WHAT IF APOLLO NEVER DIED?

What If Apollo Never Died? Part 1: One Has To Wonder...

I find myself in the mood to write. In order to flex my writing muscles, if you will, I decided to engage in a bit of speculation, to whit, the title of this article.

Make no mistake, Apollo didn't just die, it was killed. There were many factors contributing to this: the Vietnam War, lack of both government and public interest, political interference. As President Lyndon B. Johnson, the space program's biggest supporter, colorfully put it, it was all "pissed away."

Again, make no mistake, figuratively and literally demolishing the Apollo infrastructure and systems in favor of the built-from-the-ground-up/wholly-new Space Shuttle was extremely costly in both money and knowledge.

In our history, Apollo moon missions ended after only six landings in December 1972 with Apollo 17. Of those landing only three of them had truly begun to scratch the surface of what was on the Moon. The program then gave its last big gasp with Skylab, launched in 1973. The interim space station hosted three crews and actually did accomplish a great many feats of research, endurance and observation. Finally, things sputtered to a close with the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project in July 1975. No American astronauts would go into space again until the Space Shuttle was finally launched in April 1981.

The Shuttle had a hard life, don't get me wrong. It's purpose was continually redefined over the course of its development and career and inherent frailties were exposed tragically with the loss of Challenger and Columbia. When it finally came to time to build the massive space base that NASA had been jockeying for since the late 60s, it came at the prices of being reliant on international cooperation and having to use launch vehicles that would take many, many trips to fully assemble the station. And now, almost 10 years after the station was finally completed, they're talking about de-orbiting it in the early 2020s. And with the Shuttle program ended in 2011, we now wait to see if NASA can get back on the horse, as it were, or will have to become utterly dependent, some would say subservient, to private enterprise for human spaceflight.

But what if things went a little bit differently? What if the government and the American people had chosen to squeeze the $24 billion Apollo investment for all it was worth?

In my mind, at least three things would have to change to guarantee Apollo to continue. These are pretty big historical fudges, I'll grant, but since the very nature of this is speculation, we might as well go all out.

1. The Vietnam War either doesn't happen or is a much smaller conflict that the US is able to exit from without massive civilian ire and/or drain on taxes.

2. Nixon does not become President in 1968.

3. NASA does a MUCH better job on its PR.

Admittedly, the fudge-iest one of the three is Nixon. I do feel that he needs to be removed from the equation as much as possible however, as he was not terribly interested in the space program, insomuch as it could be a tool for personal prestige. At least Kennedy, with his doubts, felt it should be a tool for national prestige. But as I said, this is speculative anyway, so we'll just say that for this timeline scenario, Johnson runs for a second term and actually does manage to defeat Nixon by a very, VERY slim margin. In fact it goes down as the absolute closest election in US history. As for Vietnam, as much as I would like to spare the soldiers from that hell, it's more than likely it would still occur no matter what in any realistic setting. Keeping it small is probably the most likely of outcomes. I say all this though without saying that I am an expert on history or politics so bear with me.

Now that the stage is set, we enter the Apollo program as it begins in 1967...

1967-1968