Space Policy Edition: Why Apollo Ended (with John Logsdon)

Planetary Radio: Space Exploration, Astronomy and Science

The Planetary Society

Science, Technology

4.8 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 6 September 2019

⏱️ 109 minutes

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Summary

As NASA struggles to return humans to the Moon by 2024, it's worth asking: why did it stop in the first place? Space historian John Logsdon joins the show to discuss the politics behind the decision to abandon the Moon in 1972. Casey and Mat also discuss the proposal to offer a $2 billion prize for sending humans back to the Moon and establishing a base there, and why that's not good public policy. More resources about this month’s topics are at http://www.planetary.org/multimedia/planetary-radio/show/2019/space-policy-edition-41.html

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Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome. Welcome space policy folks. This is Matt Kaplan the host of
0:17.8	planetary radio back with the September 2019 space policy edition of our show.
0:25.4	Joining me once again is the chief advocate for the planetary society.
0:29.5	That would be Casey Dreyer.
0:31.2	Casey, I want to welcome you and I'm looking forward to yet another of these great
0:36.2	interviews that you did as part of that Apollo mini-series.
0:39.4	Well thanks Matt, always love to be on my favorite podcast in the entire world of the Space Policy Edition.
0:45.0	And why am I not surprised? It's pretty good. It's pretty good.
0:50.0	I'd say it's an objective opinion. Well, we're going to provide some other objective, we hope, opinions of some of the things
0:59.1	going on in the news today before we get to that interview with one of your faves, one of my faves, the great John Logston.
1:07.6	Yeah, we had a very good discussion capping off our series of interviews here on the 50th anniversary of Apollo, we talk with
1:15.8	John Logston about why Apollo stopped and what were the motivations, what
1:21.5	happened in order to walk away from building up hundreds of billions
1:26.0	of dollars of infrastructure capability for the United States just to say, well, we did it and to move
1:31.1	on.
1:32.1	John Logson was there while it happened.
1:33.5	He obviously founded the Space Policy Institute,
1:36.1	one of the chief space historians in the world today.
1:40.0	I think it's a really interesting cap and really nice comparison to the original discussion we had with Roger Lanius.
1:46.2	Why did Apollo happen? Why did it end? It kind of has the same story of what sorts of external political forces were going on to drive the need for a
1:57.0	moon program and then of course once we landed to make it effectively irrelevant going
2:02.0	forward from a political perspective.
	...

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