Category After Apollo?

In preparation for the January 3 White House meeting, the NASA lead­ers prepared a letter reporting on their conclusions following the harried weekend of answering OMB’s questions. The letter reported that “the previ­ous conclusion that the full capability 15 x 60—65,000# shuttle makes the most sense has been reaffirmed and we now urge—even more strongly— that this configuration be adopted.” It said that “the OMB proposed option of a 14 x 45—30,000# shuttle is not acceptable because it will not handle manned space station modules, manned sortie flights, or manned resupply missions in a standard space station orbit.” In addition, “this shuttle would not handle 28 different science, applications and planetary payloads.” Once again, NASA asked for an “Administrator’s contingency” of 20 percent of the estimated development cost to accommodate “future cost growths due to technical problems.”12

Before their meeting, Fletcher and Low stopped by the offices of the Space Council across Pennsylvania Avenue from the White House to dis­cuss with Bill Anders, who had become an ally in their conflict with OMB and OST, “what they were going to say and what they thought the state of play was. Clearly they thought everything was still under scrutiny and study and it wasn’t close to a decision.” Then they went to Shultz’s White House office; the 6:00 p. m. meeting was attended by Shultz, Weinberger, Rice, David, Flanigan, and Nixon Congressional liaison Clark MacGregor. David briefly restated his opposition to going ahead with the NASA-recommended 14 x 45 foot shuttle, but Shultz quickly overruled both David and Rice and told Fletcher and Low that they could proceed with their plans for the full capability 15 x 60 foot, 65,000 pound shuttle. At some point between December 29 and January 3, Shultz had telephoned fellow economist Oskar Morgenstern to discuss the Mathematica study of shuttle econom­ics that Morgenstern’s firm had carried out; Morgenstern assured him that the shuttle was a reasonable program in economic terms. (One report even had Shultz making the call to Morgenstern during the January 3 meeting, but this seems unlikely, given the short duration of the meeting.) With that assurance, aware of the impact of the shuttle on aerospace employment, and also apparently aware of President Nixon’s interest in the national security missions enabled by the full capability shuttle, Shultz had decided before the meeting to approve NASA’s full capability shuttle configuration. Within a few minutes, Fletcher and Low were back in the Space Council office, “kind of elated,” to report “we didn’t have to say a word; we were just told that the decision was to go ahead” with the full capability shuttle that NASA had been advocating all along. When the two NASA leaders returned to NASA headquarters and reported the outcome of their meeting to human space flight chief Dale Myers, he was “amazed.”13

The next day, to be sure that his understanding of what had been decided was correct and to get that understanding on the record, Fletcher wrote Weinberger “to document the decision reached yesterday concerning the space shuttle.” As Fletcher understood it: “NASA will proceed with the development of the space shuttle. The shuttle orbiter will have a 15 x 60-foot payload bay, and a 65,000-pound payload capability. It will be boosted either by a pressure-fed liquid recoverable booster or by solid rocket motors. NASA will make a decision between these two booster options before requests for proposals are issued in the spring of 1972.” In addition, “NASA and indus­try will also continue to study, for the next several weeks, a somewhat smaller version of the orbiter. . . The main purpose of studying this smaller shuttle is to determine whether or not significant savings in operational costs can be realized, with [already existing] solid rocket motors, at this smaller size.”14

Richard Nixon saw in the Apollo H mission a unique opportunity. Project Apollo had been intended from its 1961 approval by President Kennedy to be a large-scale effort in “soft power,” sending a peaceful but unmistakable signal to the world that the United States, not its Cold War rival the Soviet Union, possessed preeminent technological and organizational power.11 Nixon agreed with this rationale for the lunar landing program, and in his first months as president made sure to identify himself and his foreign policy agenda with what he later would hyperbolically characterize as “the greatest week in the history of the world since the Creation.” But Nixon’s embrace of Project Apollo as a tool of American soft power was short-lived. Once the United States had won the race to the Moon, he perceived little foreign policy benefit from subsequent lunar landing missions or from approving a post-Apollo program focused on preparing for missions to Mars. Other considerations, primarily domestic in character, would determine the Nixon approach to space in the post-Apollo period.

