History Lesson 
So Long, Cosmic Cowboys
All right, men, we've got this manned spacecraft center, see? And we've got to figure out what to do with it, understand?
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Many of the most direct beneficiaries of the Skylab and Space Shuttle are of course workers at the MSC who now have the means of continuing their employment. Skylab project manager Kenneth Kleinknecht says that "every effort" is being made to find places for displaced Apollo workers. They are "trying to facilitate movement from one contractor to another," which means "encouraging" Skylab contractors to pick up workers laid off by other, less fortunate, contractors.
"There's an enormous wealth of experience here," reasons Kleinknecht, "and we know all these people are very goal-oriented. I think we can expect to get better results from them." Some Apollo project people have already shifted to management of the command module portion of the Skylab.
The current availability of many experienced MSC personnel—veterans of Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs—has been a determining factor in scheduling the development of the Space Shuttle. Some critics have already said the Shuttle program, which calls for a first horizontal flight in 1976, is "too rushed," and thus "needlessly expensive" and dangerous. Rod Rose, an Englishman who has been with NASA since the Agency was created and is presently Technical Assistant for the Space Shuttle program, argues that "There are certain people around here whose skills you need to work on a project regardless of the schedule. Thus you have an essentially fixed overhead which will just add to your costs if you drag it out. The key is to find a balance where your people work at maximum efficiency without falling into a crash program." It had been the "crash program" aspects of Apollo that helped to mount up the enormous costs of going to the Moon: seven-day work weeks and triple-shifts were standard at the MSC for months at a time, and expenses for overtime often approached the regular payroll.
Much of the publicity resulting from the NASA employment cutbacks has been less concerned with the number of people thrown out of work than with what kind of people they are, it being apparently assumed that PhD's have more difficulty coping with unemployment than everybody else. Job titles at the MSC normally stretch through three and four progressively more incomprehensible adjectives, and many people have honed their specialties to a fine edge, thus painting themselves into dark corners of the esoteric. Don Pierson accumulated seven degrees on his way to expertise in such things as gamma ray reduction and plasma physics, only to find himself a victim of one of the first MSC cutbacks. He complained at the time that "they're not getting rid of the deadwood around here," which was essentially an echo of the continuous running feud between the engineer/manager end of the NASA hierarchy and the scientist/pure research population.
The scientists, known around the MSC as "the long hair and tennis shoe types," have for years complained that scientific goals are sacrificed to the needs and priorities of the engineers and project managers. "All they [the engineers] wanted to do was get to the Moon and back," said one scientist, "without a thought as to why they were going or what to do when they were there."
"If you left it up to the scientists," retorted an engineer, in the wake of Apollo 17, "they'd still be talking about it, too."
Proportionately, the science directorate took nearly double the employment cutbacks of the MSC as a whole. A NASA official, who took cover in that "off-the-record" cloud of anonymity that bureaucrats lug around with them, answered that statistic this way: "Look, we didn't want to fire anybody. But when we had to, the only people we could afford to lose were the ones who weren't directly essential to the safe and successful accomplishment of the mission. To an unfortunate degree, those were the people doing pure research."
Many of the displaced scientists and technicians have been forced to move outside their fields to find work, a blow they feel far more personally than being uprooted from Clear Lake. Their roots have never been very deep there in the first place, transience being one of the characteristics of the NASA community. As Alvin Toffler and Vance Packard have pointed out, in the high-technology sectors of society mobility and transience are the guiding characteristics of the technocrat's life-style. Geography and permanence are largely irrelevant when one builds his identity around his work. To lose that work is a doubly cruel shock. At the MSC, where most of the employees quite obviously ride the arrowhead of technological change, the loss of work means a good deal more than just the loss of income, and they are more than willing to move if they can find it again.
"Well, I was pretty lucky," says Poppy Northcutt, who "does return trajectories" for TRW Systems, Inc., the software contractor for the Apollo program. She had been the first woman to earn a slot in the "trenches"—the banks of consoles and monitors in the Mission Control Center (reportedly, she was the only person in the retro-fire trench to keep a cool head when Apollo 13 suffered a deep-space abort and had to be brought back from the far side of the Moon with its main engine disabled). "My project manager has been trying to get us jobs elsewhere and I've got one in Los Angeles. A lot of the smarter people saw it [the cutbacks] coming and started looking a long time ago. But some of the project managers just kept sitting around, figuring something would turn up, I guess, I don't know. They're the ones who are really in trouble. I don't know what some of them are going to do. It's really too bad."
