Apollo 19

June 22, 2016 9:09 AM

Photos of the unused first stage from the cancelled Apollo 19 being transported to its final resting spot at Infinity Science Center in Pearlington, Mississippi.

Apollo 19 was one of three canceled missions from the program. With the success of Apollo 11 and the near disaster of Apollo 13, NASA choose to focus its attention and dwindling budget towards the Skylab and Space Shuttle programs, despite much of the hardware for later Apollo missions having already been built.

Current plans for this last unpreserved Saturn V first stage are for it to be restored from the damage of four decades of outside exposure, then placed in a yet to be constructed building.

Had Apollo 13 landed on the Moon and Apollo 19 not been canceled, astronaut Fred Haise would have been the only human to walk on the lunar surface twice. He currently sits on the Board of Directors at the Infinity Science Center, where the stage will be kept.

posted by Brandon Blatcher (30 comments total)

I remember when it was a common cliché to say "If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we (insert some seemingly trivial but actually quite difficult task here)?" Does anyone say that anymore? If they do, do they realize that not only can we not put a man on the moon anymore, the US can't even put a man in orbit?

I miss NASAs heyday.
posted by TedW at 9:18 AM on June 22, 2016 [6 favorites]

A bunch of old people looking at a rusted out rocket. Christ, I can't remember ever seeing anything quite that sad.

I remember when space was about young people.
posted by Naberius at 9:26 AM on June 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we put a woman on the moon?
posted by Faint of Butt at 9:29 AM on June 22, 2016 [4 favorites]

If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we put Donald Trump on the moon?
posted by ocschwar at 9:45 AM on June 22, 2016

If we can put a man on the moon, why can't we put a man on the moon?

If we can put a man on the moon, why don't we want to?
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 9:45 AM on June 22, 2016

Fuck SpaceX—this is what a rocket is supposed to look like!
(Basically, a child's drawing of the concept of 'rocket ship'.)
posted by Atom Eyes at 9:48 AM on June 22, 2016

If we can put a man on the moon, why don't we want to?

Turns out space travel, in reality, is kinda pointless and nothing like Star Trek.

(cue obligatory argle bargle off this rock reply nevermind that in all likelihood, we will be broiled alive long before a large enough rock goes smashy-smashy into our once lovely little planet)
posted by entropicamericana at 9:53 AM on June 22, 2016 [2 favorites]

I miss NASAs heyday.

I wasn't alive for it, but I'd probably marvel at sending people on massive rockets to distant bodies, too. It's a hell of a thing, and I'm not sure we're done doing it.

But our achievements (and we're still clocking them) look different, for now. On Mars, Opportunity's still setting endurance records. And damn, remember when the complicated landing sequence for the Curiosity rover went off without a hitch? Or when we saw what Pluto actually looks like, atmosphere and all? And, fuck me--now SpaceX is landing spent rockets on boats in the ocean.

So maybe, for now, our successes lack some kind of nationalistic grip strength that they used to have, but they're no less substantial or invigorating.
posted by Chutzler at 10:26 AM on June 22, 2016 [6 favorites]

I remember when space was about young people.

Wow, someone managed to turn this ageist in a hurry. Especially when a lot of us over-40s are trying to support the US program, each in our own way. (Yay, Juno, excited for July 4!)
posted by NorthernLite at 10:35 AM on June 22, 2016

Fuck you, Richard M. Nixon. Fuck you.
posted by mikelieman at 10:36 AM on June 22, 2016 [3 favorites]

We just got to bleeding Pluto, chaps, heard two massive black holes spiral to their fate millions of light years away and are rebuilding the instant of creation to insane accuracy. Can the misery: we are boldly going in ways that beggar belief.

The reason Apollo got curtailed was mostly because nobody wanted to lose any more astronauts on a mission that had done its job. Same with the Shuttle. This stuff is incredibly dangerous even if everything works perfectly. It was an age of wonder, but it was also only the start. Birth is an obvious miracle - growing up is just as miraculous but you have to take a step back to know it.

