What hurt U.S. space station progress more: JFK or the STS?

Thanks to TLs like Eyes Turned Skyward and Wired's Beyond Apollo blog, I've recaught the space bug and have been looking into plans and proposals for space stations over the last few decades. Very cool stuff, and quite depressing that only a small fraction of them ever went up. :( Now, I know the Shuttle gets a lot of flak (and deservedly so) for sucking up NASA funding while keeping the program in a perpetual tailspin, but I've also seen posts that lament JFK's 'put a man on the moon within the decade' speech for throwing the space program out of whack and forcing NASA to throw resources into a focus they weren't really ready for.

So, overall, what do you think set back the development and deployment of American space stations the most?
 
Space Shuttle. Kennedy toyed with the idea of space station program, but he was told that orbiting a space station would effectively commit the Americans to a heavy lifting race with the Soviets and that the Americans would lose for at least five years.
 
I would have to say JFK. By concentrating the American Psyche on the Moon, a program that could be abandoned by a future Congress once it was completed, he stopped the permanent development of space. If we had a space station build as a stepping stone to future exploration a future Congresses could not just defund it. We would be decades ahead of where we are now. JFK's boast was a PR gambit , not a real plan for space exploration.
 
I would have to say JFK. By concentrating the American Psyche on the Moon, a program that could be abandoned by a future Congress once it was completed, he stopped the permanent development of space. If we had a space station build as a stepping stone to future exploration a future Congresses could not just defund it. We would be decades ahead of where we are now. JFK's boast was a PR gambit , not a real plan for space exploration.

But in general no one in the US Congress was interested in space exploration per se. They saw space as just another area of competition with the Soviets where they had to prove US superiority. That was why the call to put a man on the moon resonated in a way that competing with the Soviets over space stations wouldn't.

Also the notion that Congress couldn't defund a spacestation is optimistic at best; Congress has shown its quite capable of making irrational decisions where NASA funding is concerned. The fact is its far too easy to portray NASA programs as wasteful and a spacestation would be no more immune than any other project.

Unless you are going to throw in a few other historical rewrites to shore it up sooner or later spending on manned spaceflight will be slashed by some Congress that wants to look tough on 'big government'. Doesn't matter whether it's moon landings or spacestations.

The real problem lay not in Apollo or the STS but in a lack of clear long term goals and and endless changes of plan that poured billions of dollars down the drain.
 

JRScott

Banned
Ultimately what hurt it was the budget cuts.

If NASA had been given on average 1% GDP funding instead of its average of .5% we'd be in a lot better shape.

The problem is you probably need both the shuttle program and a space station program in the late 60s, and the only way to get both is to increase funding to NASA. To achieve that what do you cut? Where do you get the money?

There's just valuable lessons from both you need. The problem was that our politicians only see to the next election. They have a harder time seeing past that. As such they have difficulty with long range planning and hence why we are today 16 trillion in debt with another 100+ trillion in unfunded mandates. As such due to short sightedness and the lack of vision they shorted the space program because it could not produce short term results.

What probably hampered space exploration and the development of such technologies was the Outer Space Treaty of 1967. Later amendments to this like the Moon Treaty failed but the OST places such restrictions on the use of celestial bodies that it makes it hard to argue that you could recoup the cost of exploration. While some parts of the treaty are good like the ban on orbital weapons of mass destruction, the parts limiting development and use of outer space including the moon, asteroids etc were detrimental to space exploration in my opinion. It prevented earlier privatization of the space industry which would of lowered costs through competition and removed any incentive to really do so.
 

Archibald

Banned
I would have to say JFK. By concentrating the American Psyche on the Moon, a program that could be abandoned by a future Congress once it was completed, he stopped the permanent development of space. If we had a space station build as a stepping stone to future exploration a future Congresses could not just defund it. We would be decades ahead of where we are now. JFK's boast was a PR gambit , not a real plan for space exploration.

Good point. And a bit more. NASA felt the danger of JFK mandate for the future. Administrator James E. Webb tried to do with it, and the answer was EOR: Earth Orbit Rendezvous. By using that they literally hoped to build a space station on the way to the Moon, so that the program couldn't be shut entirely after "this decade is out".
Unfortunately an expert at this forum told me this recently

The National Goal established by Kennedy was to get a man to the moon within the decade. Period. Leaving infrastructure behind for subsequent programs wasn't part of the mandate. Kennedy made that quite clear in private meetings with Webb.
That's really unfortunate. Ultimately it did not mattered, since Apollo moved toward LOR and Saturn V, and total inflexibility. And cancellation.

And after Apollo of course, an Earth orbit space station looked totally boring. A shameful retreat from the glory of the Moon (or Mars). Although I'm personally convinced even that "retreat" could have been better managed if there had been no space shuttle - rather a more balanced program made of Titan III, manned capsule, modular space station, and... Agena space tug.
 
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