McCurdy: there were 3 great battles, I think during the 1960s when we almost lost John F. Kennedy's goal of going to the moon by the end of the decade. One of those was done by Kennedy himself, the other was precipitated by Kennedy himself and then the third came in 1967 after the Apollo fire, after the President was assassinated. Within a month of President Kennedy making the speech that he made on May 25th, 1961 He was looking for a back door to get out of his own commitment. It occurred primarily at the Vienna Summit with Kruschev, but there were a whole series of memos which are now in the NASA history office files that show that the Reaching-Out-For-Some-Kind-of- cooperation with the Soviet Union was occurring simultaneously with the decision to go to the moon. LET'S TALK ABOUT PRESIDENT KENNEDY'S INITIAL PLEDGE. WHICH WAS THE FIRST CALL WAS IT AT RICE, OR WAS IT BEFORE CONGRESS? LAUN: The speech before Congress was the first public announcement endorsement of the aggressive plant to land a man on the moon. WHAT'S THE OCCASION -- I HAD ALWAYS ASSUMED IT WAS THE STATE OF THE UNION ADDRESS, WAS IT? McCurdy: Well it was the State Of the Union. The difficulty was: is that Eisenhower had not left until mid January he'd proposed his State Of The Union it was really his farewell address which he delivered from the Oval Office and he also proposed a budget. So When Kennedy came in, he wanted to have a new State Of The Union and a new budget message. It took about four months to put those together and so what you get in the May 25th speech is a whole series of initiatives called "Urgent National Needs" and one of those urgent national needs was to respond in some way to the Soviet Union n particular to the Gregarin Flight which had occurred that spring. LAUNIUS: And it's important to remember that: by titling them "Urgent National Needs," I mean, this is a special, joint meeting on Congress that he's doing this in front of and it really is couched in very significant Cold War rhetoric It is almost a crisis atmosphere that he's in the process of dealing with in that May 25th speech. And in that context, it's his kind of first opportunity to address the nation and Congress in a public venue after entering office. But it's also a little bit like Roosevelt talking about "There are serious issues that have to be dealt with". "We have nothing to fear but fear itself." And so on like that that he was doing in an earlier context LAUNIUS: there's a crisis atmosphere. And Kennedy's responding to it. McCurdy: And the crisis had occurred on his watch. LAU: Right. McCurdy: He was worse than Roosevelt, because he could blame the bank closings on Hoover. Kennedy comes into office, promises to get the country moving again and what do we get? The Soviet Union becomes the first nation to put a human into space, and that's followed by the Bay Of Pigs. So they're on their heels. The only victory that he had that spring was his recommendation proposals for the reorganization of the House Of Representatives rules committee. He was a failing President. He had to do something. TALK ABOUT THE AUDACIOUSNESS OF THIS REQUEST. HE WAS ASKING FOR A TON OF MONEY. Launius: I'm not sure he was really sure how much money he was talking for on that May 25th speech. There were people who were talking about various numbers ranging from lows of 10 billion dollars over the course of the program to very high numbers. Most of the people were putting it between 20 and 40 which is not an insignificant amount. But I'm not sure the numbers had really been run and he really, carefully understood what he was asking for at that particular time. Audaciousness in another way too: In 1961, the United States had spent exactly 15 minutes in space with a human being. And he is standing before the public, standing before congress and saying, "We're going to go to the moon and we're going to do it on this very tight schedule and demonstrate that we are the technological power of the world." McCurdy: I remember talking to (name?), who became Director of the Johnson Space Center and he said when Kennedy made that speech, they didn't have a CLUE about how to go to the moon. It was a long time ago, so the numbers don't sound very big. Kennedy was told that a mission to the moon would cost between probably between 20 and 40 billion dollars. ... Now, in 1961, the Federal Budget was 94 billion dollars, that's the whole thing. And NASA and the space advocates came to Kennedy and said, "we'd like to go to the moon, it's going to cost over the period of the decade 20 to 40 billion dollars." Put that in today's context. Today's budget for Fiscal 2000 is 1.8 trillion. This is as if, somebody came to the White House and said, "Hey, let's go to Mars. It's gonna cost 400 to 800 billion dollars," and the President says, "Sure" without having a price tag. If that happened today, the persons who advocated it would be laughed out of town. It was a HUGE amount of money at that time. Kennedy understood it was a huge amount