Category After Apollo?

NASA Seeks Support

As OMB began its review of the NASA budget, Low set out on an intense effort through both face-to-face meetings and letters to communicate the NASA story, both inside the agency and to anyone outside the space agency who might offer support to NASA’s plans. One of those targeted by Low was William Pickering, the long-time director of the NASA-affiliated Jet Propulsion Laboratory of the California Institute of Technology; Pickering had expressed some skepticism regarding whether NASA was indeed prepared

to begin shuttle development. Low suggested to Pickering that “the technol­ogy for the shuttle appears to be as well or better in hand than the technology was for the Apollo lunar mission when that program got started.” Low in 1961 had been in charge of human space flight at NASA headquarters and had prepared a key report saying that there were no technological barriers to a lunar landing mission.9

One of the meetings Low organized as he explained the NASA budget request was with science advisor Ed David and his space staff person Russ Drew. Low was quite surprised to discover that David and Drew were “very much opposed to Skylab.” The two argued that the only reason for getting experience with long-duration space flight was preparing to send astronauts to Mars, and, since there was no intent in a relevant time frame of undertak­ing a Mars mission, there was no need for Skylab. Low found it “inconceiv­able” that “there would be serious consideration given to the cancellation of Skylab,” given all the money that had already been spent on the program. Following this meeting, Low wrote a letter to David discussing the rela­tive priority of Skylab and Apollo. With respect to Apollo, Low was rather guarded, reflecting his own concerns about additional Apollo missions, say­ing that although the final four Apollo missions would increase scientific understanding of the Earth-Moon system, the missions “would in another sense be dead-ended. No new capabilities or techniques would be explored that could be further exploited. . . no major new opportunities for leadership and prestige would likely accrue; and the potential of Apollo for interna­tional cooperation is limited.” By contrast, with respect to Skylab “there has been no return from considerable investment to date. . . We simply have no data on man’s ability to live and work in space for long periods of time.” Low suggested that “on balance, the weight of evidence seems to favor Skylab over Apollo if a choice must be made.”10

One of the other people to whom Low wrote in this period was national security advisor Henry Kissinger. Kissinger and his staff had not gotten deeply involved in NASA-related decisions, with the exception of monitoring the discussions in 1969 and 1970 between NASA and European space offi­cials about possible European participation in the U. S. post-Apollo program. Low pointed out to Kissinger that, given the NASA decision to defer space station development, the space shuttle program provided the only opportu­nity for international participation in human space flight, something that the president wanted. He hoped that Kissinger would support a decision to begin shuttle development in FY1972, since without “forward motion on the space shuttle system. . . the prospects for the major advance in interna­tional cooperation that we have hoped for will dim to the vanishing point.” The letter had little impact; Kissinger did not get involved in the budget

process.11

Low also tried several times in October to set up a meeting with Peter Flanigan, but Flanigan “cancelled each time because of other commit­ments.” In comparison to his active role in the deliberations that had led to the NASA budget decisions a year earlier, Flanigan was noticeably missing from the FY1972 discussions. The OMB was approaching its review of the NASA budget request in a much more orderly fashion than had been the case in late 1969 and trusted Nixon assistants were in charge of the budget process. In addition, the Domestic Council was monitoring space options. Flanigan may have felt no need to intervene in the budget process to make sure that the president’s priorities were heeded.12

NASA’s informal contacts with the OMB staff working under Don Rice had alerted it to the areas where OMB was considering NASA budget reduc­tions. Trying to preempt such cuts, Low wrote Weinberger on October 28, saying that he wanted to make “especially sure” that several elements in the NASA budget request were “clearly understood and given careful consider­ation.” Low gave particular emphasis to the reasons for going ahead with the space shuttle, saying that shuttle development “can be justified as a versatile and economical system for placing unmanned civil and military satellites in orbit, entirely apart from its role in conducting or supporting manned missions.” This was the newly developed NASA argument as the agency recognized that the shuttle now had to be justified as a launch and orbital operations vehicle, absent a space station to service. Low added what would turn out to be a winning argument: “With the shuttle the U. S. can have a continuing program of manned space flight. . . without a commitment to a major new manned mission goal.” Recognizing that the Nixon administra­tion had no intention of setting out an Apollo-like goal for the post-Apollo space program, NASA was basically arguing that the country could have, almost “for free,” a continued human space flight program by approving a system justified by reducing the costs of space launch and in-orbit opera­tions, which incidentally happened to be operated by a human crew and could carry humans as passengers.13