And what of the Astronauts then, Space Heroes with no dragons to slay, highly skilled in a profession of rather restricted application? Deke Slayton, head of the Astronaut Office, in that "everything's fine" style of dealing with the press that NASA 's military-bureaucratic fusion has resulted in, discounts Astronaut morale problems because "this is a volunteer organization." Besides, he says, "there's plenty of work around here for them to do." Twenty are working on the Skylab (only nine will fly, and they have already been named), nine working on the joint U.S.-Soviet flight (three will make it, in 1975), three holding down management roles, and "that only leaves seven to work on the Shuttle program [not scheduled for orbital night until 1980]. There's no shortage of jobs around here." There is, however, a shortage of nights, which is what most of them, as Deke Slayton himself knows much too well, had volunteered to do in the first place.
Slayton had been one of the original Mercury 7 Astronauts (he and Al Shepard are the only ones still in the program) and was for many years reputed to be the best pilot in the Astronaut Corps, an accolade of the highest esteem in the circles of experimental test pilots, a breed which approaches airplanes with the same elan that the Hell's Angels bring to motorcycles. A heart murmur washed him off night status before his first mission, and he has spent the last dozen years assigning other men to the flights he had hoped to be on. A bitter task for a skilled and active man, almost on the borderline between dedication and masochism. Slayton can probably feel great empathy for Astronauts who don't get to fly, but the closest he will come to stating it is to admit that "a lot of them [the astronauts] will probably be doing some different things sooner or later. Some may retire, some may find something else to do."
About the only people in the area who haven't suffered in some way from the cutbacks in the NASA budget are those, as you might have guessed, at the Humble Oil and Refining Company. If America's faltering climb into outer space didn't return all of the benefits to the old West Ranch that it was supposed to, well then, the good earth did. A enormous petrochemical complex has grown up in the neighborhood, filling the void intended for the aerospace industry. The Bayport complex had at last count 16 plants, all turning out various carbon and chemical compounds instead of rocket engines, but nonetheless paying the rent. The Monsanto Chemical Company built another huge refinery in nearby Alvin, and Tenneco, Gulf and the Celanese Corporation all moved new plants into the area.
Clear Lake City is still bustling away, the natural growth in the area having taken up much of the slack from the NASA reductions. Chemical engineers make just as much as aeronautical engineers, and the money is still coming in. The enormous economic expansion of the Houston metropolitan area has crept down toward Clear Lake and largely filled whatever gaps the chemical industry left open. Except for a few motels that were almost totally dependent on MSC trade, area business has hardly noticed the changes. A Friendswood Development spokesman rates housing occupancy "as high as ever," and other local developers agree. "We had to scale down our projections some," said one, "but fortunately we did that before we were overbuilt." Clear Lake City is not likely to overtake Salt Lake City any time soon, but it looks to be around for a while. It may even outlast the space program.
THE TRADITIONAL SPLASHDOWN PARTIES after Apollo 17 had, as everyone noted, some of the overtones of an Irish wake. If scientists, engineers, astronauts and technicians all got drunk and lecherous, smoked the cigars doled out by the American Cigar Institute (accompanied by press releases attesting to its public spirit) and pitched friends in swimming pools, still their hearts weren't in it. Many had their jobs touch down together with the command module. "It's kind of sad," said one. "It's like having a relative with a long terminal illness—you know it's coming, but when it gets there it still hurts."
Journalists, though hardly the best-loved group to lurk around the MSC, probably took it harder than most. For all their efforts at cynicism, journalists are romantics at heart and the epic of Going to the Moon had caught them all up in it. The foreign journalists, who had looked on the Apollo program as the kind of crazily grandiose scheme that is archetypally American, were positively disconsolate.
Geologists and necromancers are probably best equipped to determine what it all meant, but old Sam Houston had gotten in a last lick, casting a final irony on a program of ironies: a quarter-million miles away, the wasted hulk of the LEM Challenger, with Richard Nixon's name inscribed, forever sits 200 feet from the crater called Camelot.
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