The US won the race to the Moon because, unlike the Soviet Union, it committed vast resources to a well thought-out "game plan" right from the start. NASA also stuck to that plan despite occasional technical & political problems. The foundation for Apollo's success was laid in 1962-67 when some 500,000 people from 20,000 companies built the spacecraft, Saturn carrier rocket & launch facilities. After this, the program was rapidly dismantled in just five years while the Apollo/Saturn system became operational, achieving President Kennedy's goal in July 1969 when Neil Armstrong became the first man on the Moon.
The elements that comprised the American manned lunar program cost approx. 100 billion dollars in 1994 terms. They were:
A. Manned Earth Orbit:
Project Mercury: which lasted from August 1959 to May 1963. The program was conceived in 1957. Six manned flights. TOTAL COST: approx. $1.5 billion (all costs figures at 1994 rates).
Gemini Project: started in 1962. Two unmanned, ten manned flights between April 1964 and November 1966, plus seven Gemini-Agena Target Vehicle launchings (five successful). TOTAL ESTIMATED COST: approx. $1.9 billion. TRUE COST: $5.4 billion.
B. Lunar Probes:
Ranger: (lunar impact/imaging missions). Nine probes (incl. three fully successful missions) launched between 1961 and 1965. TOTAL COST: approx. $1 billion.
Surveyor: (lunar soft landing). Contract awarded to Hughes in 1961. ESTIMATED TOTAL DEVELOPMENT COST: $300 million/1st mission in 1963. TOTAL COST: $2.8 billion, seven missions in 1966-68 (five successful).
Lunar Orbiter: Program started in 1963. Five successful missions in 1966-67. TOTAL COST: approx.$800 million.
C. Launchers:
Atlas and Titan (two converted ICBMs) were used in the Mercury and Gemini programs. The US Air Force's Agena upper stage was modified to serve as a docking target for Gemini, and also provided the 'final push' out of low Earth orbit for the Ranger and Lunar Orbiter probes.
The major non-Apollo/Saturn related project was the Centaur cryogenic upper stage, started in 1959 for use in the Surveyor and Mariner programs. Eight Atlas-Centaur (AC) test flights between May 1962 and April 1966, including six total/partial failures. EXPECTED COST: less than $1 billion, 1st operational flight in 1961. TOTAL COST: $4 billion.
Saturn series: Project started in 1960, initially comprising four different launchers (Saturn C1-C4). A fifth heavy-lift variant called 'Saturn C5' (later renamed Saturn V) was chosen for Apollo in late 1961. Ten Saturn I launchings (incl. four single-stage ballistic tests, three Pegasus satellites) in 1961-65. Nine Saturn-IB missions in 1966-75 (incl.three Skylab, one Apollo-Soyuz). Thirteen Saturn V launchings in 1967-1973 (incl. one Skylab). TOTAL COST (Saturn IB,V): $35 billion. PEAK FUNDING:$6.7 billion in 1966.
D. The Apollo Spacecraft:
Work began on the Apollo CSM in November 1961, when NASA selected North American as main contractor. Two 'boilerplates' were launched in 1964. Two Block-I CSM prototypes were launched on ballistic test flights in 1966; two more unmanned Block-Is flew on Saturn Vs in 1967/68. Fifteen manned Block-II (lunar orbit) spacecraft were launched in 1968-75, including three Skylab and one Apollo-Soyuz Test Project. TOTAL COST: $17.5 billion. PEAK FUNDING: $2.6 billion in 1966. COST PER SPACECRAFT: $220 million.
The Apollo LM was conceived in June 1962 when NASA decided to use the lunar orbit rendezvous technique rather than land the CSM on the Moon. Grumman won the contract in September 1962. The first unmanned tests took place in Earth orbit in 1968 (Apollo 5, 6). Nine manned LMs were launched in 1969-72. ESTIMATED COST: $2-3 billion. TOTAL COST: $11 billion. PEAK FUNDING: $2 billion in 1967. COST PER SPACECRAFT: $170 million.
Although not part of the lunar program, the Skylab space station was nevertheless based on surplus Apollo hardware. The Skylab 1 laboratory cost about $7 billion, while the total cost of the three Apollo/Saturn IB flights to the station probably cost approx. $2 billion. Although NASA constructed two Skylabs, it could afford to launch only one of them. Launching the second would have cost only $1.1 billion, plus $1.3 billion for two 2-month Apollo missions in 1974-76.
