Just another Apollo? Part two (2005)

Re:Just another Apollo? Part two (2005) by cratermoon on Tuesday June 14, 2022 @12:35PM (#31741930)

Nixon, who was president by the time the US landed on the moon, in case you've forgotten, hated JFK, and had ever since he lost to Kennedy in the 1960 election after Nixon's disastrous appearance at the debate vs JFK.

So of course, when Nixon became president, he considered Apollo to be JFK's program and killed it. Not all at once – first by cancelling missions after 17, then more so. Also, Nixon wanted the money for his expansion of the war in Vietnam after the Tet Offensive, as well as money for his other imperialist interventions around the world.

The reason why we got the Space Shuttle was, bluntly, Air Force involvement in wanting a reusable, crewed vehicle to deploy and retrieve spy satellites. That's why the shuttle bay got to be so big[1]

1 https://www.thespacereview.com/article/1960/1

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Just another Apollo? Part two (2005) by BitwiseFool on Tuesday June 14, 2022 @01:34PM (#31742973)

Adding on to the Air Force thing, the shuttle program was being starved of money so the decision was made to accommodate the Air Force to get some money from the DoD. It wound up seriously disfiguring the original design of the shuttle and it never ended up doing any of the kind of missions the Air Force required the changes for.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Just another Apollo? Part two (2005) by cratermoon on Thursday June 16, 2022 @01:14AM (#31762633)

There was a shuttle launch pad at Vandenberg, SLC-6, which never saw a launch. After the loss of Challenger on STS-51-L, the Air Force gave up on the shuttle anyway, leaving it as an albatross around NASA's neck.

[ Parent | on HN ]