of money, but I don't think he understood the effect it would have on the budget down-steam into the 1960's ONE CAN'T HELP BUT NOTICE, THAT WHEN HE SPEAKS THE MOST FAMOUS LINE FROM THE SPEECH, HE GETS NO REACTION. WHY IS THAT? There's a famous story that 's always told in space history that when he got in the limousine to go back to the White House, he turned to one of his aides and said, "Wow," he says, "I didn't get any applause on that." The response of the Congress was very unenthusiastic. He didn't think the Congress was going to go ahead and approve the project. AND AFTER THESE SPEECHES, THIS BECAME A NATIONAL PRIORITY. Launius: The rhetoric that Kennedy was able to use on many occasions not just in the context of space exploration really resonated with the public in general. The number one issue consistently in public opinion polls was the Cold War. And so the Soviet Union appeared to be wining the technological race into space and we knew technology was the way we were going to win the war we certainly couldn't beat them person-for-person. McCurdy: We were terrified and here you have a young, vigorous president coming forward and saying, "All this stuff you've been reading in comic books and pulp magazines for the last 20 years is going to come true. We're going to go into space -- we're going to the moon. It was incredibly galvanizing to the public at large. It was I think somewhat galvanizing to Congress and I think it scared the dickens out of the President when he got back to the White House and realized (laughs) what he had done. WHAT WAS THE JUSTIFICATION FOR DOING THIS? TALK ABOUT THE WHOLE IDEA OF "BEATING THE RUSSIANS" Launius: You have to understand that you have a continuum of activities here. In 1945, the United States explodes the Atomic bomb -- demonstrating our technological virtuosity. In 1949, the Soviet Union does the same thing. In 1952 the United States explodes a hydrogen bomb. In 1953, the Soviet Union does the same thing. In 1954 really, they began the crash program to build ICBMs. Oh, by the way, the Soviet Union suddenly launches before the United States in 1957 an orbital satellite. And now they've overtaken us. We see this enormous capability that they are demonstrating on a daily basis and in 1961, Kennedy has that context that he has to deal with. McCurdy: My research suggests that the public that Kennedy was appealing to with the Apollo decision were the publics in uncommitted nations in the 3rd World. India for example Africa as another example. Nations in Europe that were not exactly committed one way or another. Nations in Europe that might vote in Communist governments, if they were given the opportunity. What he wanted to do with the Apollo decision and could accomplish, simply by making the speech was to say to the world "We are going to match and best the Soviet Union technologically." Let's get the scorecard so we know who's on which team. When we started out, the people who opposed the crash program to go to the moon were fiscal conservatives. Lots of Republicans like Dwight Eisenhower, Gerald Ford and Barry Goldwater. Then on the other side, fiscal conservatives in the Democratic party like Richard Russell of Georgia. And their opposition was largely an opposition to large Federal spending for any kind of program. Well you gotta get the other side lined up. If you look at the 1963 vote in the Senate where NASA's appropriation is rescued, the people who are voting for NASA are a who's-who of American Liberalism. Hubert Humphrey, Eugene McCurdyarthy, Warren Magnuson of Washington State, Edmund Muskie of Maine. The battle in the beginning is a battle over who in the democratic party is going to going to embrace this space program. And in the beginning it is the cold War Liberal Democrats who are the most aggressive proponents of a race to the moon. Eisenhower, you have to remember, came out of a generation of military leaders who'd basically gotten a sneak-punch at Pearl Harbor. And they were determined that this would NEVER happen again. The Soviet Union was developing missiles that could reach the United States and clearly had bombers that could do the same. They were determined that the Soviet Union would never do to the United States what had happened at Pearl Harbor. Eisenhower, from Gettysburg two years after he left office is still giving magazine interviews in places like the Saturday Evening Post where he was talking about how crazy this crash program was to go to the moon. And so were a lot of Republicans in his own party who were opposed to it and would have shut it down in those first few years if they could have done so. Lyndon Johnson faced a very peculiar problem in order to get enough people in the United States Senate to vote for any space program even before Kennedy's declaration to go to the moon he needed the votes of his mentors on the Democratic side. They were fiscal conservatives Democrats from the South, by and large, and they were inclined not to vote for any large