Category After Apollo?

Richard Nixon’s vice president, Spiro T. Agnew, was not an obvious choice to chair a review of the U. S. space program. Agnew had been elected governor of Maryland in 1966; before then he was a local Maryland politician. He had no prior exposure to space issues, or indeed to most national issues. Agnew had first supported Nelson Rockefeller as the Republican nominee for presi­dent in early 1968. But Rockefeller, much to Agnew’s surprise, in March 1968 had announced he would not enter presidential primaries or otherwise campaign for the Republican nomination. (He later reversed this position and competed with Nixon to be the Republican nominee.) Richard Nixon met with Agnew for the first time two weeks later; Nixon was “impressed with his intelligence and poise.” Nixon’s campaign asked Agnew to be one of Nixon’s nominators at the Republican convention; this put him among the leading candidates to be Nixon’s choice for the vice presidential nomination. After two of Nixon’s closest advisers turned down the vice presidential possi­bility, Nixon informed Agnew that he was his choice as vice-presidential can­didate. Nixon noted in his Memoirs that Agnew at his first press conference admitted that his name was not exactly “a household word,” and assured the press “that he would work to change that situation.” In ways likely not intended, Agnew succeeded in that objective.39

There was a straightforward reason for involving Vice President Agnew in space affairs. The vice president by law was the chairman of the National Aeronautics and Space Council, the White House organization set up by the 1958 Space Act to provide presidential-level coordination of space policy. At its origin, the president chaired the Space Council, which included as members the administrator of NASA, the secretary of defense, the secretary of state, and the chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. When John

F. Kennedy became president in 1961, he asked the Congress to change the law to make the vice president the council chair. Kennedy recognized that Vice President Lyndon B. Johnson had been deeply involved in space matters in the Senate, and he wanted to give Johnson some specific respon­sibilities during the Kennedy administration. Johnson in his role as Space Council chair had played an important part in developing the recommenda­tions that led Kennedy to set a lunar landing within the decade as a national goal, but in the remaining 30 months of the Kennedy administration he had limited influence on space choices. Johnson did accumulate a sizeable staff for the Space Council. Once Johnson became president and chose Hubert Humphrey as vice president and thus council chair, the Space Council dur­ing the rest of the Johnson administration had become almost dormant, even while it retained its large staff.

The Nixon transition task force on space had discussed what to do with the Space Council. It observed that “the Space Council has not been very effective” and observed that President Nixon could ask Congress to abol­ish it. But, “as long as the Council exists. . . it should be made effective. For that purpose, there should be a strong staff and the President should be Chairman.” As he considered how best to organize the post-Apollo space review, science adviser DuBridge also considered what to do with the coun­cil. One option, suggested Russell Drew, the space specialist on DuBridge’s staff, was to “strengthen the Space Council,” with a “vigorous and knowl­edgeable person as Executive Secretary.” The Executive Secretary was the presidentially appointed, Senate-confirmed top staff person for the Space Council and ran the day-by-day operations of its staff. If the president were to replace the vice president as chair of the Space Council, then the council staff could logically become part of the presidential science adviser’s office and the executive secretary could report to the president through DuBridge. (It is likely that OST staffer Russell Drew aspired to the position.) The other alternative was to abolish the Space Council, but this would be likely to run into vice presidential opposition, since it would mean that he would lose a large number of dedicated staff positions.40

There was no serious consideration at the start of the Nixon administra­tion given to making the president the Space Council chair. However, over the course of 1969, there were attempts to revitalize the Space Council. One step in that direction was the May 1969 selection of 34-year-old Apollo 8 astronaut Bill Anders as the Space Council’s new executive secretary. NASA Administrator Paine was instrumental in Anders’s selection, seeing an opportunity to place someone positively disposed toward human space flight in a senior White House position, counterbalancing the skepticism of OST and OMB. Anders could not take on the job immediately, since he was part of the Apollo H backup crew; this meant that the council staff would not become engaged in the work of the STG. Anders had become convinced that he was unlikely to get a role on a later Apollo flight that would give him the opportunity to walk on the Moon, and so was ready to take on a new and very different challenge with the Space Council position. He was told

by Agnew and Paine that once he came to Washington he would have the opportunity to reinvigorate the Space Council and its staff so that they could play a more influential role in space policy development.41

But that was in the future; by coming into the vice presidency with the Space Council as one of his assigned responsibilities, Spiro Agnew in February 1969 became the titular leader of the effort to define the U. S. future in space. Few could have predicted at the time that he would become perhaps the program’s leading cheerleader within the Nixon administration.

