The Planetary JAG knew of the de facto congressional "no new starts" injunction but apparently assumed that it did not apply to studies with implications beyond the next fiscal year. 41 Congressman Joseph Karth (Democrat-Minnesota), chair of the House Subcommittee on Space Science and Applications, saw it differently. Normally a strong NASA supporter, he lashed out at the "ostrich-like, head-in-the-sand approach of some NASA planning," and added, "Very bluntly, a manned mission to Mars or Venus by 1975 or 1977 is now and always has been out of the question—and anyone who persists in this kind of misallocation of resources is going to be stopped." 42
By August, the expected 1967 Federal budget deficit was $30 billion. Goaded by MSC's Request for Proposals, on 16 August 1967 the House zeroed out funding for both Voyager and advanced piloted mission planning. AAP funding fell to $122 million. On 22 August, the House approved a $4.59 billion FY 1968 NASA budget—a cut of more than $500 million from the January 1967 White House request.
Faced by a spiraling budget deficit, war and anti-war dissent, and urban riots, President Johnson reduced his support for NASA, saying, "Under other circumstances I would have opposed such a cut. However, conditions have greatly changed since I submitted my January budget request." 43 He added, "Some hard choices must be made between the necessary and the desirable . . . . We . . . dare not eliminate the necessary. Our task is to pare the desirable." 44
Denouement
The Voyager program died in part because NASA cast it as a lead-in to piloted flybys. The scientific community viewed Voyager's loss as a slap in the face. In September, in an unusual move, NASA officials went before the Senate Appropriations Committee to negotiate a Mariner mission in 1971 and a Mars landing mission in 1973, both designed "to conform to sharply reduced funding in FY 1969." 45 The 1971 Mariner mission became Mariner 9. In March 1968, NASA unveiled Project Viking—a cut-price version of the Voyager program. Viking, managed by NASA's Langley Research Center, emerged as one of the few FY 1969 NASA new starts.
MSC received and reviewed MSSR study proposals from industry, although, of course, no contract for such a study was ever issued. The piloted flyby mission, the object of so much study from mid-1962 to late 1967, was defunct. Despite the obvious congressional hostility toward advanced planning, however, NASA's piloted Mars mission studies were not. As will be seen in the next chapter, the focus shifted to the other area of Planetary JAG emphasis—piloted Mars landing missions using nuclear rockets.
Chapter 5: Apogee
Thus, Mr. Vice President—[the] Solar system is opening up before us. With landing on the Moon we know that man can lay claim to the planets for his use. We know further that man will do this. The question is when? We know that [the] U.S. will take part. The question is how soon will we follow up on what we have begun with Apollo? It could be the early 1980s. (Thomas Paine, 1969) 1
The Big Shot
In a November 1965 article on the next 20 years of space flight, Wernher von Braun sought to convey the Saturn V rocket's immense potential. "One Saturn V alone," he wrote, "will carry twice as much payload as the entire NASA space program up to this point in time. In fact, all the orbiters, all the deep space probes, and all the Mercurys and Geminis that have ever flown would only load the cargo compartment of one Saturn V to 50% of capacity." 2 With Saturn V available, the Moon, Mars, and indeed the entire solar system seemed within reach.
The first of fifteen Saturn V's ordered by NASA to support Project Apollo rolled out to Launch Pad 39A at Kennedy Space Center on 26 August 1967. Designated AS-501, the mighty rocket would launch Apollo 4, the first unmanned test of an Apollo CSM spacecraft. The 24-hour countdown commenced early on 8 November and reached T-0 at 7 a.m. Eastern Standard Time on 9 November. Seen from the KSC press site, three and one-half miles from the pad, the white and black rocket rose slowly at the summit of an expanding mountain of red flame and gray smoke. Thunder from "the Big Shot," as the news media nicknamed AS-501, drowned out television and radio reporters giving live commentary and threatened to collapse their temporary studios.
AS-501 stood 111 meters tall and weighed about 2,830 metric tons at liftoff. Its 10-meter-diameter S-IC first stage carried 2,090 metric tons of kerosene fuel and liquid oxygen oxidizer for its five F-1 rocket engines. They gulped 13.6 metric tons of propellants each second to develop a total of 3.4 million kilograms of thrust at liftoff. AS-501's first stage depleted its propellants in two and one-half minutes at an altitude of 56 kilometers, detached, and crashed into the Atlantic about 72 kilometers from Pad 39A.
The 10-meter-diameter S-II second stage carried 423 metric tons of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for its five J-2 engines, which developed a total of 1 million pounds of thrust. The S-II depleted its propellants after six and one-half minutes at an altitude of 161 kilometers.
The 6.7-meter-diameter S-IVB third stage carried 105 metric tons of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen for its single restartable J-2 engine, which fired for two minutes to place the Apollo 4 CSM in a 185-kilometer parking orbit. For an Apollo lunar mission, the J-2 engine would ignite again after one orbit to place the Apollo spacecraft on course for the Moon. For Apollo 4, the third stage restarted after two Earth orbits, 3 hours and 11 minutes after liftoff, putting the stage and spacecraft into an Earth-intersecting ellipse with a 17,335-kilometer apogee (highest point above the Earth).
