To play Devil's advocate, because this is most definitely not my judgement in the least, lots and lots of ATL space race second guessers say we were mistaken to splurge on loads of money for a narrowly focused launch system and spacecraft useful for just one mission only, which was landing some guys on the Moon and hauling back a few hundred pounds of moon rocks. That we "should" have spent less money on gradual, systematic, steady development of LEO launch capacity, systematically built a space station, then meticulously gone on to the Moon later using a bunch of tried and true general-utility systems to bootstrap to the specialized Moon mission. Slow and steady tortoise wins the race and all that.
Yes, I would indeed say this.
The fallacy here I think is, "no Buck Rogers, no bucks."
Which is itself a fallacy. Congress has proven itself willing to spend money on all sorts of things that are expensive and have few or no practical applications--and which don't require any kind of Buck Rogers. Given my experiences, I point to the Department of Energy's particle physics program, which has spent considerable amounts of money on a series of particle accelerators, detectors, and experiments that are more comparable to space probes than space capsules. Yes, you can point out that part of the reason for this is because (especially in the 1940s) particle physics has been viewed as intimately linked to nuclear physics, and a potential source of new war-making capabilities--but the same is true of space exploration, which has obvious applications to such fields as rocket design, metallurgy, autonomous navigation, and so on.
If there had never been a human flight in space at all, Congress would very probably still be paying for some level of space program, and it likely would have involved a lot of the stuff that the actual space program has done.
But it is definitely not my sense that the general zeitgeist said "we've spent far too much on space!"
But that is what the actual historical record, and especially the Congressional record, says. We see Representatives and Senators alike beating on NASA for spending a fortune on sending people to the Moon, and actual polls of people show weak levels of support for NASA in general and Apollo specifically.
Does it follow then that had we done the whole thing with shrewd green eyeshades of scrupulous economy and efficiency, we would not have faced the debacle of the late 1960s and early '70s?
it does indeed, because the reason the debacle
even existed was because NASA assumed there would be an Apollo 2, which was never in the cards, and because the budget had been inflated tremendously to pay for Apollo. No Apollo, no budget inflation and no assumption that the budget would continue to be high. NASA is just another agency like NOAA or the DoE that does some mission that's been deemed nationally important. It will face ups and downs, of course, but those are just the usual issues of being a government agency. Not some existential crisis.
I'm gonna say, no, we'd be quite optimistic to just assume that! No matter how frugal and cost-effective some ATL systematic, slow and steady plodding space program might be, it was definitely not the case that absolute amounts of money spent on it were anything close to crippling. The whole Apollo program was a rounding error in DoD's budget, even somehow leaving the extraordinary costs of Vietnam out of it somehow.
It was more than a "rounding error". In 1964, for instance--which wasn't even one of the peak budget years for Apollo--NASA's budget was
8% of the entire DoD's budget. That might not sound like a lot, but for instance today that would mean NASA would have a $50 billion/year budget. That's still a lot of money.
In any case, it's not whether in some absolute sense the amount of money being spent on Apollo was crippling, it's whether in
relative terms it made NASA a target. Which it did, because regardless of how much you say "ah, but all that money is being spent on Earth" what people
saw was that NASA was spending a large enough amount of money to be worth going after to put a few men on the moon when there were more urgent priorities on Earth. No program can survive that kind of pressure.
Nor am I convinced that "it was money wasted because the technology developed was inappropriate to more reasonable near-Earth short term needs." The F-1 engine for instance--massively overscale? Well, a single one, stretched a wee bit into the F-1A, development actually done OTL, would serve as a dandy single engine for a Saturn 1B scale launcher, and that scale is exactly the level we'd need and want for such missions as a modest but expanding modular space station, or a robust and roomy LEO truck, or freaking Dynasoar, which I think is another fantasy Luftwaffe '46 bit of fashionable flashy vaporware that is so damn popular but not really very practical for anything. The J-2S engine is pretty nifty too, causing me to question the whole point of developing the SSME as anything but a money cow boondoggle--surely making that engine reusable would be far cheaper than developing SSME. Apollo as is was pretty darn inappropriate to LEO missions, but trimming down with a smaller lighter SM and adding on mission modules in some way seems entirely feasible and useful--the heat shield would then be overkill, but it is a simple matter to either lighten it, or simply take the standard CM capsule design as enjoying a safety margin.