At the conclusion of the August 4 meeting, NASA was given the assignment of defining the programmatic content of these three options. This was the role that the agency had sought from the very beginning of the STG pro­cess, when Tom Paine had argued vigorously against the proposal that space program options should be defined by DuBridge and his external advisory panel. NASA took full advantage of this assignment, and by mid-August submitted to the Staff Directors Committee three options, each of which included the same hardware elements, derived from Mueller’s integrated plan, and each of which included human missions to Mars; the difference among the plans was in their schedules and annual budget requirements, not in their content. Each included simultaneous development of the two new systems that were NASA’s top priority objectives for the next few years—a large space station and a space shuttle. Although at the August 4 meeting the STG principals had suggested that NASA prepare a $4 billion/year “aus­tere” option that included a continuing human space flight effort, NASA argued that such an option was not feasible, and thus refused to provide it. The NASA options were:

• Program A, described as “maximum progress technically feasible,” and “comparable to the 1961 decision to go to the moon.” This was essentially the program that had been presented to the STG on August 4;

• Program B, described as “maximum returns from an economical pro­gram”; and

• Program C, described as “minimum consistent with continuing techno­logical advance.”39

It was clear from the way that NASA presented its options that Program B was its preferred choice; if adopted that option would commit the Nixon administration during its second term to NASA budgets greater than those at the peak of the Apollo effort.

In the meeting with Mayo, Ehrlichman, and Flanigan on December 5, President Nixon decided to give tentative approval to the BOB recommen­dation of a NASA budget for FY1971 of $3.7 billion, but also decided to suspend production of additional Saturn V boosters. It is likely that Flanigan had significant influence on the president’s views. By the time of the budget meeting, he had become much more cautious with respect to NASA’s future plans than had been the case in the immediate aftermath of the STG report.

He also had become attuned to the reality that there was limited public support for ambitious post-Apollo space activities. On December 6, he sent a memorandum to the president reporting that “the October 6 issue of Newsweek took a poll of 1,321 Americans with household incomes ranging from $5,000 to $15,000 a year. This represents 61% of the white population of the United States and is obviously the heart of your constituency.” Of this group, Flanigan reported, “56% think the government should be spending less money on space exploration, and only 10% think the government should be spending more money.”22

Nixon’s budget decisions were communicated to Paine by Flanigan, not Mayo as would normally have been the case. Flanigan told Paine that “the President says that he doesn’t have enough money within the next couple of years and must accept limitation of activity,” that “the President will agree that at some time we will go to Mars,” that Nixon “did not see the need to go to the moon six more times,” and that “the President was alarmed [in the sense of being concerned about their future costs] about the space station and shuttle.”23 Nixon’s skepticism regarding the value of additional lunar landing missions was to be a recurrent theme during the next two years.

In a December 17 letter to Nixon appealing the tentative budget deci­sions, Paine once again gave priority to getting started on the station and the shuttle, saying “if, because of today’s severe fiscal constraints we must sacrifice some current operations. . . so be it. The important thing is to press forward now with our new program.” Closing his five-page letter, Paine told the president “I believe I would be remiss and do you and your Administration a disservice if I did not place before you as you reach these important decisions on America’s future in space the relevant facts, conse­quences, and potentialities.” He requested a meeting with Nixon to discuss his appeal.24

An indication of the context in which President Nixon would evaluate that appeal came soon after the December 5 Nixon-Mayo meeting. One influence was Flanigan’s December 6 memorandum reporting on the nega­tive public attitude toward increases in space spending. In addition, an entry in the president’s carefully read daily news summary discussed the Hunger Conference taking place in Washington that week. It noted that “constant references were made to space” as an example of spending that “could have been far better spent on hunger.” After reading this report, Nixon asked his advisers Ehrlichman and Daniel Patrick Moynihan “whether you agree that some of our money would be better spent on hunger.”25

Another signal that NASA was not going to succeed in its budget appeal came as the Apollo 12 crew visited President Nixon in the White House on Saturday, December 20. The crew and their wives (except for Alan Bean’s wife, who was ill) had dinner with President and Mrs. Nixon in the White House family quarters, then watched the movie Marooned, a story about three astronauts stranded in orbit. This was a rather odd choice for the occa­sion, given that all three of the Apollo 12 crew hoped to fly in space again, but the movie had just been released to critical acclaim. Like the Apollo 11 crew, the astronaut families stayed overnight at the White House and joined the Nixons the next morning for coffee, then attended a White House worship service. The Apollo 11 visit to the White House the previous month had been a warm and relaxed affair, but Pete Conrad sensed the president’s “apparent lack of interest in the space program.” Conrad was “disappointed and disil­lusioned” after his White House visit. He suggested that “the President paid very little attention to any discussions on space and exhibited no technical interest. He also appeared to have very little knowledge of what had gone on in space and what was going on in the future.” Conrad on several occasions “tried to bring up the future of space, the space station, the space shuttle, Mars missions, and was very quickly turned around and the subjects went back to small talk.”26

