Category After Apollo?

Richard Nixon saw in the Apollo H mission a unique opportunity. Project Apollo had been intended from its 1961 approval by President Kennedy to be a large-scale effort in “soft power,” sending a peaceful but unmistakable signal to the world that the United States, not its Cold War rival the Soviet Union, possessed preeminent technological and organizational power.11 Nixon agreed with this rationale for the lunar landing program, and in his first months as president made sure to identify himself and his foreign policy agenda with what he later would hyperbolically characterize as “the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation.” But Nixon’s embrace of Project Apollo as a tool of American soft power was short-lived. Once the United States had won the race to the Moon, he perceived little foreign policy benefit from subsequent lunar landing missions or from approving a post-Apollo program focused on preparing for missions to Mars. Other considerations, primarily domestic in character, would determine the Nixon approach to space in the post-Apollo period.

Like many other Americans, Nixon quickly lost interest in continuing Apollo flights to the Moon. As early as December 1969, after the first two lunar landings, he remarked that he “did not see the need to go to the moon six more times.” When the Apollo 12 crew visited the White House that month, mission commander Pete Conrad came away “disappointed and dis­illusioned.” He reported that Nixon evidenced an “apparent lack of interest in the space program.” Nixon did become emotionally engaged with the fate of the Apollo 13 crew, but that near-fatal experience only added risk avoid­ance to lack of interest as part of Nixon’s attitude toward lunar missions. For the Apollo 15 mission in July 1971, Nixon slept through the launch, even though the White House felt it should announce that he had followed the event closely. By that time Nixon was already urging his associates to find ways of canceling the last two Apollo missions, Apollo 16 and 17. By April 1970, the iconic “Earthrise” photograph taken during the Apollo 8 mis­sion that had been hanging on the Oval Office wall throughout 1969 was removed, a symbolic action reflecting the president’s lack of commitment to continuing space exploration.

As Apollo 17 lifted off the lunar surface on December 14, 1972, President Nixon issued a statement saying “this may be the last time in this century that men will walk on the Moon.” As the statement was read to the Apollo 17 crew as they circled to Moon before heading back to Earth, astronaut Harrison “Jack” Schmitt was furious, thinking “that was the stupidest thing a President could have said. . . Why say that to all the young people in the world. . . It was just pure loss of will.”12 By his space decisions, Nixon made sure that his forecast would become reality. As of this writing, humans have not traveled beyond the immediate vicinity of Earth for 42 years, and no such journey is planned before 2021, almost 50 years after the last Americans left the Moon.

Nixon coupled his lack of personal interest in continuing Apollo flights to a political judgment with respect to the space program—that the American public was not interested in supporting an expensive, exploration-oriented space program. As he met with NASA Administrator Tom Paine in January 1970 to explain his decision to reject the Space Task Group-recommended post-Apollo program, Nixon told Paine “the polls and the people to whom he talked indicated to him that the mood of the people was for cuts in space.”

In May 1961, John Kennedy had paid little attention to poll results showing that the majority of the U. S. public opposed spending the sums of money needed to send Americans to the Moon; Kennedy proposed Apollo as a top-down leadership initiative based on geopolitical considerations. In

contrast, Richard Nixon saw no persuasive foreign policy or national security reason to lead a reluctant nation and its representatives in Congress toward accepting an ambitious post-Apollo space program, particularly one aimed at developing the capabilities needed for early trips to Mars. Staff assistant Clay Thomas “Tom” Whitehead, who among the White House staff had the most level-headed approach to future space activities, commented that “no compelling reason to push space was ever presented to the White House by NASA or anyone else.”14

The immediate consequence of Richard Nixon’s decision not to continue space exploration was suspending production of the Saturn V Moon rocket and approving a NASA budget outlook that forced the agency’s leadership to cancel two planned Apollo missions in order to have funds available for future projects. During the 1960s NASA had developed the Saturn V and its related ground facilities on the expectation that the vehicle would remain in service for many years and would be the enabler of a continuing exploration- oriented space effort. These hopes were dashed by Richard Nixon’s initial space decisions; those decisions meant that the United States was voluntarily giving up for the foreseeable future the results from its multibillion dollar investment in exploratory capabilities and transforming the unused Saturn V launchers into very impressive museum exhibits.

