Category After Apollo?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• “exploration of the solar system and beyond”;

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

• “international participation and cooperation.”

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

The meeting with the president that Administrator Paine had requested in his January 15 letter was set for 4:00 p. m. on January 22. Earlier that after­noon, the president had delivered his first State of the Union message to a joint session of the Congress. He had said “the Seventies will be a time of new beginnings, a time of exploring both on the earth and in the heavens,” but otherwise made no mention of the space program. As was standard prac­tice in preparing Nixon for a meeting, Flanigan composed a briefing memo­randum. He told Nixon that the purpose of the meeting was to allow Paine “to express his convictions regarding the importance of the Space Program as it relates to your Administration.” He added that Paine had taken the first two cuts in the NASA budget “in a spirit of complete cooperation.” But with regard to the final cut, “he did resist as he believed NASA was bearing a disproportionate share of the reduction.” Flanigan characterized Paine as “consistently loyal and cooperative.” He suggested that “no doubt you will wish to assure Dr. Paine of your personal interest in and support for the Space Program in the long run.”43

The Nixon-Paine meeting went off as scheduled; Ehrlichman as well as Flanigan were present. Nixon began the meeting by saying “how much he regretted having to make the last additional cuts in NASA’s ’71 budget. He understood these were very severe and he had done it most reluctantly,” but had no choice given the overall budget situation. He worried that “NASA might find it difficult to defend even this low space budget” against charges it represented misplaced priorities. The president said that “the polls and the people to whom he talked indicated to him that the mood of the people was for cuts in space and defense.” Nixon also said that the people of the country seem to think all they want is a nice environment and a turning-away from challenge and sacrifice. Even so, thought Nixon, there were areas like “sci­ence, space, and the SST [supersonic transport] the nation must put money into.”

Paine asked Nixon what he should tell the NASA workforce about the thinking behind the budget cuts. Nixon responded that the FY1971 NASA budget should be “rock bottom” and that he was “committed to the space program for the long-term future,” adding “we should have a strong space program and it should be on an increasing [budget] curve.” Paine’s conclu­sion after the meeting was that Nixon “honestly would like to support a more vigorous space program if he felt that the national mood favored it.” This seems to have been a valid reading of Nixon’s position; in the hours following his meeting with Paine, Nixon called Bob Haldeman, directing him to make sure that the message accompanying the release of the FY1971 budget would include “the flat statement ‘We shall plan to go to Mars.’”44

Conspicuously absent from discussions in the preceding weeks on the space budget was Tom Paine’s putative White House ally, Vice President Spiro Agnew. Paine had thought as the STG process went forward that Agnew’s recommendations would carry weight within the Nixon administration, and that Agnew as chair of the Space Council could play an ongoing role in space policy and budget decisions. By the end of the budget process, Paine cer­tainly recognized that these assumptions were not valid. Agnew had become marginalized in administration policy discussions, and the Space Council had not carved out a useful role. Thus it was of limited consolation for Paine to receive a January 30 memorandum from Agnew, saying that while the vice president could not fault the “decision to reduce all budgets in a fashion commensurate to absolute national requirements,” he was “concerned about our ability to maintain the high quality of performance that NASA enjoys.” Agnew told Paine “you may be assured that I will do whatever I can to per­suade the President to move the space program back to a more ambitious level at the earliest possible moment.” There was little to no chance that Agnew could be successful in such an undertaking.45

For 11 months, Thomas Paine had been depending on the work of the Agnew-led STG and the recommendations in its report to provide the char­ter for the bold space program he thought was in the nation’s, and NASA’s, interest during the post-Apollo period. He had consistently tried to use the report as a basis for arguing against cuts in the NASA budget. With the continued reduction in that budget, Paine’s aspirations were close to being dashed. In an almost plaintive sentence in his record of the meeting with President Nixon, Paine lamented “the President didn’t mention the Space Task Group Report.”46

Richard Nixon has frequently been identified as the individual who decided to truncate the Apollo program. As the above account shows, this is not fully the case. Nixon’s personal attitude toward the desirable number of Apollo flights was not consistent. In January 1970, Nixon and his advisors approved a NASA FY1971 budget that anticipated seven more Apollo flights, even though the president had in early December 1969 expressed skepticism regarding “the need to go to the Moon six more times” and “didn’t care about building more [Apollo] hardware.” After the April 1970 Apollo 13 accident, which had a strong emotional impact on Nixon, the president indi­cated that the Apollo program would continue as planned. It was a Nixon decision to hold NASA to the tightly constrained budget that forced a choice between existing missions and getting started on future programs. But it was the NASA leadership that proposed not flying all remaining Apollo missions. In June, reflecting on NASA’s future outlook, George Low had even contemplated canceling four, rather than just two, of the remaining six Apollo flights. He noted that “if we make a major program change like this, we will attribute it to the budgetary situation and to the manpower situation in NASA, and not to the fact that it may programmatically also make more sense.”11 The United States decided in 1970 to retreat from exploring the Moon; that decision had several parents, not just Richard Nixon.