Category After Apollo?

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.