Exploration isn't about putting people into strange places, it's about finding things out. Sometimes you do that by taking people along; sometimes you do it by proxy. We're in the middle of a lot of exciting booster development, not to take people to Mars or to prove who has the biggest geopolitical todger, but because space is economically important and doing it cheaper and faster makes a lot of sense. And that is exploration too - watching the Blue Origin rocket go to space and then land vertically on a pinnacle of fire - wow. Just wow. We'll get people to Mars, too, when the time is right, and it will be risky and expensive and so worth it; we're just doing a different bit of the jigsaw right now.

So: if you haven't been to the Cape to stand under a Saturn V stack suspended above your head and to go out past the VAB to look at hte launch area spread out like a giant Neolithic ritual landscape - do it. It is a profound experience. If you don't watch the live launches on the Internet of the Arianes and the Protons and the Long Marches and the SpaceXs and the Blue Origins - do it. We are busy. And if you don't stand out under the night sky, look up, and know we are counting the stars and counting their planets and tasting the infinite subtleties of the gas and energies between them, do that too.

All this is the legacy of Apollo and the people who built it, and those who flew it, and it is more magnificent and thrilling and full of hope than ever before.

Jeez. You people.
posted by Devonian at 10:43 AM on June 22, 2016 [14 favorites]

This shot makes me so nostalgic. The sight of those five Rocketdyne F-1s is almost as iconic as anything from that era.
posted by Thorzdad at 10:49 AM on June 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

sudden craving for Space Food Sticks
posted by thelonius at 11:18 AM on June 22, 2016 [2 favorites]

Devonian and Chutzler, robots and deep-space sensing are amazing. I don't think you'll get too much disagreement here.

But I'm with TedW and Naberius. Sending humans into space can be stupendous, inspiring, and awesome. That NASA backed off of it is damned tragic.

I hear this from my son - 17 years old - who plunges into a depression every time he thinks about the decline of human spaceflight. I hate talking about budgets and politics, which are at least as significant as the fear of human deaths.

I'm old enough to remember the later moon landings, and feeling my heart (and mind) soar.
posted by doctornemo at 11:21 AM on June 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

Every few months a little device in my pocket, still called a "phone" for some reason, using a network of satellites to pinpoint the exact time and my location on Earth, alerts me that if I step outside in a few minutes, I can witness a freaking Space Station flying overhead, a station that has been continuously occupied by humans over fifteen years.

We keep this station occupied via a series of rocket launches, both crewed and uncrewed. Some of these uncrewed rockets are launched by commercial enterprises. Those same companies will soon be launching crewed rockets to the station and beyond.

Work is being done on the next generation of space craft that will hopefully send us back to the moon, to asteroids, and on to Mars. Those things are still a long way off, but they're being worked on.

Up until a year or so ago Pluto was a blurry dot in even the best photographs. Now we have high resolution closeups.

We have a bunch of robots on Mars and will soon be sending more.

There is a spaceship still orbiting Saturn. Saturn.

We have craft currently orbiting Mercury, Venus (I think?), Mars, The Moon, Ceres.

We have sent spacecraft beyond the solar system. One of them has a dick drawn on it.

Spacecraft have landed, or sort-of-crash-landed on, and taken photographs of the surface of, The Moon, Mars, Venus, Titan, a freakin' comet, and couple of asteroids.

Astronauts tweet and post photos from space. One of them recorded a music video.

Some dude who, among other things, makes amazing electric cars has a good chance of sending humans to Mars in the near future. Some of his billionaire buddies are doing similar things.

Space is still super exciting to me.
posted by bondcliff at 11:35 AM on June 22, 2016 [3 favorites]

So: if you haven't been to the Cape to stand under a Saturn V stack suspended above your head and to go out past the VAB to look at hte launch area spread out like a giant Neolithic ritual landscape - do it. It is a profound experience.

Agree completely. And even more profound if the pinnacle of your visit is staying up all night to see the ISS fly overhead just before sunrise, followed a few minutes later by the thunderous launch of the shuttle Atlantis lifting off and turning to chase it.

