Category After Apollo?

In an article published soon after the 1986 Challenger accident, I suggested that “the space shuttle program must be assessed as a policy failure, at least in terms of meeting the objectives [lower cost and routine operation] that have been its articulated rationale since 1972.” In deciding to approve the NASA shuttle, “too much attention was paid to the short term, while longer range considerations were inadequately considered. . . The shuttle decision stands as a powerful example of how not to make a national commitment to an undertaking on which many other significant projects depend.”28 Do these judgments still stand up, almost three decades later? Was the shuttle program itself a failure? Or was it the Nixon administration decision to approve the NASA full capability space shuttle that was the policy failure? I was not very clear in what I wrote in 1986, but it was my judgment then, and now, that the latter alternative is the case. As the preceding paragraphs have suggested, the record of the space shuttle program is a mixture of success and failure. But there were in 1971 better alternatives to approving development of the NASA full capability shuttle, and thus that approval is better described as a policy mistake, rather than a policy failure.

While the White House debate over the Moyers proposal was out of the public view, such was not the case as both The Washington Post and The New York Times published editorials critical of Richard Nixon’s granting himself a central role in celebrating the lunar landing. Nixon was deeply suspicious of the media, and especially the elite Eastern newspapers; less than a month into his presidency, he had told one of his speechwriters “they are waiting to destroy us.” In this case, he had reasonable cause for his anger. The Post objected “with special sarcasm” to the fact that Richard Nixon’s signature was on the plaque that would be left on the Moon, saying “how dare the space program be treated as some run-of-the-mill public works project!” A rather snarky Times editorial was captioned “Nixoning the Moon.” It noted that “Mr. Nixon’s attempt to share the stage with the three brave men on Apollo 11 when they attain the moon appears to us to be rather unseemly.” It criticized the plan to have the president “share a split television screen with the two lunar pioneers” and noted that an “unnecessary” presidential conversation with the astronauts as they walked on the moon would cut into the “extremely precious time” available to Armstrong and Aldrin to carry out their scientific program. The Times concluded that such a “public­ity stunt” was “unworthy of the President of the United States.” Richard

Nixon learned of this editorial at his Camp David presidential retreat; typi­cally angry and vindictive, he “wanted action” in response to the Time’s criticism, directing Haldeman to “ban” the Times from the White House and to organize attacks on the newspaper’s views. Nixon assistant Buchanan was asked, in coordination with Borman, to stimulate letters to the editor of the Times critical of the paper’s position.19

The rejected idea of naming the Apollo spacecraft “John F. Kennedy” may have caused confusion among some subsequent accounts of the Apollo 11 mission. On occasion, it has been suggested in books and documentary films that NASA requested the White House to assign the newly commissioned aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy as the recovery ship to be in the central Pacific as the Apollo H crew splashed down after their historic journey, and that the Nixon White House rejected that request. For example, Craig Nelson in his book Rocket Men states that “NASA had asked for aircraft carrier USS John F. Kennedy to take part [in the recovery] as a tribute to the president’s original vision; the Nixon White House gave them USS Hornet instead.”20 Nelson gives no evidence for this claim, and the research associated with this book did not reveal either a request for the Kennedy from NASA or a denial (which surely would have come) from the White House of such a NASA request. In addition, the carrier Kennedy and her battle group were on a just-begun deployment as part of the Sixth Fleet in the Mediterranean Sea in mid-1969; it would have taken a major effort to re-deploy the Kennedy to the Pacific Ocean for the sole purpose of being the recovery ship for Apollo H. So the notion that the Kennedy might have served as the Apollo H recov­ery ship if not for Nixon White House ill-will is almost certainly one of the long-standing inaccuracies in the history of Apollo H. (The worst, of course, being that the mission never happened and that there has been since 1969 a well-orchestrated conspiracy to conceal this reality.)

