Why did America stop going to the Moon — and is what's happening now actually different?
Frank White goes straight to the heart of it.
After Apollo 13's drama, four more lunar landings followed — almost routine. Plans for Mars existed. Then Watergate took down Nixon, a corruption scandal took down Agnew, Vietnam dragged on, and Congress lost interest.
The reasoning was brutally simple: we went to beat the Russians. We did. Why keep going?
NASA's mission was never settlement — it was to get there first. Once that was done, the program had no larger mandate to stand on.
But White sees something genuinely shifting now.
The vision of large numbers of humans moving into space — not just visiting — is no longer fringe. It's inside NASA. The race to beat the Chinese adds urgency, but this time there's something behind it beyond competition.
The wild card? Democracy itself. Every two to four years, a new administration can dismantle whatever the last one built.
White's provocative suggestion: humanity may need some kind of international body — beyond any single nation's election cycle — to carry the space program through the political storms and actually see it through.
If you have questions for Frank, leave them in the comments and we will gather selected questions for a future interview.
13 was the one where something blew up.
They couldn't really land on the moon.
They had to hurry back to Earth.
But then 14, 15, 16, 17, four really routine Apollo landings on the moon.
And there was talk about going farther.
And, in fact, President Nixon asked Vice President Agnew to come up with a plan.
And they did develop a plan to go to Mars and to really build on what they'd accomplished.
But Nixon had to resign because of Watergate.
Agnew got caught in a corruption scandal.
The war in Vietnam dragged on.
Congress just wasn't willing to do more.
And I think the attitude was, well, the reason we went to the moon was to beat the Russians.
We did that.
Why do we want to keep doing it?
And if you ask what went wrong, well, at that time, NASA's mission was to get there first.
Not to create human settlement throughout the solar system.
Now, what's going on now is different, actually.
I think if I were to look at what Jared Isaacman is doing, I would say he is attempting to do both things.
One, I'm sure he's been told, you need to beat the Chinese to the moon.
Absolutely.
That seems clear.
But he's made it very clear that that's just part of it.
Finally, the work that you've been doing, the work that I've been doing,
the work that other people have been doing in the space settlement movement or the space movement,
it's finally paying off in that this larger vision of large numbers of human beings and of civilization moving into a larger ecosystem.
It's part of NASA now.
Overall, nothing is cast in stone.
Who knows?
One of the obstacles for the United States is we have elections,
and quite often a new administration comes in, has new approaches to space exploration,
and everything that's been done can be undone or stopped.
We don't know in 2028 what will happen.
That's just a fact.
It really is the downside, I guess.
There's lots of beautiful things for democracy.
I like what Edward Morgan Forster, E.M. Forster, said, two cheers for democracy.
He thought two was enough.
Three means you don't have any critique.
He had plenty of critiques, but two, because it allowed some basic pushback and questioning.
I think there is a downside to democracy in the sense that every two to four years we rip our policies apart,
and we start over, and so we really get left behind.
It would be nice to have some sort of international body for space.
You have the Human Space Program.
We could have the Human Space Alliance or something that could weather the storm of all those crazy political moments.
No matter where you come from, if you're human, you're in the suit.
You're going up.
We're going to build space for humanity.
It's a big lift.
It's a big request.