government spending. He knew that he couldn't get these people to vote for civil expenditures like the Great Society Program though that's what he wanted in the long run. So what he did, according to Robert Dalek, an historian of that period was he thought: "Well I can get them to vote for a civil program as long as it's tied to the Cold War. And that's where his interest in space exploration came forward. BUT EVEN THIS EARLY ON, KENNEDY IS GETTING COLD FEET. WHAT'S GOING ON HERE? LAUNIUS: Even before Kennedy gives his speech, he's working the possibility of a cooperative agenda. It's interesting to look at the number of communications and the number of meetings between people like Robert Kennedy his brother and the Attorney General and senior-to-middle-level people who are associated with the Soviet Embassy in Washington and they're talking about possibility of cooperative efforts to talk about the possibility of doing a joint Soviet/American space effort. HE MAKES HIS SPEECH, THEN McCurdyurdy: Within the next month, at Vienna he proposes to Kruschev; "hey, how 'bout a joint effort." BUT EVEN THIS EARLY ON, KENNEDY IS GETTING COLD FEET. WHAT'S GOING ON HERE? McCurdyURDY: I think it was money. Look at the numbers that were involved! The first, firm estimate that you get on the Apollo program is 19.5 billion dollars that's in 1964. So Kennedy's looking at a number that's around 20 billion dollars. By comparison, the War On Poverty, was annually 1.8 billion. Aid to elementary and secondary education annually 2 billion. NASA's budget was going to go to 5 billion! It was going to take away all of the funds that Kennedy and Johnson together needed for their Great Society or their War On Poverty initiatives. And that was a real problem for Kennedy. And I think he realized that almost immediately after seeing that Congress was prepared to appropriate the funds. Launius: I think there's another issue here as well and that is: Kennedy's a good politician. Good politicians like to keep their options open. And so if you can pursue multiple tracks on an issue before you commit to one track or another the longer you can keep those multiple tracks in play, the better off you are the greater your ability to come out of whatever the issue is looking very good. After the May 25th speech is where he's really starting to look at: "Oh my gosh! We've got a huge budget here. And it's gonna cost us a lotta money. Are there other possibilities? What are the other options that we have before us?" McCurdy There's another -- perverse interpretation too and that is: Kennedy accomplished everything he needed to accomplish just by making the speech. Originally, the lunar landing proposal came with a landing date of 1967 or 1968. and he says, "No we don't need to do that, you can land after I leave." That was an insight that the gani that he got -- the prestige gain from catching and capturing the attention of 3rd world leaders accomplished with the speech -- simply by making the declaration that the United States is prepared to do this -- actually landing a person on the moon, that was gonig to be on somebody else's watch and he wasn't as concerned with the accomplishement as he was with the intent. SO WHAT DOES HE DECIDE TO DO ABOUT IT? McCurdy: First thing he does is he sends out his brother and a lot of other people to approach leaders in the Soviet Union and then he himself -- secretly, this was not known at the time -- takes Kruschev aside and says, "Hey, let's go to the moon together. Let's stop this race, we don't need to spend all this money. We can take our time." I GET THE SENSE THAT IF HE DOES THIS, HE LOSES THE BACKING OF THE CONSERVATIVES WHO ONLY BACKED THE MOON PROGRAM IN ORDER TO BEAT THE RUSSIANS. McCurdy: And that's exactly what happeend when he goes -- when he went public with the statement in 1963. This was all done back-channel in 1961. In'63 he went to New york, he made a speech at the United Nations at which he publicly invited the Soveit Union to join with us together. The response in the Soveit Union was less important than the one that occurred in the Congrss of the United States because his opponents -- the loose members of the coalition, if you will -- suddenly said, "Gee, if the PRESIDENT doesn't want this, why shoudl we be appropriating billions of dollars for NASA to accomplish it? They cut NASA's budget signigifcantly and there were moves in the United States Senate which very nearly passed -- that would have gutted the Apollo program at that time. I have always maintained that, had Kennedy lived, his coalition would have probably come unravelled but he was assassinated somewhat thereafter and this became what, in the military is referred to as his "gold watch". It was his reward for being president -- it was something that a lot of peopole did not want to touch and as a result, the coalition held together much better than it would have if he had survived. The debate over Apollo was never a debate about whether or not we were giong to go to the