The Apollo 4 CSM separated from the S-IVB stage, then fired its engine for 16 seconds to nudge its apogee to 18,204 kilometers. The CSM engine ignited a second time 8 hours and 10 minutes into the flight to throw the CM at Earth's atmosphere at a lunar-return speed of about 40,000 kilometers per hour. The CM separated and positioned itself with its bowl-shaped heat shield forward. Heat shield temperature soared to 2,760 degrees Celsius, and CM deceleration reached eight times the pull of Earth's gravity. Three parachutes opened, and the Apollo 4 CM splashed into the Pacific Ocean 10 kilometers from the planned spot, 8 hours and 38 minutes after liftoff.
The success of AS-501/Apollo 4 helped rebuild confidence in NASA's ability to fulfill Kennedy's mandate following the January 1967 fire. President Johnson told reporters that the "successful completion of today's flight has shown that we can launch and bring back safely to Earth the space ship that will take men to the Moon." Von Braun told reporters that he regarded "this happy day as one of the three or four highlights of my professional life—to be surpassed only by the manned lunar landing." 3
“To the Very Ends of the Solar System”
Apollo 4 also cheered Mars planners, for Saturn V had become their launch vehicle of choice following the end of post-Saturn rocket planning in 1964. NASA and AEC engineers developing the NERVA nuclear-thermal rocket engine saw special cause for celebration, for Saturn V was their brainchild's ride into space. The encouragement was well timed. NERVA, which stood for Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application, still had no approved mission and had just survived a narrow scrape in a Congress ill-disposed toward funding technology for future space missions.
NERVA was a solid-core nuclear-thermal rocket engine. Hydrogen propellant passed through and was heated by a uranium nuclear reactor, which caused the propellant to turn to plasma, expand rapidly, and vent out of a nozzle, producing thrust. Unlike chemical rockets, no oxygen was required to burn the hydrogen in the vacuum of space. Nuclear-thermal rockets promised greater efficiency than chemical rockets, meaning less propellant was required to do the same work as an equivalent chemical system. This would reduce spacecraft weight at Earth-orbit departure, opening the door to a broad range of advanced missions.
Initial theoretical work on nuclear-thermal rockets began at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in 1946. The New Mexico laboratory operated under the aegis of the AEC. The joint AEC-U.S. Air Force ROVER nuclear rocket program began in 1955, initially to investigate whether a nuclear rocket could provide propulsion for a massive intercontinental missile. In 1957, the solid-core reactor engine design was selected for ground testing. The test series engine was appropriately named Kiwi, for it was intended only for ground testing, not for flight.
Citing LANL's nuclear rocket work, AEC supporters in the U.S. Senate, led by New Mexico Democrat Clinton Anderson, pushed unsuccessfully in 1958 for the commission to be given control of the U.S. space program. Anderson was a close friend of Senate Majority Leader Lyndon Johnson, who led the Senate Space Committee formed after Sputnik 1's launch on 4 October 1957. 4 In October 1958, the Air Force transferred its ROVER responsibilities to the newly created NASA, and ROVER became a joint AEC-NASA program. AEC and NASA set up a joint Space Nuclear Propulsion Office (SNPO). NASA Lewis—which at this time was performing the first NASA Mars study, an examination of the weight-minimizing benefits of advanced propulsion, including nuclear rockets (see chapter 2)—became responsible within NASA for technical direction of the ROVER program.
In July 1959, the first Kiwi-A test was carried out successfully using hydrogen gas as propellant at the Nuclear Rocket Development Station (NRDS) at Jackass Flats, Nevada, 90 miles from Las Vegas. Senator Anderson arranged for delegates to the Democratic National Convention to be on hand for the second Kiwi-A test in July 1960. At the Convention, Anderson arranged for a plank on nuclear rocket development to be inserted into the Democratic Party platform. 5 In October 1960, the third Kiwi-A test using hydrogen gas showed promising results, building support for a contract to be issued for development of a flight-worthy nuclear rocket engine.
The Democratic ticket of John Kennedy and Lyndon Johnson narrowly defeated Dwight Eisenhower's Vice President, Richard Nixon, in the November 1960 election. Anderson took over as head of the Senate Space Committee. President Kennedy embraced space after the Soviet Union helped end his White House honeymoon by launching the first human into space on 12 April 1961. He charged Johnson with formulating a visible, dramatic space goal the United States might reach before the Soviets. Johnson suggested landing an American on the Moon.
Before a special joint session of Congress on 25 May 1961, Kennedy called for an American astronaut on the Moon by the end of the 1960s. Then he asked for "an additional $23 million, together with $7 million already available, [to] accelerate development of the ROVER nuclear rocket. This gives promise of some day providing a means for even more exciting and ambitious exploration of space, perhaps beyond the Moon, perhaps to the very ends of the solar system . . . ." 6
Because of Kennedy's speech, FY 1962 saw the real start of U.S. nuclear rocket funding. NASA and the AEC together were authorized to spend $77.8 million in FY 1962. Funding in the preceding 15 years had totaled about $155 million.
In July 1961, Aerojet-General Corporation won the contract to develop a 200,000-pound-thrust NERVA flight engine. NERVA Phase 1 occurred between July 1961 and January 1962, when a preliminary design was developed and a 22.5-foot NERVA engine mockup was assembled. At the same time, NASA Marshall set up the Nuclear Vehicle Projects Office to provide technical direction for the Reactor-In-Flight-Test (RIFT), a Saturn V-launched NERVA flight demonstration planned for 1967.