's too expensive we have national debt we have the job deficit do you think that we should be spending more money and effort in space exploration well i think i personally think we should but i think that since there's so many people around the world who are struggling to just put food on the table i don't see how we can i mean we could but there are so many other problems that are major focuses that the government should be studying that should be working we need to get our national debt paid off before we can go and play around in space if given the opportunity if somebody said do you want to go to space would you go me i i think that depends how much they paid me don't want to be astronaut what are they going to fly there's nothing to fly there is no mars program there is no astronaut program there's casual talk about it i know what a program is i know when a man says you're going to the moon and you're coming home eight years from now i know what that means the space shuttle pulls into port for the last time its voyage had an end [Music] you know there's a lot of people that think that the end of the shuttle program was the end of america uh going out into space it's absurd it's ridiculous flying a shuttle in circles around the earth is not exploring it's not pushing forward the human frontier you're simply making work you're simply funneling taxpayer money into certain people's pockets who were working in different areas politicians aerospace companies people who run space centers that's not what this should be about but that's what it's become because there's no leadership because there's no vision [Music] in columbia houston we see your tire pressure messages and we did not copy your last houston com check columbia houston uhf comcheck columbia houston uhf comp check february 1st 2003 columbia re-enters tragically and breaks up over texas the notion that we could continue flying the shuttle for a long time went away [Music] the commission that investigated that accident said if you're going to be risking human lives you really need to explain what it is that you're trying to accomplish in human space flight consistent with safety concerns and the recommendations of the columbia accident investigation board the shuttle's chief purpose over the next several years will be to help finish assembly of the international space station in 2010 the space shuttle after nearly 30 years of duty will be retired from service the first shuttle tragedy made everybody stop and think exactly what it was we were using the shuttle for and did you really need to have humans aboard in a spacecraft in order to launch satellites and the second tragedy columbia really brought it down to a real focus on why are you doing human space flight at all using the crew exploration vehicle we will undertake extended human missions to the moon as early as 2015 with the goal of living and working there for increasingly extended periods of time see i was i was there i was literally in the room when president bush announced we were going to go back to the movement on to mars and i'm a texan i was close enough to where i could look at him and we're fairly good at spotting bs in each other and i think he really meant it president bush to his credit said you know we're not going to just do this anymore we're going to do something different and we should go back and we should explore a powerful argument was made that what needed to happen was we needed to start making economic use of all the things that we had found by all this taxpayer-funded space exploration if we want to start going back to the moon but this time for economically useful purposes how would we do that and they came up with some really interesting ideas all of which were affordable all of which were executable all of which were quite reasonable paths that we could have gone forward none of which looked like apollo and then he hired a new nasa administrator who said he was absolutely dedicated to carrying out the president's vision and that was dr michael griffin and griffin came in and said i know how i'm going to do this he had a plan he had a way of getting america back to the moon and then on to mars it is very apollo like it may have a different shaped heat shield it may have a different surface contact system but the outer mold line is very apollo like except larger think of it as apollo on steroids everything was tanked all of the ideas were dropped and ditched because mike griffin had his own plan for das program [Music] nasa's new program for human space exploration is called constellation for the first time in a generation we will be traveling beyond low earth orbit returning to the moon and expanding human presence to mars exploration must be taken in steps because we learn from every journey there is a link between every place we go [Music] very quickly the bush administration started to cut back on some of nasa's hoped-for budget increases that brought you to the obama administration in which they said i understand that some believe that we should attempt a return to the surface of the moon first as previously planned but i i just have to say pretty bluntly here we've been there before will american astronauts return to the moon in the foreseeable future nbc news has learned that plans to travel there and beyond may in fact be scrubbed the white house was willing to support the vision of returning to the moon by 2020 and going on to mars verbally but not when it came down to the nation's pocketbook it had been known from the start that constellation could not be executed on anything like nasa's current budget the assumption was made that nasa would receive a very substantial budget increase in order to do something like constellation when president obama came into office he set up this committee to take a look at the consolation program and that