By James Pethokoukis and John Logsdon

In the summer of 1969, NASA’s Apollo program succeeded in its mission to put a man on the Moon. But in the 49 years since Apollo 17, neither NASA nor any other space agency has brought man beyond low-Earth orbit. How have American presidents and the public thought about manned space flight in the past half century? And what does the future for space flight hold as private companies venture beyond the atmosphere? To answer those questions and more, I’m joined by John Logsdon.

John is the founder and Professor Emeritus of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs. He is the author of several books on the space program. His most recent is Ronald Reagan and the Space Frontier.

What follows is a lightly edited transcript of our conversation. You can download the episode here, and don’t forget to subscribe to my podcast on iTunes or Stitcher. Tell your friends, leave a review.

Pethokoukis: What did you think about the William Shatner ride into space?

Logsdon: Well, it’s great PR for Blue Origin and his reaction is almost literally priceless. He really captured the excitement of being in space that motivates a lot of us to continue to support space exploration, not just exploitation.

One thing that I noticed about his response after landing was rather than thinking about Earth in the classic Carl Sagan-Pale Blue Dot way, he instead seemed to focus on how precarious life seemed to be. On how we have the Earth, with just a thin layer of blue and then surrounded by the black. I don’t know, it’s maybe just a little bit of a different way of looking at it than how people often describe the Earth.

Well, I think a number of people that have had the experience of being in orbit — and of course Shatner didn’t go into orbit — have experienced what they call the “overview effect” of looking back at Earth and indeed perceiving just how fragile this planet is and how thin our atmosphere sheltering us from the void of the cosmos is and how important it is to preserve this planet. And it will take work.

After his ride, not unexpectedly, there were some politicians criticizing it as “billionaires taking joy rides.” I think after some of the previous flights, Bernie Sanders said something similar. Their critiques are about billionaires and wealth but also probably about how resources are being spent. This is not a new critique. Certainly during the Apollo age, there were a lot of critiques of Apollo as a waste of valuable resources, weren’t there?

Well, yes, and I’ll come back to that in a minute. But I think it’s worth pointing out that this flight with Shatner was totally private. There was no public money, no government money, except on the very margins, involved in the enterprise. So private people can spend their money as they choose and be subject to criticism, but it’s not the same as misplaced priorities in government spending. That was the argument during Apollo. Even during Apollo, Amitai Etzioni, the social critic (he’s still with us), published a book in 1963 called Moon-Doggle and it is a trenchant criticism of the priority being allocated to Apollo, and it was an entirely legitimate criticism. I didn’t agree with it then; I don’t agree with it now. But there were choices made about how to spend public money, not on education, not on welfare, but on competing with the Soviet Union for global space leadership. And you could say that was or was not worth it.

If I recall correctly, after it became clear that the Apollo program was going to come to an end, there was a New York Times editorial which said something like, “We’ve been critical of the program all along, that it was only merely about prestige. Now that the space race is won, it’s over. So any other reason that you may have given for going to space, well, obviously that was just a phony reason because now it’s over.” I think that sort of criticism still hurts efforts today: that the Apollo program and any new vision about manned space exploration are about little more than things of national pride or maybe some sort of soft-power geopolitics. But there’s not a substantially good reason for people leaving the Earth.

Well, I think it is, but I think there’s more to it than that. John Kennedy, when he decided to send Americans to the Moon, was very clear that it was an element of national security strategy, that it was a way of demonstrating leadership, vis-a-vis the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union. That was something of crucial national interest and importance in the early ‘60s. So he made a very calculated decision that the prize was worth the cost. He revisited that. Whether he would’ve kept that had he lived all the way through is an interesting question.

The problem since has been that there’s no answer like: “How do you beat the Soviets? Go to the Moon.” What’s the question to which the answer is “Go to Mars” or “Return to the Moon”? There really is no compelling answer to that. It becomes a matter of choice — I think societal choice, as long as it’s government money. My own view is that space exploration is an element of human experience that is worth investing in. I think less than half of one percent goes into the NASA budget. Given all the other things we spend money on, spending money on exploring space and the human adventure of exploring space, I think, is worth the cost.

You mentioned President Kennedy. The Apollo program ended under President Nixon. Have American presidents thought fairly similarly about space?

Oh, I think they have differed pretty dramatically from president to president. I’ve been working on a study of the presidents since Nixon and their attitudes towards a space program, and you see they’re highly variable. Jimmy Carter wasn’t interested in human space flight at all and gave it very low priority. Ronald Reagan saw human space flight and space in general as kind of a new frontier. He had a frontier attitude towards life. He wanted to push new frontiers, and he saw space that way, but he didn’t put money behind that thought. The NASA budget was basically the same percentage of the federal budget as Reagan came in and when he left.

