🚀 'Earthrise' and the end of the Space Age
The iconic photo's journey to and from the Oval Office mirrors NASA's post-Apollo decline
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Super-Short Summary: Astronaut William Anders, who died last week, captured the famous "Earthrise" photo during Apollo 8. The photo hung in the Oval Office for awhile but was removed in 1970 as public support for the space program waned. Polls showed most Americans felt Apollo wasn't worth more spending after the Apollo 11 lunar landing. The near-disaster of Apollo 13 further shook confidence. Nixon cut NASA's budget and ended the program after Apollo 17. Critics felt abandoning Apollo vindicated claims it was only done for prestige. As a new Space Age dawns with private sector involvement, however, I hope to see “Earthrise" return to the Oval Office.
Astronaut William Anders, who died last Friday at age 90 in a small airplane crash, is typically given credit for the famous “Earthrise” photo — a beautiful blue-and-white planetary oasis rising above the gray, cratered lunar surface and contrasting against the inky black of space — that he snapped during Apollo 8’s December 1969 flight around the Moon. But “Earthrise” resulted from a team effort, as NASA likes to point out. It was Commander Frank Borman's roll maneuver that brought the Earth into view in Anders' window in the first place. Jim Lovell also played a key role by quickly locating a roll of color film and handing it to Anders so he could capture the stunning sight. Anway, the three astronauts' exclamations of awe as they scrambled to photograph “Earthrise” reveal what an unexpected and moving experience it was:
Anders: Oh my God! Look at that picture over there. Here’s the Earth coming up. Wow, that’s pretty.
Borman: [chuckle] Hey, don’t take that, it’s not scheduled.
Anders: [laughter] You got a color film, Jim? Hand me that roll of color quick, would you. …
Lovell: Oh man, that’s great.
The next year, “Earthrise” was placed on a US Postal Service stamp commemorating the Apollo 8 mission. And the photograph itself ended up hanging on a wall in the Oval Office, prominent just to the right of President Richard Nixon’s Wilson desk. (In his autobiography published just after he left the presidency because of the Watergate scandal, Nixon called space exploration “one of the last of the great challenges to the American spirit. Space is perhaps the last frontier truly commensurate with America’s capacity for wonder.”) Indeed, you can see "Earthrise" in the photos and video images of Nixon's telephone-radio transmission to Apollo 11 astronauts Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, congratulating them on their successful Moon landing on July 20, 1969.
But “Earthrise” — an artifact from a key moment in US space exploration and a captured moment of wonder by an American astronaut — was removed from the Oval Office sometime in 1970, certainly by September of that year. With Apollo 11’s successful Moon landing the previous July, the US-Soviet Space Race was over and America seemed ready to focus more attention on problems here on Earth, from civil rights to the economy to Vietnam. The Pacific Ocean splashdown of Apollo 17 marked the end of America’s Moon program, a low-key finale Nixon blamed on an American public “now blase about the ever-present hazards of space as well as the excitement of its challenge.”
Which was true enough. The public’s support for the space program, including Apollo, always seemed more a product of Cold War opposition to the Soviet Union than an unquenchable desire to explore space for its own sake. In 1961, 51 percent of respondents in a survey said it was “very important” for the United States to be ahead of Russia in space exploration versus 23 percent who said it was “not too important.” And a 1965 poll explicitly found that if the Soviet Russians were not interested in space, only 38 percent of Americans would favor the space program and 50 percent would oppose it. Americans often ranked the space program near the top of federal programs they desired to be cut during the decade-long advance toward the first Moon landing.
As space historian Roger Launius of the National Air and Space Museum has written about the American public’s surprisingly lukewarm interest in space during the most existing time of their nation’s space program:
Consistently throughout the 1960s a majority of Americans did not believe Apollo was worth the cost, with the one exception to this a poll taken at the time of the Apollo 11 lunar landing in July 1969. And consistently throughout the decade 45-60 percent of Americans believed that the government was spending too much on space, indicative of a lack of commitment to the spaceflight agenda. These data do not support the contention that most people approved of Apollo and thought it important to explore space.