committee determined that technically the constellation program was doing quite well but that there wasn't enough money the budget for the that program had been reduced substantially every single year since it started and as a result our look at the constellation program that we were then pursuing was that it was not executable the program was on a trajectory to fail we did recommend that either nasa's budget be increased rather substantially or that they should be given some other mission that they can do within their current budget everyone agrees that there's a three billion dollar shortfall in what we need to accomplish our goals of what you have suggested as alternatives other options are are any of those uh accomplishable without that shortfall [Music] do you want to deal that no okay there you go the white house was not willing to invest that kind of money in it congress was not willing to invest that kind of money in it so the consolation program was cancelled the reason we were unable to sustain humanity in space or on the moon after apollo was there was no decision to do so and there was no technology that was designed to allow us to do so because the decision was not there interestingly in the constellation program and under president bush he said we're going to establish human permanence beyond the earth unfortunately the people in charge were unable to understand what that meant and instead redesigned a bigger badder version of the apollo program it was doomed to failure from the beginning [Music] september of 2011 nasa proposes a new capability for human exploration a massive rocket the largest ever built for a variety of missions beyond low earth orbit when president obama announced that he was cancelling constellation what he wanted to do was to wait five years and invest in game changing technologies and after that period of time a decision would be made as to what new rockets or spacecraft were needed to go wherever it is the nation was going to go next in human space flight and that presupposed in five years you can do something that essentially obsoletes chemical propulsion we will increase investment right away in other groundbreaking technologies that will allow astronauts to reach space sooner and more often well there was nothing in the pipeline at all that would do that i mean there was discussion of what might be there was some hypotheses of what could be done but now we're five years later and there really was nothing in the pipeline that was even remotely mature enough and congress hated that idea congress felt it was really important to have a destination and a time frame within which to meet specific visionary goals for human space flight and so congress wrote into law directing nasa to build a new big rocket which they called the space launch system and to build a multi-purpose crew vehicle which we know as orion in order to provide the capabilities to keep a vigorous human spaceflight program going so constellation was cancelled but congress promptly reinstated all the expensive parts of it under new names [Music] but did not give nasa the budget increase that would be necessary to fly missions with them do you know what the budget for the sls launch system is i we don't know so you don't know either quite frankly that was a leading question all right uh and if that money was going to be taken out of your budget to develop the sls launch system rather than go with the launch systems that we've already got would you be supportive of that no right we really don't have a lot of momentum and a lot of vision on what space launch system is going to do it's been pegged the rocket to nowhere when they finally get it upgraded to 130 metric tons which may be 2025 it will be equivalent and almost equal to a saturn v which we will have had 60 years earlier we're talking about after proving one flight that we might do an orbit around the moon called apollo 8. you're keeping space station alive you're supporting the various nasa centers you've got two pieces of hardware you're developing but they have no destination and they're like what we did 60 years ago i always call it a rocket to anywhere because it's just like the shuttle when the shuttle was designed it was designed to be a shuttle capability it didn't have payloads identified all those missions were non-existent on the day the first shuttle flew if space is a frontier and i shall hereby declare it to be so and your goal is to settle the frontier in other words for people to live there like they do here in what used to be a frontier [Music] then you have to create a means for that to occur no frontier has ever been opened based on the development and operation of a single giant government vehicle they can launch two to three at least two in the past potentially three sls's per year they can build that many and they can launch that that's the way the design of the infrastructure and the vehicle and the assembly plan is set up to do but they need more funding to date unfortunately the budget has not been increased and that's a major concern that's been a major concern since day one and if there's anything our commission emphasized it was that we have to have a budget and a space program that are consistent with each other and unfortunately throughout the human space flight history for a couple of decades that's not been the case tonight nasa announced further cuts have been ordered in its new budget and one effect will be a delay in the timetable for the space shuttle 50 000 employees are not looking forward they're looking elsewhere if this country really needs another expensive piece of hardware in orbit when here on the ground we can hardly get the mail delivered congress cut the shuttle's budget by 234 million dollars already there have been some cutbacks and there could be others it is without question the biggest