Tom Paine had a 20-minute meeting with President Nixon on the after­noon of December 23 to make his case for a higher NASA budget. In advance of that meeting, Flanigan made his recommendations to the president on dealing with NASA. He suggested that Saturn V production should be sus­pended, that study funds for the space station and shuttle should be reduced, that the frequency of Apollo launches to the Moon should be reduced to “an average of 1ЛА per year. . . thereby extending the period of manned space flight beyond the presently planned date of 1974,” that university research funds should be eliminated “as requested by the President,” and that the newly opened NASA Electronics Research Center be closed. Paine in his December 17 appeal letter had once again claimed that the steps NASA would have to take to accommodate a NASA budget of $3.7 billion would mean that “U. S. manned flight activity would end in 1972 with an uncer­tain date for resumption many years in the future.” Flanigan called this claim “unacceptable,” since it would place the “onus” for terminating the current human space flight “on the President,” while NASA would “create commit­ments for very expensive programs that will require excessive outlays in the next few years.” Flanigan was quite aware of NASA’s “crying wolf” strategy in the budget negotiations, and by this point had become extremely skeptical of its validity.27

Notes taken by Ehrlichman at the December 23 meeting dealt with only two issues—whether to continue production of the Saturn V and, if the deci­sion on that issue was to suspend production, whether to “close Kennedy [Space Center] in ’72.” Nixon did not respond to Paine’s arguments at their meeting; rather, the president made what he thought was his final decision on the NASA budget on December 26, approving a $3.735 billion NASA budget that confirmed the suspension of Saturn V production and the clo­sure of the Electronics Research Center. NASA was told that it should launch Apollo missions no more than twice a year in order to extend the time the Saturn V would be in service. Only a low level of study funds for the space station and shuttle was approved. The budget decisions were accompanied by the message that “the President was quite favorably inclined to the NASA program but that he just did not have the money to spend on it.”28

However, the shuttle-based approach to keeping space station development alive as an immediate post-Apollo prospect had a short lifetime. The NASA leadership in mid-July 1970 met to formulate the agency’s program for the next five to ten years. They took into account the president’s March space statement, the funding the agency would request in its FY1972 budget submission, due on September 30, and an estimate of the budget it could expect in the subsequent few years. A key result of these discussions was a decision to return the space station to preliminary study status rather than seek FY1972 approval to begin its detailed design and development. This decision effectively postponed the station for a number of years. Associate Administrator for Manned Space Flight Dale Myers, who had joined NASA in January 1970 as George Mueller’s successor, told Low that he was “mov­ing out to the shuttle first because. . . an interim space station, without a proper logistics system, would be dead-ended.” Low agreed, recognizing that “a space station without a shuttle makes no sense at all. . . a shuttle with­out a space station does.”4

This was a momentous choice. It meant that NASA would abandon its plan for simultaneous development of the station and shuttle that had been at the heart of its post-Apollo aspirations; rather, NASA would first seek approval to develop the space shuttle, postponing station development until after the shuttle began flying later in the 1970s. It also meant that the shut­tle would have to be sold as a general-purpose, lower-cost launch system and as the way of keeping astronauts flying in space, not as a logistics vehicle for a space station, its original rationale.

Even with the decision to give shuttle schedule priority vis-a-vis the station, the link between the space shuttle and an eventual space station remained unbreakable; in NASA’s view, one of the highest priority require­ments driving space shuttle design would be its ability to launch modules large enough to be assembled into a viable space station. NASA told the White House as it submitted its budget request in September 1970 that “we have made a major decision to defer development of a space station. . . to a later time and to orient the space station studies we will continue in FY1972 toward modular systems that can be launched as well as serviced by the space shuttle.”5 The space station for the time being might be postponed, but it would not be forgotten.

Based on the decisions made during the previous months, the human space flight program that NASA presented to the White House in September 1970 looked very different from the one put forward a year earlier. NASA hoped that this revised program, focused on beginning to develop the space shut­tle, would be seen as sufficiently responsive to White House budgetary and program priorities to gain Richard Nixon’s approval.