I think the unmanned missions NASA has embarked on in the past few decades are amazing, and it is not their fault that they no longer have the budget for serious manned space fight, but I hate to see other nations filling the void we have left. Apollo really was the best sort of national pride, not the jingoistic crap we get nowadays that has all the historic importance of a Lee Greenwood song. Although I also am glad to see so much international cooperation on the ISS, which makes me proud of humanity in general, a feeling I don't get very often.
posted by TedW at 11:43 AM on June 22, 2016

It's also worth remembering that we're now in a space age the likes of which the Apollo-era NASA could hardly have dreamed of. Nearly all of us regularly utilize tools that are in space to go about our daily lives on the ground. The space race and moonshot were about exploration for many people, and mostly about the Cold War for policy makers. There is still exploration, in the form of the amazing missions throughout our solar system and beyond. And there's still great science being done with ISS.

But most of the current space age is about making life easier and better for billions of people with things like GOES-R (launching in November!) and other Earth missions, the GPS Constellation, and communications satellites.

And that's a really, really wonderful thing. It shouldn't be trivialized just because we're not putting people on the moon right now.
posted by atbash at 11:50 AM on June 22, 2016 [2 favorites]

Speaking of amazing, tiny Pluto, out there in the really cold parts of our solar system, might have a liquid ocean.
posted by Brandon Blatcher at 11:52 AM on June 22, 2016

This shot makes me so nostalgic. The sight of those five Rocketdyne F-1s is almost as iconic as anything from that era.

The KSC exhibits are amazing. You get to experience countdown to launch and then you walk underneath one of them hung from the ceiling.

Again, Fuck you, Richard M. Nixon, Fuck you.
posted by mikelieman at 12:14 PM on June 22, 2016

I miss NASAs heyday.

Landing a man on the moon was a political stunt and NASA was turned into the bureaucracy to support that stunt. Once the moon landings were over NASA lost direction and the space program became welfare for engineers and scientists.
posted by Rob Rockets at 12:41 PM on June 22, 2016

Wow, someone managed to turn this ageist in a hurry.

I think you mistake my point, NorthernLite - sorry to be less than entirely clear. I'm old enough to remember watching the moon landings on TV. I was quite young, and space was what the future - my future! - was about. Somewhere, that changed.

I recognize that we're doing far more impressive things from a science standpoint with unmanned probes, and I think it's cool that we've got private companies doing what they can do in terms of cost to orbit. But there was always more to the whole cultural vision than just getting the most data per dollar out of a tiny budget. The Apollo program went from an inspirational vision for the young people who watched it to pretty much just nostalgia for the old people we became. I don't see a lot of young people who see a future for themselves in space. In science, sure, but that's not really the same.

But maybe I'm just wrong. I'd very much like to be persuaded by Devonian and Bondcliff's rosier picture. Maybe I'm just being cranky because we used to be a nation that could do that and now we're a nation so lost and despairing that we can barely avoid electing an unhinged toddler in the middle of an epic tantrum to the Presidency. Even the good stuff that's happening is happening largely because we got lucky in our choice of robber barons this time around and picked a couple who wanted to make rockets instead of just pyramids or something. We didn't need benevolent despots when Apollo was a thing. I don't know. Sorry if I offended you. That was not my goal. It's just very hard watching what we achieved as a nation back then recede into the past, gradually turning into legends of some golden age that people don't even quite believe anymore.
posted by Naberius at 2:18 PM on June 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

But I'm with TedW and Naberius. Sending humans into space can be stupendous, inspiring, and awesome. That NASA backed off of it is damned tragic.

I hear this from my son - 17 years old - who plunges into a depression every time he thinks about the decline of human spaceflight. I hate talking about budgets and politics, which are at least as significant as the fear of human deaths.

We have more humans in space for longer times than ever before. That must count for something.

We will go back to the Moon, and we will go to Mars, and perhaps we'll visit a few asteroids and a comet or two, and that will be exciting. But then what? Nobody's going to Venus to land (although there was a rather baroque idea to do a manned loop around Venus using Apollo cast-offs...) and there are very good reasons not to send people to Jupiter or Saturn, even if you want to explore the moons, because those environments are seriously distant and seriously hostile and with our current technology the cost-risk-reward ratios are off the scale.