waste of money i've seen since i've been in the united states senate today president clinton put in his latest bid he outlined 13 billion dollars in savings at four federal agencies more than half the cuts at nasa the bailout the bank bailout that sum of money is greater than the entire 50-year running budget of nasa wow i think we have to be realistic when it comes to the budget if we need additional funds for a heavy-lift rocket we're going to have to set priorities and have to shift funds from other parts of the program i don't think that that nasa or our space program is somehow going to defy budget gravity and be the only agency to get an increase when other every other agency is going to be flatlined or be subject to the budgetary constraints so i think we're just going to have to be smarter we're going to have to make sure we don't have cost overruns and we're going to have to set priorities and use the money that we do have better and then we can get the funds saved for a heavy lift rocket if we started today how long do each of you estimate it would be before we could place a person on mars with the current budget yes give me a date with a current budget and a date with apollo era budget [Music] with the current budget bear with me i would probably say never hey china can we borrow some money to finish our mars trip [Applause] you know with constellation mike griffin and now people with the sls just assume that if we develop the sls it will fly forever we had the saturn v it worked it was flying humans to the moon and we cancelled it when did we last leave low earth orbit you know a couple of hundred miles up where the space station space shuttle orbit to go somewhere interesting with humans when did we last do it 1972 apollo 17. it's been more than four decades since we've left earth for another destination what's the problem what are we missing is it political will is it motivation is it money is it is it are we distracted are there other issues we went to the moon in the 1906 [Music] what we didn't have problems in the 1960s [Music] we were at a hot war in southeast asia a cold war with the soviet union the civil rights movement was fully underway there was campus unrest there were riots in the urban centers shall be the policy of this nation to regard any nuclear missile launch from cuba against any nation in the western hemisphere as an attack by the soviet union on the united states we had the greatest problems the country has seen since the civil war and in that climate on that landscape we went to the moon so don't turn around and tell me that these past four decades we've had challenges we couldn't overcome that's why we're not going into space no that's not the reason we're not going into space [Music] it is the most natural question in the world to say you know if you're a young person in this country wait a second we were on the moon american citizens were walking around jumping around on the moon they were driving a golf cart on the moon they brought back hundreds of pounds of specially selected rock samples to see what the geological history of the moon was and you stopped why did you stop [Music] are you people nuts my read of history tells me there's only two maybe three motivations forever doing something so grand and one of them is war [Music] the other is money let's do it for money if you can do it for money it'll happen i've never seen anyone do it to explore there is a growing tendency to think of man as a rational thinking being which is absurd there is simply no evidence of any intelligence on the earth wait why do we stop producing saturn v rockets it's one of the great mysteries to me [Music] the saturn v rocket can put more mass into low earth orbit than our shuttle it had been a natural to help build the international space [Music] [Applause] [Music] station saturn v was a really unique rocket in the sense that it was really the first rocket designed for exploration the mercury projects launched on a redstone which was an intermediate-range ballistic missile that was modified then the gemini went up on a titan which was an icbm so the saturn program was really the first rocket that was never designed to be launching missiles on other people it was actually the first one that was designed to launch people to new destinations so the saturn v was a leap beyond anything that had been seen before [Music] it had five million and a half pound thrust engines on just the first stage the second stage had five quarter million pound thrust hydrogen engines on it and had a third stage with another quarter million pound press it was a massive rocket it was something that had never been done before and it worked very well and it was able to do things that nothing could have been able to do and nothing can do today we have a tendency in this country like the tortoise and the hair we are the hair we build something we do something we go back and try something else look folks modern design the russians in the meanwhile are the tortoise they build something they keep it going do you know that the booster the rocket that put eureka garen up in space in 1961 is basically the same vehicle that's putting our astronauts and their cosmonauts into the international space station today the same vehicle and yet we don't keep ours the saturn v could have been improved that would have been a good stepping stone towards going back to the moon we could have improved the lunar module we could have done lots of things to the saturn v to upgrade it and we'd have had it still a viable lunar program going it's a tragedy and i will mention that every time that someone tells me it's a tragedy that we stopped building the saturn v rocket [Music] the decision to stop production of the saturn v dates back really to the lyndon johnson administration the space agency facing severe budget restrictions