A final NASA move in making the case for shuttle approval was to pre­pare for OMB Director George Shultz a paper “from a national—not just a NASA—standpoint of the need for and importance of a continuing pro­gram of manned space flight.” Shultz was reputed to be skeptical about the value of humans in space, and the NASA paper was aimed at countering that skepticism. In his cover letter, Low emphasized “that manned flight to Mars is not a goal or justification of the program that NASA is recommending for the 1970’s. Skylab and the space shuttle, for example, are necessary ele­ments of the United States space program without a manned Mars mission.” This statement was intended to rebut the claims of Congressional critics of the two programs such as Senators William Proxmire and Walter Mondale and Representative Joseph Karth, who had linked the station and shuttle in Congressional debates to preparing to send astronauts to Mars. Karth’s attempt to cut station and shuttle funds from the NASA FY1971 budget had failed, but only on the basis of a 54-54 tie vote.

The 11-page NASA paper discussed both “the role of manned space flight as a means for accomplishing objectives in space” and “the importance of manned space flight to the United States as an end in itself.” With respect to the former role, the paper stressed that the space shuttle was “not a ‘manned spacecraftit is a space transportation system” that “would bring about a fundamental change in space operations and result in very substantial cost reductions.” With respect to the latter role, the paper argued for “acceptance of manned exploration of space as an important and continuing goal in its own right” one which “the United States, as a great nation, should continue” and “take a leading role.” It suggested that “manned space flight will con­tinue to be the best and perhaps the only arena of worldwide interest where the United States can demonstrate at the same time technological strength, peaceful intentions, power without confrontation, and the openness of a free society.”14

Preface and Acknowledgments

Th, s study has had a very long genesis. When my first book, The Decision to Go to the Moon: Project Apollo and the National Interest, was published by the MIT Press in summer 1970, I gave a copy to NASA Deputy Administrator George Low. By that time there had been two successful landings on the Moon—Apollo H and Apollo 12—and one near-tragedy—Apollo 13. Low told me that NASA at that point in time was in the midst of a confused pro­cess of dealing with Richard Nixon’s White House with respect to what the space agency should do after Apollo. He suggested that I take a look at that post-Apollo decision-making process similar to the one that had led to my Apollo study, and provided a modest NASA grant to facilitate such an effort. That suggestion set me on the lengthy and winding path that 44 years later has resulted in this book.

Working with NASA chief historian Gene Emme and especially Nat Cohen of NASA’s policy office, during late 1970 and 1971 I carried out a series of interviews with many of the key actors in the post-Apollo debate; these interviews took place as NASA was struggling to get White House approval for developing the space shuttle as the central focus of its efforts for the 1970s. Those interviews are one basis for the current study; they provide an “at the moment” look at what was on the minds of those trying to decide what kind of post-Apollo space program was in the nation’s, and President Nixon’s, interest. In 1973, I wrote up but never published an initial account of post-Apollo decision making, and put that draft and transcripts of the supporting interviews in the NASA Historical Reference Collection at NASA Headquarters in Washington, DC; other researchers have drawn on that material over the years. I continued on a sporadic basis over the follow­ing years to interview individuals involved in post-Apollo decisions; the last of those interviews was with top Nixon assistant John Ehrlichman in 1983. I published several articles on the space shuttle, most notably a controversial analysis titled “The Space Shuttle Program: A Policy Failure?” that appeared in the journal Science a few months after the January 1986 Challenger acci­dent. But the press of teaching and administrative responsibilities was a bar­rier to completing the book-length study needed to tell the full post-Apollo story.