On December 3, 1968, President-elect Nixon created a transition task force on space, chaired by Nobel Prize-winning physicist Charles Townes of the University of California at Berkeley. This task force was one of 17 such panels established by the president-elect; their creation followed the model that had been originated by John Kennedy in 1960.22 The members of the space transition task force in addition to Townes were Spenser Beresford, Lewis Branscomb, Francis Clauser, Harry Hess, Norman Horowitz, Samuel Lenher, Ruben Mettler, Charles O’Dell, Alan Puckett, Walter Roberts, Robert Seamans, and James van Allen. Seamans had been a senior NASA official from 1960 to 1968 and during the transition became Nixon’s choice for Secretary of the Air Force; he seems to have had a particularly strong impact on the conclusions. Of the other members, Beresford was a Washington lawyer with experience on space issues as a Congressional staffer. Lenher, Mettler, and Puckett were leaders in the aerospace industry; Branscomb, Clauser, Hess, Horowitz, O’Dell, Roberts, and van Allen were well-known scientists. All had had some significant exposure to space issues prior to their transition team service. Thus they spent little time in fact­finding and never met as a group; rather, they worked by exchanging draft inputs to prepare what was intended to be a consensus report. In addition, Townes was also a member of the Space Science and Technology Panel of the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC); Branscomb was chair of that panel. The PSAC panel had met in December 1968 and prepared a report “with malice aforethought” that fed into the transition team activity. Townes met with president-elect Nixon on January 8 to brief him on the task force conclusions.23

The task force’s report identified a number of issues and presented related recommendations. Among them were the following.

Is any significant change required in thrust or content of the present space program? A new look is required at the balance between the manned and unmanned segments of the NASA space program.

What should be the objectives and scope of the manned program? While this issue is complex, and the function of man in space not yet clear, a consid­erable majority of the task force believes there is a substantial role for man in the long term, and that a continued manned flight program, including lunar exploration, is justified at present.

What are the program items and their urgency for the immediate future?

Various items needing special consideration are

a. A manned space station. We are against any present commitment to the construction of a large space station.

b. [omitted]

c. Lunar exploration. Lunar exploration after the first Apollo landing will be exciting and valuable. But additional work needs to be initiated this year to provide for its full exploitation.

d. Planetary exploration. . . The great majority of the task force is not in favor of a commitment now to a planetary lander or orbiter.

Cost Reduction and “Low Cost” Boosters. The unit costs of boosting pay­loads into space can be substantially reduced, but this requires an increased number of flights, or such an increase coupled with an expensive development program. We do not recommend initiation of such a development, but study of the technical possibilities and rewards.

International Affairs. Space operations put in a new light many international questions and also lead naturally toward some areas of international coopera­tion. We believe these offer opportunities for initiatives and some progress towards world cooperation and stability, and the U. S. should exploit these opportunities with both care and vigor.24

With respect to NASA, the task force estimated that a $4 billion annual budget, “about % of one per cent of the GNP, does not seem excessive in view of the importance of the space developments to the nation.” This fig­ure included $2 billion annually for human space flight; the majority of the task force members accepted that the United States would have a continuing human space flight program into the indefinite future. The task force believed that because “a considerable number of boosters and space vehicles will remain after the first lunar landing, it is possible to have an active and successful manned program for several years while at the same time steadily decreasing the level of funding for manned space flight to perhaps $1.25 billion by fiscal 1972.” While it accepted in principle the existence of a post-Apollo human space flight effort, the panel thought that “it would be undesirable to define at this time a new goal that is both very ambitious in scope and highly restric­tive in schedule, for example a manned landing on Mars before 1985, even though such a goal might be achievable. Such a commitment, adopted now, might inhibit our ability to establish a proper balance between the manned space program and the scientific and application programs.”25 These findings and recommendations closely foreshadowed the approach the Nixon admin­istration would take in its post-Apollo space decisions, including continuing human space flight, not setting another ambitious space goal, not approving space station development, and giving higher priority to international space cooperation than had been the case during the 1960s.

NASA did not receive a copy of the Townes report until sometime in March 1969, and it took another two months to generate its response. Tom Paine’s response to the report, not surprisingly given his bullish approach to NASA’s future, took umbrage at the report’s tone, while welcoming its endorsement of the need for a vigorous U. S. space program. But, Paine asked, “What do we mean by the word ‘vigorous’?” If “one associates vigor with youth, with growth, and with the promise of future accomplishments, one can only view the state of affairs in our space program with serious concern for the future.” Paine also objected to the report’s opposition to a near-term commitment to any major future space undertaking, suggesting that this posture was a continuation of the situation in which NASA had found itself in the final years of the Johnson administration. He complained that “we have been frustrated too long by a negativism that says hold back, be cautious, take no risks, do less than you are capable of doing.”26

NASA’s frustration was understandable. Given the uncertainty that accom­panies the arrival of any new president, combined with the recognition that the 1961 commitment to a lunar landing by the end of the decade would soon lose its potency as the central focus around which NASA could orga­nize its efforts, the fact that the Townes report took a “go slow” approach to the future in space meant that NASA, as it approached humanity’s first steps on a celestial body other than Earth, had little sense of what might lie ahead. It was squarely up to the new administration of President Richard Nixon to chart America’s future course in space. If the recommendations of the Townes report were to be the foundation of the Nixon space policy, that course would be a very different one than NASA had been following and hoped to continue to pursue.