moon. Eisenhower said, "Sure we're giong to the moon. Just don't ask me when." What Kennedy said was "We're giong to the moon and we're giong to go by the end of the decade." The crash program to the moon becomes the critical factor. People then begin to look for a way out of the deadline becasue once you're out of the deadline, you're out of the problem of having to spend money on a crash program. So when Kennedy, himself goes to New York and says, "Gee, I'm not as committed to this as I used to be," many of the Members of Congress in both the House and the Senate begin to say, "well if he's not committedd, let's not spend the money. Let's take NASA down to a reasonable level of expenditures and whenever they get to the moon that'll be fine we're not going to worry about this end-of-the-decade deadline. AND SO YOUR FEEL IS: IF KENNEDY HAD LIVES ... IF THE DECISION TO GO TO THE MOON BY THE END OF THE DECADE HAD REMAINED HIS ... WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED? McCurdyurdy: I think if Kennedy had lived, that we would not have made the end-of-the-decade deadline for going to the moon. I think the coalition in Congress would have unraveled, I think that NASA would not have had enough money to do it successfully. We might have gone in the 1970s, we might have gone in the 1980s we might still (laughs) be working on it today. I don't think we would have gone by 1970 or 1969. LAUNIUS: When Kennedy makes his speech in 1963 ... Kruschev has also changed HIS mind to a certain extent. And he is much more willing to at least open the possibility that there could be a cooperative project. Had he lived, it's quite possible that they could have sat down, had some kind of Superpower sumit, agreed to some sort of cooperative venture that might even push the deadline out to some indefinite time and have gone forward from there. And he had back-channel communications between Robert Kennedy -- his brother and the Attorney General -- before the decision; they also took place after the decision -- there were a whole series of dialogues between officials at NASA and officials in the Soveit Academy Of Sciences in 1962 which did lead to some cooperative ventures. And remember what happened in Vienna in 1961, Kennedy proposed to Kruschev over lunch that the United States and the Soviet Union go to the moon together. Kruschev said, "No." Kennedy looked at him; Kruschev said, "Alright, why not?" So he said both no and yes, and then he started to think about it and the same thing went through Kruschev's mind that went thruogh Kennedy's mind: "What is this going to cost me?" Because Kruschev was heavliy committed to spending large amounts of money on nuclear deterrence -- on his own missile program. And so he came back to Kennedy and he said, "Well, we can go, and we can participate and fund this, but we have to have disarmament first." And Kennedy thought, I think "Well he's just trying to create a ploy that will prevent cooperation. But the Russians today say Kruschev was serious; that he could engage in a joint enterprise, but he couldn't fudn it, unless there was some kind of winding down of the Cold War arms build up. LET'S TALK ABOUT OPPOSITION TO THE MANNED-SPACE PROGRAM. I AM SURPRISED TO HAVE LEARNED THAT THERE WAS OPPOSITION IN THE SCIENTIFIC COMMUNITY FROM THE VERY BEGINNING. Launius: There are many people -- thoughout the history of space exploration -- who are from the science world -- who have suggested over and over and over again that human space flight is not the best way to accomplish scientific ends. And their agrument is a very simple one: What they say, essentially is that any spacecraft that is designed to carry a human being -- its primary mission -- in some cases, as in the case of Mercury -- it's only mission is to bring that person back alive.and anything else is secondary. When you get into robotic probes ... you can design them as a robot you can do everything that you want to do on a robotic spacecraft that you can do with a human aboard and perhaps more. Oh, by the way: they're much less expensive because you don't have to worry about taking care of -- and protecting that human being WHAT WERE THE REASONS GIVEN BY SCIENTISTS WHO QUESTIONED IT, TOO EXPENSIVE? TOO DANGEROUS? TOO WHAT? If you wanted to impress people around the world, ... then the way to do it was through scientific acheivemehnts. ...that scientific acheivements would impress people more effectively than would races to the moon. It is true that you tend to train the young, best minds -- they become enamored -- they become engaged by some particular problem and they pursue that particular line of inquiry -- both in terms of their graduate education and ultimately in their carreers. And for the last few years, for instance, many of the people who have been engaged in science, have been invovled in things in terms of bio-meidcal research which is where some of th very important kinds of -- and issues that resonate with society as a whole rest today. In the