By shutting down the Saturn V and Apollo spacecraft production lines and by returning the space station to preliminary study status, NASA was in effect giving the Nixon administration only one alternative if there was to be a continuing U. S. human space flight program after the mid-1970s—to approve development of the NASA-designed space shuttle. This was a situ­ation unacceptable to the new space actors in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Office of Science and Technology (OST); they would push NASA over the remainder of 1970 and particularly during 1971 to come up with alternative human space flight proposals or, at a minimum, alternatives to NASA’s preferred shuttle design. These two organizations operated under the premise that President Nixon did not want to termi­nate U. S. human space flights, and thus pushed to find a way of continuing such flights that both made technical sense and also could be carried out in the context of a modest NASA budget, while also maintaining a balance between the human space flight effort and robotic science and application activities. Tensions between OMB and OST on one hand and NASA on the other would be the axis of space policy debates in coming months.

With White House failure to find a successor to Tom Paine, there was a de facto realization that George Low would serve as NASA’s acting administrator as the NASA budget was being decided during the fall of 1970. Compared to Paine’s call for NASA to be a “swashbuckling” organization, Low’s thoughts as he became the agency’s top official were much more somber.

In the 1960’s, the country was looking outward, and the national priorities included the Apollo goal, because this would establish clearly in our minds and in the minds of the world technological leadership by the United States. . . The

situation in the beginning of the 1970’s is very different. We are now an intro­spective nation. We will do only those things that help ourselves and help

ourselves at an early date.1

This rather dour perspective would color Low’s actions as he sought a per­suasive rationale to convince the White House to approve NASA’s reduced post-Apollo ambitions.

Low’s first responsibility as acting administrator was finalizing NASA’s budget request for Fiscal Year (FY) 1972, due at OMB on September 30. The prospects for getting OMB approval to begin shuttle development in FY 1972, which would begin on July 1, 1971, were very much on Low’s mind as the NASA budget request was prepared: “If we do not get a firm go-ahead for the shuttle this year, we will not have a viable space program in the middle 1970’s. . . The question, then, is ‘how do we approach OMB and the White House to get them to give us $500-$600 million more than they would like to approve?’”2

It would turn out that there was no positive answer to this question. Even though the process by which decisions were made on NASA’s FY1972 budget was much more orderly than the chaotic approach of a year earlier, NASA did not get the definitive commitment to the shuttle it was seeking, In addition, there was some last-minute drama. There was serious thought given to canceling Skylab, NASA’s experimental space station. A new con­sideration—the possibility that aerospace unemployment in areas that could affect President Nixon’s reelection prospects in 1972—became part of the discussion about NASA’s future, and was a major factor in the ultimate decision to proceed with Skylab. In addition, Nixon, shaken by the Apollo 13 accident, personally tried to cancel the final lunar mission, Apollo 17, as excessively risky, but was persuaded not to follow through on that action. By the time final budget decisions were made in early January 1971, NASA’s post-Apollo future remained uncertain, although there were some positive signs that a space shuttle would eventually gain White House endorsement.

The excitement of Apollo 11 had barely begun to diminish when on September 15 President Nixon received the report of the “Space Task Group” he had created in February 1969 to recommend the course of the post-Apollo space program. That report laid out an ambitious plan, culminating in human trips to Mars sometime in the next 15 years. The president was soon to decide that the nation neither wanted nor could afford that kind of ambition in space. But this “deceleration” of the U. S. space program was still in the future as Richard Nixon and his associates made sure that the president was closely identified with the success of Apollo 11, even though he had only the good fortune to be the occupant of the White House when the lunar land­ing occurred. One way of emphasizing the linkage between the president and the mission’s success was a purposeful ignoring in Nixon’s statements related to Apollo 11 of the role of the two presidents actually responsible for Apollo—Lyndon B. Johnson, who had provided steady support for the proj­ect during his five years in the White House, and especially John F. Kennedy, who had the original vision of using a mission to the Moon as an instrument of U. S. grand strategy and then had backed up that vision with a massive commitment of human and financial resources. Richard Nixon was able to harvest the fruits of Kennedy’s and Johnson’s nurturing of Apollo without any additional commitment of tangible resources on his part. His major, and not insignificant, contribution was linking the prestige of the office of the president of the United States to the Apollo achievement. He did so skillfully, personally orchestrating his engagement with the lunar landing and its aftermath. Nixon took some significant risks along the way. If there had been a mission failure at some point or if the Apollo 11 crew members had not been so successful in their unaccustomed role as global diplomats, the “spirit of Apollo” that President Nixon so effectively used to signal U. S. determination to maintain global leadership might not have been so potent a symbol. But NASA delivered extraordinary results in carrying out the first landing on another celestial body, and Richard Nixon was able to leverage that success to a major strategic triumph for the United States.