From Paine’s perspective, there were several reasons for adopting a Mars goal. NASA’s continuing attempts to gain support for a space station pro­gram on the basis of its being the next logical step in developing human space flight capability or its use as a scientific laboratory had gotten little support from other STG members. By picturing it as a necessary precursor to a human mission to Mars, Paine hoped to present a convincing rationale for early station development. Not only the space station but also develop­ment of the space shuttle, space tug, and nuclear rocket stages and continued production of the Saturn V had to happen in the 1970s if a Mars landing in the 1980s were to be adopted as a national goal. Emphasis on Mars was also based on a rationale for the U. S. space program that went beyond advancing technological capability and applying that capability to provide tangible ben­efits on Earth. The Mars emphasis recognized exploration for its own sake as a legitimate goal of space activity.

Paine’s own personality was such as to find the Mars focus attractive. His basic strategy during the STG deliberations had been to “err on the bold, bold, bold side.” He thought that in the wake of the successful launch of Apollo 11 chances for approval of a major new space goal were as great as they were ever likely to be. Paine saw the Mars mission as an “offer” that NASA should make to the country, an offer to undertake another tremendously challenging but very exciting national enterprise like Apollo. Paine judged that it was “worth the effort to at least hoist the banner and see if anybody would rally to it.”25

Paine undoubtedly was influenced in his willingness to have NASA iden­tified with the Mars focus by the repeated requests by Vice President Agnew during the STG deliberations and elsewhere for an “Apollo for the seventies” and by Agnew’s now public support for Mars as that goal. Paine may also have thought that the vice president’s support would have significant influ­ence on President Nixon’s space decisions. That judgment turned out to be deeply flawed. Spiro Agnew had even less influence on White House policy choices than most vice presidents.

Paine had by the day after the Apollo 11 launch, July 17, decided to develop a proposal for an early human mission to Mars for presentation to the STG. He ordered his planners to come up with a “very strong, very far out, but down-to-earth technical presentation” which would “substantially shake up” the STG. Such a presentation would necessarily minimize the many techno­logical uncertainties associated with sending astronauts on the months-long Martian journey. The decision to add the Mars focus to Mueller’s already ambitious integrated plan was essentially Paine’s; Mueller “would have been more conservative.” It is unlikely, given the tone of STG deliberations to date and the signals regarding budget constraints that NASA was already getting from the White House, that Paine believed that a crash program to send humans to Mars as soon as technically feasible would actually gain political support. Rather, by presenting an accelerated Mars effort as doable, Paine hoped that a program leading to a Mars landing later in the 1980s might not seem too ambitious, and thus be acceptable to the other STG members and ultimately to the president.26

The possibility that NASA would propose an early Mars mission to the STG evoked early skepticism of the mission’s technical feasibility. At a July 15 meeting of the STG Staff Directors Committee, Russ Drew of OST indicated that he thought that sending people to Mars “was not technically feasible in this century, let alone in the 1980s.” One of the NASA representatives at the meeting, Milton Rosen, found Drew’s perspective “incredulous.” Rosen pointed out “that NASA was within days of putting men on the moon after eight years’ work starting from scratch.” He added that “the preliminary design of a Manned Mars launch vehicle, based on nuclear propulsion, was completed” and that “program plans were well advanced for putting men on Mars in the 1980s.”27 Rosen’s views were typical of the technological hubris of the NASA leadership as Apollo H sat on the launch pad.

