Category After Apollo?

First Adjustments

All of these final Apollo missions used equipment already in production by 1970. The ability to produce more Apollo spacecraft and Saturn launchers would soon be abandoned.

No More Saturn V Launchers

NASA in July 1969 had awarded 11-month contracts to study the preliminary design of a Saturn V-launched space station to leading aerospace companies North American Rockwell and McDonnell Douglas. The space agency had set the parameters for the studies based on George Mueller’s integrated plan. The initial station module was to be 33 feet in diameter, the size of the first and second stages of the Saturn V booster that would be used to launch it. This “core module” would be able to support a 12-person crew and have a ten-year lifetime; it was to be the first step on a path to having an increasing number of humans living and working in space.

The FY1971 budget decision to suspend for an indefinite period produc­tion of the Saturn V cast an immediate pall over this plan. NASA would need one Saturn V to launch the initial module, and additional boosters if the subsequent low-Earth orbit infrastructure buildup contemplated in the STG report were to be pursued. However, the seven remaining Saturn V vehicles of the original 15 ordered at the start of Apollo were already committed to the six remaining Apollo missions after Apollo 13 and to Skylab, and pros­pects for restarting Saturn V production in a few years appeared dim.

As noted in chapter 2, the process of shutting down the production line for the Saturn V had begun in 1968, even before Richard Nixon had arrived at the White House. Then-NASA Administrator James Webb had rejected a request to begin procuring long lead-time equipment for a next production run of the Saturn V on the grounds that there was no approved requirement for those additional launchers. The Saturn V had received a brief reprieve in early 1969 as the STG recommended adding the funding to NASA’s FY1970 budget needed to keep the production line open in order to preserve President Nixon’s option to approve an ambitious post – Apollo space program. That decision had been reversed in the December 1969 budget negotiations; Tom Paine had chosen to sacrifice funding for additional Saturn Vs in order to obtain White House approval for funds to study the space station and space shuttle. The FY1971 presidential budget proposed “suspending” Saturn V production, with the idea that produc­tion could be restarted if additional heavy-lift boosters were needed in the future.

By mid-June 1970 NASA Deputy Administrator George Low concluded that restarting Saturn V production was an unrealistic hope, given NASA’s budget outlook. This meant that the only way to have the massive boosters available to launch the initial large space station module or a second Skylab mission was to cancel one or more Apollo missions and use the Saturn V boosters assigned to those missions for those launches. Low judged that NASA would “not get the amount of funding we anticipate in 1972 or 1973” and that “there seems to be a disenchantment in America and particularly in Congress with additional flights to the moon.” Low discussed his ideas on canceling one or more Apollo missions with Tom Paine, who “originally was very negative,” but upon reflection “talked about this in a much more positive vein.”2 The final decision that NASA would not retain the industrial capability required to restart Saturn V production was not made until 1972, but by mid-1970 it was virtually certain that there would be no more of the Moon rockets produced. With this decision, the United States gave up for decades to come its capability to launch astronauts for voyages beyond the immediate vicinity of Earth.

Paine Leaves NASA

On Saturday, July 25, Tom Paine called the Western White House in San Clemente requesting a ten-minute meeting on the following Monday or Tuesday to discuss a “personal decision.” That decision, it turned out, was to leave his position at NASA to accept an unexpected and apparently unso­licited offer from his former employer, General Electric, to become its vice president in charge of the company’s power generation group. This was a well-compensated position and Paine had the education of four children to pay for, but it is probable that he also was very frustrated by his inability to get the Nixon administration to accept his vision of the future in space. There is no evidence that the White House had encouraged Paine to resign; in fact, Peter Flanigan would later ask Paine to stay on until his successor was ready to take over.17

When George Low learned of Paine’s resignation, he was surprised. In a July 25 telephone conversation, Paine had told Low that he would have “some important information” he would discuss once Low arrived in Washington; Low was in the process of moving his family from Houston. Low “momen­tarily thought that this information might concern Tom’s resignation,” but he “quickly discarded this idea” because Paine had “told me after Apollo 13 that he would not leave the agency until after we had flown a successful Apollo mission.”18

Paine met with the president on the morning of Tuesday, July 28, to submit his letter of resignation, effective on September 15. Even after resign­ing, Paine continued his effort to convince Richard Nixon of the value of an ambitious U. S. space program. On August 10, Paine once again requested a 90-minute appointment with the president to present “NASA’s projection of man’s future in space to the year 2000.” Although Ehrlichman and Flanigan recommended that the president schedule such a meeting, Nixon decided to “wait for [the] new man,” that is, Paine’s replacement. When the search for a new NASA administrator did not produce quick results, the meeting never occurred.19

In attempting to set NASA on an ambitious post-Apollo course, Tom Paine had reversed by almost 180 degrees the approach followed by his predeces­sor, James Webb. According to one of his closest associates, Paine from the start of his time as NASA administrator had “decided to be a promoter. . . a fighter for what he thought ought to be done. He always may have known that he wasn’t going to get it all, but he would never admit it in advance.” Where Webb had believed that NASA should create a broad basis of capa­bility and allow the country’s leaders to select specific missions to use that capability, Paine felt that NASA should take an “uninhibited look at what the program should consist of” and then ask “the public and the nation the biggest question that we could ask, namely, whether the United States was sufficiently wealthy and sufficiently adventurous to continue human explo­ration of the solar system.” As he prepared to leave NASA, Paine continued to believe that NASA had asked “the right question, made the right offer,” but that the country, including Richard Nixon and his associates, “may have made the wrong response.”20

Paine’s 23 months as the head of NASA left a mixed legacy. He brought to the fore those within NASA who had the most expansive view of the agency’s objectives; by doing so, he tried to shake the agency out of what had been its rather cautious approach to the future. He adopted and expanded on George Mueller’s ambitious integrated plan, giving priority to human space flight rather than robotic science and application missions and in the process perpetuating the split between NASA’s human and robotic programs and antagonizing large elements of the external scientific community. Paine was willing to give up the repeated use of existing capabilities, particularly the Apollo/Saturn system, in order to get started on the next generation of human space flight projects. He took the lead in advocating international participation in NASA’s post-Apollo human space flight efforts; that partici­pation has been a hallmark of such efforts since.

Given the desire of those advising the president to avoid committing to major post-Apollo space projects, Paine’s advocacy may have been a necessary counterbalance; he thought that “the responsibilities of leadership. . . required him to get approval for as large a space program as the traffic would bear.” According to NASA’s Homer Newell, there was “a difference of opinion as to whether Paine’s attempts to force the space budget far above the lev­els the administration wanted to see kept it from falling lower than it did, or were counterproductive.” One assessment noted that Paine’s departure was “greeted with relief in the Bureau of the Budget and the White House staff”; another suggested that his resignation “came as a welcome relief to both the executive and legislative branches.” A Bureau of the Budget veteran characterized Paine as a “glory hound” who was “unrealistic and unwilling to compromise.” But to Flanigan, Paine’s aggressiveness was not “counter­productive.” Paine was a “good soldier” who accepted decisions after getting a full hearing. Ehrlichman compared Paine’s bold proposals to a spring that “had to be stretched in order for it to come back to where it belonged.”21