There is one sense in which Richard Nixon’s decision to reject continued space exploration might seem somewhat surprising. Nixon often included space activity as an important aspect of his frequently repeated call for “exploring the unknown,” an activity that he believed was essential if the United States was to remain a “great nation.” For example, in February 1971 he told a group of astronauts “in the history of great nations, once a nation gives up in the competition to explore the unknown, or once it accepts a position of inferiority, it ceases to be a great nation.” In a June 1972 conversation with the Apollo 16 crew, Nixon equated exploring the unknown with concepts as varying as “science, breakthroughs in educa­tion, breakthroughs in technology, breakthroughs in transportation,” adding “space—that’s the unknown. What’s out there?”15 Nixon did com­municate to his associates that he was interested in eventual human jour­neys to Mars, and even mused about the possibility of finding life on a moon of Jupiter, but he saw those activities in the far future, not as objec­tives related to the decisions he would make during his time in the White House. Nor did Nixon cast his decision to approve the space shuttle in the context of its being an initial step in a decades-long effort to explore destinations beyond the immediate vicinity of Earth. NASA in its input to the Space Task Group had portrayed the space shuttle as part of a coher­ent long-range strategy ultimately leading to outposts on the Moon and journeys to Mars, and even in 1971 retained elements of that thinking in its technical planning, but that perspective was not considered as part of Nixon’s decision to approve the shuttle.

To Nixon, “exploration” was not a sharply defined concept, and his repeated calls for “exploring the unknown” seem to have been little more than what a historian would call a “trope”—an overused rhetorical device offered in the place of substantive thought. Nixon was notoriously poor at conversation with any but those in his inner circle, and falling back on repetitive rheto­ric was often his way of dealing with discussions of policy issues with those outside that inner circle. The lack of logic in Nixon’s attitude with respect to space activities was on display as he told one of his Congressional relations staff in 1971 that “the United States should not drop out of any competition in a breakthrough in knowledge—exploring the unknown. That’s one of the reasons I support the space program.” Without pausing, he then said “I don’t give a damn about space. I am not one of those space cadets.”

Exploring the space frontier was in reality not part of Richard Nixon’s strategic vision for America, and thus his repeated call for “exploring the unknown” had little connection to his actual decisions on space policy and budgets in the post-Apollo period. By rejecting the recommendations of the Space Task Group, the Nixon administration attempted to reduce U. S. space ambitions to match the budget it deemed appropriate to allocate to NASA in the post-Apollo period. However, that lowering of ambitions did not hap­pen, either then or since. The exploratory vision still persists; a 2009 blue – ribbon review of the U. S. human space flight program concluded that “Mars is the ultimate destination for human exploration of the inner solar system” and that “human [space] exploration. . . should advance us as a civilization towards our ultimate goal: charting a path for human expansion into the solar system.” Discussing the persistence of this vision, Howard McCurdy suggests “expectations invariably fail, but the underlying vision rarely dies. Rather, people update the vision. The dream moves on.”16

One can argue that Richard Nixon made a major policy mistake in man­dating that the space program should be treated as just one of many govern­ment programs competing for limited resources. Certainly the belief that this judgment was ill-conceived is the long-held position of space advocates. But it is also possible that Nixon’s decision-that U. S. space ambitions should be adjusted to the funds made available through the normal policy process-was a valid reading of public preferences, and there were no countervailing reasons for him to reject those preferences. If this is the case, then the Nixon admin­istration in its space decisions was correctly reflecting the view of the major­ity of the U. S. public. There is no evidence that this situation has changed over the past 40 years; the most recent review of the U. S. space exploration program notes “lukewarm public support” for a program of human space exploration and the absence of “a committed, passionate minority large and influential enough” to provide a political basis for such a program.17

What has actually happened since Richard Nixon made his decisions to end lunar exploration, not to set a new exploratory goal, and to remove the space program’s special priority is neither reduced ambitions nor increased budgets; instead, for more than 40 years there has been a continuing mis­match between space ambitions and the resources provided to achieve them. This outcome is close to the worst possible recipe for space program success; a central part of Richard Nixon’s space heritage is thus a U. S. civilian space program continually “straining to do too much with too little"

While Richard Nixon’s involvement with the Apollo 11 mission provided the background to the first steps in the process of deciding what the United States would do in space after reaching the Moon, it did not create the posi­tive momentum needed to overcome both skepticism on the part of those advising the new president about the value of continuing a fast-paced and expensive program of space activities after Apollo and the reality that NASA was ill-prepared to face its future. All involved recognized that there was a need for decisions on what would follow Apollo, but they approached that imperative with widely differing perspectives. It took almost a year to make and announce an initial judgment—that the United States would not continue an Apollo-like program of space development and exploration. The confused process of reaching this outcome is described in this and the following four chapters, which together constitute the first act of the post-Apollo drama.