As the budget review went forward, an important new player in future space decisions entered the stage. Since he had left his position as NASA’s deputy administrator in October 1968 to become acting administrator, Tom Paine had been without a deputy. The White House was under pressure to appoint Republicans loyal to Richard Nixon to various NASA positions. For exam­ple, as early as March 1969 a young Texas Congressman (and future presi­dent), George H. W. Bush, had noted that “NASA is about the only agency that does not have a pro-Nixon, Administration-oriented contact man,” and suggested “correcting this situation. . . so that we can be assured of getting qualified Republicans and Nixon supporters into jobs there.” The White House personnel office was sympathetic to this and similar pleas and urged Flanigan to find a qualified Republican for the deputy position. Flanigan suggested to Paine appointing Gordon McDonald, a California-based scien­tist; when Paine met with McDonald, he judged him not well qualified for the job. Instead, on September 19 Paine recommended the appointment as deputy administrator of George M. Low, a career NASA employee. Paine told the president that it had been “my hope initially to find a high-level candidate with qualifications similar to those of Mr. Low who wished to join the government from private life and, hopefully, with strong science, space engineering and Republican backgrounds,” but that “my search for such an individual was unsuccessful.” Paine characterized Low, then 43 years old, as “one of the country’s most brilliant young technical managers.” He pointed out that Low, who had served both as deputy director of the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston and, after the 1967 Apollo 204 fire, as man­ager of the Apollo spacecraft program, had made essential contributions to Apollo’s success.6

Low was an Austrian-born engineer whose family had immigrated to the United States in 1939, after the German takeover of Austria. He became a U. S. citizen in 1949 and received a M. S. in aeronautical engineering from Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in 1950. He at that point was already work­ing for the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (NACA), NASA’s predecessor organization, and had risen steadily in responsibility within NACA and NASA during his 20-year career. Even at a relatively young age, he was widely known and respected within the aerospace profession.

As the White House considered whether to accept Paine’s recommenda­tion, Low traveled to Washington to meet with science adviser Lee DuBridge and Flanigan. DuBridge was not well briefed for the meeting; according to Low, he “was under the impression that I was already on the job” and wanted to discuss NASA’s future. The meeting with Flanigan was “not quite so sat­isfactory.” The meeting lasted only ten minutes, and Flanigan was “quite

provocative” in his questions. Low felt that he “was not communicating very well at all”; the meeting ended abruptly when Flanigan announced that he had an appointment with the president.7

Low apparently made a better impression on Flanigan than he thought. On October 21 Flanigan sent a memorandum to President Nixon recom­mending that Low’s appointment be approved. He told the president “I have met Mr. Low and he is obviously a very capable individual.” Flanigan noted that Frank Borman, the president’s favorite astronaut, had characterized Low as “a man who has done a superior job. Perfectly capable of assuming utmost responsibility.” After his meeting with Low, Flanigan checked again with Borman, who indicated “his complete support” of Low’s appointment. Ehrlichman, likely after clearing the appointment with the president, ini­tialed the “Approve” box on Flanigan’s memorandum. Low’s confirmation hearing was on November 25, and he was sworn into his position by Tom Paine on December 3.8

Low would become a central participant in 1970-1972 space policy and program debates and decisions. He had a low-key, steady personality that was an effective complement to Tom Paine’s more ebullient style, but was also very tough-minded and more politically astute than Paine. Low was meticulous in style, and, like Bob Haldeman, Nixon’s chief of staff, on an intermittent basis kept a detailed personal diary.

The possibility of having non-U. S. astronauts go into space on U. S. space­craft had interested Richard Nixon from the start of his presidency. He asked Henry Kissinger soon after his inauguration to explore broadening interna­tional space cooperation, and especially “participation of foreign astronauts in the US program.” Nixon may have mentioned this idea to Frank Borman when the Apollo 8 crew visited the White House on January 30, 1969. At any rate, as Borman returned from touring Western Europe, he recommended that President Nixon invite the European Space Research Organization, the intergovernmental agency created to pool resources for Europe’s space sci­ence efforts, to nominate two European scientists to train at NASA as astro­nauts. Borman followed his phone call with a letter to Secretary of State Rogers proposing that the United States “immediately request an interna­tional agency to select a certain number of qualified scientists from different nations of the earth to join our program to participate as scientists/astro – nauts in future earth-orbital space stations.”20

The subject of non-U. S. astronauts came up again on the July 23 flight across the Pacific Ocean aboard Air Force One to meet the returning Apollo H astronauts, as Borman discussed the idea with the president and Henry Kissinger. Nixon remained intrigued, and asked Borman to follow up with Kissinger. Borman laid out his thinking in an August 5 memo. He proposed that the United States immediately begin discussions with Europe and Japan to nominate scientist-astronauts who could “participate in the earth orbital flights. . . in the mid-1970’s.” He also proposed “a rather dramatic call for Japanese-European experiments to be flown on the space station.” He sug­gested that “the appropriate time to undertake negotiations” leading to for­eign participation was “the immediate future.”21