Total Costs:
TOTAL COST PER APOLLO MISSION: ----------------------------- Year ($M) (94$M) Apollo 7 1968 $145 $575 Apollo 8 1968 $310 $1 230 Apollo 9 1969 $340 $1 303 Apollo 10 1969 $350 $1 341 Apollo 11 1969 $355 $1 360 Apollo 12 1970 $375 $1 389 Apollo 13 1970 $375 $1 389 Apollo 14 1971 $400 $1 421 Apollo 15 1971 $445 $1 581 Apollo 16 1972 $445 $1 519 Apollo 17 1972 $450 $1 536 --------------------------------- $3,990 $14,644 NASA'S ANNUAL BUDGET & APOLLO: ----------------------------- Fiscal Apollo Total % Year (94$B) (94$B) 1962 $0.78 $5.89 13.31% 1963 $2.91 $10.52 27.66% 1964 $10.33 $20.62 50.08% 1965 $11.47 $28.20 40.67% 1966 $12.57 $28.20 44.58% 1967 $11.95 $27.15 44.04% 1968 $10.14 $24.41 41.55% 1969 $7.76 $21.04 36.87% 1970 $6.24 $17.26 36.19% 1971 $3.25 $15.36 21.14% 1972 $2.05 $11.99 17.10% 1973 $0.25 $11.99 2.05% ----------------------------------- Total $79.7 $222.6 35.80%
[Editor's Note: From Moon Miners' Manifesto, Issue #93]
Many people envision with enthusiasm an eventual wholesale settlement and colonization of Mars, and I number myself among them. In doing so, we carry forward what has become a radical dream of our species throughout this century. And we have done so, stubbornly, through revolution after revolution in our perceptions about the Red Planet. Banished to the realm of myth are the Mars of Edgar Rice Burroughs, populated by green men and princesses and thoats, and the Mars of Percival Lowell, crisscrossed with canals feeding green strips of irrigated vegetation, defying the creeping desiccation of the Planet. But gone, too, is the glimpse of a moon-like Mars that we read into the first photos from early Mariner orbiters.
We know now that Mars was once warmer, wet with ocean, rains, and rivers, and lakes, and possibly in early stages of greening. We are all but certain that much of that watery endowment yet remains, locked up in permafrost layers of soil in lower lying basinlands. There may even be liquid subterranean lakes if there are near-surface geothermal pockets still simmering here and there, but we do not know. As to the polar caps, we now know that under a few inches of carbon dioxide frost seasonally chilled out of the atmosphere, there are vast polar ice sheets hundreds of meters thick, at least in the north.
How much water is there? That is, how extensive and patchy are the permafrost deposits? How thick are they? How fresh or brinish? All these questions must be answered to a first approximation accurate to an order of magnitude before any brainstorming schemes of "terraforming" (or, as we would prefer, of "rejuvenaissance" i.e. not making Mars like Earth, but bringing it back to the more encradling Mars-state it once enjoyed) can be much more than an exercise in "garbage in, garbage out." Which is why MMM has never gotten into such schemes. It is far too premature an exercise.
What does remain is the promise of a world that is more thoroughly endowed with prerequisites to support human and Earth life than is our own bondsworld, the Moon. Mars would seem to have far more appeal as a homesteading destination for those with enough of the right stuff to be willing to forever forsake the Green Hills of Earth.
But we can indulge in these fantasies, these declarations of willingness to go, only because the need to take a second look has not been thrust upon us by any imminent opportunity to open this frontier. That point of truth is still over the time horizon by an unknown number of years.
When that time does come and those who've thought themselves ready to go are faced with the decision to "put up or shut up", we think that many, even most, will get cold feet.
For despite Mars' life-supportive endowments, the challenges and obstacles to the establishment of a long-term human population capable of first enduring, then of thrivingly coming into its own, are daunting. And they are daunting from many points of view: engineering, logistical, biospheric, but above all and most critically, personal.
It is this last but ultimately most make-or-break class of challenges that we want to discuss here.
POINT: Mars is farther from Earth than the Moon, much farther. And the implications are compounded.
Resupply, reinforcement, relief, and rescue are always from 6 months to 25 months away. This will mean a reliance on a strategic "egg yolk" policy, as opposed to maintenance of "umbilical" style logistics. On site repair and fabrication shops as well as hospitals, both as to equipment and personnel expertise will need to be very much more complete. Triage in medical emergencies will have to be accepted by all as a potential personal consequence before leaving Earth.
It will mean that the personal commitment to the Mars frontier of each pioneer recruit must be individually that much deeper, more "final", that much less open to reconsideration down the line. It will be much more expensive to return to Earth, and the delay time before such a repatriation can be affected will be much, much longer. Only the hardiest, most self-reliant, and resilient personalities should tempt such odds.
The sense of isolation from the mainstream of human civilization will be much deeper. Electronic communication with Earth will involve response delays of 6 to 44 minutes, not the 2 and a half seconds Lunans will experience. While, in all but live radio communications, those delays can be edited out, the edited conversations will flow jerkily and clumsily. The new "Martians" will tend to turn inward culturally and socially, and go their own way.
POINT: The Sun not only is further, dimmer, and much less warming, it is noticeably so to the naked eye. Not all of that is bad, of course. On Earth, full sunlight is uncomfortably intense. On Mars the softer light will be still plenty bright enough, and welcome, much as the softly sunny November skies in the northern United States and Canada.
But the smaller Sun will be a constant reminder of the reliefless cycle of very cool and bitterly cold seasons. Martian summers are but caricatures of our own temperate zone warm seasons, not even quite on a thermal par with the patchy thaws of our Antarctic summers.
The new Martians will learn to cope, to be sure, and grow to find much pleasure and satisfaction in the accommodations they will have to make to acculturate themselves to this new world. But only those with the inner strength and drive to do get over the enormous adjustment hurdles had better set out on such a venture.