Nasa Acting Administrator Thomas Paine told a reporter a few days after the November 1968 presidential election that he intended to present the incoming Nixon administration with an ambitious proposal for future human space flight. He was true to his word. In his first communication to President Nixon, on February 4, 1969, Paine urged the new president to “give early personal attention to the question of the future direction and pace of the nation’s space program.” He noted, in words he and his advis­ers thought would appeal to the new people in the White House, that “the future position in space of the United States relative to the USSR is at stake” and that “significant opportunities exist now for new leadership and initia­tives.” Casting space choices in terms of U. S.-Soviet competition was rather tone deaf on Paine’s part, a characteristic that was to persist through his time at NASA. Richard Nixon during his campaign and then in his inaugural address had made it clear that he was seeking areas of cooperation, not com­petition, with the Soviet Union.1

Later in February, Paine followed this plea with proposals to increase the NASA budget for the coming fiscal year in ways that would preserve the abil­ity to produce more Saturn V launch vehicles, allow a second, more scientifi­cally rewarding, phase of lunar exploration, and accelerate the pace of space station development; these were the items that Lyndon Johnson had refused to approve in his final space budget decisions. Paine also sent to the president on February 26 a lengthy and impassioned argument for an immediate com­mitment to a large space station as the first major post-Apollo space goal.

The creation of the Space Task Group (STG) was a blow to NASA’s hopes to get early approval of a major new space initiative; the president not surpris­ingly took the position that he would wait until he received the STG recom­mendations before making any commitment to new space ventures. Thus influencing the STG to take a position supportive of NASA’s aspirations became a very high-stakes objective for the space agency, and particularly Tom Paine.

There were good reasons for Paine’s attempts to get an early decision on a new program to follow Apollo. If no major new start were approved in

the first year of the Nixon administration, NASA was facing both a hiatus in developing new capabilities for human space flight and a shutdown of the production lines for existing capabilities. Subsequent missions to the Moon after the first lunar landing would be based on already developed and purchased Apollo/Saturn equipment, as would the orbital workshop that was the only approved post-lunar landing human space flight project. The workshop and however many lunar landings would be attempted would be completed by 1975 at the latest, and more likely by the end of 1973. After then, there was a real chance that the U. S. program of human space flight would come to at least a temporary end. Paine and his associates were con­vinced that no U. S. president would accept such a situation, and wanted to press their case for quick approval of new human space flight efforts to avoid a lengthy hiatus. They also wanted to preserve NASA’s identity as an engineering and systems development organization, not just as an operator of existing space capabilities, and to maintain as much as possible of the large personnel and facility base developed for Apollo. They thought it self-evi­dent that the nation should continue an ambitious program of human space flight; according to NASA senior strategist Willis Shapley, “it was really a cultural shock, not really realized for many years [after 1969], that you did have to justify” the human space flight program.2

Although the target date for submitting the STG report to the president had been set in February as September 1, it became increasingly clear dur­ing August that more time would be needed to reconcile the differences among the STG principals. Rather than strongly advocate the views of the President’s Science Advisory Committee contained in its report to the STG, which had endorsed the space shuttle but not the space station, DuBridge in these final weeks gave priority to his role as STG staff director in trying to find a way to bridge the differing views among his colleagues on the Staff Directors Committee. DuBridge’s assistant Russ Drew took the lead in drafting the report, but DOD’s Nevin Palley, Agnew’s assistant Wolff, and NASA’s Newell were also deeply involved in that effort. By the end of August, a draft report had been produced that in Newell’s view repre­sented “a consensus, one that could be accepted by all members” of the Staff Directors Committee and forwarded to the STG principals. Newell suggested that the goals and objectives of the draft report were those that NASA “probably would have chosen by ourselves.”44

On December 30, President Nixon signed a tax reform bill that he charac­terized as both “good and bad.” One of the negative effects of the bill was that it would make it more difficult to balance the FY 1971 budget. Even so, as he signed the bill the president repeated his frequent pledge to present a balanced budget, saying that failing to do so would be “irresponsible and intolerable.” This pledge flew in the face of warnings he had been getting from BOB’s Mayo as final budget decisions were being made that it would be impossible to achieve a balanced budget without increased government revenues. The Treasury Department and BOB had discovered at the end of December that their revenue estimates, taking into account the impact of the tax bill, were wrong, and that there was an almost $4 billion gap between the proposed FY1971 budget of $205 billion and projected revenues. The issue facing the president was how to close that gap in order to achieve a bal­anced budget. He could either agree to a tax increase of some kind or further cut the budget.37

The Treasury Department quickly came up with a “painless” tax increase package as a means of rapidly generating additional revenue; it involved speeding up collecting estate and gift taxes and levying higher excise taxes on liquor, tobacco, and gasoline. That package would produce a revenue increase in FY1971 of $4.5 billion, more than enough to cover the pro­jected gap. There was one catch to this approach; it depended on the will­ingness of the Congress to quickly pass another bill incorporating the new tax increases.