Like many other Americans, Nixon quickly lost interest in continuing Apollo flights to the Moon. As early as December 1969, after the first two lunar landings, he remarked that he “did not see the need to go to the moon six more times.” When the Apollo 12 crew visited the White House that month, mission commander Pete Conrad came away “disappointed and dis­illusioned.” He reported that Nixon evidenced an “apparent lack of interest in the space program.” Nixon did become emotionally engaged with the fate of the Apollo 13 crew, but that near-fatal experience only added risk avoid­ance to lack of interest as part of Nixon’s attitude toward lunar missions. For the Apollo 15 mission in July 1971, Nixon slept through the launch, even though the White House felt it should announce that he had followed the event closely. By that time Nixon was already urging his associates to find ways of canceling the last two Apollo missions, Apollo 16 and 17. By April 1970, the iconic “Earthrise” photograph taken during the Apollo 8 mis­sion that had been hanging on the Oval Office wall throughout 1969 was removed, a symbolic action reflecting the president’s lack of commitment to continuing space exploration.

As Apollo 17 lifted off the lunar surface on December 14, 1972, President Nixon issued a statement saying “this may be the last time in this century that men will walk on the Moon.” As the statement was read to the Apollo 17 crew as they circled to Moon before heading back to Earth, astronaut Harrison “Jack” Schmitt was furious, thinking “that was the stupidest thing a President could have said. . . Why say that to all the young people in the world. . . It was just pure loss of will.”12 By his space decisions, Nixon made sure that his forecast would become reality. As of this writing, humans have not traveled beyond the immediate vicinity of Earth for 42 years, and no such journey is planned before 2021, almost 50 years after the last Americans left the Moon.

Nixon coupled his lack of personal interest in continuing Apollo flights to a political judgment with respect to the space program—that the American public was not interested in supporting an expensive, exploration-oriented space program. As he met with NASA Administrator Tom Paine in January 1970 to explain his decision to reject the Space Task Group-recommended post-Apollo program, Nixon told Paine “the polls and the people to whom he talked indicated to him that the mood of the people was for cuts in space.”

In May 1961, John Kennedy had paid little attention to poll results showing that the majority of the U. S. public opposed spending the sums of money needed to send Americans to the Moon; Kennedy proposed Apollo as a top-down leadership initiative based on geopolitical considerations. In

contrast, Richard Nixon saw no persuasive foreign policy or national security reason to lead a reluctant nation and its representatives in Congress toward accepting an ambitious post-Apollo space program, particularly one aimed at developing the capabilities needed for early trips to Mars. Staff assistant Clay Thomas “Tom” Whitehead, who among the White House staff had the most level-headed approach to future space activities, commented that “no compelling reason to push space was ever presented to the White House by NASA or anyone else.”14

The immediate consequence of Richard Nixon’s decision not to continue space exploration was suspending production of the Saturn V Moon rocket and approving a NASA budget outlook that forced the agency’s leadership to cancel two planned Apollo missions in order to have funds available for future projects. During the 1960s NASA had developed the Saturn V and its related ground facilities on the expectation that the vehicle would remain in service for many years and would be the enabler of a continuing exploration- oriented space effort. These hopes were dashed by Richard Nixon’s initial space decisions; those decisions meant that the United States was voluntarily giving up for the foreseeable future the results from its multibillion dollar investment in exploratory capabilities and transforming the unused Saturn V launchers into very impressive museum exhibits.

There is one sense in which Richard Nixon’s decision to reject continued space exploration might seem somewhat surprising. Nixon often included space activity as an important aspect of his frequently repeated call for “exploring the unknown,” an activity that he believed was essential if the United States was to remain a “great nation.” For example, in February 1971 he told a group of astronauts “in the history of great nations, once a nation gives up in the competition to explore the unknown, or once it accepts a position of inferiority, it ceases to be a great nation.” In a June 1972 conversation with the Apollo 16 crew, Nixon equated exploring the unknown with concepts as varying as “science, breakthroughs in educa­tion, breakthroughs in technology, breakthroughs in transportation,” adding “space—that’s the unknown. What’s out there?”15 Nixon did com­municate to his associates that he was interested in eventual human jour­neys to Mars, and even mused about the possibility of finding life on a moon of Jupiter, but he saw those activities in the far future, not as objec­tives related to the decisions he would make during his time in the White House. Nor did Nixon cast his decision to approve the space shuttle in the context of its being an initial step in a decades-long effort to explore destinations beyond the immediate vicinity of Earth. NASA in its input to the Space Task Group had portrayed the space shuttle as part of a coher­ent long-range strategy ultimately leading to outposts on the Moon and journeys to Mars, and even in 1971 retained elements of that thinking in its technical planning, but that perspective was not considered as part of Nixon’s decision to approve the shuttle.

