"Between 1961 and 1973, NASA flew the Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Skylab, Ranger, Surveyor, and Mariner missions, and did all the development for the Pioneer, Viking, and Voyager missions as well. In addition, the space agency developed hydrogen oxygen rocket engines, multi-staged heavy-lift launch vehicles, nuclear rocket engines, space nuclear reactors, radioisotope power generators, spacesuits, in-space life support systems, orbital rendezvous techniques, soft landing rocket technologies, interplanetary navigation technology, deep space data transmission techniques, reentry technology, and more. In addition, such valuable institutional infrastructure as the Cape Canaveral launch complex, the Deep Space tracking network, Johnson Space Center, and JPL were all created in more or less their current form," Dr. Robert Zubrin, said in US Congressional testimony 29 Oct. 2003.

The problem with this program for a reformed NASA is that it is based on a rosy view of the 1960s space program that owes more to propaganda than to reality. Let's examine some of Zubrin's specific claims:

Hydrogen oxygen rocket engines: This is the closest thing to a new technology used in the Apollo era, but NASA did not do most of the development. Liquid hydrogen rockets were first tested at Ohio State University, and later much of the supporting technology was developed by the CIA under a highly classified spy aircraft program called PROJECT SUNTAN.

When this aircraft was cancelled in favor of the A-11/SR-71, the technology was inherited by NASA and the space agency made little contribution to bringing it to fruition. In fact, the RL-10/Centaur program was very nearly cancelled by Congress due to mismanagement, and the long delay in getting Centaur operational almost killed the Surveyor program and threatened Apollo/Saturn.

Multi-staged heavy-lift launch vehicles: NASA merely took existing military missile and upper stage designs and scaled them up. This is particularly obvious in the case of Saturn I, where the first stage is actually eight Redstone battlefield missiles clustered around a Jupiter IRBM. Even Saturn V incorporates the basic technology and design concepts of the 1950s ICBM programs. The Saturn contractors are the same firms developed by the military services in the Redstone, Atlas/Thor, Jupiter, Agena, and Titan programs.

Nuclear rocket engines, space nuclear reactors, and radioisotope power generators: These vital technologies were mostly in the hands of the old Atomic Energy Commission, not NASA which played only a minor role. In fact, the first two were never actually developed to flight status before they were cancelled to pay for Space Shuttle development. And many students of the NERVA and SNAP programs hold that NASA's role during the 1960s was essentially obstructive.

Some go so far as to say that if the AEC had been in total control of these programs, we would have had operational nuclear spacecraft by 1971. Senator Al Gore (I) of Tennessee actually introduced a bill in 1957 that would have placed the entire civilian space program under AEC control; it is interesting to speculate how history would have been different had this plan been adopted.

Spacesuits: The modern spacesuit was actually perfected by the US Navy in the 1940s and 1950s; the Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo suits are all very similar to the Navy Mark IV design. NASA's contribution was mainly to add outer layers for thermal and micrometeorite protection.

In-space life support systems: Once again, this technology was adapted from existing systems for balloons, submarines, and bathyscaphes. It is absurd to suppose that NASA could have significantly developed this technology in the two years between its formation in October 1958 and the first Mercury chimp mission in January 1961.

Deep space data transmission techniques: This technology was developed by the military radar and civilian radio astronomy communities. In its early days, NASA was frequently reduced to asking astronomical observatories like Jodrell Bank in England to track its spacecraft (when they weren't tracking Soviet ones at the behest of shadowy intelligence agencies).

Reentry technology: Again, the key principles of blunt bodies and ablative coatings were developed for the ICBM and IRBM programs in the mid-1950s. It was the military services and NASA's predecessor agency NACA that perfected these technologies. NASA's main role in this area since about 1963 has been a series of expensive and hopeless attempts to revive the older technology of airplane-like reentry vehicles.

So history tells us that NASA is a technology sink, not a technology source. Specifically, it is clear that most of the technical advances touted by NASA and its cheerleaders during the Golden Age were really made by military research agencies and "sheepdipped" by the NASA publicity machine.

If there ever was a Golden Age of aerospace R&D in the USA, it was during the 1920s and 1930s when the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics was developing the basis of the modern airplane with path-breaking basic research on aerodynamics, alloys, engines, and fuels.

This tradition was swamped during the Golden Age by the pressing emergency of the Moon Race and left NACA's successor NASA oriented towards building and launching massive pieces of hardware, instead of conducting research on faster/better/cheaper ways to build and launch them.