has decided to cut back apollo moon landing missions to two flights a year nasa stopped ordering long lead time items for the saturn five in 1968 and announced suspension of of its production there were 15 built and then there weren't going to be any more then there were ambitious recommendations to nixon in september of 69 to use mars as the long-term goal of the program and build a space station those recommendations were rejected in the fall of 69 and then there was no need for the kind of capability represented by the saturn v so it was in the the budget cycle in december of 1969 that the decision finally was made to suspend production basically shut the program down [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] we had a president who was not particularly interested in the space program we had a vietnam war that was picking up a lot of money and uh so as soon as the nasa budget for apollo began to drop off a little the white house looked at it like a great place [Music] so [Music] thomas paine administrator of the space agency said today that 50 000 people will be dropped and the space program stretched out as a result of what he called fairly stringent budget cuts ordered by president nixon most of those who will lose their jobs work for private contractors the rest for the space agency among other things payne said production of the saturn v rocket will be ended the last one will be used to launch an experimental space station the rocket was designed at the marshall space flight center in huntsville alabama [Music] now takes space placing i personally require as far as [Music] the idea of going to mars was not selling putting a base on the moon was not selling we weren't going to get the big space station we knew we weren't going to get the nuclear rocket with the apollo program doing so well we thought we would be able to at least continue with the sort of budget support that we had had for apollo which had been terrific and uh didn't happen and so we were pretty depressed group for a while saturn 5 center 1b command module all disappeared and that would be a mission to mars someday but i don't know when 50 years from now maybe this time vote like your whole world depended on it [Music] when i look at the present direction of our space program today i feel disappointed i feel that our leaders don't really have a good reason for continuing it i think that they that it's not their desire to really have a first-class first-rate program that they can be proud of and we look at ways that we waste money in this country when we could put it to good use in a program that everybody really the average individual really wants to see done then it kind of makes me feel sad you know today we stand on the shoulders of giants and we have to honor those people i know a lot of apollo astronauts they're pretty pissed off because they did their job they did what they were asked to do they put their lives on the line they went out and they did something incredible and then nothing happened can nasa mount a project can they do a project anymore or does the project be succumbed so politicized and so wrapped up in washington that it gets strangulated and can't happen unfortunately i come from the 60s [Music] i'm not cynical i come from the 60s the greatest project management the world has ever seen on any project and we did it we did it urgently we did it on cost on schedule and we did it right even with 45 years of hindsight history we did it right i believed that when we landed on the moon in 1969 as a flight director my children would see an american back on the moon i'm starting to lose that belief i had hoped that i would see it myself that is now impossible ironically going to the moon could have been a natural continuation of the westward migration that began with the 13 colonies and and uh continued uh to the end of the 1800s but we didn't we didn't do it that way we had a government planned crisis project instead of opening up this opening up space like a frontier you realize during the entire golden age of space exploration that we generally associate with the 1960s and the voyage to the moon we remember ourselves as pioneers in that era but in fact we were reactive [Music] to the statements made by the soviets rather than proactive in fulfillment of dreams we had they put up a satellite we got to put up a satellite they put an animal non-human animal in orbit we put a non-human out they put up a first human we put up a first human this went on and on and on with russia beating us in practically everything then we get to the moon before they did we say we win [Music] if that's how we look at it we didn't understand who was pioneering that race so we are better at reacting than proacting given that fact we may have to sink deeper into economic poverty as a nation before we wake up and say we got to do something about this it's an unfortunate fact of how we function you know there's a generation out there right now that doesn't believe we've ever been to the moon now that's not because the shadows from the flag fall the wrong way or the lens flare is wrong or you can't see the stars because of the contrast ratio or this or that or the other or anything like that the real reason that any of that sticks at all is that we're not there now and it's incredibly hard to believe that if we ever did something that magnificent that exciting that inspirational why did we stop that's the reason there's people who believe we never went why aren't we there now peacetime jim the government isn't making that kind of appropriations well they'll need the rocket one of these days and if it's not ready the government will do the job and they'll turn to you to private industry to do it government always does that when gets in the jam it has to this time i figured we might be ready for the government the british