NASA's Original Post-Apollo Plans Were INSANE | Answers With Joe

In 1969, President Nixon created a commission to set the course for NASA's Post-Apollo years. What they came up with was a bold, ambitious vision of the future. One with multiple space stations, moon bases, regular travel to and from space with airline-like frequency, and people on Mars in the 1980s.

It was overly optimistic and naive to say the least. But many of their ideas stuck around and shaped everything that's come since. It's an interesting look at a wild future that could have been.

Here's the full Task Group report if you'd like to read it:

And here's Werner Von Braun's Mars Projekt book:

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Timestamps:

0:00 - Intro
1:48 - Werner Von Braun's ideas
5:02 - The Space Task Group Report
6:25 - The Mars Goal
8:50 - Program Objectives
11:43 - The Space Stations (plural)
13:19 - The Space Transportation System
16:28 - The Budget
17:40 - What Parts Of The Plan Came True
18:50 - What Might Have Been
21:14 - Sponsor & Close

[wlittle]

My favorite sci-fi show in the 70's was SPACE:1999 and i was in love with the idea of having a Moon Base Alpha and flying around in an Eagle Transporter. In the first episode it made a trip to the moon as common as flying from Toronto to Calgary. For a show made in the mid 70's it gave its fans a "tour" of what it might be like in the not so distant future.

[misternewoutlook]

As a child of the space race, the "today Moon, tomorrow Mars" was a real thing we were conceptualizing - even expecting. Yes, the idea of a manned Mars landing was known to be a 1980s vision, but I recall commentators saying that the 1990s was more realistic for such a venture! Naturally, as kids, we felt depressed at such a delayed timeline.

[sthomas]

I was sold this vision as a GenXer growing up in the 1970's. As a geeky, tech fascinated kid watching Star Trek, Star Wars, etc. and then seeing these visions from NASA, I was convinced that was the direction for me, and I decided to become an Aerospace Engineer. Of course, by the time I got to college in the 1980's, a lot of those visions had already been scaled back and/or militarized under Reagan and "Star Wars" and related systems. Of course it was great that we defeated the Soviet Union, but that led to a collapse in the Aerospace industry in the early 1990's. I did find gainful employment as a satellite engineer, but it was far from the visions NASA had planted in my mind in the 1970's.

My point? The loss of those visions not only "set us back" from where we might've been, but it also robbed many of us of dreams that we'd built. Aerospace technology, despite what some would have you believe, isn't easily achieved alone, in your garage (show me the nuclear rocket that someone is working on in their garage and I'll gladly eat my words). So we lost a generation of talented, motivated people as well.

[Nicole-xduj]

I think that one of the reasons the Apollo program was so successful is that the bureaucrats and administrators were forced out of the way by the insane timeline, allowing science and engineering to happen rapidly. Not sure that could ever happen again

[tessat]

My grandfather worked as a consultant for NASA in the Apollo era and retired in 1972. I just googled his most famous published paper. He wrote it the year before I was born, while my parents and siblings were living with my grandparents and both my parents were working to save up for a buying a house. I sometimes wondered why my grandfather would always mention its topic when he talked to me. The paper was published in May, 1966, just after I was born. He must have had an association of that paper with my birth. It is behind a paywall, but heck, for $35, I might just have to get myself a copy. My dad worked as an engineer for Westinghouse Defense and Electronics at the same time, which was bought out by Northrop Grumman in the 1990s. Westinghouse made the TV camera for Apollo 12. To this day my dad is still pissed off at Al Bean for pointing their precious camera at the sun, burning out the tube, and spoiling their moment of glory. My grandfather worked with lasers and worked on the Lunar Laser Ranging Retroreflector Array and the laser that shot to the moon and was reflected back by the retroreflector array. I remember sitting in class in the second grade in 1973 or74 and listening to a classmate's dad talking to us about the future plans for NASA that included going back to the moon and to Mars. The one thing I remember asking him is if women would be included in the missions. He told me that yes, they would. I think that if the US government had chosen to fund NASA at anything close to the Apollo level, I expect that we would certainly have run into all of the same technological limitations that we face now, but we would have had the resources of the finest minds and institutions attacking them. I definitely think that we would have seen more accidents and deaths related to space exploration, which might have had a limiting effect, but only time would have told how much more of that ambitious plan would have come to fruition.

[nicolaslanglais]

Can you imagine if they kept NASA's funding at 4%? That is the version of reality I'd like to live in.

[wanderingsilver]

Yeah, the timeline got screwed and so much more could have happened. My grandfather had expected to see us go to the moon. Now I'm a damn grandfather. I was born in 1966 and I grew up with Star Trek and NASA showing us the way. But the military industrial complex got the money, not science and exploration that actually advances humanity. Ok, I may be a bit disgruntled. I do feel like we slipped into some weird alternate universe these last couple of decades. Thanks Joe for always showing us a great perspective. And most of all, for your humor and intellect. You really do make my world more interesting and bearable.

[nj]

The series "For All Mankind" is an incredible series about if the funding had kept going on Apple TV

[ComaDave]

I was five years old when my mother kept me home from school to watch Armstrong and Aldrin on our little TV in New South Wales, Australia.
I turned 58 four days ago, and the path that was taken regarding space travel post-Apollo has been far and away the greatest disappointment of my life.

