20 Years Since Last Lunar Landing, a Vacuum of U.S. Space Exploration

Twenty years later, the words still chill Harrison (Jack) Schmitt, one of the last two men on the moon.

“This may be the last time in this century that men will walk on the moon,” President Richard M. Nixon declared after Schmitt and Eugene Cernan rocketed off the lunar surface on Dec. 14, 1972.

Schmitt has never forgiven Nixon for that remark and says he never will.

“Whether that turned out to be true or not, it was an inappropriate statement for the President of the United States to make,” he said.

What’s worse, it’s proving to be true.

Twenty years after Apollo 17, the last of six manned lunar landings, NASA’s plan to send astronauts back to the moon and on to Mars is up in the air. There is no funding for the Space Exploration Initiative this fiscal year and, as Cernan sees it, no vision, no challenge, no derring-do.

“We’re talking about a generation ago having gone a quarter-million miles into space, a generation ago, and yet today we don’t have the capability to go more than 300 or 400 miles from the surface of this Earth,” said Cernan, who commanded Apollo 17.

Cernan, Schmitt and Ronald Evans left Earth on a mighty Saturn 5 rocket on Dec. 7, 1972. Four days later, as Evans orbited the moon in the command ship America, Cernan became the 11th man to walk on the moon. Schmitt was No. 12.

The last footsteps on the moon were Cernan’s.

“We leave as we came, and, God willing, we shall return with peace and hope for all mankind,” Cernan said before following Schmitt into the lunar module for the third and final time.

The mission, and arguably NASA’s grandest era, ended Dec. 19, 1972, when the Apollo 17 spacecraft splashed down in the Pacific Ocean.

“We used to say Apollo 17 was not the end but rather the beginning,” Cernan recalled. “The problem is, neither Jack Schmitt nor I nor Ron Evans ever dreamed that the beginning would be a generation in coming, and maybe it isn’t here yet.”

Cernan wonders what people will say 100 or 200 years from now “when they look back at the order and sequence we did things in.”

“We went to the moon and somehow forgot to keep going,” he says.

There’s been Skylab and Apollo-Soyuz and the shuttle. Around the turn of the century there probably will be the orbiting Space Station Freedom. But that’s as far as American space travel goes.

Although President Bush in 1989 proposed colonizing the moon early in the next century and later sending astronauts to Mars, little progress has been made due to lack of funding.

Congress refused to fund the Space Exploration Initiative (SEI) in the budget year that began Oct. 1.

Michael Griffin, NASA’s associate administrator for exploration, had planned to use most of the requested $32 million to start building the first in a series of robotic lunar probes, precursors to human settlement. He had been aiming for a spring, 1995, launch.

“We’ll be at least a year later on that, and that assumes we get funding” for the next fiscal year, Griffin said. “We’re not going to be going to the moon or Mars or indeed anywhere unless there is some added money for NASA. Those things don’t come free.”

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s budget this fiscal year is $14.3 billion, slightly less than last year’s.

It’s not just the federal deficit that is hurting SEI, Griffin said. It’s the way money for space is appropriated by Congress, and politics too: Democrats were reluctant to support the Bush Administration’s exploration plans, he said.

Space policy analyst John Pike of the Federation of American Scientists blames the withering moon and Mars support on President Bush and Vice President Dan Quayle, head of the National Space Council. He said neither Bush nor Quayle ever asked the two fundamental questions: “Why are we doing it, and how are we going to pay for it?”

Bush had set a goal of having astronauts on Mars by 2019, the 50th anniversary of Apollo 11, the first manned lunar landing.

“My disappointment with the SEI program is that the work they have been doing has primarily focused on how you’re going to do it rather than why you’re going to do it,” Pike said.

The how--for Mars, anyway--has focused on nuclear-powered rockets. Nuclear propulsion could cut travel time to the Red Planet by nearly half: 300 days round trip, including a 14-day stay, as opposed to 500 days via chemical rockets. It’s assumed such a venture would be international in scope.

NASA plans to use Space Station Freedom, once it’s built, to test Mars flight equipment and astronaut endurance. Space officials doubt that Freedom will be of much use to lunar base planners.

Setting up camp on the moon, though, is a necessary steppingstone for Mars, Griffin said. The current plan is for astronauts to initially spend 45 days on the moon, with the stints gradually getting longer.

“I think it’s a crazed notion, from an engineering viewpoint, to go directly to Mars without resuming travel to the moon,” Griffin said. “It’s a three-year affair away from home, and if we do that next we won’t have been to the moon for three decades, and the last time we went to the moon we were limited to three days. There’s just too big of a gap.”

Although it’s too soon to say how SEI will fare under President-elect Bill Clinton, most political and space experts believe the program will be shelved for economic reasons, at least for a while.

Preliminary estimates by NASA put the cost of a lunar base and human expeditions to Mars at $400 billion to $500 billion over 30 years. Griffin believes it could be done more cheaply but is reluctant to specify a price or timetable.

“We don’t know, and we won’t know until we spend substantially more on a study effort than we’ve done,” Griffin said.

To avoid cost overruns, Griffin has pledged to limit the robotic lunar missions to $100 million each, including launch expenses. At least three such missions are planned.

Jay Greene, flight dynamics officer for Apollo 17 and now Griffin’s deputy, targets 2005 for the next manned moon mission, at least in theory.

Space exploration advocates envision astronauts mining the moon and erecting giant observatories for viewing the universe. Those views would not be obstructed by atmosphere as they are on Earth.

Such ideas enthrall NASA’s 89 astronauts, many of whom joined the space program in hope of one day going to the moon and Mars.

“It’s just those dreamy things that you have in the back of your mind that motivate you, and then you do the real things that are practical,” said astronaut Michael Foale, who will make his second shuttle flight in the spring. “I hope these things become practical soon.”

Greene figures that astronauts could be going to Mars 10 years after humans return to the moon. But he quickly adds: “I don’t know if we’ll opt to do that.

“I think we’re going to find so much on the moon that we’ll want to stay there before we push on, or, if you’re a pessimist, we won’t find enough on the moon and so we won’t want to go to Mars.”

Former NASA historian Alex Roland, now a history professor at Duke University, already is convinced that there is nothing on the moon worth pursuing.

“We’ve been there and we’ve looked around. The evidence is pretty overwhelming,” Roland said.