American Experiment (390 page)

Time and time again it had taken disasters, whether natural or man-made, to force Americans to do the kind of thinking that, had it been done in advance, might have averted or mitigated them. The deaths of seven astronauts focused the American mind. “More than the Challenger exploded in the blue sky over the Atlantic Ocean,” wrote
New York Times
science correspondent John Noble Wilford. Thirty billion dollars and fourteen years after the huge shuttle effort began, “we are left full of doubts not only about the shuttles and NASA’s fabled competence, but about the very fundamentals of our national space policy.” At first the media concentrated on the O-rings—so simple to present graphically and ominously— and other shuttle apparatus. Gradually, as the debate widened and deepened, it was apparent that, as Joseph Trento wrote, “the destruction of
Challenger
is not a story of technological failure—it is a story of political failure,” a function of policy decisions that emerged from political compromises that in turn reflected conceptual muddle.

The failure to anticipate and plan against disasters had often had its roots in complacency—over the unsinkability of the
Titanic,
the safety of hydrogen-filled dirigibles, the permanence of 1920s prosperity, the American inability to lose a war. So with the space program, and the complacency had some justification. John Kennedy had made a solid commitment to put a man on the moon—a commitment no later President could repudiate. It was his way of dramatizing his active leadership in comparison with that of Eisenhower, who, according to a Washington story, had said that unlike Queen Isabella’s patronage of Christopher Columbus, he would not “hock his jewels” to send anyone to the moon. Kennedy had been attacked for grandstanding, playing politics, fighting the cold war in space. But Kennedy had his reasons: national defense, strengthening the aerospace industry, national morale. Above all for him it was a matter of national prestige—Yuri Gagarin’s earth orbit was a challenge. His Vice President agreed; to be “second in space,” advised LBJ, was to be “second in everything.”

On this issue, as on others, Kennedy shifted later. Two months before he died he proposed before the United Nations that Russians and Americans make the moon flight together. “Let us do the big things together.”

The spectacular feat of Apollo had captured the world’s headlines and imagination. The moon landing became a symbol of the American will, unassailable proof of superior American technology. But Apollo’s end left NASA “with a vehicle rather than a mission.” What next? The boldest
spirits wanted to combine a Mars landing with an earth-orbiting space station and a reusable shuttle, but the political environment was changed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Vietnam, together with the easing of cold war tensions, made a national commitment to an adventure in space on the scale of Apollo impossible. And Apollo’s very success—Apollo 11and five subsequent moon landings—had made the public blasé even about men on the moon. The object now, in John M. Logsdon’s words, “was to make access to orbit routine and relatively inexpensive, and that these objectives could be achieved within a budget substantially less than required for Apollo.” But NASA, with the shuttle program it formally adopted in 1972, made a grandiose mockery of these realistic and coherent objectives. The shuttle design incorporated the “highest possible level of technology,” when simpler, cheaper technology would have served the purpose as well, or better. Because the price of the shuttle was so high, the space station which it had originally been intended to service was indefinitely postponed. And in order to promote the shuttle as the only American launch vehicle, NASA reduced or deferred research and development of alternatives, thus eliminating the possibility of a balanced space program or of a fallback in the event of a shuttle failure or disaster. As Wilford wrote, “NASA mortgaged nearly everything—science, space exploration, the development of new technologies—to build the space shuttle on what was a shoestring budget, as big Government projects go.”

As Congress grew more interested in the shuttle program, NASA, hungry for more funding, responded by creating still other justifications for the shuttle’s existence. Like any bureaucracy, NASA had to justify its own existence, and it was also heavily cross-pressured by its contractors, for whom the agency had been in the 1960s a bottomless feedbag. NASA countered these pressures in part by encouraging the commercial use of space and space technology—the contractors would be kept busy and business would share the costs. Thus telecommunications companies developed their own satellites and NASA launched them, and the later Apollo flights and the shuttle missions conducted experiments in space manufacture. In 1984, the Reagan Administration stepped up commercial development of space. But by the time of the
Challenger
disaster, the profitability of space manufacture was still unproven. Nor had the shuttle met the expectation that it would lower the cost of space transportation: instead of a projected $260 per pound of payload, the actual price was over $4,000 per pound—and that would rise to $6,800 when shuttle flights resumed.

The Reagan Administration also accelerated the militarization of the space program. Eisenhower had set a policy followed by the next three Presidents: top priority to the open, civilian applications of the program,
not to military uses. When Moscow was reported to have resumed anti-satellite tests in 1976, President Ford instructed the Defense Department to make development of space weaponry a high priority. When the Soviets in 1981 and again in 1983 offered at the United Nations serious treaty proposals for space arms control, the Reagan White House ignored them and continued to pour money—by the late 1980s billions of dollars a year—into a “Strategic Defense Initiative” whose purpose was to “counter the awesome Soviet missile threat” by developing directed-energy weapons that, shot from satellites or from earth to orbiting reflectors, would intercept Soviet missiles in flight. Scientists urged in vain that such funds be spent instead on a more realistic, multifaceted, balanced, and steady program of space research.

What, then, was space to be used for? For disinterested scientific exploration? Commercial exploitation? As a new platform for the cold war? The American space effort was a complex interweaving of scientific, military, geopolitical, and commercial influences, resulting in complex policy making and shrouded accountability and responsibility. “Because it is difficult in the pluralistic U.S. policy-making process to reach consensus on policy goals, debates about means to achieve those goals often are used as surrogates,” Logsdon wrote after
Challenger.
“Substituting choices of means for choices of ends produces effective public policy only when agreement on means implies a decision on goals.”

