_Live From Cape Canaveral_ - Jay Barbree [82]
NBC Radio and Television was there for every flight, from launch to splashdown. We enjoyed an out-front position and first-place ratings. Jim Kitchell, our executive producer, was simply the best. He had cut his teeth in television news by directing the first newscast put on the air by journalists, not broadcasters, who simply read what they were given. The show was the legendary Huntley-Brinkley Report, where Kitchell was the first to cover a breaking news event live. When it came to covering space flights, he led, we followed; and when Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin reached the moon, Kitchell’s space unit was given the Emmy for “Coverage of Special Events.”
But sadly, as quickly as Project Apollo had arrived, it was gone—gone for thirty-one years until January 14, 2004, when President George W. Bush dusted off its historic pages. As of this writing, astronauts not yet born when Apollo 17 returned from the moon December 17, 1972, will head back to the lunar surface as early as 2018.
And if you should be asked, the first Martians are already here. They are your sons and daughters, and as soon as they move through the halls of learning, they’ll be saddling up to fly to our planetary neighbor on rockets and interplanetary ships named Ares and Orion.
As history had its voyages to the New World, its wagons west, its Kitty Hawks, and its Lindbergh flights to Paris, Mars will be the next generation’s Apollo.
It just could be the greatest adventure of all.
SEVENTEEN
After the Moon
America was proud of its moonwalkers, but we who followed spaceflight daily knew earthlings’ first visits to the moon could have been different. Had Russian cosmonauts sustained their early lead, the number going there might have been two or three times twenty-four.
In the beginning, the competition was fierce. The Soviets had gone all out in their desperate attempts to be first. But costly failures slowed them to a halt, and then, only two weeks before Apollo 17 returned from the moon, the Russians were down to a last-gasp hope that their giant N–1 rocket would fly. They could no longer be first, but they still struggled to get their cosmonauts to the moon in the same period in history as American astronauts had. Such a landing would restore some Soviet pride.
It was not to be.
Martin Caidin was in Russia. It was N–1’s fourth launch attempt. The mammoth rocket was to boost a heavy, unmanned lunar-landing spacecraft directly to the moon in a rehearsal for a manned landing. It rose into the Kazakhstan sky only to be ripped apart again by a series of violent explosions, its wreckage tumbling earthward while sounding the death knell of the Russians’ last, slim hope.
From the ashes of N–1, the Russians returned to their proven rockets and spacecraft and became successful in their efforts to place a space station in Earth orbit. The Salyut station led the way, while the American road to space in the aftermath of the highly successful Apollo moon landings developed potholes and detours.
A simple “breaking and entering” burglary at the Democratic Party’s headquarters in the Watergate scandal propelled this country into a self-devouring frenzy that would last until a peanut farmer from Georgia was elected President in 1976. No longer was there the driving force in the country’s space effort that had carried America to the moon. NASA’s visions were lost on the floors of a disenchanted Congress and a public that rapidly became apathetic.
Slowdown was NASA’s new marching orders. The agency’s planners and builders were replaced by a new wave of bureaucrats who swayed with the political winds, sadly short on dreams, drive, and any determination to keep forging outward beyond Earth.
NASA’s new task