You're assuming that none of those would have been developed without Apollo-as-it-was, which is very probably wrong (except for perhaps the F-1, which might have ended up withering the way the M-1 did). All of those programs started
before the call to go to the Moon and were simply reappropriated for that mission when it became fixed. The earliest Apollo designs, for instance, were specifically intended to support Earth-orbit test missions (basically the Gemini missions), space station missions, and eventually some lunar flyby and lunar-orbital missions with upgrades. Had JFK not called for the Moon landing mission, development probably would have proceeded along basically these lines and you would end up with exactly the spacecraft you describe (or something reasonably close), only without the whole detour of spending a large amount of money on vehicles with no application to low orbit.
In truth I think a more modest program of the plodding kind many assume von Braun, Nixon and others would have preferred would get the plodding plug pulled on it in the late '60s with a hell of a lot less to show for in terms of potentially useful technology that would no more be used in practice than our OTL nifty stuff we put on the shelf to gather dust because big contractors wanted more money to develop something newer and therefore more sexy. There is no reason to anticipate some green eyeshades person is going to go before Congress and say "you know, we could have blown ten times the money and have gotten a Moon landing or six out of it, but look how frugal we were, so please keep funding us." No Buck Rogers, no bucks. No thousands of contractor paychecks spread across the nation, no constitutency to sustain the frugal shoestring effort.
The trouble is that the "frugal shoestrings" effort is basically exactly what NASA has been doing since Apollo got shutdown...just badly...and yet Congress hasn't decided "Oh, we'd better dissolve NASA". Even in the absence of an all-out effort to land people on the Moon, Congress still has a number of reasons to keep funding the civilian space program:
- There would still be a large number of contractor paychecks going to employees of Chrysler, Douglas, whoever ends up getting the Apollo contract, and so on and so forth;
- There would still be reasons of prestige to continue flying humans into space--basically, "The Russkies are doing it, so we'd darn well better be doing it too!";
- There would still be reasons of scientific discovery to continue launching both robotic and human (especially space station) missions;
- There would still be practical applications to Earthly concerns like surface observations (e.g. Landsat) or communications (which NASA was doing quite a bit of R&D in);
- And there would still be reasons centered around maintaining a workforce trained in spaceflight and operations, as I described above.
All of that is more than enough to justify spending a few billion dollars (in '60s money) a year on the space program, i.e. basically the budget range that the space program has received ever since Apollo. Of course the green eyeshades person isn't going to go to Congress and say, "Well, in an alternate universe we spent ten times as much and landed people on the Moon, so keep funding us," but they are going to say, "We're exploring the cosmos. See, we developed this telescope to observe the stars in wavelengths invisible from the ground, we built this communications satellite to prove that we can transmit television signals across oceans without expensive cables, we built this probe that went to Mars, we landed this other probe on the Moon, our astronauts are hard at work proving the feasibility of men working in space, we're employing thousands of people in California and Texas and Florida and so on, so give us money to keep doing all this," or in other words all the things administrators have said since the Apollo program to persuade Congress to keep funding them. It worked for them, and similar appeals have worked just as well for keeping NSF, NIH, the Department of Energy, and other civilian scientific agencies funded and operating.
We might not have seen a human crewed landing on the Moon to this very day.
Yes, and? This isn't
Kerbal Space Program, people don't actually have an insatiable urge to go to space just for the sake of going there. The point is to go to space because we can do useful things and make interesting discoveries there. It's quite possible that there would be more of that in a timeline where no one had landed on the Moon than in ours.