NASA Administrator Paine was also on the flight across the Pacific, and he met separately with Nixon and Kissinger. Nixon authorized Paine to begin discussions with potential international partners, particularly in Europe, with respect to their possible participation in the post-Apollo program. Soon after returning to Washington after the Apollo H landing, Paine met with the head of the European Space Research Organization to brief him on U. S. post-Apollo planning. He stressed that the opportunity “to associate their own astronauts with us in future programs” had to be considered “in the context of substantive joint contributions” to those programs. Linking flight opportunities to sharing the costs of hardware development was to remain central to Paine’s thinking on international cooperation.22 Paine had either misread or misinterpreted Richard Nixon’s interest in enhanced cooperation, which was focused on flying non-U. S. astronauts, not on joint development of or major foreign hardware contributions to post-Apollo space systems. What the president had in mind was clear to Flanigan, who told Nixon of Paine’s initial conversations with European representatives, saying that based on these discussions, Paine “would prepare a plan for the inclusion of foreign nationalists [sic] in future U. S. space activities.”23

Between October 1969 and March 1970, Paine traveled to Europe, Canada, Japan, and Australia, promoting the STG report as reflecting what the United States was very likely to do in space in the coming years, even as he knew full well that the Nixon administration was resisting approval of the major programs the STG had recommended. His rather paternalistic goal in Europe was “to stimulate Europeans to rethink their present limited space objectives” and “to help them avoid wasting resources on obsolescent developments [such as their own launch vehicle].” Paine also sent the STG report to the Soviet Union in the hopes of promoting “complementary or cooperative space programs.” These efforts to create substantial international involvement in the U. S. post-Apollo space program will not be discussed in detail in this study, other than to note that they became controversial within the upper reaches of the Nixon administration.24

By late November Richard Nixon was becoming impatient with the lack of any action with respect to flying non-U. S. astronauts. He asked “is there still no way to get multi-national participation in some of our future space flights? I have raised this with Paine and Borman and I know there are some technical problems but it is a pet idea of mine and I would like to press it.” He asked Peter Flanigan to “jog the bureaucracy” on the issue.25

Flanigan did discuss the issue with Borman, and Borman responded in a December 2 memorandum, saying “it was perfectly feasible and desirable to invite foreign participation in the space program at the present time.” He equated “foreign participation” with flying foreign astronauts, saying that “the inclusion of foreign astronauts in our programs would lead to further cooperation at the engineering level and hopefully to more direct financial participation” on the part of other countries. While NASA’s Paine believed that financial contributions were a necessary prerequisite to flight oppor­tunities for foreign astronauts, Borman (and seemingly Richard Nixon) thought the flight opportunities should precede, and perhaps lead to, finan­cial involvement. Borman noted that in principle a foreign astronaut could be part of an Apollo lunar landing mission, but he recommended against such a step, saying that “the Apollo hardware is extremely complicated and requires long training periods for proper utilization.” In addition, there were already a number of U. S. astronauts who had been training for a long time and who “would quite properly wonder at the sudden inclusion of a foreign crew member.” As he had suggested in August, Borman repeated “the time to take the initiative in this field is ripe.”26

Paine also responded to Flanigan’s query about flying foreign astronauts by lobbying for approval of a NASA FY1971 budget that allowed rapid prog­ress on the space station and space shuttle. Paine told Flanigan “obviously, we can’t fly foreign astronauts if we are not going to have anything to fly them in—a Space Shuttle, or anything to fly them to—a Space Station.” Flanigan responded in a manner suggesting either a slip in attention or that he was still not fully familiar with NASA’s programs, saying “how about fly­ing them in the Apollo obligations [sic—should be applications] program?” While Borman had suggested that foreign astronauts could fly on the orbital workshop, which is what Flanigan was referring to, Paine did not offer that possibility, saying that there were too many American scientist-astronauts hoping to be on one of the planned three flights to the workshop to open up a slot for a foreign participant.27

With the decision to postpone the release of the space statement until March, the urgency of responding to President Nixon’s query about flying foreign astronauts diminished. But Nixon did not forget his “pet idea.” On February 12, after reading a report regarding Paine’s international activi­ties, the president, clearly impatient, tried to force the issue. He informed the National Security Council that “he would like to have a program which could be announced as soon as possible for German, Japanese, British and French astronauts to participate in our space program.” Nixon wanted “to have this program initiated in the earliest possible year.”28