It was only in 2008 as I left after 38 years the active faculty at the Space Policy Institute, part of The George Washington University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, that I could turn my full attention to my backlog of policy history work. First up was a relook at President John Kennedy’s 1961 decision to send Americans to the Moon and a fresh examination of what he did to turn that decision into reality. The result was published by Palgrave Macmillan in December 2010 as John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon. One of those reading an early copy of the Kennedy manu­script and providing a book jacket endorsement was Bill Anders. Bill had flown around the Moon in December 1968 on the Apollo 8 mission and had taken the iconic “Earthrise” photograph, then came to Washington to be executive secretary of the National Aeronautics and Space Council, the organization set up in 1958 to provide White House level space policy coor­dination. Anders was thus a participant in post-Apollo policy discussions from fall 1969 through the decision to approve the space shuttle, and he encouraged me to continue my research and writing to present a full account of space decision making during the Nixon administration. Bill backed his encouragement both with continued involvement as the study progressed, commenting on chapter drafts, and with crucial financial support from the Anders Family Foundation. That support helped me visit various archives during my research and avoid other compensated activity so I could focus on my writing. I thus owe a strong “thank you” to Bill Anders for all his effort in helping bring this book into existence.

If I had completed my study of post-Apollo decision making on its origi­nal schedule, it would have been a far less rich account. The availability of books by senior White House staff and of the Nixon administration papers at the Richard Nixon Presidential Library in Yorba Linda, California, and the release of Nixon’s tape recordings, which can be accessed at a variety of websites (I used www. nixontapes. org) were all essential to a full narrative. At the Nixon Library, the staff of the research room was extremely researcher – friendly. I owe particular thanks there to audio-visual archivist Jon Fletcher, who was very responsive in my search for fresh images to include in the book. Freelance researcher Alicia Fernandez provided useful help in tying up some last-minute loose ends.

I also consulted the papers of Caspar Weinberger, Clay Thomas Whitehead, and Tom Paine at the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress; George Low’s papers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute; James Fletcher’s papers at the University of Utah (at an early stage in my research); material in the Johnson Space Center Historical Collection at the University of Houston Clear Lake; and interviews available in the Archives Division of the National Air and Space Museum. The staffs at all these venues were very helpful; I am grateful to them all but owe particular thanks to Jean Grant at Clear Lake for provide a large amount of useful material. The NASA Historical Reference Collection is a treasure trove for researchers into NASA’s his­tory and was absolutely crucial to my work, and I owe thanks to the NASA history office staff, particularly its director, Bill Barry, chief archivist Jane

Odom, and archivists Colin Fries and Liz Suchow for their help. I have put the documents and interviews that form the basis for this study on deposit at the NASA Historical Reference Collection as “Logsdon Source Notes.”

As I completed the study I was able to interview a number of those involved in the 1969-1972 events, including Bill Anders, Don Rice of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), and former astronaut and Nixon adviser on space Frank Borman. Russell Drew of the White House Office of Science and Technology, Dan Taft of OMB, and original shuttle program manager Bob Thompson provided useful comments on chapter drafts. In addition, Frank Borman, Richard Speier, Chuck Friedlander, James Dewar, and Jim Behling were good enough to share material from their personal files, and Paul Shawcross gave me access to the few files on the shuttle decision that had been retained at OMB.

I owe a particular debt of gratitude to “space shuttle guru” Dennis Jenkins. Dennis shared material from his voluminous files and read and perceptively commented on drafts of every chapter. My book is not a history of the early evolution of the space shuttle; rather it is an account of the decisions made by the Nixon White House and the NASA leadership in Washington that made the shuttle central to what the United States has done in space for over four decades. I hope that when I do discuss the early years of the shuttle program, I make no major errors. When it becomes available in 2015, Dennis Jenkins’s three volume compendium on the totality of the space shuttle program will be the definitive work.