On January 3, Nixon approved this approach to achieving a balanced budget; he then called Arthur Burns, his conservative economist coun­selor, to tell him that news. Burns was scheduled to become chairman of the Federal Reserve Board at the end of January. Although he had lost standing vis-a-vis overall domestic policy within the White House, in his new position his agreement on the path Nixon was taking to achieve a balanced budget was essential. Burns did not agree; he insisted on a prop­erly balanced budget, not one balanced through tax “gimmicks.” This meant, Burns argued, additional budget cuts. Nixon had little choice but to agree.

The president announced his decision to seek additional budget reduc­tions at a January 13 meeting of the cabinet, begun just as the NASA press conference announcing the first round of additional budget cuts was wind­ing up. The meeting lasted over three hours. Mayo, present even though he was not a cabinet member, argued that further budget cuts were not possible. Burns’s position was argued by Secretary of Housing and Urban Development George Romney, who “exhorted his colleagues to cut even deeper into their own budgets and capped his plea by an astonishing sermon calling on all members of the Cabinet and the President, to take a 25 per cent pay cut.” Following the meeting, President Nixon ordered “anguished department heads to make still greater cuts to achieve a Burns-style balance.” The budget-reduction exercise was dubbed “Operation Paring Knife.”38 It ended up resulting in nearly $4 billion in additional budget reductions, so that the budget proposal President Nixon sent to Congress on February 2 requested $201 billion in expenditures for FY1971, with revenues estimated at $202 billion.

NASA was not represented at the January 13 cabinet meeting, but the next day Paine was advised by Ehrlichman and Mayo that NASA’s share of the overall budget reduction would be a reduction of an additional $200 million. This amount had been decided by, or at least cleared with, Nixon. (Mayo later suggested that Nixon had decided on the $200 million NASA reduction even before the January 13 cabinet meeting and thus it was not integral to the “Paring Knife” process.39) The NASA leadership quickly identified $51 million in cuts that could be made through a series of small reductions in science and applications programs, but to reach the $200 mil­lion reduction, they thought, Apollo missions 17, 18, and 19 would have to be canceled. (Apollo 20 had been canceled in May 1969 so that the upper stage of its Saturn V booster could be used as the basis for the planned orbital workshop, later named Skylab.) Paine wrote the president another strongly worded letter on January 15, informing him of the $51 million reduction but saying that additional reductions to reach the $200 million figure “would require actions which you have specifically instructed me you do not wish to take—actions which would cripple the space goals of your administration and dissipate the Apollo team.” These actions included canceling the final three Apollo missions and reducing funding for the space station and shuttle. The job loss accompanying this action, said Paine, would be an additional 15,000 positions in addition to the 50,000 person job reduction he had just announced in his January 13 press conference. Paine said that if NASA were forced to take the whole reduction “I must discuss the problems involved with you personally.”40

Reacting to Paine’s letter, on January 16 there were a series of conversa­tions between NASA and BOB. By late afternoon, Mayo phoned Paine and told him that BOB would accept the $51 million reduction and that no additional cuts would be needed. Paine phoned Flanigan with this news, recognizing the breakdown in communication between BOB and Flanigan’s office likely meant that Flanigan was not party to the BOB decision. He was correct. Flanigan’s reaction was anger; he said “Do you mean Mayo capitu­lated?” Flanigan informed Ehrlichman of the agreement, who in turn relayed the news to Nixon, who was at Camp David. The word quickly came back that the agreement was not acceptable; NASA would have to accept the full $200 million reduction. This message was communicated to Paine as he was enjoying a dinner at a Washington hotel in honor of Charles Stark Draper, the head of the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory. A loudspeaker announce­ment asked Paine to call the White House; Paine made the call “knowing damn well that they were not calling me to say we had more money.”41

