Category After Apollo?

Following up on another of the Ash Council’s recommendations, the presi­dent also proposed to create within the Executive Office of the President an Office of Management and Budget (OMB) that “would be the President’s principal arm for exercise of his managerial functions. . . The Domestic Council will be primarily concerned with what we do; the Office of Management and Budget will be primarily concerned with how we do it, and how well we do it.” Although functions of the Bureau of the Budget (BOB) remained the core element of the new OMB, responsibilities such as overall management of the executive agencies and evaluating their per­formance were added to the organization’s charter. In the BOB, only the director and deputy director were chosen by the president. In the new OMB, there would be in addition several presidentially selected associate and assistant directors; by placing political appointees in these positions, the intent was to more effectively link budget choices to Nixon’s policy and political priorities.3

Chosen to be the first OMB director was George Shultz, at that point Nixon’s secretary of labor. Shultz held a doctorate in economics and had come to the Nixon administration from the University of Chicago, where he had been dean of the business school. Shultz was a steady personality and was one of the few cabinet members who had established a good relationship with President Nixon during the administration’s first year; in his new posi­tion, he soon became part of the president’s inner circle of advisers. To clear the way for appointing Shultz, BOB Director Robert Mayo in June 1970 was named counselor to the president, a position with no substantive responsibil­ity. Recognizing that he had been shunted aside, Mayo resigned in July to become the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago.

Selected as OMB deputy director with primary responsibility for bud­get issues was Caspar “Cap” Weinberger, who was chairman of the Federal Trade Commission, a regulatory agency. Weinberger had served as California governor Ronald Reagan’s budget director before coming to Washington, and his budget-cutting fervor there had earned him the sobriquet “Cap the Knife.” The OMB assistant director for energy, natural resources, and sci­ence, one of the new political appointees, was Donald Rice. He came to OMB from the Department of Defense, where he had been responsible for cost analysis, manpower and logistics requirements, and budget planning. Shultz, Weinberger, and Rice would from the time they took office in mid – 1970 become key actors in the space policy process.

There was little inclination on Richard Nixon’s part to acknowledge President John Kennedy’s role in initiating the lunar landing program as the launch of Apollo 11 approached. Indeed, throughout the many celebrations of the Apollo 11 achievement, Nixon never once publicly spoke Kennedy’s name.

This visceral aversion to sharing credit for Apollo became evident as Nixon’s Special Assistant for Urban Affairs Daniel P. Moynihan, who was among the more liberal of Nixon’s White House staff and who had earlier served as an assistant to President Kennedy, received a request from another Kennedy alumnus, Bill Moyers. Moyers, in 1969 the publisher of the Long Island, New York, newspaper Newsday, on June 4 forwarded a column he had written suggesting that the Apollo 11 spacecraft be commissioned “The John F. Kennedy” in recognition of the late president’s role in initiating Project Apollo. Moyers told Moynihan “you knew John Kennedy even bet­ter than I did; can’t you influence your friends there to take up this sugges­tion?” Moynihan forwarded the suggestion to Haldeman, saying that “the Newsday proposal has a certain gallant quality to it. I imagine this would be interesting to the President, and I strongly suspect it would be to his advan­tage.” Haldeman had the proposal circulated among other senior staff mem­bers. Counselor Arthur Burns, at that point Nixon’s top advisor on domestic policy, “heartily” endorsed the idea, saying that “such an act of gracious­ness is justified by history and would be, I think, good politics besides.”

Presidential science advisor Lee DuBridge thought that the proposal would be “a fitting tribute indeed to the man who, against great opposition, initi­ated this bold project.” In contrast, White House communications direc­tor Herb Klein “strongly” recommended against the proposal, saying “the Kennedy angle will get major play anyway. We would get more mileage with a gracious Presidential mention of Kennedy’s vision.” Congressional rela­tions assistant Bryce Harlow noted that it was President Eisenhower who ini­tiated the U. S. space program and remarked that “we have gone far enough in ‘Kennedyizing’ the mission.” Senior advisor John Ehrlichman pragmati­cally noted that “such an action would win us neither friends in Congress nor votes in 1972,” suggesting “fall prey to this and the next step will be renaming the moon because NBC thinks it would be a good idea.” After receiving these diverse views, Haldeman directed that “any plan to commis­sion the Apollo 11 shot John F. Kennedy be abandoned”; in initialing the memorandum recording this decision, he added in bold handwriting with double underlining, “positively!!”18

There is no evidence in the written record that President Nixon knew of this episode, although it is hard to imagine that Haldeman in his frequent and extended meetings with Nixon did not raise the matter. At any rate, Haldeman’s decision meant that there was no obstacle to the Apollo 11 crew themselves choosing the names for their spacecraft, as had become the tradi­tion. The crew announced at their last prelaunch press conference on July 5 that their command and service module would be christened Columbia and their lunar lander, Eagle.

