In 1950 a group of scientists had proposed a global study of the Earth and its resources. It was to be known as the International Geophysical Year and it would run from July of 1957 to December of 1958. Both America and the Soviet Union committed resources and money to this ambitious project and both stated their intentions to launch an earth-orbiting satellite during the IGY to assist in the global research. The American science community, with the approval of the White House, made the decision that America’s first satellite would be completely divorced from the military. An untested missile proposed by the Navy would be used to carry the Vanguard civilian satellite.

Wernher von Braun had been discussing his plans with the Army since 1954 and he knew that he could almost certainly accomplish a satellite launch with the proposed upgrades to his Redstone missile; but the funding was constantly in question. In September of 1956 he launched a Redstone/Jupiter C (Missile 27) but was told that he was not to add the extra propellant that might have pushed its payload into orbit, instead the tank was filled with sand.

The Army wanted von Braun to launch a satellite with Redstone but the Eisenhower administration wanted nothing to do with the potential militarization of space. Meanwhile, the Air Force were pitching their untried Atlas ICBM as a satellite launcher, while simultaneously pitching the proposed Thor missile as the best choice for America’s medium range defense. The stakes were incredibly high, whoever was given the funding to build a missile to launch a satellite would have a huge advantage when it came to snatching the real prize: the control of America’s missile forces.

General Bruce Medaris ran the Army operation out of Huntsville, Alabama. At the end of the war it had been the Army who had ensnared von Braun and his team, and few would argue that they were the world’s leading group of rocket scientists. But the Army’s main political clout resided with contractors like Chrysler in Detroit. On the other side of this feud was the Air Force team led by Bernard Schriever. His political support came from the aerospace industry, Boeing, McDonnell, Grumman and the dozens of other smaller aircraft manufacturers. Both Medaris and Schriever knew that missiles represented the wave of the future, and that the government would not be able to afford two independent missile programs. Inevitably a rancorous situation erupted between the two services over this plum assignment. While Schriever found it difficult to convince Washington that the Air Force was better equipped than von Braun’s team to launch an American satellite, he still managed to divert enough political and fiscal capital away from Huntsville to keep the Air Force in the running until the Atlas and Thor missiles were brought up to speed.

A pivotal moment occurred in July of 1958 when America’s civilian space agency, NASA, was brought into existence to take care of the nation’s space program. Almost immediately NASA approached Medaris and asked if the Army would be willing to turn over the cream of their rocket team to the civilian agency. Medaris and von Braun were dead-set against breaking up the organization of nearly 4000 rocketeers based in Alabama, and rebuffed the NASA invitation. This decision was a watershed moment because it permanently took the potential lead in America’s space program away from the Huntsville team and opened up the doors for Houston and Langley to take over.

Medaris and von Braun continued to work on improving America’s missile program and to that end the trusty Redstone was soon to evolve into the Juno and the Jupiter, before von Braun would propose, in September 1958, a gigantic booster called the Juno V. This super-booster would be comprised of several Redstones strapped together and its proposed payload would be the Air Force’s orbital bomber the X-20 Dyna-Soar. To mount the Dyna-Soar onto the Juno V would require a powerful second stage and the Air Force had already suggested that their new Titan booster would be perfect for the job.

The problem with this proposal was that no one knew exactly what the Dyna-Soar’s mission would be. At one point it was to be a suborbital recon vehicle, then it was upgraded to a suborbital bomber, before it was decided it should be a fully-functioning orbital weapons’ platform. During the course of this relentless upgrading the Juno V was renamed the Saturn and the tooling and design work were set in place to accommodate the Titan I as the second stage.

However, when Schriever and the Air Force upgraded the Dyna-Soar for the umpteenth time it was decided that the more powerful Titan II would now be needed for the second stage. This simple decision, made by the DOD and the Air Force, caused a huge problem for von Braun and the Army. Retooling the Saturn to accommodate the Titan II would mean changing the diameter of the Saturn. This presented a very difficult and expensive problem for Medaris and von Braun.

Medaris saw this as a ploy to force the Army out of the missile business because he knew he would have to go back to the DOD and ask for a sizeable increase in the Saturn budget to meet the Air Force’s new specifications. As soon as he made this request, Schriever was standing by with a counter proposal; to use an unbuilt and untested Air Force missile to be dubbed the Titan IIIC.