NASA was able to achieve the additional budget reduction by stretching out the schedule for Apollo launches and the launch of the orbital workshop and reducing funds for space station and shuttle studies. No Apollo mis­sions were canceled; the White House had once again called NASA’s bluff with respect to saying a reduced budget would mean the early end of human space flight. The final NASA budget was $3.3 billion, $400 million less than Nixon had approved in early December, 25 percent less than NASA’s budget request of the preceding October and 15 percent less than NASA’s FY1970 budget. New NASA Deputy Administrator George Low noted that “the whole budget situation has been tremendously confused. . . The series of consecutive cuts, each one of which was defined as being the last cut, is quite hard to understand.” Low thought that Richard Nixon was “assessing as we go along the mood of the country.” Low referred to a January 17 editorial in the Washington Star newspaper bemoaning the NASA budget cuts but saying “cutting the space program is exactly the right thing to do in this period of fiscal restraints.” Low judged that “the President feels that he would be severely criticized if he did not make a major cut in the space program,” given all the other budget reductions he was proposing.42 NASA had been caught up in a chaotic confronta­tion between budget choices and broader fiscal considerations, reinforced by a breakdown in the White House policy-making process. That chaos obscured a stark reality—that through its decisions on the FY1971 NASA budget, the Nixon White House and ultimately the president himself had significantly reduced the priority of the space program among the whole range of government activities. In the form of modest funds for continued study of the space station and space shuttle, NASA’s hopes for the future were still alive, but just barely.

NASA thus decided to go through a formal consultation process before mak­ing a final decision on how to proceed. On August 5, Paine wrote John Findlay, chairman of the Lunar and Planetary Missions Board (a NASA-chartered advisory group) asking him to provide the board’s views on the question “what additional values accrue to lunar science by retaining Apollo 15 and 19 in the lunar exploration program?” A similar letter was sent to Charles Townes, chair of the National Academy of Sciences Space Science Board, on August 13. NASA alerted the White House to what it was contemplating, saying that it was assessing two program alternatives. One would involve fly­ing Apollo 14-17, then launching Skylab and the planned three astronaut vis­its to the workshop, and then launching Apollo 18-19; the other option was canceling Apollo 15 (the last mission without the lunar roving capability) and Apollo 19 and flying the four remaining Apollo missions before Skylab. The latter choice, which was preferred by NASA, would make two Saturn Vs avail­able for future uses—“such as space station launches.” NASA told the White House that it “would be in touch with you about September 1 to let you know the conclusions” of its review. Peter Flanigan responded quickly, saying that “it certainly seems to me that you are giving this problem the careful con­sideration it deserves” and asking whether someone from the White House “could profitably sit in on” the final review meeting “in order to hear the pros and cons of the arguments,” rather than just having the White House be informed of NASA’s conclusions after the review was completed.7

The review meeting was held on August 24. Myers presented a plan call­ing for the deletion of Apollo 15 and Apollo 19, a step he estimated would save approximately $800 million over the next several years. Findlay reported that both the Lunar and Planetary Missions Board and the Space Science Board strongly preferred flying the remaining six lunar landing missions as “markedly superior from the point of view of scientific yield,” but if a mis­sion had to be canceled, “the loss of Apollo 15 from the program is serious, but the loss of Apollo 19 would be much more serious due to its capability for longer lunar surface EVA and its significant transverse capability.” In response to Flanigan’s suggestion, NASA had invited several White House representatives to the meeting. No one came from Flanigan’s office, but Bill Anders from the Space Council and Russ Drew from the Office of Science and Technology attended. Anders was “extremely concerned” that, if Apollo 15 and 19 were canceled, there could be a hiatus of up to four years in human space flights between the end of the Skylab program and the first flight of the space shuttle; he was later to suggest flying several Earth-orbiting mis­sions using leftover Apollo spacecraft in this period.8

As NASA was preparing to make its decision, science adviser Lee DuBridge added his thoughts, writing Paine on August 28 to say that even if Apollo 15 were canceled, he would “favor making every attempt to retain all of the other flights and I hope very much that it will not be decided to elimi­nate Apollo 19. This can cap the climax [sic] of all the others.” DuBridge added “I understand the desire of some to keep Saturn V’s in reserve. But they have been built for the Apollo purposes and there is no emerging purpose which seems clearly able to take precedence over the use of the Saturns for the additional Apollo missions. In addition, one must recognize that. . . there is a certain non-zero probability that one will be lost as in the case of Apollo 13.”9

