I understand the point you are trying to make, but I think you are overstating it.

Example:

As I said, Nixon’s sins were many, including on the space program. What was in dispute was who ended the Apollo program. It was Lyndon Johnson.

I have to disagree with you on this, and agree with Gary. Language is important.

Lyndon Johnson did not “end” the Apollo program. Yes, Lyndon Johnson bowed to political and budgetary realities, and started the “beginning of the end” of the Apollo program (which is not the same as “ended”). The “end” came during the Nixon administration (with the approval and support of a Democratic Congress).

While you (and Alan Wasser) are correct that the OST stopped a race for sovereignty in space, and potential resources, since sovereignty was never the express purpose of Apollo, the OST is not the root “cause” for the end of the Apollo. Correlation does not equal causation.

I agree that if the OST had never been signed, that Apollo conceivably could have continued.

But the root cause for the end of Apollo is that it had achieved its “real” goals (as an instrument of soft power in the cold war), our nation had a growing budget deficit, AND the perceived value of space resources (by our national leaders) was low enough (and the cost of how NASA conducts its operations high enough) that no elected leader could justify (with a straight face) the large federal investment required to “establish sovereignty and acquire the resources”.

The key problem was that our “space effort” was not designed, from the bottom up, to be “affordable”. It was rational to shut down an “unaffordable program” after it had achieve its national security goals.

It is irrational to assert that you can take an “unaffordable” system, and a set of values and processes that are not designed to be “affordable”, and just redirect those values and processes to cost-effectively utilizing space resources. Anybody doing the economic analysis at the time (in the mid 60s) would realize that the numbers did not add up.

I assert that if it had been economically rational to “establish sovereignty” using the then existing (or predictable) technology, that the OST would not have been signed in its current form.

Thus, Wasser’s line of argument is incorrect.

On the subject of “sins”, Nixon tasking a government agency with building a “low-cost reusable space transportation system” that was supposed to be a “space truck”, is at the top of my list.

FWIW,

– Al

So who ended the Shuttle era? Bush or Obama? Have we entered a post-
Shuttle era? How about post-Partisan era?

No, the real “gist” of the OST was that it shut down a race for resources and sovereignty in space (there was concern among State Department bureaucrats over a costly space race to claim extraterrestrial property, as occurred half a millennium before in the New World –they wanted to shut it down before it got really expensive). It worked all too well, as Wasser points out. The recognition of overflight rights was clearly a benefit, and one of the reasons that many argue not to upset that apple cart, but as you note, that became effectively moot after Sputnik (one of the reasons that the Eisenhower administration was complacent, and didn’t realize the potential public outcry and blowback).

Now, you appear to be backing away from your comment. Hmmm…

No, I’m not. I back away from nothing.

Johnson ended the Apollo program. Nixon ended the post-Apollo program. And started the Shuttle program.

Whether that’s a sin or a mitzvah is for history to judge.

My apologies Rand I got fixated on typing ‘David’ for some reason even though I knew his name was Alan Wasser. And yes I did read his column. And I found several claims he makes rather wanting. For instance in this excerpt:

Because of that lack of intelligence, the administration had to assume that, if it cut space spending to pay for Vietnam, it might well lose the Space Race. The question became how to keep the other side from using that victory to gain control of space. So Johnson offered the Soviets a deal for mutual renunciation of the prizes to be won: no nuclear weapons in space, and neither country claims ownership of the Moon, regardless of which nation gets there first. As the New York Times pointed out on May 8th, “the treaty sought by the United States would be similar to the one pertaining to Antarctica” which had effectively stopped all development there.

LBJ must have been pleasantly surprised when the Soviets accepted, since he didn’t realize they too were now worried about the consequences of losing the race to the Moon. LBJ had no idea of the significance of the death of Korolev—if, indeed he’d ever heard the name—but Khrushchev certainly understood, and unlike the US, the USSR could easily keep tabs on how their opposition was doing so they knew the US was doing better than they were.

The result was the “Treaty on Principles Governing the Activities of States in the Exploration and Use of Outer Space, including the Moon and Other Celestial Bodies” (referred to simply as the Outer Space Treaty), negotiated directly with the Kremlin by Johnson’s personal representative, former Supreme Court Justice and UN Ambassador Arthur Goldberg, and only later shown to the UN in its final form to be ratified by other nations.

This is a rather strange interpretation. In the 1960s, the US was engaged in developing and operating a spy satellite program the first of which was Keyhole utilizing Corona and Zenit satellites. The real gist of the Outer Space Treaty was that it formally recognized the right to operate military satellites in space since no nation could claim boundary rigths in space. Such overflights had been informally recognized with the launch of the Sputnik. Whether that was a blunder on the part of the Soviet Union is debatable. Thus, of course, Johnson was pleasantly surprised that the Soviet Union would be agreeable to making the orbiting spy satellites legal. It gave the US a hell of advantage in monitoring Soviet Union’s military capabilities. As I have mentioned before, the Apollo 1 accident and the Vietnam War had far greater impact on the space program than this treaty did.

Obama is shaping up to be a weak advocate of Nasa, just as Bush II, Clinton, Bush I, Reagan, Carter and Nixon before him.

And Johnson (who ended the Apollo program) before him.

This was your original post that I was responding to Rand. Now, you appear to be backing away from your comment. Hmmm…