TODAY'S TWD: NIXON SCRATCHES APOLLO

"Lunacy", an episode of 'Law & Order: Special Victims Unit', provided an alternate revision to the Toobworld timeline which separates the TV Universe from the Trueniverse.

Colonel Dick Findlay, still working for NASA with hopes of being a part of the projected 2018 return to the Moon, related how he was in a Florida diner with Pete Conrad when they got the news about Nixon cancelling the rest of the Apollo space program in favor of the space shuttle system.

This would place his lunch with a real-world figure on January 5th, 1972, or the next day.

Here are the opening paragraphs of the statement released by President Richard Nixon on the 5th:

"I have decided today that the United States should proceed at once with the development of an entirely new type of space transportation system designed to help transform the space frontier of the 1970's into familiar territory, easily accessible for human endeavor in the 1980's and '90's.

This system will center on a space vehicle that can shuttle repeatedly from Earth to orbit and back. It will revolutionize transportation into near space, by routinizing it. It will take the astronomical costs out of astronautics. In short, it will go a long way toward delivering the rich benefits of practical space utilization and the valuable spinoffs from space efforts into the daily lives of Americans and all people.

The new year 1972 is a year of conclusion for America's current series of manned flights to the Moon. Much is expected from the two remaining Apollo missions - in fact, their scientific results should exceed the return from all the earlier flights together. Thus they will place a fitting capstone on this vastly successful undertaking. But they also bring us to an important decision point - a point of assessing what our space horizons are as Apollo ends, and of determining where we go from here."

BCnU!
Toby O'B