We can't go back to Apollo, like we can't go back to the glory years of Antarctic exploration - well, we could, but why? What would you have us do to get the excitement back?

Space is not linear. It is not as easy to get to the next target as it was to get to the last. Some things we can do now immensely better than we could in the 1960s, which is why we have fleets of robots exploring space and can run a permanently manned space station. But in the basic, limited-by-physics and limited-by-human-physiology business of accelerating lumps of living flesh to useful speeds and slowing them down again, guarding them against the viciousness of space and giving them worthwhile things to do the while, we are still very limited.

You can't wish that away.
posted by Devonian at 2:42 PM on June 22, 2016 [1 favorite]

> do they realize that not only can we not put a man on the moon anymore, the US can't even put a man in orbit?

We're capable of putting a man in orbit (SpaceX Dragon with return capability), we're just MUCH more risk averse than we used to be. The very first dragon flight that returned a wheel of cheese could have had an astronaut in it for a few orbits, but NASA is going through a very extensive human-rating process for the Falcon 9 and Dragon before putting people in it. The current Dragon is probably statistically much safer than the Gemini and Apollo generation hardware already.
posted by thewalrus at 3:32 PM on June 22, 2016

I'm really glad to see this is going to get some restorative treatment. In 2012, my wife and I went on a Roadtrop[sic] around the country in a Dodge station wagon (with an Ikea bed in the back) and a fairly constant theme throughout was national parks, dinosaurs, and SPAAAACE. In our travels, we visited all but one of the existing Saturn V rockets.

The following year, we were in New Orleans for the Voodoo festival, and in some downtime, drove out the Michoud facility to collect that last Saturn V. I snapped a photo of our car next to the spacecraft. There just aren't a lot of places where you can pull your car up behind the most powerful machine ever built. Considering the treatment the other Saturn Vs out there have had, it was kind of shocking to see this relic of the space age exposed to the elements and looking like such a relic. We'd seen a lot of other amazing abandoned machinery, but for some reason, seeing the Saturn in this shape was particularly sad.

Anyhow, I'm babbling now. If you can find a way to do it, visit the Kennedy Space Center.
posted by Leviathant at 4:56 PM on June 22, 2016 [3 favorites]

You notice no Presidential candidates have yet uttered a word about space exploration? Not that it's the happy place of any of our recent ant overlords. There might should be another factor in the Drake Equation for "low attention span".
posted by RobotVoodooPower at 5:06 PM on June 22, 2016

They have said a little bit here and there.
posted by gucci mane at 6:43 PM on June 22, 2016

Thank you Chutzler, Devonian and bondcliff. You saved 1968 2016
posted by Molesome at 3:05 AM on June 23, 2016 [1 favorite]

Landing a man on the moon was a political stunt and NASA was turned into the bureaucracy to support that stunt. Once the moon landings were over NASA lost direction and the space program became welfare for engineers and scientists.

That's one way of looking at it. I believe the root cause was more Nixon destroying them out of spite for Kennedy.

Apollo got cut. And so did everything follow on. It became a fight just to get the Shuttle off the ground, and that was a world of suck when we should have been developing the heavy lift capability to build solar power satellites in GEO...
posted by mikelieman at 4:54 AM on June 23, 2016 [1 favorite]

mikelieman: Now I am nostalgic for The High Frontier. Also, thinking about that cultural transition always reminds me of the bit of the 'wave speech' in Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, where "with the right kind of eyes you can almost see the high-water mark—that place where the wave finally broke and rolled back."
posted by rmd1023 at 5:36 AM on June 23, 2016

Fun fact: There is a highway rest area right next to the entrance to the Infinity Space Center. I stopped at said rest area a few days ago. The gate to the Space Center was closed, as it was after 5 PM and they were closed.
posted by Windopaene at 7:42 PM on June 23, 2016