None of the arguments that NASA heard in August changed the agency’s July’s thinking—that the prudent course of action, given NASA’s antici­pated budgets for the next several years, its desire to get FY1972 approval to start developing the space shuttle, and the high risk associated with each Apollo mission, was to fly Apollo 14 in January 1971, to cancel Apollo 15 and Apollo 19, and to re-number Apollo 16-18 as Apollo 15, Apollo 16, and Apollo 17, with Apollo 17 being the final lunar landing mission. Paine informed President Nixon of this plan on September 1, saying that “the most compel­ling reason for the decision to delete these flights, which we have arrived at reluctantly but with overwhelming consensus, is the current and reasonably foreseeable austere funding situation for NASA.” Paine told Nixon of the views of the scientific community in favor of not deleting the missions,” but said that the scientific benefits of the two missions being canceled “do not, in our judgment, outweigh the benefits of other ongoing and future NASA programs and the risks involved in these difficult missions.” Paine noted that “in view of Soviet progress on large launch vehicles, it is prudent to retain a modest Saturn V capability. . . Deleting the Apollo 15 and 19 missions pro­vides a national reserve of two Saturn V’s.”10

In January 1970 Richard Nixon had approved a NASA FY1971 budget of $3.3 billion in outlays, the funds actually to be spent during the fiscal year. There had been attempts in both houses of Congress to make cuts in this request by eliminating funds for the space station and space shuttle, primar­ily on the grounds that they were the first steps toward missions to Mars, but these attempts were defeated. By mid-summer it was clear that Congress would approve a FY1971 NASA budget with only a slight reduction from the president’s request. On the basis of Richard Nixon’s comments at his January 22, 1970, meeting with Tom Paine that the FY71 budget level was the end of NASA budget reductions, NASA had hoped to get a budget target from the White House for FY1972 that was higher than its FY 1971 budget. But the poor economic outlook had persisted; NASA was disappointed when in August it received a budget target of $3.1 in new budget authority and $3.2 billion in FY1972 outlays, both reductions from the FY1971 figures. It was this highly constrained budget outlook and the anticipation that it was likely to continue in subsequent years that had colored the summer 1970 decisions to defer the space station and to cancel two Apollo missions.

The deadline for NASA to submit its budget request to OMB was mid­night on September 30, and NASA went down almost to the last minute before deciding what to request and especially how best to justify its propos­als. The budget requests from the various elements of NASA totaled over $4 billion, and it took some doing on the part of Low, his strategy adviser Willis Shapley, and his budget chief Bill Lilly to get the request down to $3.7 in new budget authority and $3.4 billion in outlays. This latter number was the one of most interest to the White House, given its short-term economic concerns with respect to limiting government expenditures; the NASA total was $200 million higher than the OMB outlays target. Low felt that “a bud­get at this level was the lowest level that I could submit in good conscience.” On September 30, the budget submission letter was “written and rewritten, edited and re-edited, and finished typing by 8:30,” reaching OMB “at 9:00 or three hours before the deadline.”7

The budget letter spelled out the adjustments in its program that NASA had made in order to avoid “an unacceptable peaking of the NASA budget at over $5 billion in the middle 1970’s,” saying that the program laid out could be approved “without committing the nation to an annual budget level in excess of $4 billion.” These adjustments represented a dramatic lowering of sights since the submission of the Space Task Group report a year earlier, which had forecast NASA budgets in the $8-10 billion range in the late 1970s. NASA argued that “the key element in our program for the 1970’s is the space shuttle. . . We must start this development now to lay the founda­tions for the nation’s future space program, and to bring about the major economies in later years.” In justifying the shuttle, NASA said that “the space shuttle will be used for manned and man-tended experiments and to place unmanned scientific, weather, earth resources and other satellites in earth orbit and bring them back to earth for repair and reuse.” Only in the future would the shuttle be used to “transport men, supplies, and scientific equipment to and from space stations.” Deciding to characterize the space shuttle as an all-purpose launch and space operations vehicle was a major change, since it represented a claim that the shuttle could stand on its own merits, not primarily as an adjunct to the space station. NASA justified the shuttle as “cost-effective,” a claim that was to become a controversial point in NASA-OMB interactions in the coming months.8

There was significant weakness in NASA’s argument for approving shut­tle development in FY1972; in essence, the shuttle concept was “not ready for prime time.” NASA was focusing on a large, two-stage, fully reusable shuttle, but had not yet decided what version of such a system it wished to develop, whether it was technologically feasible, or how much it was likely to cost. Intensive contractor studies of fully reusable shuttle designs and alternate configurations were just starting. An independent study of shuttle economics requested by the Bureau of the Budget in early 1970 was also not complete. What NASA was asking OMB to approve was putting in the FY1972 budget a modest down payment of $190 million on shuttle develop­ment; more significant, that down payment was to represent a commitment that the shuttle had gained White House approval. The $190 million would allow NASA to award contracts soon after the start of FY 1972 on July 1, 1971, for detailed design and development of both an advanced technology rocket engine planned for the shuttle and the shuttle’s “airframe,” that is, the basic structures of the shuttle orbiter and booster. The results from the shuttle technical and economic studies were expected in the May-June 1971 time frame, and the proposition that NASA was asking OMB to approve in fall 1970 was that those results would justify an immediate start on shuttle development. This request—to approve in advance a multi-billion dollar, multi-year program to develop a not-yet-well-defined shuttle—was not a proposition OMB was likely to accept.