government explored hudson bay then the hudson bay company was created the u.s government explores the moon then the lunar gofind lunarrocks.com company will get created we have companies now spacex leading the way bringing cargo to and from the space station that should have been happening decades ago you don't need astronauts to serve as truck drivers hauling cargo back and forth an unmanned vehicle can do that and let the commercial marketplace take care of it let them bid for that they can do it faster cheaper better than any government program could do it for sure when airplanes were first beginning a very smart group of people decided that they were not going to america was not going to own its own its own fleet its own airline it said what we're going to do is help build the airline industry and the airplane industry and they did that by simply guaranteeing a certain amount of mail that was going to be traveling on on airplanes and what happened was that an industry developed where america became the leading country and the leading technology developer of what we now know as modern aviation [Music] [Applause] people should be able to come up with creative beneficial things that they can figure out how to afford to do and if there's science involved that can benefit the the country and the federal government can get involved if there's technology that needs to be developed that can help people the government can get involved there we could have partnerships and we can move out you know we can have the 21st century equivalent of the transcontinental railroad which by the way was built by private companies without a government department of railroad telling them how to do it [Music] we did it with land grants well we could do the same thing in space we can do the same sort of innovative partnerships in space we just have to get away from this sort of bureaucratic mindset that it needs to be a government program to do it for us the vast amount of brains talents special skills and research facilities necessary for this project are not in the government nor can they be mobilized by the government in peacetime without fatal delay only american industry can do this job the way frontiers have been open and the way that they should be opened is by an interaction of the private and the public sector working for the good of all so that the government is providing a lewis and clark function a magellan function a drake function and then those explorers are returning and telling us about what's over the hill what's across that ocean and then the private sector moves into that realm and begins to turn what it is that's been found into new land new wealth and that's how you open a frontier you don't open a frontier by sending a few highly paid government employees out there in a large and expensive government vehicle and throwing most of it away on the way there and back well i know one thing if they do build a space station in my lifetime or send a ship to the moon i'm going to be ready to go what courses are you taking next year oh my schedule's already made out in the ninth grade you have to take mathematics and english and history no science well i had my choice of taking general science this year or next but i put it off for years then you put your trip off a year science is the engine of prosperity all the wealth we see around us comes from science but science is made by scientists mainly young people young people have to be inspired they have to look into the sky and say wow i want to be part of this great endeavor to explore the universe the real spin-off that matters out of the apollo program was a generation that saw that and in their mind they mixed here's the apollo program and people really doing something cool out there in space and here's captain kirk and and these kinds of shows and movies 2001 space odyssey and if you put this all together in the mind of a child or a teenager what begins to happen is a synthesis that says i want to do that somebody's done it i can do it i'm going to figure out how to do it the biggest spin-off of the apollo program was a generation who stayed in school who studied and now they want to do that they want to give back to civilization in the way that they were inspired to do as children my son looked up at me one night and asked me sorry it still breaks me up uh you know daddy is it really true that they used to fly to the moon when you were a boy i was really disappointed that we had not sent anyone to mars that would not progress beyond apollo and i kept waiting for when we would and it just didn't happen uh year after year i submit that if we engage in another bold vision like we did in the 60s this time not motivated by war but by an understanding of the impact of that adventure on our culture our culture what people wanted to be when they grew up i am a child of apollo the greatest influences i had growing up were nasa and star trek i didn't just believe we were going into space i expected it it stimulates an entire generation of scientists and technologists and it's the 21st century you need them if you care about the health of your economy tomorrow you need folks like that around you i went to the nasa website to just see when are we going to mars and i can find that out [Music] so then i thought well perhaps this is a question of of will is there sufficient will to do this the reason i fight so hard for this cause is because i believe we are here to expand and grow and carry the light of life into space if we don't embrace space as a frontier what are we as a species we have the power to do it we have the know-how to do it we know what it can bring us culturally economically militaristically to not do it is to simply not have the foresight in these final hours before apollo 17 some people are gloomy about the future of space exploration not among