Apollo Applications Program

AAP was the ultimate development of a number of official and unofficial Apollo follow-on projects studied at various NASA labs.

[1] However, the AAP's ambitious initial plans became an early casualty when the Johnson Administration declined to support it fully in order to remain within a $100 billion budget.

These included a crewed lunar base, an Earth-orbiting space station, the so-called Grand Tour of the Outer Solar System, and the original Voyager program of Mars Lander probes.

Aside from attempting to show that Apollo presented value for money, NASA and the main contractors of Boeing, Grumman, North American Aviation and Rockwell also hoped to put off the inevitable scaling down of staff and facilities following the completion of the first Moon landing.

Three AAP proposals were selected for development: In the meantime several of the Earth-orbit "checkout" missions for Apollo had been canceled, leaving a number of Saturn IBs unused.

It was also suggested that the Apollo Telescope and Survey Mission modules might be docked to the Wet Workshop to create a modular space station.

However, when NASA's 1969 budget was cut, focus was shifted to the Skylab space station proposal, which managed to accommodate the equipment already specified for some of the AAP missions.

The concept of launching another Skylab into lunar orbit using a spare S-IVB was briefly discussed around the same time, but no justification could be found for it, so the project was abandoned early on.

Although the Soviet Union continued to operate the Soyuz and Salyut space vehicles, NASA's next crewed mission would not be until STS-1 on April 12, 1981.