George H.W. Bush was convinced to set a return to the Moon and then on to Mars as a goal. But that didn’t take. Congress was opposed, and there wasn’t any strong public support. But he proposed on the 20th anniversary of Apollo going back to the Moon. Then Bill Clinton didn’t have high interest in space exploration. He was focused on the space station, using it as an instrument of post–Cold War diplomacy. George W. Bush had to react after the Columbia accident in 2003 and the criticism, of which I had a hand, from the Columbia Accident Investigation Board that the program lacked a vision. W. Bush set out again a vision of long-term, sustained exploration with people as well as spacecraft.

Those starts and stops have persisted since 2004. Certainly Mr. Trump saw the dramatic potential of space and set us on a sustained course of exploration. President Biden has said he’s going to stay that course. So we’ll see. We’re on a path now to return to the Moon with humans — “the first woman and the next man” is the cliche — some time in the next five to seven years.

Of my favorite television shows — I’m not sure if you’re familiar with it — is a show called For All Mankind.

Yeah, I’ve seen some of the episodes.

It’s kind of an alternate history show and the premise is the Soviets get to the Moon first and that sets into motion a variety of events in which the space race never really ends. The Soviets keep going to the Moon. We keep going to the Moon. Technology keeps advancing. Was there a scenario where Apollo doesn’t end and a new manned space program ends up being the successor program to Apollo? Was there a conceivable scenario where that happened?

Well, was it a scenario? I’m not sure it was proposed. President Nixon knew he had to define what happened after Apollo. He chartered a thing called the Space Task Group chaired by a well-known space expert named Spiro Agnew, his vice president, to come up with definitive recommendations of what to do after Apollo. They recommended going to Mars in the mid-1980s. If that recommendation had been accepted, it would have been a very different program. Nixon had no interest in spending money on doing that. He liked the astronauts, but he didn’t see continued exploration as an important element. He said, “It’s just another program funded in competition with all the other things that are important.” In that competition, space went from 4 percent of the budget to one half or 1 percent of the budget. It has stayed there or around there now for the past 25 or 30 years, maybe even more.

With Nixon, was it purely just that he didn’t grasp that idea of human adventure? I’ve read that the near disaster of Apollo 13 also may have played a role. That really shook him up.

Yeah, it really did. He got very emotionally engaged with the fate of the Apollo crew. Even before then, he was skeptical of continued lunar exploration. But after Apollo 13, he tried very hard to cancel what turned out to be Apollo 16 and 17. It was NASA that canceled the final two planned missions, and told Nixon they’d rather spend the money on new programs than on repeating trips to the Moon. NASA, at least some of the people in NASA, also got cold feet after Apollo 13, realizing just how risky this was. So NASA has really not embraced exploration as much as it has embraced building and operating the space shuttle, building and operating the space station, and only then turning to, “What do we do next?” The answer is resume exploration.

To what extent have the changes in the program been driven by a fickle public? We all love the notion of Apollo and politicians love putting scenes of the Moon landing in their ads, but America’s interest in space might not be as great as one might think. Given our love of Apollo, not to mention our love of science-fiction films, if the American public was more enthusiastic about the notion, would the politicians follow? And am I characterizing the public opinion correctly?

Well, James, I don’t know how old you are. I know how old I am. And I was at the launch of Apollo 11. So I’m very much of the Apollo generation. But 60 percent of the people alive today have been born since Apollo, and that’s not part of their memory. So for those of us that it is, it’s kind of sad that there isn’t continued enthusiasm.

But look at all the interest in sending Shatner, even just on this little suborbital jaunt. The people followed the Inspiration4 private orbital mission. I think instead of the Apollo astronauts, we now have Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, and Richard Branson. And the things that they’re trying to do certainly are capturing a fair amount of public attention. It’s been my view that government space programs of the character of Apollo and similar are really presidential issues, where a president sees the link between space exploration and some important national priority: national image, national intervention, national morale. Some of the presidents have seen that, others have not.

The fact that we have not left low-Earth orbit in a half century, does that mean Apollo was a failure? In what ways do you think Apollo was a failure? In what ways, looking back, was it a success beyond the goal of actually getting on the Moon?

Well, for John Kennedy, the point of Apollo was a demonstration of American technological (implicitly military) and organizational potency. It was an act of national power and national prestige. In those terms, I think it was totally successful. The rest of the world was more impressed by Apollo at the time than the people in the United States. But it was also by defining it as a race — once you won the race, there was no reason to keep racing. As I said earlier, the race rationale has not been replaced by any other compelling rationale strong enough to rally political support for the funds that are necessary to do things like this.