Medaris saw this as a transparent political maneuver to push the Army out of the missile business, but he could do nothing but stand and watch as the Air Force pulled away with the money and the go-ahead to take over the booster program for Dyna-Soar. This regrettable situation left the Army holding 4000 rocket engineers, a gigantic booster program with no payload, and nowhere to turn. Medaris offered von Braun his choice, to either go and work for the Air Force or to approach NASA to see if they might still be interested.

At first NASA expressed little interest in bringing the massive Huntsville team onto its payroll but then something extraordinary happened; President Kennedy announced that America was going to the moon within nine years. This grand task would fall to NASA, which at the time had exactly fifteen minutes of spaceflight experience and only a fraction of the infrastructure necessary to accomplish such a program. Suddenly, von Braun’s super-booster began to look extremely attractive. It was already half built, most of the R & D had been paid for by the Army and there was no contesting the value of the team of engineers who were now virtually sitting in political limbo.

In July of 1960 Medaris and the US Army handed over their prime Saturn missile program to NASA. The NASA administrator inherited the Saturn at virtually no charge, along with the best missile research team in America. As an added bonus NASA was also given the Army’s prime satellite team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and a huge parcel of land and infrastructure in Alabama, soon to be known as the George C. Marshall Space Flight Center.

Saturn was no longer a weapon, so now the money began to flow into von Braun’s department from NASA. The extra money freed up at the DOD was pumped into the Air Force’s Dyna-Soar and Titan programs and for a time everyone was happy, except Medaris, who perhaps rightly felt like he and the Army had just been robbed.

Unfortunately, it could be argued that this set the stage for the dismantling of the Saturn program before it had barely even started. Saturn had begun life as a heavy-lift military launch vehicle, built by the team who had competed for the country’s missile program and lost, and then it was converted into a civilian launch program with no immediate future beyond the end of the decade. The Army relinquished the missile business to the Air Force and von Braun’s team headed into what must surely be one of the most amazing decades of research and development the world has ever seen; but his team now only existed for an end-goal that was less than ten years away. Ironically the Dyna-Soar program would be cancelled in late 1963.

Both von Braun and the Air Force had wanted to go to the moon long before President Kennedy made his decree. In December of 1958 von Braun had pitched a military lunar base to Washington called Project Horizon. It was to have used a massive 12 million pound booster and would have been able to carry as many as 16 people into low earth orbit. The Air Force had also started their own lunar base proposals back in the late 1950’s under the name Project Lunex. Needless to say, both of these military moon bases were to have been audacious and expensive.

From 1958 to 1962 all of the proposals under consideration involved building very large boosters to send very large spacecraft directly to the lunar surface. This was known as Lunar Direct and the only way to pull off such a mission was to build a gigantic booster. This may have been a deliberate choice by the Air Force and Army teams since they wanted to establish a permanent presence on the lunar surface. When NASA came into the picture and were told to just “get there and back” within nine and a half years, and not to worry too much about staying very long, the von Braun team, along with the rest of NASA’s very capable engineers had to take a long hard look at how to achieve this goal, with less money and less time.

It soon became apparent that NASA was not going to have the benefit of the Pentagon’s deep pockets, and that NASA’s budget was going to be constantly held under close scrutiny, since it sat on the same appropriations ticket as the Housing and Urban Development budget. This would be a curse for NASA for years to come. Every time the NASA budget came under discussion the pundits would compare space exploration with housing for poor people. Undoubtedly if NASA had been put on the agriculture budget it would never have been mentioned in the same breath as HUD, but would have been held hostage to crop yields.

To accommodate the President’s very short time frame, and to do it within the confines of a limited budget, NASA’s engineers opted to resurrect an idea first proposed in 1938 by H.E. Ross of the British Interplanetary Society Committee. Ross had figured that if you wanted to land on the moon it made more sense to leave your return fuel in lunar orbit while you went on a lunar excursion. In the summer of 1962 NASA adopted this technique known as Lunar Orbit Rendezvous. It involved leaving part of the spacecraft in lunar orbit while an independent modular lander was sent down to the surface. From that point forward NASA began to develop a totally separate lunar landing craft.

Boeing, Convair, GE, Bendix, Martin and many others had tried their hand at building a spacecraft that could fly straight to the moon but it would be Grumman that would ultimately get the coveted contract for the modular lunar lander in November of 1962. The orbiting mothership, known as the command and service modules, would be built by North American Aircraft at their Downey, California factory. In a remarkably short period of time the lunar module would evolve from its early NASA designs, in the Spring of 1962, to its almost final configuration in 1968.

