![]() A Mars landing was estimated to cost two to three times the cost of the entire Apollo program: The Apollo program ended up costing about \$25.4 billion. 11.6īut Mars costs even more than Apollo. Where No Man Has Gone Before, NASA SP-4214 ch. Three options were proposed: an all-out effort, including a 50-man earth-orbiting space station and a lunar base, culminating with the Mars landing in the mid-1980s a less ambitious program providing for evaluation of an unmanned Mars landing before setting a date for the manned mission and a minimum program that would develop a space station and a shuttle vehicle but would defer the Mars landing to some unspecified time before the end of the century. For that goal they suggested manned exploration of the planets, specifically a manned landing on Mars by the end of the 20th century. Its most radical suggestion was that NASA should adopt a new long-range goal, comparable to the Apollo goal that had sustained space exploration for eight years, to provide the impetus for new developments. Predictably, the group's report, submitted on September 15, recommended a balanced program of manned and unmanned space activity. ![]() It recommended sending men to Mars and the other planets:Įarly in 1969 the new President appointed a Space Task Group to study the space program, calling for a report in six months on alternatives for the post-Apollo period. Before the first moon landing, President Nixon ordered a study of the U.S. As with many things in history, the answer is not always clear-cut :)Ĭontinuing to Mars was actually considered. I personally think that the end of the Space Race is really the Souyz-Apollo joint mission, where the groundwork for the partnership between USA and USSR/Russia was laid. It's commonly considered that the US prevailed since putting men on the moon is really no easy task and requires a lot of new technologies to be developed. So, there wasn't really a meeting where it was decided that the space race was won. On the Soviet side, the effort was dedicated to building orbital station, which resulted in the Salyut (which was launched before Skylab) and Mir (the first modular space station!). On the US side, political support for Apollo died down after it had achieved the landing and funds were allocated for a more exciting project (from the perspective of the politicians), the STS. The Soviet Union was always hemorrhaging money and that only got worse during the years. However, that project was really not successful - early launch failures destroyed the N-1 launch pad, and after some more failures the project was eventually cancelled without ever having a successful test flight.ĭon't forget that space is expensive. The Soviets developed their own rocket, the N-1, to go to the moon. Space exploration was initially a secondary goal. Don't forget that the Space Race itself is very closely tied to the military in both countries. So more and more money was poured into NASA. The support that NASA had in the initial stages of the space race was there because of the political reasoning - USSR put the first satellite in space, and this presented the US with a possibility of an orbital strike - nothing to laugh about. ![]() More to the point of the question: it did not "end" at Moon per se, but just slowly ramped down. To be completely honest, I don't think saying that one side "won" the Space Race is entirely correct.
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