Word: nasa
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...hardly lifted off the Sea of Tranquillity when the very success of Apollo 11 heightened the controversy over what role the space program should take in the future. Vice President Spiro Agnew wants the U.S. to aim at putting a man on Mars by the year 2000, and NASA already has on hand a plethora of ambitious projects that should keep it busy through 1985. Critics like Housing and Urban Development Secretary George Romney insist that it is time to slow down in space and "deal with problems on earth...
...price tags under consideration are no more precise than early estimates of the cost of putting man on the moon. NASA officials, who have always worried about being accused of underestimating costs, used to quote figures as high as $40 billion, but the actual cost of Apollo to date has been $24 billion. As for Mars, New Mexico Democrat Clinton Anderson, head of the Senate Space Committee, guesses that the bill for a manned mission would run from $25 billion to $40 billion...
...NASA's own package of post-Apollo programs, which includes additional lunar flights, orbital space stations and a series of unmanned planetary probes, would, by the agency's estimate, absorb between one-half of 1% and 1% of the gross national product every year for ten years. In the present $900 billion U.S. economy, the price would range from $4.5 billion to $9 billion a year. Though the total would be considerably smaller than the budget for defense (now $79 billion) or the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (now $58 billion), it would run considerably higher than...
...spending has already declined from its 1966 peak of $5.9 billion. Wernher Von Braun, whose team was responsible for the Saturn boosters, argues that unless the nation embarks on another Apollo-size program, the U.S. stands to suffer a "tragic loss of a national asset." He fears that NASA's skilled engineers and scientists may be dispersed after the last of the nine remaining Apollo missions is flown in 1972. The space team has already shrunk from 400,000 in 1966 to 140,000 today, and the group might be difficult to rebuild. "To continue to attract the kinds...
...Apollo team. The impact would be most severe in towns like Huntsville, Ala., where Saturn rockets are assembled. Space has changed the onetime "Watercress Capital of the World" from a town of 16,000 to a lively city of 160,000, but now Huntsville grimly awaits layoffs at NASA's Marshall Space Center...