Richard Nixon would face his decisions on the future in space with some background in space policy, particularly in comparison to John Kennedy as he became president eight years earlier. Then, a leading journalist had observed “of all the major problems facing Kennedy when he came into office, he probably knew and understood least about space.”1 Nixon as Dwight Eisenhower’s vice president had an early impact on the organi­zation of the U. S. space effort. In a February 4, 1958, meeting in which President Eisenhower discussed how the United States should organize its response to the October and November 1957 launches of Sputniks 1 and 2 by the Soviet Union, Nixon had suggested that “our posture before the world would be better if non-military research in outer space were carried forward by an agency entirely separate from the military.” Nixon judged that having a separate agency for “peaceful” research projects would also make possible a broader range of internationally cooperative space activities. Eisenhower accepted this advice, which came not only from Nixon but from other sources; the result was the president’s April 1958 proposal to create

the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) as a civilian agency. Nixon’s 1968 transition task force on space noted that “separation of the space program into a part directed towards military applications in the DOD and a largely unclassified part without strong military coloring in NASA has, we believe, been an eminently wise policy.”2 Richard Nixon was an early advocate of that policy.

One account of President Eisenhower’s measured response to Sputnik notes that Nixon “was far more attuned than Eisenhower to the political ramifications of space.” In White House discussions, Nixon suggested “we can make no greater mistake than seeing this as just a Soviet stunt. We’ve got to pull up our socks and get with it and make sure we maintain our leadership.” This account suggests that, had he been elected president in 1960, Nixon “would have pursued a [space] policy more active and flashy than Eisenhower’s.” Nixon agreed with this assessment; in his Memoirs he suggested that in cabinet and National Security Council meetings in the final years of the Eisenhower administration, he “strongly advocated a sharp increase in our. . . space program.” Once he was in the White House, how­ever, Nixon did not follow this path, instead continuing the reductions in NASA’s budget that had begun under Lyndon Johnson. To Nixon, in a theme that he would frequently repeat in his White House years, “when a great nation drops out of the race to explore the unknown, that nation ceases to be great”; like many Nixon pronouncements, this was more an empty rhe­torical statement than a guide to his policy and budget decisions.3

There was little or no Nixon involvement in space issues between his defeat in the 1960 presidential election and his selection as the Republican nomi­nee for president in August 1968. However, a few days after his February 1, 1968, announcement that he would be a candidate for that nomination, Nixon told a space-interested audience in Washington that “the United States must remain competitive in this field, and we must support a space program which is second to none. That’s looking at it in long-term objectives.” But in the shorter term, Nixon added “I believe that space is one of the areas that will have to be in the [next] President’s recommendations for budget­cutting. . . With the immense financial crisis which currently confronts the United States, we will have to make some cuts.” These views foreshadowed the approach to space issues that Nixon would actually pursue as president, but they were articulated before the glare of campaign attention had begun. As candidate for president, Richard Nixon was much more bullish, telling audiences in Texas and Florida that the “space program was indispensable and of major importance to our country,” that in space “we must do all that we can,” that the space program was “a national imperative,” and that the United States “must be first in space.” How candidate Nixon’s general state­ments on space might translate into specific decisions was not made clear. As one observer commented after Nixon’s election in November 1968, his statements during the campaign “provide few clues as to what he will really do”; the president-elect’s views of the future of the space program were “as obscure. . . as his intentions across the spectrum of national problems.”4

The first meeting of the STG was set for March 7. It was a “principals only” gathering. Attending as the Department of Defense (DOD) member was Secretary of the Air Force Robert C. Seamans, who had been assigned by Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird to be his surrogate on the STG. In formal organizational terms, this role might more appropriately have been filled by Director of Defense Research and Engineering Johnny Foster as DOD’s senior science and technology official, but Seamans had been a top official in NASA from 1960 to 1968 and the Air Force also managed the bulk of DOD’s space activities. This made Seamans’s assignment logical. Others attending were Vice President Agnew, science adviser DuBridge, and NASA Acting Administrator Paine, whose nomination for the permanent position had been announced the previous day.