My former student and colleague Andre Bormanis also read every chap­ter with an eagle eye, catching my many typos while providing thought­ful substantive comments. Other colleagues who commented on chapter drafts include Roger Launius, Teasel Muir-Harmony, Russ Drew, Dan Taft, Dwayne Day, and L. Parker Temple III. I must thank Scott Pace, my suc­cessor as director of GW’s Space Policy Institute, for his hospitality in pro­viding an aging professor emeritus continuing work space at the university. There have been a number of people at GW who helped in the early stages of my research on post-Apollo decisions, but frankly I cannot remember any specific names. If any of those individuals happen to read this book, I thank you for your help and apologize for my poor recall. More recently, student assistants Caitlan Dowling helped with archival research and retyping some of the early interviews, Luis Suter took on the unenviable task of trying to transcribe the often-garbled conversations on the Nixon tapes, and Gaurav Dhiman helped get the manuscript in shape for submission. Rachel Nishan of Twin Oaks Indexing did an extremely thorough job of compiling the book’s index, and she and Dwayne Day provided invaluable “second eyes” in reviewing the study’s page proofs.

I am appreciative of Roger Launius’s interest in having this book be part of the Palgrave Series in the History of Science and Technology that he and Jim Fleming co-edit, and to editors Chris Chappell and his successor Kristin Purdy, editorial assistant Mike Auperach, and production editor Erin Ivy at Palgrave Macmillan for seeing the book through to publication.

The time taken in completing this study covers most of my professional career—38 years on the active GW faculty and six as an emeritus professor. I tell people that I have not retired, and offer John F. Kennedy and the Race to the Moon and this book as evidence. There are likely to be more books to fol­low, both in terms of policy history and perhaps also a collection of my own insights and opinions over the years. In those same 44 years, my two sons have grown to be outstanding men and three delightful grandchildren have been born. I am dedicating this book to Jacob, Sara, and Aaron Logsdon with the hope that they will see a future in space with more purpose and pay­offs than the one created by the Nixon administration decisions chronicled in this work. Throughout these 44 years, and even before, my wife Roslyn has provided the loving foundation of my life. Maybe now that this long- running opus is finished we can find more time to enjoy life together.

Needless to say, I am responsible for all errors of fact (including what was actually being said on the Nixon tapes!) and interpretation. I am sure that many people will not agree with my assessment of the Nixon space heritage, especially with respect to the space shuttle, and my characterization of the recent and current state of the U. S. space program. After a career devoted to that program, I regret that my conclusions are so downbeat. I can only remain hopeful that better days are ahead.

John M. Logsdon January 2015

NASA Not Ready for Success

While Richard Nixon came to the White House knowing that he would soon have to make choices regarding the future of the United States in space, the NASA leadership was not well prepared to present the new president with attractive options for that future. At what should have been a moment of great triumph, with the spectacular success of the bold Apollo 8 mission and with the first landing on the Moon just months in the future, the top offi­cials of NASA in January 1969 did not have a clear sense of what might best follow Apollo. According to one of those officials, “the general atmosphere [among NASA’s leaders] in terms of decisiveness, purpose, dynamics—a feel­ing that you were in an agency moving forward—that was not there.” Those at the helm of NASA did not accurately perceive the broad societal changes that would influence political decisions on what space future was sustainable; “the dramatic political, cultural, and socioeconomic changes of the tumul­tuous decade of the 1960s” had left NASA, focused on the Cold War goal of beating the Soviet Union to the Moon, “in a time warp not completely of its own making.” Apollo’s message of America’s technological power stemming from the concerted actions of government and industry “ran up against a powerful shift in American culture that was beginning to push in the opposite direction, and which ultimately undermined the very premise (and promise) of the manned space program.”5 Decisions on the post-Apollo space program would be made in a very different context than that existing as John F. Kennedy in 1961 decided to send Americans to the Moon.