In 1961, a large number (anywhere from 15 to 24, according to various accounts) of individuals were considered for NASA administrator before President Kennedy and Vice President Johnson on January 30 finally settled on James Webb as their choice. Webb was one of the last Kennedy nominees for a high position. The Nixon administration also considered a (smaller) number of candidates to replace Acting Administrator Tom Paine. During the transition, the position was offered to retired Air Force general Bernard Schriever, who declined, saying “he had too many obligations” to take on a full-time administration job. The position was reportedly also offered to Simon Ramo, head of the aerospace industry firm TRW. President Nixon on January 28 personally offered the job to Patrick Haggerty, chairman of Texas Instruments. Haldeman recorded that Nixon was “very impressed by his obvious brain power, and with his concept of institutionalizing innova­tion.” In fact, Nixon told Haggerty that his work in this respect “maybe was a more important contribution to the nation than actual federal service.” Haggerty agreed. He wrote Nixon on February 4, saying that “your invita­tion to join your Administration as Director of NASA both did me a great honor and faced me with an extremely difficult decision.” However, wrote Haggerty, he had decided, as the president had suggested, that finishing his effort at Texas Instruments to institutionalize innovation took priority. He thus turned down the president’s invitation.42

Almost by default, Tom Paine thus became Richard Nixon’s choice as NASA administrator. After Haggerty turned down the job, science adviser DuBridge recommended that Paine be kept on; the space trade press noted that “more and more sentiment was growing among space insiders to keep Dr. Paine.” President Nixon himself would have preferred to offer the posi­tion to Apollo 8 commander Frank Borman, with whom he had become impressed in the first weeks of his administration. Near midnight on February 24, the second day of his initial European tour as president, Nixon, after

returning from dinner with Prime Minister Harold Wilson at Chequers, the prime minister’s country home, met with Haldeman in his room at the posh Claridge Hotel in London. Haldeman reported that he and Nixon, “in his pajamas and pretty well out. . . discussed the NASA appointment briefly. He said go ahead on Paine, the Deputy, unless I thought we could do Borman.” Haldeman did not think that Borman would take the job, and thus the choice of Paine as the head of NASA was made.

President Nixon announced the nomination on March 5 as he presented a trophy to the Apollo 8 astronauts at the White House, saying “there has been a great deal of interest as to who would be the new head of NASA. I will admit right now that we have searched the country to find a man who could take this program now and give it the leadership that it needs, as we move from one phase to another. This is an exciting period, and it requires the new leadership that a new man can provide.” He added “but after searching the whole country for somebody, perhaps outside the program, we found, as is often the case, that the best man in the country was in the program, and that is why I am announcing today that Dr. Paine, who is now the Acting Director of NASA, will be appointed the Director of NASA.”43

With Nixon’s choice of Paine, NASA got a leader who over the next 18 months would be an unceasing advocate for a space program more ambi­tious than Richard Nixon felt he could afford or that the U. S. public and the Congress would support. The gap between what Paine thought was desir­able for the nation to undertake in space and what the Nixon administration decided was fiscally and programmatically possible frustrated Tom Paine, but he never lost his enthusiasm.

That NASA would indeed be frustrated in its ambitions was not clear in early 1969 as the review of options for the future in space got underway and as NASA readied itself to send Americans to the Moon. In the enthusiasm surrounding the lunar landing, it was not unreasonable for NASA to expect that the White House would want to continue the kind of ambitious space effort that had led to that remarkable achievement. With Tom Paine leading the charge, NASA set as its top priority making sure that the Space Task Group would recommend an ambitious post-Apollo effort aimed at landing on another celestial body. Having reached the Moon, the space agency now would set its sights on voyages to Mars.

As the STG effort moved toward its conclusion, President Richard Nixon and his inner circle of advisors were focused on capitalizing on, for broader policy and political purposes, the excitement surrounding the successful Apollo 11 mission. Nixon purposely avoided saying anything about future space efforts in the many remarks he made both in the United States and during his around – the-world trip following the Apollo 11 splash down. However, Nixon could not help but be aware of Vice President Agnew’s call for a human mission to Mars, given his regular reading of his daily news summaries. He had talked about the space program with both Tom Paine and, separately, with Frank Borman on the trip to the Apollo 11 landing, and he had indicated his interest in foreign astronaut participation in U. S. space flights, an interest that Paine either misinterpreted or amplified without the president’s approval to include non-U. S. hardware contributions to post-Apollo space system development. Nixon in his conversation with Paine did not share his broader views on the future in space, nor did he refer to the STG deliberations.