Paine, like most of the Washington space community, thought it unlikely that he would be kept on as NASA administrator by the incoming Nixon administration. He was a liberal Democrat, and his wife had campaigned for Nixon’s opponent, Vice President Hubert Humphrey. But it was not in Paine’s character to sit back in a caretaker role until his successor was named. On December 23 he briefed the space transition team that had been set up by the president-elect on NASA’s future aspirations. He spent much of his time in the first weeks of 1969 trying to develop a more compelling argu­ment than what was coming out of the Newell planning effort for developing a space station, the program that NASA had chosen to be the centerpiece of its post-Apollo efforts.

There was a problem in developing that argument—the various elements of NASA were not in agreement on what kind of space station the agency should be developing. The BOB had agreed that the FY1970 budget would contain modest funds for studies of a space station by the aerospace industry, and as 1969 began NASA was struggling to outline for potential contractors the characteristics of the station they should study. What had emerged from NASA’s internal planning was a station with a six-to-nine astronaut crew capable of resupply and crew rotation. The goals of such a station were both to qualify astronauts and their equipment for long-duration flights in Earth orbit and beyond and to demonstrate the ability of astronauts to carry out useful engineering and science experiments in the microgravity environment of space.18

Paine found this station concept neither sufficiently ambitious nor excit­ing enough, and on January 27, 1970, called his top managers to Washington for a meeting on what kind of space station NASA should be proposing. By the time of this meeting, Richard Nixon was already president and NASA had received the expected request from Nixon’s new budget director Robert Mayo to reexamine its FY1970 budget proposal, primarily to identify places where it could be reduced. Paine also knew that the White House was con­sidering several candidates to be his replacement as Nixon’s NASA adminis­trator. Even so, Paine continued his push for bolder thinking. He told those invited to the meeting that there was a “need to outline bold objectives for the Space Station program. Modest goals. . . are not worthy successors to those of Apollo. They will neither challenge our people nor draw the support of the nation to retain a space effort of the present size and capability.” These two objectives—developing a technologically challenging program for the NASA workforce and gaining enough public and political support to allow NASA to continue to operate in an Apollo-like mode—were underpinnings of Paine’s approach to the future of NASA.19

At the January 27 meeting, Paine discovered that he was not alone in seeking a more ambitious post-Apollo goal. The director of the Marshall Space Flight Center, emigre German engineer and space visionary Wernher von Braun, observed that NASA should spell out “what we foresee as the ultimate—the long range—the dream—station.” Then, he suggested, NASA could define a first-generation station “as a core facility in orbit from which the ultimate ‘space campus’ or ‘space base’ can grow.” Director of the Manned Spacecraft Center Robert Gilruth suggested that NASA should be looking “at a step more comparable in challenge to that of Apollo after Mercury.”20 Paine found von Braun’s and Gilruth’s advice very much to his liking. Commenting on the space station meeting, he said “We’re trying to get the best talent in NASA focused on setting the right course for the future.” He added that “the Space Station looms very large in post-Apollo manned space flight, but we’ve not yet adequately planned for this.”

Soon after the January 27 meeting, the trade publication Aviation Week and Space Technology reported that “all previous concepts have been retired from active competition in favor of a large station,” with the goal of a “100- man earth-orbiting station with a multiplicity of capabilities” and with the first step the launch “of the first module of a large space station, with per­haps as many as 12 men, by 1975.”21 Paine would soon try to sell to the new Nixon administration an ambitious space station program as the initial large-scale post-Apollo space effort. It would prove to be a tough sell.

The vision of human missions to Mars had long been central to those dream­ing about exploratory voyages into the solar system. The prospect of former or even current life in some form on Mars had for many years intrigued scien­tists and explorers. Even if there were no life to be found there, Mars seemed a much more interesting celestial body to explore than was the Moon.24

The notion of getting ready for Mars missions in the 1980s as the ratio­nale for developing a space station, a space shuttle, nuclear propulsion, and other new capabilities in the 1970s, while retaining the Saturn V for heavy lift assignments, had been in the background of Newell’s planning for some months. However, it did not figure prominently in Mueller’s integrated plan, which was focused on operations in Earth-Moon space. What Paine decided to do in July 1969 was bring the “Mars in the 1980s” goal to the forefront, to see if the nation and the White House were ready to take on another Apollo-like challenge in space.