It can best be summed up so. Only a tiny fraction of the numbers who say they would go to Mars had they but the chance to do so, would also be as willing to commit to pioneering the relatively far friendlier fringes of our own Antarctica, with its vast fresh water supplies, breathable sweet air, and surrounding oceans teeming with life and food. That has to tell us something. We are all too romantic about Mars!
Yet as long as the moment of truth, the time for a reality check is yet far off, we can afford to indulge our Martian illusions. And perhaps that is good in the long run. For it carries forth the dream, and with it the ongoing brainstorming exercises that will one day overcome the daunting odds.
[Ed. Note - See the article "SELENE: A New Space Utility; Laser Beaming Power into Space", by Jim Spellman, in the May issue for more information.]
Beaming power by microwave from space for use on Earth, of course, was suggested by Peter Glaser in 1968, and following this suggestion there were several analyses of the possibility of beaming from space to space by microwave. In the 1980's, researchers at NASA Langley, particularly Ed Conway and Gilbert Walker, worked on the potential use of lasers for space-to-space power beaming, focussing primarily on the development of a solar-powered laser to do this. In 1989 I suggested that power could be usefully beamed by laser in the opposite direction: from Earth to space. In particular, I proposed, at the Princeton Conference on Space Manufacturing in 89, that Earth-based lasers could be used to provide power to a lunar base over the 354-hour lunar night, using the same solar arrays that were used to provide solar power during the daytime. I proposed the concept to NASA as a white-paper submitted to the "outreach" program to solicit ideas for the Space Exploration Initiative in 1990, and gave more details on the concept in a paper later published in the AIAA Journal of Power and Propulsion.
In 1991, John Rather at NASA Headquarters independently had the same idea. I first met John at the Resources of Near Earth Space conference in1991; at that time he had started advocating laser power beaming for supplying power to a lunar base, but hadn't yet published anything. We discussed our two versions of the concept there. Very shortly after that meeting, John arranged a dedicated workshop at NASA Lewis on the subject of laser power beaming for a moonbase, and within a few months the SELENE project (an acronym that originally stood for "Segmented Efficient Laser Emission for Nonnuclear Energy"-- later the acronym was changed, but the referent changed to "SpacE Laser ENErgy") was official.
The idea of using an Earth based laser to extend the life of communications satellites past battery failure developed out of my laser power for the moon analysis, also somewhat before the SELENE project began. The original paper on this was published as a paper by the International Astronautical Federation in 1989 and then reprinted in the journal Acta Astronautica; a preprint of the Acta Astronautica version of the paper was included in the SELENE pre-kickoff meeting proceedings in 1991. When I presented the concept at the 1991 Space Photovoltaic Research and Technology Conference, it got picked up by Andrew Meulenberg of Comsat Laboratories, who took it to Larry Westerlund (then vice-president of Comsat), who liked the idea and called up John Rather at NASA Headquarters to push it. It first got added the SELENE baseline plan in the December 1991 "Review of SELENE FY91 Program Results & FY92 Program Kickoff" meeting, where the concept of rejuvenating "dead" satellites was discussed in detail in my presentation.
The use of an Earth-based laser to power an electric thruster for space propulsion was first proposed, as far as I know, by Grant Logan of Lawrence Livermore Laboratories in 1988, with technical details worked out in 1989. His proposal was a bit optimistic about technology (he proposed using diamond solar cells operating at a six-hundred degrees to convert ultraviolet laser light, a technology that has yet to be demonstrated even in the laboratory, at a wavelength that will not easily transmit through the Earth's atmosphere). His ideas, with the technology scaled down to be possible with more practical, nearer-term technology, were adapted into the SELENE program.
From the beginning, both John Rather and I have envisioned the use of laser power beaming as a stepping-stone to further industrialization of space, realizing that a large-scale demonstration of power beaming is a necessary step to the development of solar power satellites. I have every hope that the technology, being developed by SELENE (now a private corporation, instead of a NASA research project), will lead to great things.
Some references on the "prehistory" of laser power beaming:
G.A. Landis, "Solar Power for the Lunar Night," Space Manufacturing 7: Space Resources to Improve Life on Earth, pp. 290-296 (AIAA, 1989). Presented at 9th Princeton/SSI Conference on Space Manufacturing, May 10-13 1989
G.A. Landis, "Moonbase Night Power by Laser Illumination," J. Propulsion and Power, Vol. 8, No. 1, pp. 251-254 (1992). Also in Proceedings of the Technology Workshop on Laser Beamed Power, Feb. 1991, NASA Lewis Research Center, Cleveland OH.
G.A. Landis, "Satellite Eclipse Power by Laser Illumination," Acta Astronautica, Vol. 25, No. 4, pp. 229-233 (1991); paper IAF-90-053; 41st IAF Congress, Dresden, Germany, Oct. 1990.
G.A. Landis, "Space Power by Ground-based Laser Illumination," IEEE Aerospace and Electronics Systems, Vol. 6, No. 6, pp. 3-7, Nov. 1991. Presented at 26th Intersociety Energy Conversion Engineering Conference, Aug. 1991, Vol. 1, pp. 1-6.
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