The principals agreed to appoint a senior staff representative from each of their organizations “to lead and coordinate the necessary studies.” This “Staff Director’s Committee” was to carry out the bulk of the STG work. Staff representatives included Homer Newell, seconded by Milt Rosen, from NASA; Russell Drew from the Office of Science and Technology (OST); Jerome Wolff from the vice-president’s office; and Nevin Palley from DOD. Palley worked for Foster, not Seamans. The group also agreed to include as high-level STG “observers” Robert Mayo, director of the Bureau of the Budget (BOB), who was already at the meeting; Glenn Seaborg, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC); and Undersecretary of State for Political Affairs U. Alexis Johnson. Reflecting on the meeting, Paine felt that it had gotten “the new administration’s review of the U. S. space effort off to an excellent start: the right problems were addressed, the urgency of timely decisions recognized, and a reasonable process for reaching wise con­clusions organized.”3

Because Vice President Agnew had to be at the Western White House in San Clemente, California for a September 4 cabinet meeting, he scheduled a STG meeting on September 3 in nearby Newport Beach.45 Both Newell and Milt Rosen of NASA were unable to attend, and so the senior NASA staff person present was DeMarquis Wyatt, a top agency planner; Wyatt was to play a key role in finalizing the STG report over the next ten days.

The meeting was rather contentious, as the STG principals for the first time learned of Whitehead’s and Flanigan’s insistence that the STG report include an option with the NASA budget for the 1970s at the $2.5 to $3.0 billion level. By this time the draft report included four program options, A through D, each still including the same program elements in the 1970s, with even option D requiring a peak budget of almost $6 billion per year even though it included deferring a decision to send astronauts to Mars. In option C, that decision would be made in the late 1970s and the initial Mars mission would leave Earth in 1986. Drew of OST and Mayo of BOB pro­posed, in accordance with White House demands, to add a Program E that would reflect a hiatus in manned space flight after the end of the Apollo pro­gram, with no new starts on a space station or space shuttle. An angry Paine said that unless the implications of such an option were spelled out in detail, which would take some time, he would not sign the STG report. Seamans introduced into the discussion a totally new program plan that he and the DOD staff had developed as an alternative to NASA’s Programs C and D. Seamans’s alternative plan put more short-term emphasis on space applica­tions and robotic exploration and maintained a human space flight program by extended use of Apollo-derived spacecraft and launch vehicles through most of the 1970s. This would be followed by sequential development, first of a space shuttle and space tug, then in the 1980s a space station, with a decision whether to send people to Mars made in the mid-1980s. Seamans argued that such a human space flight program could be carried out for $2 billion a year, thereby keeping NASA’s budget in the $4 to $4.5 billion a year range for the next two decades.46 Vice President Agnew suggested including the Seamans plan in the report rather than a Program E without human space flight; Mayo responded that this alternative would not satisfy the White House directive. Seaborg commented that the draft report before the principals was “very thoughtful,” and that it made little sense at this late date to add a new option such as the one Seamans was suggesting. There was agreement with this position, and the Seamans proposal was tabled as far as the STG report was concerned (although it was embraced by the BOB staff preparing for the FY1971 budget review). Finally, the principals agreed that a Program E would be added to the report, but it would be added “to show a kind of limit that no one will want to adopt,” giving the president “a better possibility of choosing one of the higher level options.”

During the meeting, it became even clearer than it had been in August that the STG principals were not going to agree on a single program option to recommend to Richard Nixon. Paine suggested that all options be pre­sented to the president without a STG recommendation, and then Nixon could consult with individual members of the STG and others to get their recommendations. Agnew agreed with this idea, saying that it allowed the inclusion of a Program E option even though none of the STG members agreed with it. The STG members decided that they would meet one more time to review the final draft of their report, revised to reflect the decisions and comments of this meeting. That meeting was set for September 11.

A revised draft of the STG report, now including Options A through E, was ready for review on September 8. The report noted that the STG had not attempted “to classify the space program in a hierarchy of national pri­orities.” Rather, the STG had “concentrated on identifying major technical and scientific challenges in space in the belief that returns will accrue to the society that takes up those challenges.” The draft recommended a “balanced program” aimed at

• “application of space technology to the direct benefit of mankind”;

• “operation of space systems to enhance national security”;

• “exploration of the solar system and beyond”;

• “development of new capabilities for operating in space”; and

• “international participation and cooperation.”

The draft noted that if there were significantly lower budget levels in the future, it would not be possible to develop new space capabilities and that at lower budget levels “if important increases in science and application pro­grams were to be pursued, no manned space flight program would be pos­sible.” In its concluding section, the draft said that the STG had concluded “as a focus for the development of new capability,” the United States should “accept the long-range option or goal of manned planetary exploration with a manned Mars mission before the end of the century.”47