Space: Still Moonward Bound

President Kennedy had Congress and the public with him when, early in his Administration, he got the U.S. space program racing toward the moon. Bruised by Soviet space successes, national pride demanded that the first man on the moon be an American instead of a Russian, whatever the cost.

The cost is moon-high. Though $20 billion is the stated price tag, some experts feel it may take as much as $40 billion to put two U.S. astronauts on the moon by 1970, the present target date of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA’s budget has already rocketed from $117 million in 1958 to $3.7 billion this year. With the costs mounting inexorably, and with memories of Sputnik I receding, some Americans have come to take a less moonstruck look at NASA and the space race.

A Fistful of Dust. Foremost among the doubters is a longtime moon-race skeptic, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Says Ike: “Anybody who would spend $40 billion in a race to the moon for national prestige is nuts.” California’s Democratic Representative Chet Holifield has grumbled about “moon madness.” The Senate Republican Policy Committee expressed doubts about the value of “a fistful of lunar dust.”

Some U.S. scientists, too, have voiced misgivings about what one of them called the “frantic, costly and disastrous pace” of NASA’s push toward the moon. Physicist Lloyd V. Berkner, former chairman of the National Academy of Sciences space science board, has warned against reducing the space race “to the spectacle of an athletic contest.” Many scientists would prefer to see the U.S. explore space primarily with unmanned probes, incomparably less costly than manned space shots.

None of these purely verbal punches was anywhere near as painful to NASA as a solidly material blow landed last week by the House Science and Astronautics Committee, which slashed $474 million from NASA’s 1964 budget request of $5.7 billion. Nearly half the cut came out of the manned space flight program, which includes the lunar landing project. The committee also voted to reduce the amount of money that NASA is permitted to shift around among its various programs—plain notice that the committee plans to exercise tighter control on NASA’s spending in the future.

Doubts Astir. NASA Administrator James Webb complained that the “overall result” of the committee’s knife work “is an inadequate level of support for a program that is urgently needed, has achieved a high level of success and is now giving this nation the promise of early pre-eminence in all phases of space exploration.” But the committee’s cuts did not reflect misgivings about the goal of U.S. pre-eminence in space. What committee members had doubts about was NASA and the way Webb was running it.

Space Administrator Webb, 56, is no scientist but a sometime oilman who served President Truman as Budget Director and later as Under Secretary of State. With billions of space dollars to disperse throughout the U.S., Webb has spread the money with what some critics consider a political rather than a scientific eye. One scientist has charged NASA with “technological leaf-raking.” NASA’s $123 million Manned Space Flight Center now under construction near Houston aroused some suspicions that Texas’ Vice President Lyndon Johnson might have had something to do with the site selection. NASA’s proposed $50 million electronics space research center near Boston would help Senator Teddy Kennedy redeem his campaign pledge to “do more for Massachusetts.” Among the House Committee’s decisions on the NASA budget was a demand for a detailed justification of the Boston project.

Webb has had some disturbing intramural troubles at NASA. For a while, Manned Space Flight Director D. Brainerd Holmes, 42, the man in direct charge of the moon program, challenged Webb’s control. A brilliant, take-charge engineer, Holmes wanted to run the moon program his own way. Last year, when Holmes demanded an extra $400 million he felt was necessary to keep on schedule, Webb refused to ask Congress for the money. Last month Holmes abruptly resigned “to return to industry,” anddisaffection spread as several of Holmes’s moon men threatened to quitwith him.

Holmes’s sudden resignation stirred doubts in Congress. “We had come to believe in Holmes as a champion of the moon program,” said one member of the House space committee. Also disturbing to some members of Congress was NASA’s seeming inability to project its cost estimates firmly and accurately. “We ask NASA and its contractors how the money will be spent,” complained one Congressman, “and they don’t give us the answers we need.”

For the Sake of the Future. Despite the House committee’s cuts, primacy in space remains the goal of the U.S. Government. An undoubted majority in Congress still approves of that goal despite the costs. Within the Administration the need for U.S. pre-eminence in space is not even debated. “When the policy is so clear,” says a White House aide, “there’s no point in debating it.”

An international “athletic contest” in space would indeed not be worth $20 billion—not with so very much still undone on the earth below. But the space race is much more than that. In the long view, space is an arena of world politics, and the U.S. must compete in it. While the arguments about how much to spend and how and when to spend it must and will go on, the challenge is so important to the future of mankind that the U.S. cannot approach it with anything but its best effort.