NASA’s 1970s: From Moonshots to a New Space Blueprint

Lachlan Reed

Welcome to the show -- I still reckon one of the weirdest plot twists in space history is that after NASA put people on the Moon, it had to turn around and say, righto... now how do we prove we're not finished?

Simon Carver

[curious] It is strange, isn't it? You'd think walking on the Moon would buy you a century of goodwill. Instead the mood shifts. The big cultural win happens, the confetti lands, and then someone in the back asks, "Lovely, but how much is this costing me?"

Lachlan Reed

Yeah, that's the sting. Apollo was flags, footprints, ticker-tape stuff. Massive. But in the 1970s NASA had to stop chasing one giant finish line and start building a future -- an orbiting station, deeper planetary missions, a reason to keep humans in space at all. Same mob, different game.

Simon Carver

And with less public adrenaline. [pauses] That's the part I find almost moving. It's easier to sell a finish line than a long middle. "We will go to the Moon" is a clean sentence. "We will maintain an orbital laboratory and gather data over time" sounds like... a grant application.

Lachlan Reed

[laughs] Dead set, it does. But that's where Skylab matters. In '73 NASA launches this big orbital workshop -- and the beautiful scrappy bit is they used leftover Apollo-era hardware to do it. That's not decline to me. That's like looking at the shed after a race weekend, seeing spare parts everywhere, and building a trail bike that somehow goes harder than expected.

Simon Carver

I was gonna say, that is such a you analogy. But it works. Because Skylab wasn't a consolation prize. It kept people in orbit for longer stretches, turned spaceflight into lived experience instead of a dash to a destination. Eat there, sleep there, do science there. Space became a place you could inhabit, however temporarily.

Lachlan Reed

[excited] Exactly -- well, not exactly "temporarily" in a casual Airbnb sense. [chuckles] More like a tin can with very serious engineering. And Skylab had drama straight out of the gate. Damage during launch, then astronauts heading up and basically helping save the mission. That's NASA in the '70s for me: less chest-thumping, more problem-solving under pressure.

Simon Carver

But doesn't that pressure come from a weaker position too? Let me push on this. If your budget is tightening and the country is tired, then reusing Apollo hardware is clever, yes -- but it's also necessity. There's a version of this story where NASA is improvising because it no longer has the political backing to dream at full size.

Lachlan Reed

[skeptical] I hear that, but "full size" is doing a lot of work there. If full size only means another Moon sprint, then sure, the rocket wasn't as loud. But the ambition got broader. Skylab says, hang on, maybe the future isn't one heroic leap every few years. Maybe it's learning how to stay up there, work up there, keep showing up.

Simon Carver

[reflective] That lands for me because rebuilding after a huge win is hard in any field. I remember finishing a long theater run years ago -- tiny scale compared with NASA, obviously -- and the closing night was electric. Then Monday came. No applause, no deadline, just the question of whether you still knew who you were without the spotlight. The 1970s feel like NASA's Monday morning.

Lachlan Reed

Oh, that's good. Bit less oily than my shed version. [laughs] But yeah -- Monday morning is perfect. Apollo had the fireworks. The '70s had the to-do list. And honestly, to keep flying when the crowd's wandered off? That's character stuff.

Simon Carver

And maybe courage of a different kind. Not the courage of planting a flag, but of saying, "We're still here, and the work might look less cinematic now." Which, ironically, set up some of NASA's most lasting launches.

Simon Carver

So when people picture the '70s as a kind of exhale after Apollo, I think they miss what was actually happening. Viking goes to Mars in the mid-decade. Voyager launches in '77. And by the end of the decade you've got the Space Shuttle program moving toward orbital flight -- not there yet in the '70s, to be fair, but clearly becoming NASA's next big human-spaceflight framework.

Lachlan Reed

[questioning tone] See, this is where I get a bit itchy with the "exhale" thing. Viking wasn't some sleepy side quest. Sending spacecraft to Mars -- orbiters and landers -- that's huge! It's just huge in a lab-coat way instead of a parade way.

Simon Carver

Right, though lab-coat huge is harder to sell on a poster. Apollo had astronauts with visors and dust on their boots. Viking had experiments, instruments, careful images from Mars. Profound, but quieter. It's the difference between a stadium concert and someone building a cathedral one stone at a time.

Lachlan Reed

[responds quickly] But quieter doesn't mean smaller. Viking changed what a big launch could be FOR. Same with Voyager. That one always gives me a little shiver -- two spacecraft sent outward to the outer planets and beyond, basically saying, let's not just revisit the neighbourhood, let's chuck a message in a bottle into the cosmic surf and see how far it goes.

Simon Carver

[warmly] Voyager does have that mythic quality. And unlike Apollo, which was so bound up in one geopolitical moment, Voyager feels almost... patient. Open-ended. It asks humans to think in timescales longer than election cycles, which is maybe why it still captures people.

Lachlan Reed

And here's my friendly scrap with you: I don't buy the line that the 1970s were NASA's decline. Nah. Quiet revolution, mate. Skylab teaches orbital living. Viking sharpens planetary science. Voyager blows the map wide open. Then the Shuttle emerges at the end of the decade as this new reusable-spacecraft idea, with the first orbital flight coming in '81. That's not a slump. That's the blueprint getting redrawn.

Simon Carver

[skeptical] I think "decline" is too harsh, but I won't let you off completely. If ordinary people felt less wonder, that matters. Institutions don't live on engineering alone. Part of Apollo's power was that millions felt personally implicated in it. The '70s NASA story is smarter, maybe deeper -- but it also becomes easier for the public to tune out.

Lachlan Reed

Fair nick. Although -- and this goes back to your Monday morning thing -- maybe real reinvention nearly always looks boring from the outside. When I rebuilt an old Yamaha in my backyard shed, nobody came round because I'd cleaned the carburetor. [laughs] They turned up when it finally roared to life. The boring bit was the future hiding in plain sight.

Simon Carver

That's a terrible analogy... and annoyingly, it's a good one. [chuckles] Because the Shuttle, even before that first orbital mission in 1981, represented exactly that kind of rebuild: a new operational model, new expectations, a new way NASA imagined access to space. Whether or not it fulfilled every promise is another conversation -- maybe a messy one -- but the pivot matters.

Lachlan Reed

And the robots matter just as much. That's the other big shift. Apollo taught people to see astronauts as the face of exploration. The '70s said, hold up, machines can carry our curiosity far beyond where crews can go right now. Mars, outer planets, all of it. Different tools, same itch.

Simon Carver

So maybe that's the cleanest way to frame it: Apollo was the headline, the giant bold-font moment. The 1970s were the blueprint -- less glamorous, more structural, and weirdly more revealing about what NASA would become. Not just a Moon-shot agency, but a station-builder, a planetary investigator, a launcher of journeys that outlast generations.

Lachlan Reed

[reflective] Yeah... and if you're listening, maybe that's the question to carry with you: after the big victory, what work actually builds the future? Sometimes it isn't the flag-planting moment. Sometimes it's the part where you keep turning up with a spanner and a map.

Simon Carver

[softly] And with enough patience to imagine destinations you won't personally see finished.

Lachlan Reed

That's us for now. Simon, always a pleasure untangling the cosmic wiring with you.

Simon Carver

Likewise, Lachlan. Goodbye for now -- and next time, keep an eye on what comes after the applause.