On September 19, 1969, Thomas Paine recommended to President Nixon that he endorse Option II of the STG report, which led to a first mission to Mars in 1986, and suggested to the president that he soon make a statement to that effect. Before he forwarded Paine’s letter to the president, Assistant to the President Peter Flanigan, the senior Nixon staff person with space policy responsibility, asked Robert Mayo for his comments on Paine’s rec­ommendations, which Flanigan supported. Flanigan was planning on pre­paring a presidential statement on space, as Paine had suggested, “in the near future.” As he considered recommending to the president an immediate commitment to an ambitious space effort including a 1980s mission to Mars, Flanigan was concerned about whether such a commitment was politically sustainable. He wrote David Derge at the University of Indiana, the Nixon White House’s preferred pollster, asking him to make sure that “the next Republican National Committee survey of public opinion include a question as to whether the public prefers the space budget to stay at the current levels, go up or go down, recognizing that an increase means an earlier Mars land­ing at the cost of expenditures at home.”3

Budget Director Mayo was also preparing a memorandum for the presi­dent commenting on the STG report; he was basing that memo on an in­depth and skeptical analysis of the STG report prepared by the BOB staff. According to NASA’s Willis Shapley, who had spent over 20 years at BOB before joining the space agency, “the budget people were terrified at the possibility of the public enthusiasm” in the aftermath of Apollo 11 result­ing “in another major commitment of some sort. . . With all the enthusi­asm, the parades and all that, and with Tom Paine trying to exploit that, very clearly the whole name of the game from the budget side and from the people who were just afraid of an irrational decision of some sort, was to contain NASA.”4 In his September 25 memo, Mayo recommended that Nixon “withhold announcement of your space program decision until after you have reviewed the report recommendations specifically in the context of the FY1971 budget problem.”

It was Mayo’s recommended course of action that Richard Nixon chose to follow. Announcement of the overall Nixon approach to the post-Apollo space program would have to wait until after the review of NASA’s Fiscal

Year 1971 budget proposal was completed, then anticipated to be sometime in December. It would be during that budget review that the NASA pro­gram would be evaluated in the context of national priorities.5

That suggestion set off a brief and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to add an attention-getting angle to the space statement. The idea was attractive to White House speechwriters; lead writer James Keogh “was enthusiastic about casting the message as a call for more international cooperation,” since “if this were the central theme, the message would take on a novel and excit­ing quality which the present draft is lacking.”17

Early Interest in Increased International Cooperation

There was substantial background to White House interest in international space cooperation. As the Nixon administration entered office in January 1969, Arthur Burns had identified three themes from the space transition task force deserving of detailed attention. Two of these themes were a need for an overall review of the space program and the possibility of significant reductions in launch costs. These items had been combined in the decision to create the Space Task Group. The third theme was increasing the amount of and broadening the character of international cooperation in space. President Nixon had asked Secretary of State William Rogers to assess ways of achiev­ing these objectives. Rogers responded to the president on March 14, 1969, saying that “we are interested in space cooperation, not only for its intrin­sic scientific merits, but also to further specific foreign policy objectives.” Rogers identified “major new opportunities for international cooperation.” These included “foreign participation in the U. S. manned flight program, including foreign scientist-astronauts.” He told the president that he was examining the benefits of Nixon making at the successful climax of the first lunar landing mission “a major public statement on the international values of our ongoing space program.”18

Such a statement was not issued. Although he said nothing specific about increased international cooperation at the end of the Apollo 11 mis­sion, President Nixon did address space cooperation as he spoke before the General Assembly of the United Nations on September 18, 1969. Nixon told delegates from around the world “I feel it is only right that we should share both the adventures and the benefits of space.” He said that the United States would take “positive, concrete steps. . . toward internationalizing man’s epic venture into space—an adventure that belongs not to one nation but to all mankind, and one that should be marked not by rivalry but by the same spirit of fraternal cooperation that so long has been the hallmark of the international community of science.”19

Although Tom Whitehead had been deeply involved as Peter Flanigan’s assistant in developing the Nixon administration position on post-Apollo space efforts and had been the originator of the president’s March 1970 space statement, NASA issues had in fact not been his primary concern in the first year of the Nixon administration. Rather, his major focus had been revising the policy and regulatory regime for telecommunications; it was Whitehead who was the moving force behind the Nixon “open skies” policy that permitted the domestic use of communications satellites. By early 1970, the White House decided that there were enough telecom – munications-related issues on the policy agenda to merit a separate orga­nization to deal with them; Richard Nixon on February 9, 1970, sent a message to Congress announcing his intention to establish an Office of Telecommunications Policy within the Executive Office of the President.4 On September 22, Whitehead was named director of that office. Moving to head the new office meant that Whitehead would no longer serve as Flanigan’s staff person for NASA issues; that responsibility was divided between Flanigan staffers Will Kriegsman and Jonathan Rose. Over the subsequent months, neither exercised the amount of influence on NASA issues that had characterized Whitehead’s involvement. In addition, even as he directed the new office, Whitehead at critical moments would engage himself in decisions related to NASA’s future.

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.