them is dr werner von braun the retired rocket expert to develop the big saturn launch vehicles and used to send men on their way to the moon i talked with dr von braun earlier this evening i think all good things have an ending and i consider apollo a little bit as it were as the sailing ship and dog sled area to the south pole well next time we go to the south pole we'll go by turboprop airplane we doubled the number of science graduates in this country during apollo at every level high school college phd what force was operating to make everyone want to become scientists we were going to the moon so our motivation was militaristically driven but we benefited economically from it because scientists and technologists economies of tomorrow we used to invent new things with such frequency that you didn't fix something that was about to break you put in something completely new that took you to a new place you didn't have to worry about the old thing breaking because you just replaced the entire structure with better materials lighter materials more durable materials these are the things that come out of an innovation nation you know how you get an innovation nation you put a bold project in front of them that inspires people to want to innovate in the first place and i know of no greater force of nature than what going into space can do for the next generation of people who are tasked with taking us into the 21st century i believe that we can carry this battle and basically address it articulate it is an economic challenge to the nation a technological challenge to the nation a spiritual challenge to the nation that we have to believe as a nation we are capable of doing difficult things and move forward and do it we need to bring america's character to bear on america's frontier and if we do that [Music] there is no limit to what we can accomplish we were given the apollo program because of a set of challenges that a very young president faced uh we were fortunate at that time we had the articulators we had the von brauns and the lowe's and the gilros who were capable of going out and basically talking to this president and talking to the us congress and selling this program we need the people who have that fluency that belief and are willing to expend themselves in that cause during the apollo era he didn't need government programs trying to convince people that doing science and engineering was good for the country it was self-evident maybe we need a department of future thinkers who aren't thinking will i get reelected this november who aren't thinking can we afford this now i have these other problems i have to solve no we need like a new presidential cabinet position the future the futurist they can help set priorities for how we invest versus the return on that investment later on that's what we need we don't have that and i've been trying but i've been failing so basically i gave up just going back to my lab i'm tired of screaming into people's ears what we got paid back for were millions of scientists engineers doctors medical researchers inventors okay who are the people who created the economic boom of the 1990s these 40 year old techno billionaires who built silicon valley these are the 12 year olds of the 1960s apollo worked because john f kennedy said in 1961 we are going to be on the moon by the end of the decade and while administrations change in early 1969 we were practically to the moon and they weren't about to cancel that at that point if instead kennedy had said i think it'd be a good idea to go to the moon and we should do it by the year 2000 we never would have made it to the moon it's not about the rocket equation it's not about physics we solve those issues every single day we have built a cage around our ideas we have built a cage around our future that says you cannot we are telling the generation that exists today that they're going to have less that they should give up their dreams that their job is to save a planet that we've screwed up what really matters is that someday there's a kid living on the moon there's a kid living in free space there's a kid living on mars who looks back at the earth and says that's where we came from turns their head looks the other way and says that's where we're going it will be a human endeavor it will bring out the best in humankind space exploration has changed your life and it's made your life better the food you eat your communication systems your your transportation systems are all made better by space but deeper and bigger and more importantly your view of your relationship to the cosmos your place in space is fundamentally influenced by people who have insisted that we explore space that we go over the horizon that we look beyond what we can see and that is all to the good and it is in everyone's best interest to support it we cannot allow ourselves to settle for the condition and the state that we are in today we have to become the foot soldiers in the fight for space and it has to apply to every person who lives works in dreams of space and it's time to do it now [Music] so [Music] i got fired right yes sir out the door we're not gonna fly you again we don't have a job for you they get tired of hearing this stuff and when you're jabbing them the bureaucrats you're jabbing them they've had enough

Channel: Spark

Views: 358,174

Keywords: Abacus Media, Ambitious space program, Astronauts, Economic benefits, Educators, Jim Lovell, Neil Degrasse Tyson, Scientists, Space advocacy, Space challenges, Space exploration history, Space goals, Space industry growth, Space missions timeline, Space pioneers, Space policy, Space program collaboration, Space program global impact, Space program media coverage, Spark, US Space Program

Id: MpNppwQ57jI

Length: 81min 4sec (4864 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 13 2021