late 1950's and early 1960's, space science had a similar kind of resonance -- I think for lost of people and that's probably what they were talking about. LET'S TALK ABOUT THIS ANTI-TECHNOLOGY MOVEMENT THAT WAS AROUND AT THAT TIME. TALK ABOUT IT A LITTLE THE HIPPIES, THE EARLY ENVIRONMENTALISTS, THE ANTI-WAR PEOPLE WHO SAW SCIENCE AND THE MILITARY AS TOO LINKED. McCurdyurdy: 1962, Rachael Carson writes Silent Spring -- an attack on DDT and other pesticides and their effect on nature. In 1967, William Circlift -- a Harvard physicist -- forms the first citizens committee to oppose overnment funding for the Supersonic Transport. In October of 1967, war protesters -- very early on havbe their famous March On The Pentagon. A lot of it was focused on the war, and some of it fell on the space program, but the space program was still viewed as benign technology. But you had during this whole period the growing roots of an anti-technology, mystical movement that believed certain things like you could levetate the Pentagon with enough mental force. Launius: In 1961, as Eisenhower is leaving office, his famous speech where he talks about the Military Industrial Complex. And that term was kind of coined in the context of that speech. The very next paragraph talks about "the scientific, technological elite." And the fear that we may turn our democratic society over to these technocrats. Now Eisenhower certainly believed in science and technology ... but clearly he's hit a strain that's present as an undercurrent in society even as early as 1961. In 1965, Ralph Lapp publishes a book called The New Preisthood, in which he talks about the Technocrats -- these individuals who understand how these sorts of things work -- the science and technology of the world -- that they have and are starting to supplant elected our leadership in terms of control of things. And he raises this spector of fear. That's an undercurrent that's present throughout this period. Couple that with a military in Vietnam that fights the most technological war ever seen up to that point and the backlash frmo that war that we saw presently; the whole counter- culture movement -- the hippies and Summer Of Love and sor forth -- that sort of thing -- Small Is Beautiful -- the rise of the sort-of modern environmental/ecological movement all of these kind of wrap together. And some of it's a little zany; much of it is mainstream. And there's a cnocern that's present -- not necessarily a fear -- but a cnocern that we are somehow losing our grip on control of our lives. BUT THESE PEOPLE REALLY WEREN'T HEARD FROM MUCH, WERE THEY? Launius: NASA and Apollo were never really targets of this sort of counter culture movements. There were -- on occassion protests, there wee letters to the editor, that kind of thing did take place; but not in the same way at all. It was viewed as relatively benign and in that context it never received the kind of attention that the military did for instance and it never received the knid of attention that such things as major accidents -- ecological spills like the Exxon Valdezand so forth received in a later era. McCurdy: Well, there are two streams -- if you will -- underway here. One is that NASA s indeed viewed as a benigns use of technology. It's the last, great, optimistic use of technology and contiues so through the 1960's. At the same time, however -- in a contradictory fashion; there's a general impression that technology as a whole is suspicious and this results in an undercuttnig of support for ALL technology -- including the space program. IT'S FUNNY. I'VE HEARD THAT THERE WERE POLLS WHICH SHOWED ONLY 50% OF AMERICANS THOUGHT THIS WAS A GOOD IDEA. McCurdy: You can see that in regard to public opinion polls in regard to the space program. NASA begins to lose public support around 1966 public support rallys in 1967, after the Apollo fire and continues high until 1968 when in December we have the first circumlunar navigation o the moon and at that piont support for space spending drops off the charts. BUT AS WE PROCEEDED ALONG THROUGH THE 60's, THERE WAS ONE VOICE OF OPPOSITION THAT MADE ITSELF SO LOUD NO ONE COULD IGNORE THEM, RIGHT? You kind of have to back up again and ralize the situation that Lyndon Johnson found himself in when he started the war in Vietnam. He didn't have the money to pay for it. H e found himself 20 billion dollars in debt -- which is not much today, but the budget back then was only a few hundred billion dollars. He couldn't fund the war in Vietnam; he could fund a 5 billion dollar plus space program and he certainly couldn't fund all of his urban initiatives at the same time. So something had to give and the war in Vietnam in the Johnson White House wasn't going to be it. His Budget Director Charles Schultze had a terrible time trying to find out: Well, what is it we're going to cut? And you can look at the memos that he wrote -- because he makes lists of the things we can cut . And he says, well we can cut back on aid to the