Even beyond the space station and the space shuttle, we still have an active space program, just not a manned space program. I think we sometimes forget that we continue to send probes to planets, to asteroids. I mean, that’s not an inconsiderable achievement.

Yeah. There’s a mission going to the asteroids called Lucy. We’ve explored the solar system. On December the 18th, we’re going to launch the successor to the Hubble telescope called James Webb, that will look back in time and out in space to the origins of the universe. It’s been an extremely exciting robotic space exploration program.

In addition, space has become a place for business. There’s a $400 billion space economy in existence, mainly doing useful things — communications, Earth observation, positioning and navigation. Space capabilities become central to everyday life, at least in the advanced world. Then there’s the whole other use of space for national security and military power, which is very real. In the last year and a half or so, the United States created a Space Force to symbolize the importance of national security in space.

I think if we would’ve had our conversation a decade ago, it might’ve purely been about space probes and us reminiscing about the Apollo program, but clearly that has changed. That has changed partially at least, if not primarily, due to the dramatic decline in launch costs. What has been going on in space the last 10 years, and how excited are you that space seems to have been opened up in a way that we haven’t really considered for quite some time?

Well, I think what has been going on is a paradigm shift, to use a kind of jargony phrase. Space is a place to do business, and the lowering of launch costs is key to that. One has to give credit to SpaceX and Elon Musk and the introduction of reusability as a key element in the lowering of launch costs, which means there’s the possibility of trying and failing without great cost and trying and succeeding in various lines of business. So space has become an area for profit-making, for applications that benefit humanity. In a sense, it’s become dull. It’s just another place to do useful things. I still am captured by space exploration, by going places, seeing new things. But that’s been kind of overcome, except on occasion, by space exploitation, by finding all the useful things you can do from the orbital perspective and eventually beyond.

I think some people find it untoward that NASA does not seem to be leading America in space, that it is the private sector doing so instead. Are you fine with the private sector taking the lead in space for the United States?

Well, taking the lead is kind of a slippery concept. We’ve gotten to the point where there’s not one thing called space or space activity. The government still has the lead in exploration, both robotic and human, because nobody has figured out how to monetize it. You do have people like Musk who are visionaries with a personal preference for exploration. Elon still talks about a million-person city on Mars and never justifies that on economic terms. But the maturing of space means that people who are there not because of the excitement of exploration, but because of the possibility of creating new businesses, new wealth, new jobs, see it as an area with a lot of potential. So there’s more than one track in space activity, and I’m certainly fine with that.

The space race began as a geopolitical rivalry. Now there seems to be a rivalry between the US and China. Do you think that will be helpful in keeping Americans interested in space?

I do. It’s very different than the Cold War and the Space Race in the sense that there are so many more capable space actors. It’s not just as it was in the ‘60s with the United States and the Soviet Union. But clearly China is an ambitious space power. The United States has maintained its commitment to a leading position in space. I think the competition between those two is very different in character than the US-Soviet Cold War competition, and it’s probably good for both sides to stimulate activity. You can compete without racing. After all, competition is the American way of life. So what China is doing in civil space, I think, is in a sense good for everybody. It is a separate issue that China is developing military space capabilities that are threatening to the US ability to fight and win wars. That is very much a matter of concern. But China’s lunar exploration program, our Artemis exploration program, private ventures, and return to the Moon, I think, are all good for everybody.

What would you like America to be doing at a governmental level? Is there anything that the government should stop doing? What would be your policy advice?

Right now the policy advice I would give is to stay the course. The Trump administration left a space heritage for President Biden. President Biden embraced that heritage and said, “We’re going to keep moving forward.” So “staying the course of consistency of purpose,” I guess, is the jargon phrase. Let’s continue to prepare for human exploration in the end of this decade and beyond. It’s time to go back. It’s time to go somewhere again, not just in circles around the Earth.

Final question: Would you accept an invite from Jeff Bezos on Blue Origin?

Well, Shatner was 90. By the time this airs I will have turned 84. He’s in better shape than I am. So probably, yes. I don’t want to downgrade what has happened, but it’s a joy ride, going up and down in 10 minutes. If I were going to take the risk, I’d want to go to orbit, and I’m not sure I’m ready to do that.

I like that answer. My guest today has been John Logsdon. John, thanks for coming on the podcast.

Good to be with you.

James Pethokoukis is the Dewitt Wallace Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where he writes and edits the AEIdeas blog and hosts a weekly podcast, “Political Economy with James Pethokoukis.” John Logsdon is the founder and Professor Emeritus of the Space Policy Institute at George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs.

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