At lower levels in the White House hierarchy, however, there was grow­ing attention being given to the debates within the STG and to what options would be presented for presidential decision. As noted in chapter 2, Assistant to the President Peter Flanigan had since April been assigned the space portfolio; following space issues for Flanigan on a day-by-day basis was his 30-year-old assistant Tom Whitehead, who had the technical background that most others on the White House staff lacked.40 As he began to familiarize himself with NASA’s planning for its future, Whitehead quickly had become concerned that the process was heading towards an outcome that was not in President Nixon’s interests. On June 25, he alerted Flanigan to his “uneasiness” regard­ing the STG review. His main concern was that “NASA and others will use the enthusiasm generated by a success of Apollo 11 to create very strong pressures on the President to commit him[self] and the Nation prematurely to a large and continuing space budget.” Whitehead suggested that “a strong case can be made for constraining the NASA budget to its present level or slightly lower, while at the same time permitting the United States to maintain a strong space program, including manned space flight.” He looked to Fiscal Year (FY) 1971 budget deliberations later in 1969 as providing “an opportunity to review sig­nificantly different alternative levels of spending so that the President will have meaningful options to consider.” In order to create such options, Whitehead suggested “Bob Mayo has to be reassured that the President’s interests would be served and the President is personally interested in a serious evaluation of several alternative NASA budget levels including one in the vicinity of $2.5 to $3 billion”; such a budget level would reflect a significant reduction from NASA’s FY1970 budget of almost $4 billion. Whitehead also suggested that “the President should be informed that NASA is making very strong public statements about future commitments,” creating the possibility that he “may find himself in a very difficult situation in the next few months” unless he insisted on such budget options as a way of countering “pressure being gen­erated by NASA in the press and on the Hill.” Whitehead was “not arguing here for a reduced NASA budget,” but rather suggesting that there should be “a serious analysis of a $2.5 to $3 billion level in space programs, including its costs and potential accomplishments.” In his judgment, there were “signifi­cant budgetary, scientific, and political factors that suggest that this could be a desirable alternative for the President.” Whitehead also suggested that either he or Flanigan “call Bob Mayo to emphasize the importance of including at least three major options in the fiscal year 1971 budget review process.” He also suggested that Flanigan write a memorandum to the president “suggest­ing that NASA be calmed down during the enthusiasm of Apollo 11.”41

Whitehead’s views obviously ran very counter to what NASA was hoping to achieve by having its future plans evaluated in the context of Apollo H excitement. Had they become known to NASA, they might have raised a warning flag about the path that NASA was pursuing, but apparently they were not communicated except to the BOB, and then not until late August. On August 20, Whitehead discussed budget options with Schlesinger, the BOB deputy director. Whitehead told Schlesinger that “the President is not eager to proceed with an expanded space program, and in fact would like to see it significantly reduced in the near future.” Whitehead also claimed that he had discussed such a posture with “other White House people” and found “none who indicated any real problem with significant reductions in the space program.” He asked Schlesinger to make sure that a $2.5 billion option was included in both the STG report and the guidance being given to NASA as it prepared its FY1971 budget proposal. The head of the BOB unit in charge of the NASA budget, Don Crabill, who was also part of the STG Staff Directors Committee, asked whether Whitehead had spoken directly with the president; Schlesinger “thought not.” Thus there is no evidence one way or the other regarding whether Whitehead was representing Richard Nixon’s actual views, or rather using the president’s name as a justification for his own skeptical perspective, a frequent practice among the Nixon White House staff. Crabill told Schlesinger that he and other NASA budget exam­iners thought that a $2.5 billion NASA budget for FY1971 was “equivalent to a no-manned-space-flight position.”42

In an August 22 conversation with Schlesinger, Crabill learned that Flanigan, likely in response to Whitehead’s suggestion, had at some point “telephoned Dr. Paine and instructed him to stop public advocacy of early manned Mars activity because it was causing trouble in Congress and restrict­ing Presidential options.” Flanigan, saying that he had discussed the issue with the president, had suggested to Scheslinger that Nixon “would like options even lower than $2.5 billion.” Following this guidance, Schlesinger asked Crabill to prepare an additional budget option to “define a $1.5 billion per year space program.”43

These White House conversations were taking place as NASA was push­ing the STG to recommend its Program B, which called for a 1983 launch of a mission to Mars and a NASA budget during the later 1970s of almost $8 billion per year. NASA was insisting that at an annual budget of $4 bil­lion it could not carry out a viable program of human space flight during the 1970s. Even NASA’s Program C had a budget increasing to almost $6 billion by the mid-1970s. The alliance between Vice President Agnew and Tom Paine was plowing ahead toward a sure confrontation with the Nixon White House, with the content of the STG report the immediate focus of that confrontation.

