bilities. The disparity was brought out even further by the launch of Sputnik 3, weighing 1327 kg, on 15 May 1958.46 COSTS Building the launch vehicles and spacecraft described in previous sections was expensive, but necessary if the United States was to achieve the stated objectives in science, applications, and exploration. Moreover, costs did not end with development. Since most rockets and spacecraft of the 1960s were expended in the accomplishment of their missions, it was necessary to buy a new launch vehicle and a new spacecraft for each new mission. Individual costs for launch vehicles are given in table 6. These are rough, order-of-magnitude figures. Actual costs varied, depending on how many special requirements were placed on the launch by the science objectives. To start, launch vehicle costs exceeded those of the payloads they carried, but in just a couple of years Hugh Dryden was informing the Congress that spacecraft costs had come to exceed those of the launch vehicles.47 As time went on, engineers and scientists became expert in miniaturizing equipment, cramming their satellites and space probes with instruments. This practice increased the amount of research that could be accomplished in a given payload weight and space, but it also made for *These are only order-of-magnitude costs. Moreover, they are the prices after many years experience. NASA had hoped Scout would cost about $1 million per rocket, but both inflation and programs to improve performance raised the price substantially above the target. Inflation and improvement programs also increased the cost of Delta over the years. expensive spacecraft. From experience with Explorers, a rule of thumb developed that scientific spacecraft would cost about $20000 to $40000 per kilogram, but in time more complicated and sophisticated vehicles, such as the larger deep-space probes, were far more expensive. Typical costs for NASA scientific spacecraft are shown in table 7. The tabulation illustrates why many scientists were wary about getting into projects using the larger spacecraft. The cost of about three-quarters of a million dollars for four Vikings could pay for at least twice as many Pioneers, or for dozens of Explorers. When the costs of the Viking program continued year after year to delay undertaking Pioneer missions to Venus, there were strong protests. For both satellites and space probes, the larger spacecraft were recognized as essential to the accomplishment of many important investigations, but generally were not acceptable at the sacrifice of the smaller missions, which gave the scientist more flexibility and personal freedom of action. Manned spacecraft were an order of magnitude more expensive than unmanned satellites and probes. This was so not only because of the larger size and greater complexity of vehicles that were to carry men, but also because every effort had to be bent to guarantee the safety of the crew. Trying to guarantee perfect performance was very costly, often requiring much redundancy. For unmanned spacecraft and launch vehicles, it did not make economic sense to try to achieve the same degree of refinement. Scout, for example, was designed to be an inexpensive launch vehicle for science and applications missions. Reasonable care and good engineering and operational practices could achieve success rates of 90 percent or better, and still keep the vehicle in the inexpensive category. To try to guarantee 100percent success, on the other hand, would have increased costs enormously. Thus, if one required 10 successful firings for a certain program, and was willing to shoot for getting those 10 successes out of a total of 11 or 12 firings, the total program costs would be much lower than if one insisted on achieving the 10 successes with only 10 firings. The author vividly remembers a discussion of this point before the Space Science and Applications Subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics during hearings on NASA's fiscal 1966 budget request. Concerned that NASA might be escalating the costs of Scout by insisting on too high a degree of reliability, Congressman Weston Vivian, himself a former engineer, queried Edgar Cortright, deputy in the Office of Space Science and Applications, on the matter. 48 While acknowledging the desirability of striking a proper balance between costs and reliability, NASA people took special delight in this new twist. The normal experience was to be challenged to explain why the unmanned program wasn't striving all-out, as in the manned program, to achieve perfection. Neither NASA nor the Department of Defense had carte blanche to spend unlimited sums on rockets and spacecraft. While desiring that the nation's space program should be first rate and that the country should regain the image of leadership in the field, the administration and Congress still were concerned that costs be kept down. While it was apparent at the outset that in time many agencies would come to be interested in applying space techniques to their work, it soon became equally apparent that these agencies could not expect to operate their own launch and spacecraft facilities. If the Weather Bureau, the Geological Survey, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Maritime Commission, the Department of Agriculture, and the Forest Service had attempted to run their own space programs, the aggregated costs would have been prohibitive. As a consequence it was expected that NASA, and occasionally the Department of Defense, would service other agencies wishing to use space methods in their own programs. As the number of space applications grew over the years, more and more of NASA's work was expected to go into providing support to others. But manpower and money were not the only price to pay for exploring and utilizing space. As the example of the ill-fated Atlas-Able missions showed, there were failures and frustrations to endure. Also, rockets and spacecraft could at times be hazardous. Perhaps the best known illustrations were the Apollo fire, in which three astronauts were burned to death in a tragic holocaust of flammable materials in the oxygen atmosphere used in the Apollo capsule, and the April 1967 flight of Soyuz 1, in which Cosmonaut Vladimir Komorav was killed.49 Because of the universal interest in the manned flight program, these tragedies received worldwide attention. Apollo, for example, became the subject of an intense, deeply probing congressional investigation.50 But others also gave their lives in the course of the program, though with less notice from the public. Astronauts who died in accidents in their training airplanes received only momentary notice. On 5 October 1967, at Northern American Rockwell's plant in Downey, California, a hazardous mixture containing barium used in NASA sounding rocket experiments exploded, killing 2 workmen and injuring 11. The accident was thoroughly investigated by a NASA board and the procedures for handling such chemicals were revised. To the public, however, the matter appeared to pass as just another industrial accident.51 Just as tragic as the Apollo fire was the accident to an Orbiting Solar Observatory on 14 April 1964. In an assembly room at Cape Canaveral, a Delta rocket's third stage motor had just been mated to the spacecraft in preparation for some prelaunch tests. Suddenly the rocket ignited, filling the workroom with searing hot gases, burning 11 engineers and technicians, 3 of them fatally. An investigation following the accident showed that a spark of static electricity had probably set off the fuze that ignited the solid propellant.52 But, whereas the Apollo fire had evoked a national outcry, the OSO accident drew little attention except from those closely associated with the project. One measure of the difficulty encountered in a development program was the increase in cost and schedules over the original estimates. When estimates proved on the mark, engineering difficulties had been correctly estimated and the project could be carried out in the specified time and for the stated price. But when unexpected technical problems required extra time to solve, costs increased and exceeded the original estimates. These overruns, as they were called, were usual in the complex, novel developments of the space program, and special management attention was needed to keep them under control. The Department of Defense had experienced such problems in the development and acquisition of large weapon systems. Studies showed that in the course of 12 major development projects, costs increased by an average 3.2 times and schedules lengthened by 36 percent.53 NASA fared little better. Although the space agency, after its initial troubles, began to develop an enviable record of successes in its numerous programs, acquiring during the 1960s a reputation of being able to do what it set out to do, nevertheless the record was not as neat as the agency would have desired. An analysis in 1969 by D. D. Wyatt, who from the start had played an important role in NASA's programming and budgeting, showed that cost increases over the life of a project were likely to rise substantially when the estimates were made before “establishing a well-defined spacecraft design and a clear definition of required experiment development."54 Space science programs had their share of horrible examples. The Orbiting Astronomical Observatory, the Orbiting Geophysical Observatory, and Surveyor all increased in cost by about four times, as did the meteorological satellite, Nimbus. In contrast, the communications satellite projects Relay and Syncom, and the Applications Technology Satellite, for each of which a good definition of requirements was reached before estimating, showed only moderate cost increases, by between 1.1 and 1.3 times. While the manned spaceflight projects showed somewhat lower cost rises, Wyatt noted that the cost projections were made a considerable time after the projects had started and that there was evidence that estimates at the true start would have been much lower and cost increases accordingly much higher. Wyatt's basic thesis was correct. His analysis, however, did not go unchallenged. Hans Mark, director of the Ames Research Center, wrote that the analysis failed to take into account that programs sometimes were expanded in scope in midstream, as had happened in the Pioneer program. This, of course, also added to the total cost, but such increases were not properly classed as overruns. To get a true picture, one needed to take into account intentional changes in program.55 The Orbiting Astronomical Observatory was a good example of the kinds of trouble one could get into by trying to force too big a technological step. Some of the required subsystems for the satellite were not far enough along to ensure a smooth development of the spacecraft. The star trackers, for example, essential for establishing the stellar reference frame against which the spacecraft would be stabilized, ran into difficulties that took a long time to resolve. The cost of solving the problem was only part of the total increase, for, while engineers wrestled with the star trackers, a far greater number of workers on the rest of the observatory project also had to be paid as they waited for the star trackers. 56 The observatory finally proved to be a powerful astronomical facility. But in retrospect it can be seen that NASA might have done better to follow the recommendations of its advisers, who would have preferred to start with a less ambitious astronomy satellite that would have permitted astronomical observations sooner. Having the less capable astronomy satellite sooner, the astronomers would have been content to wait for the larger one, as Edward Purcell and other members of the White House's Space Science Panel had indicated.57 Both Ranger and Surveyor suffered from launch vehicle troubles. Five launch vehicle failures in a row impeded the development of Ranger, drawing the attention of NASA management and the Congress. When on the |