As early as 1961 there were people working in industry, and at NASA, who realized that the race to the moon was to be a short-lived experiment. To try and forestall the demise of Apollo, North American began offering up derivatives for their Apollo Command and Service Modules that could be used for everything from orbital ferries to reusable shuttles. Simultaneously, Grumman began planning an entire array of modifications to the lunar module that they hoped would see their spacecraft live on into the 21st century as everything from a space telescope platform to a full-fledged lunar base known as the SLAMB. LM ascent stages could be used for rescue vehicles, while descent stages could be used as trucking platforms. The LM that finally took Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin to the moon in July 1969 had a maximum payload capacity of 300 pounds, but a slightly modified Grumman LM descent stage, using a series of augmentations, would have been capable of delivering 12,000 pounds to the lunar surface.

Not to be left out of this competition Boeing, working in consort with General Motors, proposed a complex series of lunar base modules known as LESA; also designed to be launched on the Saturn V. The LESA modules were expandable and would have been supported by a dizzying array of surface vehicles, ranging from lunar fork-lifts to hovering flight indexers. The Bendix corporation responded with a fully realized series of plans, known as MOBEV, that would have delivered an assortment of mobile lunar laboratories to the surface, while the Bell Aerospace Company, of Buffalo New York, studied, built and tested a host of flying vehicles that could be used for anything from simple recon to emergency return-to-orbit.

The overall complexity of these plans for the long term exploration and inhabitation of the moon is at once inspiring and depressing. There can be little doubt that given the necessary resources NASA would now have fully-fledged lunar bases in constant use today. The Saturn V was so flexible it could have been used to deliver two lunar modules at once, or even massive logistics vehicles, to be manned by up to 18 people for months at a time.

Sadly none of this was to be, because the Saturn had been born out of military need, and had then come within a whisker of being cancelled, before President Kennedy called it to glory in May of 1961. That exhortation bore bitter fruit. It was a heart-transplant for Saturn that shifted the massive booster from military service to civilian duty and breathed a decade of life into the monster before consigning it and all of its potential progeny to oblivion.

It may be too much to hope that the new lunar spacecraft will not become a political football like Apollo. However, since the moon holds little interest for the US military, and NASA controls almost all of the reins of America’s space program, perhaps this time we might see a more robust vision for lunar exploration. A more measured and long-term plan that won’t fall victim to who-controls-what-portion of the taxpayers’ dollars.

Today, the contractor community is much more consolidated than it was fifty years ago, and the various armed services are much more settled in their alotted roles. Fifty years ago the Army was still chafing at the very notion of a separate Air Force. The political conditions are simpler today, and this time we have history on our side. We know it can be done, and we know how to do it. We have fifty years of experience in space, and the benefit of billions of dollars of research to build upon.

There are those who believe that it will cost one trillion dollars to go to Mars. This number has such a nice ring that it is now even being quoted by Presidential hopefuls. Some are even saying it will cost a trillion dollars just to go back to the moon. This is a preposterous claim and yet few in the media ever challenge these ridiculous numbers. At today’s funding levels, without a single dime of an increase, one trillion dollars would last NASA for 61 years. In fact, allowing for inflation and converting into 2007 dollars, we can see that NASA’s entire budget since its creation has been only $836 billion. That includes everything: building mission control, the Apollo moon landings, the Shuttle landing strip on Easter Island; everything.

The truth is that between 1961 and 1975 NASA’s annual budget average was just under $21 billion (in 2007 dollars). That’s a 22% increase over today’s levels; but that included all of the R & D, the infrastructure and all the programs. Most of the infrastructure is still intact and yet there are some who say it would cost more to do it a second time than it did the first time. A vast sum of money has already been spent on studying the best way to explore space. Reams of research have been generated and then ultimately shuffled off to the national archives to languish. Brilliant ideas sit side-by-side with thoroughly explored dead-ends. Both are equally valuable, but if we choose to ignore the past we may as well have burned that $836 billion.

In my Lunar Exploration Scrapbook (ISBN 978-1894959-69-8) I have gathered many of Saturn’s lost offspring and placed them side-by-side with their even stranger lost cousins. From the British Interplanetary Society’s original pre-war designs for a lunar lander to the massive nuclear habitats of the late 1960s; from the seeds of the rocket belt (born of rocket propelled snow-skis) through to nuclear lunar tricycles; my book contains fully texture-mapped color computer renderings of hundreds of unrealized possibilities from the archives of America’s golden era of space exploration, a glimpse of what might have been and what may yet be.

For more information, please visit www.apogeebooks.com