Initial NASA Proposals

Paine on February 24 had responded to a January 23 letter from BOB Director Mayo asking NASA to identify areas for budget reductions. Rather than offer such reductions, Paine requested an additional $189 million for Fiscal Year 1970. The proposed budget additions were:

• $70 million for increasing the stay time on the Moon of the lunar module, developing a lunar rover vehicle, and other enhancements to allow the six additional Apollo missions (Apollo 15-20) then planned after the first four landings to carry out more intensive scientific activities;

• $52.2 million to preserve the option of continuing to produce Saturn V boosters; without additional large rockets, NASA would not be able to launch the large space station that was central to its post-Apollo planning and to carry out other large-scale future missions;

• $66.6 million for accelerating the pace of space station and space shuttle definition studies.4

Two days later, Paine sent directly to President Nixon a nine-page memoran­dum on “Problems and Opportunities in Manned Space Flight.” The memo­randum made NASA’s case both for the additions to the FY1970 budget and for an early presidential commitment to a large space station. Paine organized his justification for the space station in several steps. First was accepting “as a matter of policy [that] the nation must and will continue in manned space flight,” adding that “no responsible and thoughtful person, to my knowledge, advocates or is prepared to accept the prospect of the United States abandon­ing manned space flight to the Soviets to develop and exploit as they see fit.” Paine then characterized a space station as “a central point for many activities in space,” but added that “we believe strongly that the justification for proceeding now with this major project as a national goal does not, and should not be made to depend on the specific contributions that can be foreseen today . . . Rather, the justification for the space station is that it is clearly the next major evolution­ary step in man’s experimentation, conquest, and use of space.”5

This justification met a critical response. DuBridge asked the Space Science and Technology Panel of the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC), his elite external group of science and technology advisers, to assess Paine’s February 26 memorandum. That panel was chaired by Lewis Branscomb, a physicist and director of the Joint Institute for Laboratory Astrophysics in Boulder, Colorado. During the presidential transition, the panel had pre­pared an assessment of NASA’s status that was a significant input into the Townes transition task force on space. The panel was “not reassured by the characterization of the space station’s justification as a technological end in itself, accompanied by a reluctance to discuss the station in terms of its potential contribution to science, applications, and defense.”6

A High-Level White House Intervention

The text of the September 8 draft of the STG report appeared to make presidential choice of either Option A or Option B the best course forward. Selecting Option A would have required the White House to commit to simultaneous development of a space station and a space shuttle in its upcom­ing decisions on the Fiscal Year 1971 budget; selecting Option B meant that this commitment could be made a year later. It was already clear to the president’s policy and budget advisors that, given the high priority President Nixon had assigned to avoiding running a deficit in government spending, the budget could not accommodate such a commitment in either year. The president, if the report was not changed, could be placed in the position of rejecting the recommendations of the group he had chartered to define the post-Apollo program.

Flanigan brought this situation to the attention of John Ehrlichman, who had emerged during the year as Richard Nixon’s most trusted adviser on domestic policy. Ehrlichman in his 1982 book Witness to Power provides a vivid account of what followed. On the morning of September 11, just before the final STG meeting, Ehrlichman, Flanigan, and DuBridge met with Vice President Agnew. Ehrlichman told Agnew that the STG “owed it to the President not to include a proposal our budget couldn’t pay for.” Since an early Mars mission would be very popular, “if the committee proposed it and Nixon had to say no, he would be criticized as the President who kept us from finding life on Mars.” Agnew argued that a mission to Mars was “a reasonable, feasible option.” Ehrlichman “saw no excuse for Agnew’s insis­tence” and was “surprised at his obtuseness.” He “took off the kid gloves” and told Agnew “Look, Mr. Vice President, we have to be practical. There is no money for a Mars trip. The President has already decided that.” He told Agnew “it is your job, with Lee DuBridge’s help, to make absolutely certain that the Mars trip is not in” the report. Agnew, doubting that Ehrlichman was actually speaking for Richard Nixon, “demanded a personal meeting with the President.” Ehrlichman’s response was “I’ll arrange it at once.” Upon leaving Agnew’s office, Ehrlichman asked Dwight Chapin to set up the meeting with Richard Nixon that the vice president had requested.48