cities; we can cut back on the War On Poverty. But Schultze, himself said, "I don't recommend that we do this." So Johnson was in a terrible fix. He had to go to Congress eventually for a tax increase .... Wilbur Mills, the Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee said, "Lyndon, I'll give it to ya, someday, but you've got to cut federal, domestic spending." And there he was faced with a terrible, terrible choice. Did he cut back on things like space exploration, or did he cut back on aid to the cities? And then the riots begin. And it's very clear at that point that he can't cut his domestic programs; his social welfare programs anymore. It's got to come out of space exploration. The only question at that point is: does it come out of the program to go to the moon or does it come out of something else in space exploration? And that's the battle that's fought in the last 1960's. NOW, JOHNSON HAD MADE AT LEAST A TACIT PROMISE -- IF NOT A PUBLIC ONE - - WHICH WAS IT? -- TO HONOR PRESIDENT KENNEDY'S PLEDGE ABOUT GETTING TO THE MOON BY 1969. Launius: Lyndon Johnson, when he became president never wavered, I think, in his commitment to accomplish the lunar landing on the schedule that Kennedy had established. He always ensured that Apollo received sufficient funding to make that 1969 lunar landing. McCurdy: When Johnson came into office, he had about a year of honeymoon, then the presidential election. Right after he was inaugurated on his own, he had to face these fiscal realities And at that time, he received memos from his Budget Director Charles Schultze which laid out alternatives like: abandoning the race to the moon. At that point, Johnson said: "I do not want to abandon that. I was involved in it and President Kennedy was committed to it and I don't want to see his legacy die. TELL US ABOUT THIS MEMO THAT YOU FOUND FROM SCHULTZE TO PRESIDENT JOHNSON: There's actually a series of memos, starting in 1965 the first year of Johnson's elected presidency; continuing in the Spring of 1966 and then, after the Apollo fire in 1967 they crop up again in August and September of 1967. The August 1967 memos are the most impressive because at that point Schultze is no longer offering an end to the moon race as an option. He is saying: "Look, let's go ahead and do this; it's better that we should abandon it ourselves rather than to fail for technological reasons or have the Congress cut it." he specifically recommend to quote him "that he United States abandon the goal of achieving the manned lunar landing by 1970" that's the end of the quote and cut the NASA appropriation by 600 million dollars. HE THOUGHT WE WEREN'T GOING TO MAKE IT? McCurdy: A lot of people thought we weren't going to make it after the fire. It wasn't at all clear that we could build a spacecraft that could go to the moon. IF THE PRESIDENT HAD GONE ALONG WITH SCHULTZE'S RECOMMENDATION IN THAT MEMO, WHAT WOULD HAVE HAPPENED? LAUNIUS: He could have perused the possibility - once agin -- of a cooperative venture with the Soviets. ... He could have simply announced: We've proved out point -- that we have the technological capability to do this and we are going to continue this down the road, but in the interest of other priorities, we're going to reduce the NASA budget. He could have taken either one of those options. he could have killed the program outright and say:"We're not doing it at all." There was never any question in Johnson's mind that he was going to take that last route. McCurdy: First of all, Wilbur Mills insisted that Lyndon Johnson cut space spending as a whole by 600 million dollars. Had Johnson said, "Well we'd rather take that out of the moon race than take it out of the post-Apollo program," I think the 600 million dollar cut would have been followed by another 600 million dollar cut and another 600 million dollar cut and we would have found ourselves in a situation similar to what happened with the space station -- we would have had enough money to keep engineers standing around, drawing view graphs, but we wouldn't have had any funds to actually build hardware and we would have designed trips to the moon ad infinitum and never had the hardware to go until somebody made a real commitment to go again. Remember too, NASA was having a terrible time meeting this deadline. The Saturn 5 rockets weren't ready. Verner Von Braun wanted to test them for 10 years. IF WE HADN'T GOTTEN THERE BY '69, SO WHAT? LAUNIUS: Sure, one can say, "So what?" But that would have meant that a major national commitment was not met. What would that do to our psychological, internal -- as a nation -- that we were unsuccessful in seeking to do this and failing? I think it would have been enormously difficult. Plus, let's face it: we were still in the Cold War. If we had failed, what would have been the result internationally? IF WE HADN'T GOTTEN THERE BY '69, WOULD IT HAVE BEEN FATAL TO THE PROGRAM? LAUNIUS: One of the things that's really important about all this is the sense that there is