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Expensive Changes. Still, for the astronauts, the cutbacks are not reassuring. The number of flight controllers at Houston—the men whose carefully honed skills are needed to guide a spacecraft —has shrunk from 175 men during the Apollo flight to only 125—"the absolute critical level in personnel," says one flight director. Tight budgeting has also had more insidious effects. Houston officials recently asked for cutoff valves on the two nitrogen tanks used in Skylab's attitude control system as a precaution against another Apollo 13-type failure. The designers at the Marshall Space Flight Center at Huntsville, Ala., refused to add the valves; the tanks, they insisted, simply would not fail. Sighs a Houston official: "Since change costs money, they won."
Paine thinks that public enthusiasm for space will be rekindled as NASA —or perhaps the Soviet Union—embarks on exciting new ventures. But other NASA officials are not so optimistic. They are especially distressed by what they consider a lack of presidential interest in space. When the three Apollo 12 astronauts visited the White House last fall, they recalled bitterly that Nixon seemed more inclined to talk about football than the moon trip.
For once, some scientists find themselves more enthusiastic about the moon than NASA's engineering hierarchy. To cut back lunar exploration so soon after the first moon landing, they say, means a delay in answering the many tantalizing questions raised by those initial expeditions. Scientists can only speculate on what they will find when they land unmanned probes on Mars, send Pioneer probes past Jupiter, and hurl even more complicated spaceships toward the other outer planets (Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto) later in the decade. But such voyages will surely challenge and contribute to earth technology in countless ways. Pickering's JPL scientists, for example, are already designing the "grand tour" computer, which, like HAL in the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, will be required to repair itself during an eleven-year journey, the first voyage to the outermost fringes of the solar system. In his new role as Deputy Associate Administrator for Aeronautics, Neil Armstrong oversees NASA's research in such areas as quieter jet engines, more efficient aircraft wings, improved air-traffic control. Although the proposed space shuttle, linchpin of NASA's space-station plans, may cost as much as $14 billion, it will provide an important test vehicle for hypersonic (many times the speed of sound) aircraft.
But surprisingly enough, NASA's most important contributions may involve improvement of the earthly environment. Studying the closed ecosystem of a spacecraft, suggests Cleveland State University Biologist Robert Rolan, may help scientists solve such problems as pollution, waste elimination and the psychological effects of overcrowding. Kurt Debus argues angrily that to say sewers are more important than moon rocks, as Senator William Fulbright said last month, is far too simplistic.