Space: Still Moonward Bound

President Kennedy had Congress and the public with him when, early in his Administration, he got the U.S. space program racing toward the moon. Bruised by Soviet space successes, national pride demanded that the first man on the moon be an American instead of a Russian, whatever the cost.

The cost is moon-high. Though $20 billion is the stated price tag, some experts feel it may take as much as $40 billion to put two U.S. astronauts on the moon by 1970, the present target date of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. NASA's budget has already rocketed from $117 million in 1958 to $3.7 billion this year. With the costs mounting inexorably, and with memories of Sputnik I receding, some Americans have come to take a less moonstruck look at NASA and the space race.

A Fistful of Dust. Foremost among the doubters is a longtime moon-race skeptic, Dwight D. Eisenhower. Says Ike: "Anybody who would spend $40 billion in a race to the moon for national prestige is nuts." California's Democratic Representative Chet Holifield has grumbled about "moon madness." The Senate Republican Policy Committee expressed doubts about the value of "a fistful of lunar dust."

Some U.S. scientists, too, have voiced misgivings about what one of them called the "frantic, costly and disastrous pace" of NASA's push toward the moon. Physicist Lloyd V. Berkner, former chairman of the National Academy of Sciences space science board, has warned against reducing the space race "to the spectacle of an athletic contest." Many scientists would prefer to see the U.S. explore space primarily with unmanned probes, incomparably less costly than manned space shots.

None of these purely verbal punches was anywhere near as painful to NASA as a solidly material blow landed last week by the House Science and Astronautics Committee, which slashed $474 million from NASA's 1964 budget request of $5.7 billion. Nearly half the cut came out of the manned space flight program, which includes the lunar landing project. The committee also voted to reduce the amount of money that NASA is permitted to shift around among its various programs—plain notice that the committee plans to exercise tighter control on NASA's spending in the future.

Doubts Astir. NASA Administrator James Webb complained that the "overall result" of the committee's knife work "is an inadequate level of support for a program that is urgently needed, has achieved a high level of success and is now giving this nation the promise of early pre-eminence in all phases of space exploration." But the committee's cuts did not reflect misgivings about the goal of U.S. pre-eminence in space. What committee members had doubts about was NASA and the way Webb was running it.