Americans followed Soviet space exploits with mortification. The Russian tortoise had got off to an early start, then the American hare had bounded far ahead with the moon landing, but by the late 1980s the hare seemed caught in a brier patch and the tortoise far ahead. A major reason was that the Soviets matched their means, their technology, to their goal of the gradual “evolution of man into space.” They had, said John Glenn, now a United States senator, “a very steady, thoughtful, well-laid-out program.” They used rather crude but low-cost and dependable rockets— “Big Dumb Boosters,” the Americans called them—and had 90 successful launches in 91 tries in 1986, while the United States had only six successes in only nine attempts. Their cosmonauts held every endurance record in space. NASA and the Defense Department had long since rejected proposals for an American Big Dumb Booster. Lacking clear ends, stable planning, and consistent follow-through, the Americans made space decisions on the basis of what would “advance the technology,” filling the policy vacuum with expensive high-tech razzle-dazzle.

By the end of the 1980s the most poignant symbol of intellectual failure in space was an object significantly not in space but rather grounded, swaddled, and isolated in an eight-story “clean room” in California. This
was the Hubble Space Telescope. Lofted into the pure atmosphere far from earth’s surface, the Hubble was programmed to peer almost to the edge of the universe. Its blindfold allegorized the clouded vision of key leaders of the space program.

The songwriter Neil Young in 1979:

Out of the blue and into the black

You pay for this but they give you that

And once you’re gone, you can’t come back

When you’re out of the blue and into the black.

I
N
J
ULY 1979, THIRTY
months after he entered the White House, Jimmy Carter faced a crisis of confidence. It was in part a lack of confidence in him, as people waited in gas lines, worried about energy supplies, and were squeezed by inflation rising toward an annual rate of more than 13 percent. It was even more the President’s loss of confidence in himself, his leadership, his government. He suddenly postponed what was to have been his fifth speech on the energy crisis and repaired to Camp David to consult and to think.

For ten days, while the nation waited in curiosity and suspense, Carter talked with over 130 persons from virtually every major segment of society. He solicited and received blunt advice, he later reported. A southern governor told him he was not leading the nation, “just managing the government.” Other admonitions: The nation was confronted with a moral and a spiritual crisis. The real issue was not energy but freedom. Some of his cabinet members were not loyal, he was told. “You don’t see the people enough anymore.” But most of the pleas were for stronger leadership. “Mr. President, we’re in trouble. Talk to us about blood and sweat and tears.” … “If you lead, Mr. President, we will follow.” … “Be bold, Mr. President. We may make mistakes, but we are ready to experiment.”

Carter came down from Catoctin Mountain in an apocalyptic mood. The crisis of confidence, he told the nation in an intensely hyped television address, was a crisis that “strikes at the very heart and soul and spirit of our national will. We can see this crisis in the growing doubt about the meaning of our own lives and in the loss of a unity of purpose for our Nation.” People were losing faith “not only in government itself but in the ability as citizens to serve as the ultimate rulers and shapers of our democracy.”

The symptoms of the crisis, Carter went on, were all around. “For the first time in the history of our country a majority of our people believe that the next 5 years will be worse than the past 5 years. Two-thirds of our people do not even vote. The productivity of American workers is actually
dropping, and the willingness of Americans to save for the future has fallen below that of all other people in the Western world.”

What to do? Americans had turned to the federal government and found it isolated from the “mainstream of our Nation’s life.” People were looking for “honest answers” and “clear leadership” and not finding them. Rather they found in Washington “a system of government that seems incapable of action. … a Congress twisted and pulled in every direction by hundreds of well-financed and powerful special interests.… every extreme position defended to the last vote.” The nation, he warned solemnly, was at a turning point, one path leading to “fragmentation and self-interest,” the other toward common purpose, toward the restoration of “true freedom for our Nation and ourselves.”

The reaction of press and people was as extraordinary as the speech. At first it was sharply positive, both in editorial columns and in the polls. Then the President, to show that he meant business, brusquely sacked several high officials whose loyalty and effectiveness he questioned. To the public, the disarray that Carter had dramatized in his address was suddenly evident in his own Administration. An aide to one of the fired officials was reminded of the story of the king who told his minister that he had been looking out of the window and perceived that his country was in trouble. “But sire,” replied the minister, “that’s not a window—it’s a mirror.” A ground swell of criticism enveloped what was now dubbed the “malaise speech” although Carter had not used the word. Confidence in the President sank further a month later when the President accepted the resignation of his old friend Andrew Young as ambassador to the United Nations after it was revealed that Young had violated an official ban against meetings with representatives of the Palestine Liberation Organization and then lied to the State Department about what he had done.

In the spirit of Winston Churchill, Carter had given one of the most candid, realistic speeches an American President had ever made. But he was no Winston Churchill. His speech was a political failure because, in contrast to Churchill’s defiance, he had followed up only with the popgun of reshuffling Administration posts. It was an intellectual failure, for Carter spoke rhetorically rather than analytically about the problems, failed to define the “true freedom” and other values he celebrated, and refused to spell out specifically what he would propose to do about “paralysis and stagnation and drift.” The disarray indeed appeared to be in Carter’s government—and in his mind.

In essence the speech was a kind of
cri de coeur
—a heartfelt appeal for national unity, for seizing “control again of our common destiny”—but just how these rousing political war cries, however sincerely uttered, could
be translated into policy and action was left unclear. The address did not hang together. While its first half was filled with grim generalities—the President warning against fragmentation, excessive individualism, against a “growing disrespect for government and for churches and for schools, the news media, and other institutions”—the second half detailed an energy program. The preacher and the engineer did not connect. Was it curious, or inevitable, that one of the most thoroughly thought-out and skillfully crafted presidential messages of recent times should reflect the central weakness of the American intellect—the Tocquevillian void between the lofty plane of abstraction and the immediate “pragmatic” action?