In a normal “budget season” President Nixon’s December 26 decisions regarding the NASA FY1971 budget would have been the end of the pro­cess until the budget was made public a month or so later. But this was not normal year in budget-making. Nixon’s December 26 budget choices had a lifetime of only a few days. The increasingly detailed involvement of Flanigan and his assistant Tom Whitehead during the preceding month had convinced them that additional reductions to the NASA budget could be made without undercutting the president’s space priorities. Flanigan had not been present at the December 26 meeting when Nixon had approved the $3.7 billion NASA budget, and in its aftermath suggested to Ehrlichman that a lower NASA budget was both desirable and feasible. In addition, Bryce Harlow, Nixon’s top assistant for Congressional relations, advised the president that a NASA budget at a $3.7 billion level was likely to run into opposition in the Congress. Based on this counsel, the issue of the NASA budget level was reopened at the end of December; within the first few days of January, the NASA budget was “ratcheted” down to a lower level.

The involvement of Flanigan and especially Whitehead in the budget pro­cess had begun in late November and intensified throughout December. There was little precedent for such intense White House policy staff involve­ment; this was traditionally seen as the role of the BOB. But Richard Nixon, with his desire to control major decisions from the White House and his dis­trust of the Washington “permanent government” epitomized by the career staff of BOB, supported involving his White House staff in budget decisions with major policy implications. The result was a significant level of tension between the White House staff and the BOB staff, with neither side helping the other and very little communication between the two. Personal antago­nism between Nixon, Ehrlichman, and Flanigan on one hand and Mayo on the other only exacerbated the situation.

As BOB was preparing its recommendations on the NASA budget in November, Flanigan and Whitehead had been monitoring the wide differ­ences between NASA and BOB on the budget’s level and content. They judged that neither NASA nor BOB was likely to develop budget choices that met the president’s rather unclear priorities. Flanigan had communicated this perspective to Nixon and got clearance to begin developing alternate options. Given this guidance, Whitehead “turned with a vengeance” toward that task.29 In a December 2 white paper, he observed that decisions with respect to the FY1971 were “particularly important,” since “deceptively small budget issues for FY71 entail enormous (up to $100 billion) budget commitments for future years.” Even so, he thought “the issues and options that have been defined for the President and the information to support them are scarcely up to the quality appropriate for a Presidential decision.” He summarized the situation as he perceived it: [5]

program” and robotic planetary exploration mission such as the Grand Tour.

• “Manned lunar landings have been scheduled at the rate of three per year at a cost of almost $1 billion per year over a rate of one per year, without this issue ever being presented for Presidential consideration.”

• “The Budget Bureau has consistently been uncooperative in White House staff efforts to produce information on lower-cost options for Presidential consideration.” In Whitehead’s view, the BOB career staff seemed “to suf­fer from an institutional tendency to save the President and his staff from hard decisions, to compromise with agencies as far as possible, then to defend the agency base.”30

It was quite unusual for White House policy staff to be delving into the technical details needed to craft and then cost out alternative programs in an executive agency. Whitehead peppered NASA with questions with respect to various “building blocks” for alternative programs. A veteran NASA official, skeptical of this activity, noted that the White House people “came up with impossible alternatives. . . They couldn’t understand why. . . even though it would take you less than four months to check out and launch a vehicle, why you basically couldn’t launch it [only] once a year.”31

In his analysis of the FY1971 budget situation, Whitehead made three additional observations:

• “While the space program is interesting to most of the public, it ranks very low in their priorities for increased Federal spending.” Whitehead suggested that “there is no space program or mission on the horizon that offers popular appeal comparable to the first lunar landing, so that space is not likely to climb in the public eye as a desirable use of Federal funds.”

• Whitehead was skeptical of the political arguments in support of a high Apollo launch rate, noting that “it is unclear how much domestic and international political benefit accrues to the President and the Nation at the higher launch rates. . . A major consideration is avoidance of another Sputnik-like event, but we now appear far ahead of the Soviets.” He added “the existing supply of 8 Saturn 5 vehicles potentially could be stretched to cover 9 years of manned activities.”

• Finally, Whitehead observed that “there is no need now to make pro­gram commitments in order to preserve the 1986 Mars landing option.” Richard Nixon in the aftermath of receiving the STG report and again as he discussed the NASA FY1971 budget had indicated that he wanted to preserve that option. Whitehead added “the President can at any time make a forward-looking statement on the future of the space program without any large funding commitments.”32

Flanigan’s late December intervention in the NASA budget process had an immediate effect. BOB Deputy Director Schlesinger on December 29 informed his NASA unit that it had to find a way to cut the agency’s budget by $1 billion, likely as a reaction to the intervention by Flanigan and Whitehead. Working overnight, the unit was able to come up with $800 mil­lion in possible cuts. These cuts were apparently too draconic. Meeting with Nixon on the morning of December 30, Mayo and Ehrlichman decided that the NASA budget would be cut by “only” $225 million. Nixon agreed, say­ing that it should be made known that he was ordering these budget cuts to “slow down and stretch out” the post-Apollo space effort, reflecting a re-ordering of the priority of space compared to other national efforts, and that he had rejected the recommendation of the STG for a “crash program to Mars,” even though sending people to Mars remained the “long-range goal.”33 Paine was called to the White House on the afternoon of December 30 to get the news of additional budget cuts, not from Mayo but from Flanigan and Bryce Harlow.