[radtech]

I remember the Space Race of the 1960s as a kid, and watching Kubrick's 2001 as a sort of preview of what was to come. Then came Skylab, and then the Viking and Voyager missions, and then ... the Space Truck (boldly going where we had already gone before). It really couldn't be called a Shuttle until the beginning of the 21st century, since there was no place in orbit for it to shuttle to (before the ISS). In the 1985 PBS documentary seies Spaceflight, host Martin Sheen warned that the US might become "the Portugal of space, " meaning it had blazed the path to space, but had abandoned space after a few early successes. Since that aired in 1985, that warning has tended toward becoming more and more correct.

[FirstLast-vres]

When I was a kid in the 80s, I thought that Space Shuttle launches were moon-bound. Then I was told that we stopped going to the moon before I was even born. That was incredibly disappointing. I just couldn't understand why we'd walk away from a massive achievement like that. I'm 42 now, and I'm still waiting on the government to correct that.

[raviyeejoshi]

Joe, how did you write this script without ever watching For All Mankind?

You literally plugged a series of we kept the space race going— it’s the premise of the entire series. It’s really good!

[floridafan]

As a 10 year old, I fell in love with the idea of space when I got a close up photo of the moon at a home show event. Now, a lot of years later, I am disappointed the space program never moved forward as hoped. I really, really wanted to see all the things that were planned come to fruition. It will be something I regret not getting to see in my lifetime.

[themoondotie]

Excellent take on the faltering stop / start space program. I think you nailed it Joe when you said that progress can't automatically be sped up by just throwing money at it. The 100's, if not 1000's of minor and major developments across a wide range of disciplines from IT to materials science, data processing to biological systems.etc needed to make long term space travel and space building possible can only be accelerated so much. I think there was little or nothing wrong with their vision, it was just their timeline - Keep up the excellent work Joe!!

[CUMBICA]

As an analogy I remember when I was 14 we did a 100m dash in my athletics class and my time was a horrible 15.6 sec. And my teacher demanded everybody should be running below 15 sec at years end. I worked very hard and my time improved to 14.5 sec and I foolishly thought wow at this pace I'm gonna break the world record in like 5 years LOL. Pretty much the space program prediction.

[Josh-svwj]

In 2011, I was in high school, picking a career path to follow. I knew I wanted to go into engineering, and living on the space coast of Florida, I wanted to work for (or at least with) NASA. But, as you may have guessed, the STS program was cancelled in 2011 and at that time, Space-x wasn't something well known, so the future of space flight looked bleak. I personally decided there wouldn't be much of a future in space programs, so I chose to pursue a career in Civil Engineering. I love it and it's fulfilling, but this video was all about what could have been, so It got me thinking, "what if?"

[RussellTHouse]

Joe, I was 13 years old in 1969, lying on the living room floor watching Neal Armstrong's first steps on the moon. I had a Saturn V / Apollo model (and still do) and was really into the space program of the 60's. I watched the news for any stories on the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo flights. I was deeply sickened by the deadly Apollo I fire and feared that that could spell the end of it all.
I had just turned 18 in 1974, registered for The Draft, then breathed a deep sigh of relief when my draft number was something like 250. The Viet Nam war ruined SO much for everyone in the world, killed 10's of thousands, and did an effective job of halting what could have been the greatest achievement of mankind - space exploration of our solar system. As a young man, I was left with a ''What's next?" feeling. Although my outlook on life is my responsibility, the end of the Apollo program was a contributor to my feeling rather aimless.
But in the early 80's, my youthful excitement for the space program found a resurgence with the STS program. I really thought we had a GREAT thing going there, regardless of the two STS tragedies. It broke my heart forever when the STS program was allowed to die without a replacement. I will never forgive our national leaders for their short-sightedness regarding space exploration at that time and the surrendering of the leadership of the USA in space. The STS was a great idea that just needed some technological improvements. Expensive? Yes, but worth it? Undoubtedly!
As I get older, I am hesitant to get excited about space exploration now, especially since we STILL have insane oligarchs who want to dominate the world and threaten world peace, or refuse to even look at evidence of hanky-panky in an election. Where are THEIR priorities? Those people are ESPECIALLY short-sighted because they focus on the things of this world instead of joining with the rest of us more sane people who want to look to the stars, exploring our potential as the Human Race. But oh, how I WANT to get excited about space exploration again! I welcome such developments as the Webb telescope and the efforts of private companies to develop launch vehicles, both ''crewed'' and ''not crewed''. :) I believe a Mars Manned Mission is fraught with risks, but on the other hand, so was the Moon Manned Missions. And our available technology today eclipses that of the 1960's and '70's by a long shot!
Thank you for the humor-injected video presentations. I appreciate your views!
Best regards,
Russ H.

[beemerwt]

Nice little disclaimer about Starlink launches there, but am I the only one who thinks it's absolutely amazing that all the Apollo launches were within 6 years? Every 6 months to build an entire rocket capable of traveling into space, and even landing on the moon. That's INSANE, ESPECIALLY when you consider this was all taking place in the 1960s.

[Kevin_Street]

Thanks for this video! There's a whole sub-genre of science fiction devoted to exploring what might have happened if NASA had kept going after Apollo. "The Tranquility Alternative" by Allen Steele is a great example of this kind of alternate history. Although he goes even further, and imagines a timeline where the first manned spaceflight happens during WWII in 1944.

I'm not certain they could have landed on Mars by 1981, because the technical challenges of building self-sustaining enclosed biospheres that can support human life for 6-12 months at a time are considerable. It's something we're still working on now, despite all those years of living on the ISS. When there's absolutely no resupply coming, just living in space becomes a very difficult challenge. Still, they had the right approach, starting with space stations and using the same components in later space ships. Each step teaches you how to make the next one.

[squeaksquawk]

The old shuttle concepts have always fascinated me. Thank you, Joe, for covering this.