Category After Apollo?

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.

One impact of creating the Domestic Council as the structure for developing policy options for presidential choice was that NASA’s FY1972 budget pro­posal was evaluated, as had been suggested in the March 1970 presidential space statement, in comparison to the budget proposals of other domestic agencies. The Domestic Council staff person assigned both to look for poten­tial cuts in the overall budget and to track NASA issues was Ehrlichman’s deputy Ed Harper, who held a doctorate in political science and who had worked in the Bureau of the Budget before joining the council staff. In mid­August, even before formal agency budget requests were submitted to OMB, Harper had provided John Ehrlichman with a list of potential budget cuts across the executive branch. Listed as among the “easier cuts to announce” were an “across the board” reduction of $40 million in the NASA budget;

Harper also identified the possibility of canceling Skylab, which would save $300 million. Another Ehrlichman assistant, John Whitaker, had provided a “political evaluation of cutback or elimination possibilities” related to the budget planning targets that OMB had provided to various agencies; with respect to NASA, Whitaker had suggested that “in principle for policy rea­sons, continue moon manned space flight on a stretched out basis, but cut out space shuttle and station. Real money ($2 billion) could be saved—[but] look at unemployment effect.”3

Tom Paine, even as he was preparing to leave NASA, and Low met with George Shultz and Cap Weinberger, the new leaders of OMB, in early September. Low reported that “the meeting was fairly short but. . . fruitful. Shultz looks like the kind of person we could easily work with, if only he were going to be available to us. I’m not sure whether the same would be true of Weinberger.” NASA was told that “the procedure that will be used by OMB this year is that they will try to delegate agency level discussions to one of the three political appointees at the Associate Director [actually Assistant Director] level.” For NASA, that would be “a man by the name of Don Rice, whom we have not yet met.” That would change quickly; Rice would establish himself as a formidable presence in NASA-OMB dealings over the 1970-1972 period. Also in early September, new science adviser Ed David came to NASA for a briefing on NASA programs. David “was attentive for about two hours while we ran through our entire program and commented very little,” according to Low, who observed that it was “quite difficult, on the basis of this first meeting, to even form a first impression.”4

Like most politicians, Richard Nixon throughout his first term as presi­dent worried about his prospects for reelection, and was concerned that job reductions in the aerospace sector caused by his cuts in the defense and space budgets could have negative political consequences in key electoral states, particularly California. Nixon and his long-time associates recognized that Nixon had won the presidency “by an eyelash in 1968, just as we lost by an eyelash in 1960, and thought during the first term we would likely win or lose by an eyelash in 1972.”5 Thus winning California loomed large in Nixon’s reelection planning. Nixon was also interested in restoring the U. S. economy to a healthy condition, and believed that unemployment in high technology sectors ran counter to that objective. Nixon brought his long­time associate Robert Finch to the White House in June 1970 both because Finch was having problems handling the stress of his position as secretary of health, education, and welfare and because he wanted Finch’s advice on strategy for the 1970 Congressional elections and the 1972 presidential cam­paign.

Harper from the Domestic Council staff wrote Finch on an “urgent” basis on September 23 about a “Key Election Issue: Federally Caused Unemployment.” He reported that “cutbacks in Defense and NASA by 1972 will shrink by 30% in expenditures from 1968 levels, creating unem­ployment (850,000 workers)—especially among scientists and engineers (an additional 130,000).” He added that “the unemployment is very localized,” with 43.5 percent concentrated in the Pacific region, with the Los Angeles area as the hardest hit.6 The connection between aerospace employment and the space shuttle, already evident in 1970, was to prove an important fac­tor in the final decision to approve the NASA-preferred shuttle at the end of 1971.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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