The Conservative Futurist: How To Create the Sci-Fi World We Were Promised by James Pethokoukis
This didn’t help either: The thrilling, civilizational achievement of Buzz Aldrin, Neil Armstrong, and Michael Collins was followed almost exactly a year after by the stomach-churning near-disaster of Apollo 13 in July 1970. The events of that mission — since memorialized in the eponymous film starring Tom Hanks — have since become America’s Dunkirk, the failure that wasn’t far worse because of America’s can-do spirit as exemplified by Jim Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise.
But while Dunkirk was a major boost for British morale and helped steel the nation for the coming challenge, Apollo 13 helped America wave the white flag on the space program, at least to send humans beyond Earth. Nixon, in particular, seems to have been left shaken. When informed of the incident, he canceled the rest of his appointments for the day and headed to the Goddard Space Center in Maryland for a briefing. The next day, Nixon and the White House staff began preparing a contingency plan in case the crew was lost, including a visit to the homes of the fallen astronauts and the posthumous awarding of the Presidential Medal of Freedom to the Apollo 13 crew.
The White House also prepared just-in-case remarks, one for a failed mission, one for the death of three astronauts. This from a memo, entitled “Draft Response to Messages, if Astronauts Unable to Land Safely”: “Even though it has long been recognized that space exploration, like all of the great pioneering adventures throughout man’s history, involves the possibility of loss, we are deeply distressed at the death of these brave men.”
And while no such remarks were needed, Nixon thought hard about canceling the Apollo 16 and 17 missions, especially ahead of the 1972 election, given the possible political ramifications of a deadly accident. Both missions went ahead, in December 1972, as Apollo 17 was returning to Earth, Nixon issued a statement saying, “This may be the last time in this century that men will walk on the Moon.”
Yet it seems likely Apollo 13 likely only further confirmed doubts Nixon was already having about Apollo once its primary mission was accomplished. By December of 1969, according to Planetary Society John Logsdon, he was already telling his associates that he did not see the need to go to the moon six more times. In March 1970, Nixon put forward his “space doctrine,” including substantially reducing the cost of space operations. From now on, NASA would be just another public program competing for taxpayer dollars. Indeed, Nixon rewarded NASA for the success of Apollo 11 with a 10 percent budget for 1971.
For the New York Times, a long-time critic of Apollo spending, it was a moment of vindication:
This nation spent roughly $24 billion to put the first men on the moon. Now, little more than a year after that triumph, the already limited program to utilize this new capability is being cut back a third to make savings that will amount at most to $60 million this year, less than 2 percent of the expected $3‐billion‐plus NASA budget for fiscal 1971, and less than a quarter of 1 percent of the overall investment. The budgetary myopia which forced this penny wise, pound‐foolish decision can only vindicate the critics who have insisted that Apollo was motivated by purely prestige considerations, not scientific goals. It is being abandoned now that the easily bored world audience has begun to yawn. All this represents an inglorious letdown for an effort whose brilliant outcome was and is one of the proudest fruits of human ingenuity and courage.
NASA had grand plans for the Apollo program beyond the historic Apollo 17 mission. The space agency was poised to launch Apollo 18, 19, and 20, which would have provided invaluable data on lunar radiation and surface dust — critical information for establishing a semi-permanent scientific outpost on the Moon. These ambitious missions were just the beginning. NASA envisioned a crewed Mars flyby in the mid-1970s utilizing Apollo technology, paving the way for a momentous Mars landing in the 1980s. These bold endeavors would have pushed the boundaries of human exploration and scientific discovery to heights that now seem like science fiction.
As we begin a new Space Age that I hope meets and exceeds the unfulfilled post-Apollo ambitions — thanks in large part to the involvement of the American private sector — I would love to see the American president return “Earthrise” to the Oval Office.
(This piece expands upon an earlier Faster, Please! essay and the story as told in my book, The Conservative Futurist.)
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