The Nixon Space Doctrine

The decisions about the NASA budget for Fiscal Year (FY) 1971 that emerged from the chaotic budget process were a result of two general influences. One was the need to fit spending on space within the very tight constraints on discretionary government spending if the overall fed­eral budget were to be in balance with expected revenues. This meant determining how the civilian space program would fit within the Nixon administration’s overall priorities. In developing the FY1971 budget, the Bureau of the Budget (BOB) had identified the administration’s highest priority domestic goals: implementing revenue sharing between the federal and state governments, reducing the crime rate, expanding family and food assistance, increasing manpower training, environmental protection, and improving surface and air transportation.1 Space did not make this list of top priorities, and that had been reflected in the FY1971 budget decisions. The other influence was the rather ad hoc policy framework President Richard Nixon and his policy advisers used to evaluate the recommen­dations of the Space Task Group (STG) and the NASA budget proposal based on those recommendations. The White House had not articulated a strategic perspective on the space program to guide it as it evaluated the STG’s proposed initiatives. The Nixon administration, by treating space as a domestic rather than foreign policy issue, did not feel compelled to evaluate future space activities in the context of broader geopolitical goals beyond the general thought that there should be increased emphasis on cooperation rather than competition.

The FY1971 budget decisions reduced the priority of space spending within the overall federal budget to a ranking significantly lower than it had held at the peak of the Apollo program in 1966, when the space agency com­manded 4.4 percent of total government spending and 19 percent of nonde­fense discretionary spending. By the time Congress approved NASA’s budget for FY1971 in mid-1970, NASA’s share of federal spending had shrunk by almost two-thirds, to 1.6 percent of the total and 7 percent of discretionary spending. This was certainly not a budget allocation that could support the kind of program NASA was advocating for the 1970s.

Apollo, Kennedy, and Nixon

During the 1960s, the United States had spent close to $25 billion to develop the capability to launch large payloads into orbit and beyond and to land on another celestial surface. This capability included not only the production facilities and tooling for the Saturn V launch vehicle and the Apollo space­craft but also the gigantic complex at the Kennedy Space Center required to launch the Apollo/Saturn combination to the Moon. To those such as James Webb who had fought for the political support and funding to create and use it, this capability represented an extremely valuable element of U. S. national power, not only in the context of the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union but also in terms of being a concrete and very visible symbol of U. S. ability to do in space whatever it decided was in its national interest. Sending astronauts to the Moon, Webb had argued throughout the 1960s, was only the first use of this capability. It could also enable a variety of other large – scale national security, exploratory, and scientific undertakings.

Richard Nixon and most of his policy and budget advisors did not share this concept of continued large-scale space undertakings as being important to U. S. power and pride. The March 1970 presidential statement on space had said that U. S. space activities should be viewed “as part of a continuing process—one which will go on day in and day out, year in and year out— and not as a series of separate leaps, each requiring a massive concentra­tion of energy and will and accomplished on a crash timetable.” Based on this perspective, through its post-Apollo budget and policy decisions the

Nixon administration made a conscious decision to abandon the capability that had been so expensive to develop and that had given the United States the possibility of an expansive future in space. John F. Kennedy in 1961 had characterized his decision to send Astronauts to the Moon as a “great new American enterprise. . . which in many ways may hold the key to our future on earth.” A year later, Kennedy declared that the he had chosen “to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” and “because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.” R ichard Nixon did not share this view of the importance of space achievement; in sharp contrast to John Kennedy, Nixon in 1970 made the mundane proposal that “what we do in space from here on in must become a normal and regular part of our national life.” Although Richard Nixon as he discussed the space program frequently linked “exploring the unknown” to continuing national vitality, there was little of such a grand vision in his actual approach to space decisions.

OMB Makes Its Recommendations

The strategy paper illuminated the consequences of various budget choices. It certainly influenced the OMB staff in its recommendations regarding the NASA FY1972 budget, with an OMB bias toward the lower budget options. The next step in the budget process was Don Rice’s presenta­tion to Cap Weinberger of his staff’s recommendations with respect to the NASA budget. This “director’s review” took place on November 3. Weinberger “tentatively decided” to accept the staff recommendation to terminate the Skylab program. Possible cancelation of Apollo 17, the final lunar landing mission, had been considered during the budget review, but the staff recommendation, which Weinberger accepted, was to continue with the mission.

