Stetson stood up, unconsciously (perhaps) putting himself into the mode where whomever was around had no choice but to listen to what he had to say. Jim was used to it and wasn’t intimidated in the least. He knew Stetson too well for that; he was just curious about what his friend was going on about.
“Think about it. Yes, Apollo was expensive and there was the Vietnam War going on. Those were tough years, with riots, assassinations, protests, and all that crap to contend with. But Tricky Dick could look past all that and see what mattered to him, not the good of the country or future generations—just to good old Tricky Dick.” He reached down and picked up from his desk his model of the Apollo lunar lander.
Holding the lander in his left hand and motioning at Jim with his right, he began again. “Nixon was president of the United States—the highest achievement that anyone can aspire to. He’d done it. He’d beaten his adversaries and was riding high. And every time there was a new story on television about the upcoming Moon landings, what did he see?” Stetson paused for effect, not really to allow Jim to answer his somewhat rhetorical question.
“Okay, I’ll bite. What?” Jim didn’t really care to offer his own opinion, since he wasn’t sure what might tweak his friend too far at the moment.
“He saw another president getting all the credit. He saw John Fitzgerald Kennedy standing at the podium over at Rice University saying, ‘We choose to go the Moon in this decade and do the other thing.…’ He saw or heard JFK whenever or wherever the Apollo program came up. And that simply burned him. And do you know why it burned him?”
Jim decided to just keep his mouth shut. He leaned back in his chair and slumped a little to relax. Politics never seemed to help the space program, and bitching about it was almost as fruitful. He decided to just ride the storm out.
“Do you know who ran against John Kennedy in the presidential election of 1960? That election was the closest election in modern history—until the election of George Bush in 2000, that is. Do you know who he beat to become president?”
All England could do was shrug. He knew his American history fairly well, but keeping a mental log of who lost presidential elections was not among the facts that he’d memorized in order to pass the public-school history exams.
“Well, and the kicker, there was controversy about some ballet-box stuffing throwing some doubt on the election outcome even!” Stetson sat the lander back on his desk, thinking to himself, Houston, Tranquility Base here. The Eagle has landed. He smiled inwardly and then answered his own question. “Richard Milhous Nixon. Kennedy beat Mr. Nixon for the presidency, just barely, in 1960. Nixon even made a statement saying something about the country didn’t need the turmoil of an investigation into the election at that time.”
“I don’t recall ever hearing that in school,” Jim said with a raised eyebrow.
“It’s true. Look it up. So, what do you think Mr. Nixon thought about when he was president at one of the greatest moments in human history and the guy who beat him, perhaps questionably, almost a decade previously—a guy who had been dead for years—was getting all the credit? Do you think that made the man who kept an enemies list happy? No way! The SOB must’ve seethed at the thought, and I am convinced the old man had neither sympathy nor remorse for ending the Apollo program. He probably said good riddance.” Stetson walked a few steps to his window overlooking the complex of the Johnson Space Center. “And that’s why we’re just now going back to the Moon instead of Mars.”
“Ha, ha!” England guffawed. “Bill, that makes some crazy-conspiracy sense, but I cannot imagine that’s how it came down. The cost of the war, the civil-rights movement, and the Cold War—NASA just became too expensive, and people lost interest. It got boring.”
“Well…” Stetson, still looking out at the mid-day sun, seemed to have his sails deflated by his friend’s comment. Jim was just glad that it seemed to be calming him down.
“Come on, Bill,” Jim said. “The U.S. was slipping into a recession then, too. Science fiction movies made space look sexier than the astronauts could. It was a whole bunch of forcing functions in a very complex dynamic system that caused the Moon missions to stop. Apollo 13 was preempted on television during primetime, and that was long before Cernan and Schmitt’s flight. I don’t think it was Nixon at all.”
Stetson said, “Yeah. All those things are true. Once you’ve gone to the Moon, what else can there be? How do you top that? NASA was given a tough act to follow—its own.”
England said, “Think about it. James T. Kirk was going to other star systems and hooking up with hot green chicks. All those Apollo guys ever did was bring home some rocks. The public got more out of the price of a movie ticket or a television show than NASA was delivering with their publicly perceived giant budget.”
“And you and I both know that NASA’s budget is tiny compared to most every other entitlement program or congressional boondoggle.”
“True.”
Stetson continued. “Only NASA can make the most complex and challenging endeavor in the history of humankind seem dull. Maybe we should’ve hired George Lucas or Steven Spielberg to do our marketing. Sure, we had great coverage for the last shuttle flight, with lots of legacy stories about the successes and failures of the shuttle program. Though if I’d had to see that video of the Challenger exploding again, I think I’d have puked.”
“No hot green chicks,” Jim interjected. “We need some hot green chicks. I think they were called green animal women slaves from Orion or some such thing. Yep, we need ’em.”
Bill ignored the comment and kept on going, “Yes, it was a tragedy, and yes, mistakes were made, but we’ve got to get over it someday and move forward. Think how insulting it must be to the thousands of engineers who made sure that those other one hundred and twenty flights were flown safely. What about the video that shows their successes?”
“Uh, people like a train wreck,” Jim reminded him.
“Humph.” Bill was on a roll and wasn’t ready to relinquish the floor just yet. “And what about the first manned flight of Ares I? The press was there with cameras rolling to see the rocket fly, but I think they’d have been just as eager to see it crash. They probably had their commentaries written for that before they even arrived at the Cape…and the astronauts’ obituaries, too. We were lucky the second flight made the news at all. If it hadn’t been for the Chinese having a launch failure the week before, I doubt we’d have rated high enough to report on.
“So, now we’ve flown over a hundred space shuttle missions, circling our tails in Earth orbit for decades. We’ve built a space station that people have been living in for fifteen years with the public’s perception that they were just floating around twiddling their thumbs and having fun eating floating globules of liquid astronaut food. We’re rebuilding a capability to go the Moon that we had—we had, mind you—when I was a child and then threw away.” Stetson almost looked angry as he turned to face England. Jim hated seeing his friend getting so worked up.
“Water under the bridge, buddy. Now, if we can manage to find some of those green animal—”
Bill cut him off with a very Spock-like raised eyebrow that told Jim he was about to push a little too far. “Jim, we’ve wasted fifty years since Neil Armstrong walked on the Moon. Yeah, we’ve done some science, and we’ve supposedly learned about how people will ultimately survive the trip to Mars. I’d never say it in public, but we’ve wasted the legacy of Von Braun and all those engineers who put us on another world before you were born. I want to get back to the Moon and prove to the American people that space exploration is worth it. That going to Mars is doable and worth it. And that going to Mars should not wait another fifty years. Going to the Moon is the first step toward that, and it is what I’m meant to do.”