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Mueller had hoped that Apollo Applications could come to the forefront as this new program. Already in 1968, it was clear that this would not happen. The Agency had spent several years trying to pursue such a route to the future, without success. More was involved here than budget cuts per se. Congress and the Administration had imposed those cuts because NASA had failed to make a persuasive case for its plans. In addition to this, NASA was not able to propose anything as compelling as Apollo.

Apollo, above all, had the beauty of simplicity. Everyone knew of science-fiction visions of astronauts on the moon. The program's goal was succinct: to carry out the lunar landing during the decade of the 1960s, and to bring its explorers back safely. As Von Braun stated in 1964, "Everybody knows what the moon is, everybody knows what this decade is, and everybody can tell a live astronaut who returned from the moon from one who didn't." 78

[103] Apollo Applications lacked this compelling character. In the end, it was a program with no clear central focus. It offered only modest initiatives: solar astronomy, flights with durations of weeks, medical studies, and opportunities to use Saturn-class rockets that otherwise might go to waste. The historian John Logsdon writes that, according to program critics, these initiatives "were designed to fit the specific features of the Apollo and Saturn hardware. The missions suggested were not necessarily those deserving highest priority, and modified Apollo/Saturn equipment was not necessarily the most effective way of carrying out those missions." Here was enough to support a single orbital workshop, but not enough to complete with something as historic as putting the first man on the Moon.

 

The events of April altered the political climate, and Kennedy no
longer was willing to wait.The planning that NASA had already done,
which had convinced the agency's officials that a manned lunar landing
was a technologically and scientifically worthwhile goal, now was to be
the basis for a decision to use the space program as an instrument of
American national strategy. Webb told Johnson that "there is
a chance for the U.S. to be the first to land a man on the moon and return
him to earth if a determined national effort is made. A possible target
date for a manned lunar landing is 1967.

 

Without a challenge and subsequent crisis atmosphere, the American
political system usually makes only incremental, adaptive shifts in policy.

One could be Machiavellian here and suggest that, if a crisis is
lacking at a time when an issue is ripe for decision, the political leadership
can fairly easily create one. This may well be true, given the
nature of the government-media relationship today. I am not sure that
a manufactured crisis would be as effective as an actual one in bringing
together diverse interests in support of a common objective, but there
is room for further examination of this hypothesis.

...

The essence of the "Apollo approach" is concentration of effort
and corresponding concentration of control. There is a constant tension
between this concentration of control, which seems required if objectives
of the scope of the lunar landing are to be chosen and implemented successfully,
and the democratic ethic, which distrusts such a concentration
of control and power.