Message posted by Peter Merlin on April 17, 2010 at 15:38:43 PST:
It's not accurate to say the president declared that we will never return to the moon. There just isn't a pressing need to do it anytime soon. Personally, I wish we would establish a permanent moon base like the one in the old British television show, "U.F.O." As in the show, I would hope America's moon base would be staffed by beautiful women in silver miniskirts and purple wigs. That is what space exploration is all about. The Apollo program was extremely expensive, eventually rising to nearly 4.5% of the federal budget, according to space policy analyst Dwayne Day in an article for Space Review. By early 1963 there was increasing domestic criticism of the cost of the civil space program in general and Apollo in particular. Some historians, including former NASA chief historian Roger Launius, believe that President John F. Kennedy was looking for a way to cancel the Apollo lunar program. In a November 1962 meeting between Kennedy, NASA Administrator James Webb, and several other top White House and NASA officials, the president commented that, “I’m not that interested in space…,” saying that he only supported the lunar program because it was a race against the Soviets. “The Soviet Union has made this a test of the system. So that’s why we’re doing it,” Kennedy explained. More surprising, during a 1963 address before the 18th General Assembly of the United Nations, Kennedy made a bold proposal for “a joint expedition to the Moon” with the Soviets as partners. Had this proposal been accepted, Apollo may have been terminated in favor of this new initiative, with costs shared by the international partners. Ironically, it was Kennedy's assassination that drove support to continue Apollo so that "Kennedy's dream" would live on.
In Reply to: Re: O.T. Lost Moon? posted by Andre' M. Dall'au on April 17, 2010 at 5:11:24 PST:
Replies: