Apollo Applications Program

• 1. Introduction

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  The Apollo Applications Program was born in 1966, just three years before any American set foot on the Moon, out of a worry that may surprise you: NASA was terrified of success. The agency had assembled roughly 400,000 workers to get Apollo off the ground. What would happen to all of them once the lunar goal was reached? The answer it proposed was the most ambitious peacetime space program ever sketched on paper, one that imagined nuclear-powered lunar bases, a crewed flyby of Venus, and a Grand Tour of the outer solar system. Then the money ran out. Congress and the Johnson Administration held NASA to a $100 billion overall budget, and the AAP's first full year of serious funding, Fiscal Year 1967, received just $80 million against NASA's own estimate of $450 million needed for that year alone. The gulf between ambition and appropriation would define everything that followed. What survived, what was canceled, and what quietly became something else entirely is a story about the strange gap between what a space agency dreams and what a government will pay for.

• 2. The Dream on Paper

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  Wernher von Braun, then head of NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, had a direct personal stake in keeping the Apollo program alive beyond its original mission. His large space station concept had already been rejected, so he pushed for a smaller orbital station that would give his engineers and technicians work to do after the Saturn rockets were finished. The office that eventually became the AAP grew out of an earlier bureau called the Apollo Extension Series, or AES, which was quietly developing concepts for missions on the Saturn IB and Saturn V boosters. Its proposals ranged widely: a crewed lunar base, an Earth-orbiting station, the Grand Tour of the outer planets, and a program of Mars lander probes that was called the original Voyager program. The Grand Tour was eventually transferred to the Mariner program as Mariner Jupiter-Saturn, and was later separated into what became the Voyager program. Two probes launched in 1977 on Titan IIIE rockets, and Voyager 2 completed the full Grand Tour in 1989.

• 3. Building a Moon Base

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  The lunar base proposals developed inside AES and its successors grew more elaborate with each iteration. The basic concept called for an uncrewed Saturn V to first land a shelter based on the Apollo Command/Service Module on the lunar surface. A second Saturn V would then carry a three-person crew and a modified CSM along with an Apollo Lunar Module. The two-person surface team would stay for nearly 200 days, using an advanced lunar rover and a vehicle described as a lunar flier, as well as logistics vehicles intended to assemble a larger shelter over time. Mission planners worried specifically about the isolation of the Command/Service Module pilot, who would remain in orbit while the others explored below. Some proposals called for a full three-person landing team to solve that problem, while others suggested the CSM rendezvous with a separate orbiting module. The escalation of plans was systematic: from a 2-person, 2-day Apollo stay, the program imagined reaching a 6-person, 180-day stay under the final LESA II configuration, with a surface payload of 25,000 kilograms. A nuclear reactor would have supplied power for the permanent base that the planners called LESA, the Lunar Exploration System for Apollo.

• 4. A Venus Detour

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  Among the stranger proposals that circulated under the Apollo Applications umbrella was a plan to send three men past Venus. It relied on a concept called a "wet workshop": the Saturn V's S-IVB upper stage would first fire itself and an Apollo CSM on the trajectory toward Venus. Once the fuel was exhausted, it would be vented to space, and the astronauts would then move into the empty propellant tanks and live there for the duration of the mission. They would separate from the S-IVB only shortly before reentry on their return to Earth. No flight was ever scheduled, but the mission would have used equipment NASA already had on hand. The wet workshop idea itself survived in modified form and reshaped a different mission entirely.

• 5. From Wet to Dry

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  When Saturn V procurement beyond the lunar landing missions stopped in 1968, the focus of the AAP narrowed sharply. Boeing, Grumman, North American Aviation, and Rockwell, the main contractors, all had strong reasons to keep the program funded beyond the first Moon landing. Their concern was the same as NASA's: avoiding the sharp drawdown of skilled staff and facilities that would follow the completion of Apollo. Three proposals won development attention. The Apollo Telescope Mission would observe the Sun from Earth orbit using a modified Lunar Module ascent stage, with a crew of three and a mission planned for 21-28 days. The Apollo Manned Survey Mission envisioned an Earth-observation module also based on the LM ascent stage, launched into a high-inclination orbit for science work. The wet workshop station concept, originally proposed by von Braun using the larger S-II stage, was redesigned to use the S-IVB when the Saturn V production run ended. The plan called for a modified S-IVB to be launched into orbit carrying a docking module and large solar panels in the space normally reserved for the Lunar Module. A CSM would then dock with it, and the crew would enter the now-empty fuel tanks as living quarters. It was also suggested that the Telescope and Survey Mission modules could be attached to the wet workshop to create a modular station.

• 6. What Skylab Became

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  Originally, AAP missions were planned to alternate with Apollo lunar missions starting in 1969. NASA's 1969 budget cut ended that arrangement and forced attention onto a single consolidated project: Skylab. The switch from wet to dry workshop became possible because the first two stages of the Saturn V had enough lifting power by themselves to place a fully outfitted S-IVB into the right orbit. That meant the tank interior could be fitted out on the ground before launch instead of being rigged in orbit by a crew. The Apollo Telescope Mission was absorbed into Skylab, renamed the Apollo Telescope Mount, and attached to the docking station used by the Command/Service Modules. Some design elements of the wet workshop carried over, including the open flooring that had originally allowed fuel to flow through the structure. Skylab 2, the first crewed mission, lifted off on the 25th of May 1973 with Charles Conrad, Paul Weitz, and Joseph Kerwin aboard for a 28-day stay. The third crew, Gerald Carr, William Pogue, and Edward Gibson, flew on the 16th of November 1973 and stayed for 84 days.

• 7. Apollo-Soyuz and After

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  The Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, which ran from the 15th to the 24th of July 1975, brought an Apollo CSM together with a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft in Earth orbit. Thomas Stafford, Vance Brand, and Donald Slayton flew the American side, conducting rendezvous and docking exercises with Soviet Soyuz 19. On return, the Apollo crew survived an incident when the spacecraft filled with toxic gas during descent. It was the final flight of an Apollo spacecraft. NASA's next crewed mission would not come until STS-1 on the 12th of April 1981, a gap of nearly six years.