Paine and his associates spent New Year’s weekend revising the NASA budget to meet the new expenditure limit. Paine wrote Mayo on January 2, 1970, telling the budget director that Flanigan had “made it clear that the controlling decision was the necessity to hold NASA FY1971 outlays to $3,600 million.” Paine informed Mayo that he and Flanigan had agreed that NASA would be free to revise its plans as it chose, as long as the result was $3.6 billion in outlays (the funds actually spent during the year). Paine told Mayo “that I would, of course, accept and meet this expenditure limitation like a good soldier. . . provided that I have the flexibility to adjust program details and budget authority.” Still pushing for approval of the STG recom­mended program, Paine added “this is the year, and the FY1971 budget is the instrument, in which President Nixon’s initiatives in space will go on the record books.” Paine’s letter was apparently the first time Mayo had heard of the agreement that Flanigan had made with NASA; he felt “double – crossed.”34

Then Flanigan wrote Paine and Mayo on January 6, laying down several conditions that NASA had to meet:

1. “The Manned Space Flight Program will be carried out on the previously agreed-upon schedule” of two launches per year.

2. “There is no commitment, implied or otherwise, for development starts for either the space station or the shuttle in FY72.”

3. “The President’s option with regard to the final Saturn 5 launch, as to whether it will be a lunar mission or a second Experimental Space Station is still open.”35

These supposedly final decisions on the NASA budget soon became known to the Washington space community. The Washington Post headlined a front page story on January 11 “Nixon Rejects Big Outlay for Space in the ’70s.” Paine felt that it was important in terms of the morale of the NASA and contractor workforce to provide some insight into what was going on, and on January 9 and again on January 12 urged Flanigan to allow him to make a statement “explaining the actions we’re taking in the most positive way.” Paine on January 12 sent a draft of the statement he proposed to make the next day to the White House for approval. The statement was heavily edited to remove any indication that the statement was being made at the president’s request and to delete sentences such as “the President accepts the recommendations of the Space Task Group as our basic space plan for the 1970’s.” Indeed, there was no mention of the STG in Paine’s statement as issued. According to George Low, there were times in the days just before January 13 when the White House vacillated regarding the wisdom of mak­ing the statement at all, and White House edits “were in part substantive (e. g. don’t talk about manned Mars landings or the grand tour) and in part were more or less nit-picking.” Final approval of the statement came only 30 minutes before Paine’s 2:00 p. m. January 13 press conference at which it was to be released. At the press conference Paine tried to put a positive spin on the impact of what he termed an “austere” NASA budget, but the headline the next day in The New York Times said “50,000 NASA Jobs to Be Eliminated.” (The 50,000 number included both NASA civil servants and contractor employees.)36

With the agreement with Flanigan on budget levels and constraints and with the January 13 press conference, NASA had good reason to believe that its FY1971 budget had at last been finalized. That turned out not to be the case.

The human space flight program that emerged from these July meetings also anticipated canceling two Apollo missions. Budget constraints were an important reason for NASA’s willingness to forgo those trips to the Moon. But there was another factor in play. Some influential individuals within the NASA human space flight leadership had by the start of 1970 become skeptical of the wisdom of flying additional missions to the Moon after the 1969 successes of Apollo 11 and Apollo 12. They argued that President Kennedy’s end-of-the-decade goal had been met and there was no compel­ling reason to continue to accept the high risks associated with each lunar journey. According to one authoritative account, Robert Gilruth, the direc­tor of NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, who some described as the “father of manned spaceflight,” suggested that NASA should “stop now, before we lose someone.” There is disagreement about whether these were actually Gilruth’s views, but certainly the risk of each additional lunar mission was on the minds of NASA’s leaders. The near-fatal accident during the April 1970 Apollo 13 flight only reinforced their already-present hesita­tion to fly out the full Apollo schedule.6

However, NASA on its own was not free to finalize a decision to cancel an Apollo mission. The Apollo 16 through Apollo 19 missions would use an enhanced lunar module capable of longer stays on the Moon’s surface and would carry a lunar rover able to carry the astronauts well beyond walk­ing distance of the module. This combination would greatly increase the potential scientific yield from the lunar missions, and was eagerly antici­pated by the segment of the scientific community interested in planetary science. Not flying latter Apollo missions would likely cause an uproar in that community.