clock that's ticking. Everybody in the agency feels that clock every single minutes of every single day. I think at a pretty fundamental level, a lot of the elected leadership of the nation felt that clock as well. And we were going to make that deadline. Once you decide that you don't need the clock - - that it just can happen -- then you can keep changing the rules year after year, as we have a tendency as a democratic society; as we revisit the issues over and over and over again Well, we don't have to do it in 70. We can do it in 71. We don't have to do it in '71, we can do it in '72. And so on. And every year it can get stretched out, ad infinitum. As a result of that, by the way is have a lunar program that would expend huge amounts of money over a longer period of time - - probably quite a bit more than was spent -- and never go. IF WE HADN'T GOTTEN THERE SO WHAT? McCurdy: It would have made Jimmy Carter's national malaise look like a head cold. Political scientists and other groups have traced trust in government from the 1950s to the 1980s and what you saw during this time was enormous trust in government in the late 50' and early 60's. And then by the l970's -- as we started to worry about national malaise -- trust in government dropped off considerably until it hit an all-time low where only 23% of the people aid they trusted the government to do what was right most of the time. And that occurred in the 1970's. One of the things that buoyed up trust in government was our knowledge that we'd at least gone to the moon. We'd at least set that national goal and accomplished it. The way that the Apollo story is usually told is as a technology race -- it's the story of the people at Mission Control and Neil Armstrong and the engineers that accomplished this incredible technological feat. ... But very few people also -- Very few people then look at what happened here in Washington, DC. We very nearly didn't go for political reasons inside the Beltway. The political problems of maintaining a coalition of support to fund the program were just a difficult as were the technical problems that the engineers in the field were facing. I WANT TO TALK HERE ABOUT WALTER MONDALE. TELL ME YOUR PERCEPTION -- FROM BEFORE WE STARTED THIS PROJECT ... BEFORE YOU TALKED WITH ME ABOUT THIS. TELL ME WHAT YOUR PERCEPTION WAS OF WALTER MONDALE AND HIS POSITION ON THE APOLLO PROGRAM. Launius: The conventional wisdom on Walter Mondale was that we was a liberal Democrat who was very committed to many Great Society programs -- welfare-type activities -- and viewed the space program; and had always viewed the space program as an unnecessary expenditure of public moneys that could be more successfully used to solved the crises that existed in the United States. And in that context, he's always been viewed as someone who disliked the space program because it took money away from those sorts of other programs. WHERE DO YOU THINK THIS CAME FROM -- BECAUSE HE SAYS IT NEVER HAPPENED. LAUNIUS: It's a good question and it seems to have grown up over a period of time -- we do know that he was very deliberate in his denunciations in the aftermath of the Apollo 1 fire in 1967 we know that he expressed those exact sentiments in the context of things like the Space Shuttle . When you look to pin down his public discussions of Apollo in general, you don't find those. THIRTY YEARS OUT FROM THIS, IT IS NOW PRACTICALLY IMPOSSIBLE TO FIND ANYONE WHO ADMITS TO HAVING OPPOSED THE APOLLO PROGRAM. WHY DO YOU THINK THAT IS? LAUNIUS: Well obviously there are many reasons. And maybe opposition is not the right term. Perhaps is more of a questioning: of it: Is this the proper use of public money? It's not hat they are leading some charge to end it; but that they're not quite sure that it's the right thing to do. And so they stay pretty-much behind the scenes until there is some sort of a scandal in the context of Apollo -- like the Apollo 1 fire that killed 3 astronauts. Then they emerge as genuine, real critics. The other reason, which is perhaps much more simple is that in hindsight, Apollo was enormously successful. Very few people -- even if they had some reservation about it -- would necessarily want to go on the record and say, "I always thought it was a dumb idea and we shouldn't have done it." And it was a success. Success has a thousand fathers. McCurdy: Apollo was to America what the pyramids were to Egypt. It's one of our great accomplishments -- it's like the American frontier. So you're going to be hard-pressed to find people who are going to come right out and say: "Yeah, I thought it was a terrible idea right from the beginning." Even though you can find those quotes in the formal record you certainly won't find it, especially after it was so successfully accomplished. But when you go back and look, there were people, at the time who are expressing public misgivings. And in private -- where you can get those kinds of conversations -- pulling their hair out about this program.