It may have been the possibility of announcing an invitation for foreign astronaut participation to which Paine was referring in January when he said that the delay in releasing the space statement would allow NASA to “add more sex appeal” to the draft. The president’s persistent raising of this issue appears to have catalyzed action on this concept. On February 26, NASA proposed a modification of the January draft of the space statement that would include

the first official announcement on foreign astronauts. Foreign astronaut par­ticipation is linked to space shuttle-space station projects as the first practi­cal opportunity for foreign astronauts in the current U. S. program. Foreign astronaut participation is also tied to “broad involvement” and “contribution” by the foreign nations to the space shuttle-space station programs so as to be consistent with our attempt to secure meaningful participation by the other countries.29

NASA’s change was not accepted; there was opposition to such a step com­ing from the president’s staff. In his February 10 memorandum discussing the possibility of making international cooperation a central theme of the presidential space statement, Lee Huebner of the speechwriting office had added a “caution,” saying that Tom Whitehead was “very skeptical about over-selling internationalization,” since “there has been little substantive progress” and the issue “is wrought with pitfalls.” Given this, “the President could easily overpromise without being able to deliver.” Whitehead perceived NASA as “engaging in some wishful thinking, trying to create new reali­ties through public relations even though the tough questions in the area have not yet been hammered out.” In addition, NASA was trying in its sug­gested language to link Nixon’s interest in flying foreign astronauts to get­ting the sought-after presidential commitment to the space station and space shuttle.30

Whitehead’s position, seconded by Flanigan, carried the day within White House policy circles, even in the face of the president’s explicit request for a plan for foreign astronaut participation. This was not an isolated incident. Nixon’s senior staff not infrequently ignored or countermanded his direc­tives, especially those issued in a fit of anger, when they judged them not to be in the country’s or the president’s interests. In this case, Nixon had persisted in pushing his “pet idea,” but either explicitly or by not being offered the option of adopting it as his space statement finally reached him for approval, his wish was overruled.

Science adviser Lee DuBridge decided in mid-1970 that it was time to leave Washington. DuBridge had not been able to exercise the influence he had anticipated in taking the science adviser’s job, and was frustrated both by his lack of direct access to President Nixon and by cuts in science funding. A search for DuBridge’s successor was initiated in early summer. It was soon successful. President Nixon’s new science adviser would be Edward E. David, Jr., a 45-year-old engineer who had spent the prior 20 years of his career at Bell Laboratories, working in areas as diverse as computer science, undersea warfare technology, and developing an artificial larynx. David was the first presidential science adviser since the position was created in 1957 to come from an industrial rather than a university background. He was reported as being “very skeptical of the value of the man-in-space program,” feeling that “we should push the space program but in a very studied fashion.” David was sworn in as science adviser and director of the Office of Science and Technology on September 14, 1970. Russell Drew stayed on as David’s top staff person on space issues.5

With most preparations for President Nixon’s involvement with Apollo 11 in place, Frank Borman in early July made a quick visit to the Soviet Union. He had met Soviet ambassador Anatoly Dobrynin in January, and Dobrynin had followed that meeting with an invitation for Borman and his family to visit Moscow. Borman informed Nixon and his national security adviser Kissinger of the invitation, and they urged him to accept. Borman remembers that Nixon “was already intrigued” with the idea of U. S.-U. S.S. R. cooperation in a joint space mission, and he viewed the Borman visit as an “opening wedge” in the process of defining such a mission. Borman was the first U. S. astronaut to visit the Soviet Union, and his trip received positive press cov­erage there. In a formal meeting with the president of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Mstislav Keldysh, who was the senior publicly acknowledged official in the Soviet space program, Borman raised the possibility of the United States and the Soviet Union increasing their space cooperation, and got a positive response. On his return to the White House, Borman reported to the president that he had not “gathered much technical information on the Soviets’ space program,” but had gotten the impression that “the Soviets would be receptive to a joint space mission.” The July 1969 Borman visit can thus be seen as a first step leading to the 1975 joint U. S.-Soviet Apollo-Soyuz mission with its “handshake in space.”21