The whole popular concept of NASA centers being full of engineers and scientists working on advanced space travel technology is wrong. Only a tiny fraction of the agency's budget is devoted to fundamental R&D. Most of this takes place at the centers inherited from the former NACA (Langley, Lewis/Glenn, and Ames) where a vestige of the old aeronautical R&D tradition survives.

Fundamental research on SPACE flight at NASA is practically nonexistent -- unless one counts the pseudo-research funded by the "Breakthrough Propulsion Physics Program" on such quack subjects as gravity screening and antimatter.

The entrenched NASA cultural trait of favoring operations instead of research started back during the Golden Age of the 1960s and is not a product of the Goldin Age of the 1990s. When NASA received its marching orders to the Moon in May 1961, it had only 8.5 years to complete Project Apollo. Given this highly compressed schedule, there simply was no time to develop any fundamentally new technology like nuclear rockets.

From the narrow perspective of the Moon Race, NASA managers were quite correct to spend their money on scaling up existing engines, boosters, and Rvs instead of pursuing blue-sky solutions that might not work. (Even liquid hydrogen was a dangerous gamble in this environment; had that technology failed the Moon Race would certainly have been lost.) Apollo was not a second Manhattan Project, but rather a second D-Day -- a victory won by means of a massive investment of resources that the other side just didn't have.

Many NASA critics believe that we can recreate the NASA of the Apollo era by establishing a list of ambitious near-term goals for NASA (there is even a bill to do his now before Congress). I believe that this policy would only repeat JFK's mistake of 1961 and hobble us with another generation of low-performance chemical spaceships that would just be too expensive to get us to Mars or anywhere else of interest.

Also, it would probably force NASA to adopt the kind of shortcuts and safety omissions that gave the Apollo missions a high level of risk (e.g. the decision to conduct the moon missions during an intense solar maximum when astronaut-frying solar flares were unusually frequent).

Zubrin's praise of NASA's "valuable institutional infrastructure" also propagates some common errors:

Cape Canaveral launch complex: Cape Canaveral was developed by the USAF, and to this day remains an Air Force Station, NOT part of NASA's Kennedy Space Center as most people think. KSC consists only of the decaying Launch Complex 39 on nearby Merrit Island that supported the Saturn V and Shuttle programs.

All other boosters and spacecraft have been launched from the Air Force base, mostly from converted ICBM test facilities that were planned before NASA even existed. The supporting range safety and tracking facilities for both KSC and CCAFS launches are entirely funded and controlled by the Air Force.

Jet Propulsion Laboratory: As one can tell from its phony camouflage name, this facility originally was a top-secret military lab. It was started by the US Navy during WWII for solid rocket research, then was transferred to the US Army to provide some competition to the technically backward ex-German group at Redstone Arsenal. JPL got into the space age by building the Explorer I satellite in 1958, and was then included in the mass transfer of military bases to the new NASA.

However, it is NOT a NASA center any more than Cape Canaveral is. It is officially part of the California Institute of Technology, which gets a big "management fee" from NASA every year in return for letting NASA actually run it. But JPL retains some important kinds of freedom that other parts of NASA can only dream of.

For instance, JPL staff are not part of the dysfunctional NASA civil-service promotion and pay system (if pressed I could actually name one or two people who were fired from JPL for incompetence). This semi-independent status is the reason JPL still has a core of bright young technicians that can still produce a successful unmanned mission -- on the rare occasions when NASA HQ leaves them alone.

Johnson Space Center: You can't deny that this magnificent facility was constructed by NASA, but many observers have grave doubts that moving the core management of the manned program to Houston from Langley VA was a wise move.

It distanced them from NASA HQ in Washington, and started a pointless Montagues v. Capulets feud with NASA-Marshall that still hobbles the program forty years later. The huge costs of JSC and the rest of NASA's over-large and over-elaborate 1960s infrastructure have been a crippling burden in later decades of lower budgets.

I hate to flog Bob Zubrin, because he has produced much of the out-of-the-box thinking that we need to work out a new pathway in space. But we can't go forward by copying the mistakes of an imaginary Golden Age NASA that didn't achieve a fraction of the feats he claims for it, and in many ways was just as dysfunctional as the Goldin Age NASA which we armchair critics like to bash.

Dr. Jeffrey F. Bell is Adjunct Professor of Planetology at the University of Hawai'i at Manoa. The opinions expressed in this article are his own and do not represent the views of the University.

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