Weinberger did approve a start on the new rocket engine intended for use in the space shuttle, but denied funding for moving forward on developing the shuttle’s airframe. Approving engine development was an important first step in eventual White House approval of the space shuttle, and sug­gested that some version of the shuttle was likely to get approval in the months to come. These and other decisions, particularly the cancelation of Skylab, brought the NASA budget recommended by the OMB staff down to $2.8 billion in budget authority and $2.7 billion in FY1972 outlays. The latter figure was some $700 million below what NASA had requested and almost $500 million less than the budget target that had been provided to NASA a few months earlier. The NASA unit in OMB, led by Don Rice, was clearly setting itself up as a counterforce to NASA’s already diminished post-Apollo aspirations. Although he tentatively approved the staff recom­mendations, Weinberger wanted a better sense of the context in which they were being made. He thus requested a more detailed analysis, taking into account “agency priorities, unemployment consequences and Soviet initia­tives.”16

The proceedings of the director’s review were not supposed to be known outside the White House and Executive Office of the President. But the Space Council’s Bill Anders attended the review meeting and on a very con­fidential basis called NASA’s Low to communicate its results. In addition, Bill Lilly, NASA’s budget chief, got feedback from some of the career budget staff. Based on this information, Low judged that while Rice and the OMB career staff were “quite negative to our programs,” Weinberger had “care­fully read our letters and is, in fact, trying to get a detailed understanding of the issues involved in the NASA budget.” In addition to calling Low, Anders wrote a letter to Weinberger in support of the Skylab program. This may have been the beginning of Anders’s relationship with Weinberger; over the following months Anders served as Weinberger’s unofficial space advi­sor, providing an informed view independent of the information and rec­ommendations the OMB deputy director was getting from his staff. This relationship gave Anders a way to have an impact on major space decisions. Anders found in Weinberger an individual who appreciated the value to the nation of a vigorous space effort; he took every opportunity to nurture that appreciation.17

Overture

July 20, 1969, U. S. astronaut Neil Armstrong took "one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind," as he became the first human to set foot on the Moon. The success of the Apollo 11 mission satisfied the goal that had been set by President John F. Kennedy just over eight years earlier—"before this decade is out, landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth."1 Inevitably, it also raised the question "What do you do next, after landing on the Moon?"

It fell to President Richard M. Nixon, sworn into office exactly six months before Armstrong’s historic moonwalk, to answer this ques­tion. The following account traces in detail how Nixon and his associ­ates in the 1969-1972 period went about developing their response. The decisions made then have defined the U. S. program of human space flight well into the twenty-first century. Those choices have thus had a much more lasting impact than did John Kennedy’s 1961 decision to go to the Moon. The factors leading to Kennedy’s decision are well understood, but that is not the case with respect to space pol­icymaking under President Nixon. The goal of this study is to provide that understanding, and thus to fill in the details of a crucial period in the history of the U. S. space program, and particularly its human space flight element. The Nixon administration also made influential decisions with respect to space science and applications efforts, but those decisions will not be discussed here.

The process of deciding what the United States should do in space after Apollo is presented here as a "play in two acts." In the first act, unfolding in chapters 1-6, decisions were made on what not

to do—not to continue during the 1970s a fast-paced, high-priority, Apollo-like effort aimed at rapid development of new space capabili­ties and leading to human missions to Mars in the early to mid-1980s. Nixon soon after taking office chartered a top-level review to recom­mend post-Apollo space goals and programs. That review took place even as Apollo 11 gained worldwide acclaim; Richard Nixon made sure that he would bask in the glow of that achievement. But when presented with a recommendation for an ambitious post-Apollo space effort, Nixon decided that the nation neither wanted nor could afford such an undertaking. In March 1970 the president spelled out a policy that assigned to the space program reduced priority among the many demands on the federal budget. The refrain "after the Moon, Mars" did not resonate with the Nixon White House, even though the president himself identified with American astronauts and was intrigued with a future in space exploration that included eventual Martian journeys.

The second act of the drama, discussed in chapters 7-14, involved answering the question, "if not an ambitious post-Apollo program centered on human space flight, then what?" Options evaluated dur­ing the 1970-1972 period ranged from focusing the nation’s space capabilities on Earth-bound problems, and perhaps even transform­ing the space agency to a general-purpose technology organization, to a modestly paced effort using surplus Apollo hardware, to develop­ing a fully or partly reusable space shuttle.