The good relations created by Borman on his trip had an immediate payoff. On July 13, three days before the Apollo launch, the Soviet Union launched the Luna-15 robotic probe, with the intent of first orbiting, then landing on, the Moon, scooping up some lunar soil, and bringing it back to Earth. There was some concern that the trajectory of the Soviet mission might intersect with Apollo 11 while both were in lunar orbit, resulting in a collision. At NASA’s request, Borman used the White House-Kremlin “hot line” to send a message to Keldysh requesting the orbital parameters of the Soviet probe. On July 17, Keldysh replied with the requested information, saying that “the orbit of probe Luna-15 does not intersect the trajectory of Apollo-11 spacecraft.” Never before had the Soviet Union provided such detailed information on one of its ongoing space missions. While Luna-15 did reach lunar orbit, it crashed onto the Moon on July 21 as the Apollo 11 crew was preparing to lift off of the lunar surface.22

By July 14, Borman was back from his trip to the Soviet Union; he would stay involved with President Nixon until the Apollo 11 astronauts were safely back on Earth on July 24. One action Borman took at the president’s request was to prepare brief profiles of the Apollo 11 crew for Nixon and similar profiles of the crew’s wives for Mrs. Nixon. With respect to Neil Armstrong, Borman told Nixon that the mission commander was a “quiet, perceptive, thoroughly decent man, whose interests still turn to flying,” and that he “follows the stock market actively.” Armstrong was “a little reserved, but when you get to know him, he has a very warm personality.” Buzz Aldrin was described as “very athletic, aggressive, hard charging,” an “almost humorless, serious personality,” and “very concerned about social problems.” Michael Collins was in “superb physical condition.” Collins was “in some sense skep­tical, more inclined toward the arts and literature rather than engineering” and a “devoted family man.” With respect to the astronauts’ wives, Borman described Jan Armstrong as “quite composed and very factual.” Joan Aldrin was “more demonstrative than either of the other wives, and perhaps more apt to show her concern.” Pat Collins “tends toward the intellectual; [is] very interested in current events”; and “enjoys evenings that include candlelight and wine for dinner.”23

NASA had sent to the White House proposed remarks for President Nixon to use as he spoke with the astronauts on the Moon. From Borman’s perspective, “the gist of those remarks was that the current administration was responsible for Apollo 11’s success. . . The statement was pure poli­tics, an exercise in self-congratulations.” Borman advised Nixon not to use NASA’s input. He told the president “look, Mr. President, you really don’t have anything to do with Apollo 11. You’re just the fortunate or unfortu­nate recipient of this mission. . . If it fails, you’ll get tarred with it, and if it succeeds you’ll get some of the credit. But for you to say what NASA is sug­gesting—that in effect you were the father of the space program—is just plain wrong.” Rather, suggested Borman, the president should say “some­thing very simple and nonpartisan, a few words of congratulations, and then get off the air.” Borman also advised against the plan of playing the national anthem as Armstrong and Aldrin stood next to the American flag during the telecast conversation involving the president. This “would force the crew to stand at attention for some two and one-half minutes. This time, plus the time allocated to unveiling the plaque and mounting the flag, would add up to a significant portion of the time on the lunar surface which is non-productive from a scientific or exploration viewpoint.”24

President Nixon met with Haldeman, Flanigan, Chapin, and Borman on July 14 to discuss plans for his involvement. According to Haldeman, Nixon “was really intrigued with his participation in the whole thing.” The plan at this point was for the president to go to either the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston or the Kennedy Space Center in Florida for his phone call to the astronauts on the Moon; Nixon’s long-time personal secretary Rose Mary Woods suggested that the call should instead come from the Oval Office, and the president agreed. Going into the meeting, Nixon was “cranked up” about playing the Star-Spangled Banner when the American flag was placed on the Moon, but he accepted Borman’s reservations about that idea, also recognizing “possible adverse reaction to overnationalism.”25

One more important detail had to be attended to in the final days before the launch: what to do in case of a mission failure involving astronaut deaths, particularly if Armstrong and Aldrin could not lift off the Moon to rendezvous with Michael Collins in lunar orbit. NASA had prepared a disaster contingency plan and sent it to the White House. In addition, Flanigan’s assistant Jonathan Rose reviewed with Borman and Safire a “rain plan” in the event of an Apollo H disaster, suggesting the need for a presidential statement and phone calls to the crew’s widows, and then a “National Day of Mourning” after the president returned from his around- the-world trip. Borman had earlier urged the president’s speechwriters to think about “what to say to the widows,” and Safire had prepared a state­ment in the event that Armstrong and Aldrin were stranded on the Moon. The suggested remarks began by saying: “Fate has ordained that the men who went to the moon to explore in peace will stay on the moon to rest in peace. These brave men, Neil Armstrong and Edwin Aldrin, know that there is no hope for their recovery. But they also know that there is hope for mankind in their sacrifice.” The message added: “Others will follow, and surely will find their way home.” After the president’s statement, at the point when NASA cut off communications with the astronauts, “a clergy­man should adopt the same procedure as a burial at sea, commending their souls to the ‘deepest of the deep.’”26 Fortunately, this statement was not needed.

