Are there any rumors of a big NASA lunar space policy due any day now?

(sci.space.history added to newsgroups)

In article ,
Monte Davis wrote:
I believe the spending and spending commitment between 4/61 and 11/63
gave it irreversible momentum. The question's moot, as Johnson was
even more committed to an aggressive space program in political fact
than JFK was in retrospective mythology.

An arguable point, considering that LBJ presided over much of the drop in
NASA's budget following the Apollo peak. He may have liked the idea, but
it looks like he wasn't willing to spend major political capital for its
continuation. He was happy to let it run on momentum, but his political
priorities for the future lay elsewhere.

The more interesting might-have-been grows out of JFK's September 1963
speech proposing to change the "race" to a joint effort with the USSR.
Was that a trial balloon with no realistic potential? Where might it
have led for better or worse?

Realistically, it didn't have much of a chance of going anywhere at the
time, because the USSR didn't *have* a lunar-landing program just then.
It had people who were interested in the idea, and projects which might
end up contributing to it, but there had been no high-level commitment.
The Soviets were still far ahead in space, and were only just starting to
become concerned that the massive effort being mounted for Apollo might
change that. And the Soviet space program was very much the poor
stepchild of the military missile program, and the military didn't like
the idea of joint ventures at all.

Had JFK still been around and still been pushing the idea six months
later, when the Soviets were starting to concede that a response to Apollo
was necessary, it might have led to official talks about the idea. But I
don't think they would have gone anywhere in the end, because the Soviets
still didn't have much to bargain with. They really didn't want to make
the investment needed to mount a credible counterpart to Apollo, and any
serious joint venture would have exposed how little they'd actually done
towards it and how badly they were about to be outclassed. They'd have
balked at any immediate joint work that might reveal this, and the West
would probably have concluded that the only reason they were negotiating
was as an attempt to delay Apollo. Which would actually have been more or
less true -- a major delay in Apollo was the ideal outcome from their
viewpoint -- although not for quite the underlying reasons the West would
have suspected.
--
spsystems.net is temporarily off the air; | Henry Spencer
mail to henry at zoo.utoronto.ca instead. |