During 1970, the future development that had had highest prior­ity in 1969, developing a long duration orbital outpost—a space sta­tion launched by the Saturn V Moon rocket and serviced by the space shuttle—fell from favor, and thus other rationales for developing a shuttle had to be articulated. A wide variety of shuttle designs were assessed, with the president’s technical and budget advisers arguing for a far less ambitious system than that advocated by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Factors such as aero­space unemployment and its impact on the 1972 presidential elec­tion entered into consideration, as did the message the United States would send to the world if it were to decide not to continue to seek space leadership. All involved believed that Richard Nixon wanted to continue some type of human space flight program, even as he personally tried to cancel the final flights to the Moon to avoid the possibility of the kind of near-fatal accident that had threatened the Apollo 13 crew.

Out of this complex mix of influences came the decision, announced by President Nixon on January 5, 1972, "to revolutionize transportation into near space by routinizing it."2 By approving NASA’s plans for a large space shuttle, Nixon put the shuttle at the center of U. S. space efforts without proposing clear strategic goals that it would serve. Because the shuttle would be flown by a two – person astronaut crew and on most missions would carry additional astronauts, it met Nixon’s desire to keep the human space flight pro­gram alive. The belief was that, by reducing the cost of space launch, the shuttle would open up space to a wide variety of activities. By providing capabilities for satellite deployment, in-orbit servicing, in­orbit assembly, and return of payloads to Earth, NASA hoped that the shuttle would usher in a new era of space operations. There were suggestions of innovative, potentially provocative, national secu­rity missions made possible by the new capabilities that the shuttle would offer.

The decision to develop a space shuttle was the culmination of the drama of post-Apollo space policymaking. The decision carried with it NASA’s intent, once the shuttle entered operations, to seek presi­dential support for developing a space station launched in separate elements by the shuttle and assembled in orbit. Those two activities — developing and flying the space shuttle, then developing, assembling, and utilizing the space station — have dominated U. S. human space flight efforts for four decades after the last American astronaut left the Moon in December 1972. 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."3 By the decisions he made between 1969 and 1972, Richard Nixon ensured that his forecast would come true.

NASA Resistance to Facing Its Future

James Webb had been NASA administrator from 1961 until he resigned in October 1968. Webb had seen as his overriding responsibility making sure that the Kennedy commitment to a lunar landing was carried out. With this as his focus, Webb had resisted agency-wide planning for what NASA should undertake in the post-Apollo period. According to Willis Shapley, one of Webb’s close associates at NASA, Webb “refused to the extent possible to recognize the importance” of post-Apollo planning. Webb did believe, as a “fundamental tenet,” that “we could not or should assume that the Apollo program would be a total success, and certainly not assume that it would be a total early success.” Webb felt “that nothing should be allowed to dilute the focus of the program we had taken on already, and that we should not start dreaming about what would take place after that.”6 (Shapley as NASA associate deputy administrator had a major role during the period examined in this study in developing NASA’s strategy and policies and articulating them to the White House and Congress. He was a prime example of a “face­less bureaucrat” who plays a key behind-the-scene policy role, in this case with respect to the nation’s civilian space program.) Webb’s perspective also reflected political reality. President Lyndon B. Johnson had made sure that the NASA budget remained adequate to assure Apollo’s success, but faced with spiraling costs of the Vietnam War and of his Great Society programs as well as with widespread domestic unrest, he was unwilling to approve a NASA budget at a level that could support major new space initiatives. NASA itself was a badly divided organization, with its Office of Manned Space Flight and its human space flight centers in Houston, Texas and Huntsville, Alabama planning their own course for the future, while its Office of Space Science and Applications worked with the external scientific community to define a different preferred future, one which would redress the perceived imbalance between human and robotic space missions. As a result of Webb’s resistance, agency-wide planning for the post-Apollo period began only in early 1968, and its early results were disappointing, reflecting the divisions within the organization.