Even after “having brooded, dreamed and schemed for the Presidency for the last sixteen of his fifty-five years,” Richard Nixon on January 20, 1969, was not well prepared to take over the reins of government. Nixon had an “encyclopedic” understanding of foreign affairs, but there were “deep and obvious gaps. . . in his knowledge of the federal government and the Congress.” As Nixon began his transition to the White House, there was “an appalling vacuum of advance planning on how to organize and oper­ate one of the biggest and most intricate governments in the world.” Nixon could “count on fewer close associates to help him run the government than any recent predecessor.” His “handful of trusted [campaign] lieutenants and advisors would, of course, take up key positions in the White House and the administration,” but “almost to a man, they were sadly inexperienced in the ways of Washington.” To supplement his few close associates in fill­ing key White House and administration positions, Richard Nixon had “to call on outsiders that would make his, at the beginning, an administration of strangers.”27 It took more than a year for the Nixon White House opera­tion to settle into place; during its first year in office there was a great deal of policy, budget, and personnel confusion. This confusion had more of an influence on NASA, as its future plans were being debated, than on many other government agencies.

Although Mueller was not ready to suggest sending humans to Mars, the team that had developed the integrated plan under his guidance had also prepared a scenario in which the hardware systems developed through the integrated plan could be used for a Mars landing in 1986. Paine heard a briefing on this scenario on July 19, as he waited in Houston for the next day’s landing on the Moon. This briefing likely solidified Paine’s decision to confront the STG with a technically plausible approach to a human Mars mission, one that would build upon the plan he had already selected as NASA’s preference for the 1970s.

Then, on July 23, Paine decided to “wheel up NASA’s big gun,” the charismatic director of its Marshall Space Flight Center, Wernher von Braun, to take the lead in preparing the STG presentation. Von Braun was a well – known spokesman for pushing the frontiers of space exploration. After being brought to the United States from Germany at the end of World War II, he had readily adapted to his new country and had become widely known as a space visionary through his appearances on television, magazine articles, and in numerous talks around the country. Von Braun had long been thinking about the technical requirements for sending humans to Mars, and after being exposed to Mueller’s thinking in May 1969 had also directed his cen­ter’s Future Projects Office to develop an approach to using the integrated plan hardware for a two-year mission to Mars. He was thus well prepared to respond to Paine’s request that he prepare a presentation based on the earli­est feasible date for an initial Mars mission.28

Von Braun was later to raise some reservations about his role in presenting the Mars mission proposal to the STG. In a 1970 interview, he suggested that “I have never in the last two or three years strongly promoted a manned Mars project. I have supplied some data on how one would mount a Mars project, a manned Mars visit with today’s technology, but I in fact have always actively advocated not to pursue such a thing at this point in time. People. . . have tried to cast me in the image in the last few years as the Mars or bust guy in this agency, which I am definitely not.” He continued, in a not very veiled rebuke to Tom Paine, that “I, for one, have always felt that it would be a good idea to read the signs of the times and respond to what the country really wants, rather than try to cram a bill of goodies down some­body’s throat for which the time is not ripe or ready.” He wondered “how bullish you can get in a bear market,” adding that “there may be too many people in NASA who at the moment are waiting for a miracle, just waiting for another man on a white horse to come and offer us another planet.” But the political environment “is more difficult and more demanding than it was with that carte blanche from Kennedy,” since “we have turned from a vision­ary society to an introspective society in the last ten years.” As his biographer notes, while von Braun may have had serious reservations about being used to present an ambitious Mars plan to the STG, “he certainly kept quiet about them in 1969.”29

Agnew on July 25 sent a memorandum to the STG members and observ­ers announcing an August 4 meeting of the STG. Paine had decided to have the meeting at NASA so von Braun could use the space agency’s elabo­rate three-screen projection system for his presentation. Agnew’s memo said that as an important item of business “the recommendations of the Staff Directors for the Principals will be discussed.” But first, NASA would make a presentation “on a proposed major new program goal which would focus United States space efforts during the coming decade.”30