To Nixon, “exploration” was not a sharply defined concept, and his repeated calls for “exploring the unknown” seem to have been little more than what a historian would call a “trope”—an overused rhetorical device offered in the place of substantive thought. Nixon was notoriously poor at conversation with any but those in his inner circle, and falling back on repetitive rheto­ric was often his way of dealing with discussions of policy issues with those outside that inner circle. The lack of logic in Nixon’s attitude with respect to space activities was on display as he told one of his Congressional relations staff in 1971 that “the United States should not drop out of any competition in a breakthrough in knowledge—exploring the unknown. That’s one of the reasons I support the space program.” Without pausing, he then said “I don’t give a damn about space. I am not one of those space cadets.”

Exploring the space frontier was in reality not part of Richard Nixon’s strategic vision for America, and thus his repeated call for “exploring the unknown” had little connection to his actual decisions on space policy and budgets in the post-Apollo period. By rejecting the recommendations of the Space Task Group, the Nixon administration attempted to reduce U. S. space ambitions to match the budget it deemed appropriate to allocate to NASA in the post-Apollo period. However, that lowering of ambitions did not hap­pen, either then or since. The exploratory vision still persists; a 2009 blue – ribbon review of the U. S. human space flight program concluded that “Mars is the ultimate destination for human exploration of the inner solar system” and that “human [space] exploration. . . should advance us as a civilization towards our ultimate goal: charting a path for human expansion into the solar system.” Discussing the persistence of this vision, Howard McCurdy suggests “expectations invariably fail, but the underlying vision rarely dies. Rather, people update the vision. The dream moves on.”16

One can argue that Richard Nixon made a major policy mistake in man­dating that the space program should be treated as just one of many govern­ment programs competing for limited resources. Certainly the belief that this judgment was ill-conceived is the long-held position of space advocates. But it is also possible that Nixon’s decision-that U. S. space ambitions should be adjusted to the funds made available through the normal policy process-was a valid reading of public preferences, and there were no countervailing reasons for him to reject those preferences. If this is the case, then the Nixon admin­istration in its space decisions was correctly reflecting the view of the major­ity of the U. S. public. There is no evidence that this situation has changed over the past 40 years; the most recent review of the U. S. space exploration program notes “lukewarm public support” for a program of human space exploration and the absence of “a committed, passionate minority large and influential enough” to provide a political basis for such a program.17

What has actually happened since Richard Nixon made his decisions to end lunar exploration, not to set a new exploratory goal, and to remove the space program’s special priority is neither reduced ambitions nor increased budgets; instead, for more than 40 years there has been a continuing mis­match between space ambitions and the resources provided to achieve them. This outcome is close to the worst possible recipe for space program success; a central part of Richard Nixon’s space heritage is thus a U. S. civilian space program continually “straining to do too much with too little"

In his new instructions to NASA’s Phase A study contractors on May 5, George Mueller had changed his original guidance to include the capabil­ity to launch 50,000 pounds rather than 25,000 pounds to the space sta­tion orbit and to provide 10,000 rather than 3,000 cubic feet of volume in the shuttle payload bay. But he did not direct the contractors to focus their study effort on vehicles capable of providing the cross-range desired by the national security community. Mueller was very aware that NASA’s “chief designer,” Maxime (Max) Faget, director of engineering and development at the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) in Houston, preferred a shuttle concept with straight wings and limited cross-range. Faget had designed the Mercury spacecraft and helped design the Gemini and Apollo spacecraft, and was a powerful force within NASA’s engineering community. As the DOD/NASA report was being approved for submission to the Space Task Group, Mueller insisted that the preface to the report include the following statement: “If it is later determined that a specific performance characteristic imposes severe penalties on technical risk, cost or schedule, the necessity for fully achieving that characteristic will be assessed.” It is likely that the cross­range requirement was in Mueller’s mind as he inserted this reservation into the report.22

Mueller on August 6 mandated that the “space shuttle will be developed utilizing fully reusable systems only.” This directive came as NASA was pushing Mueller’s integrated plan, with its emphasis on low cost based on reusability, as the basis for the recommendations in the STG report. This was an influential order. NASA and industry studies for the following two years focused only a two-stage shuttle with a fully reusable “booster” stage lifting a fully reusable spacecraft, designated an “orbiter,” off the launch pad and accelerating it to a high velocity; then the orbiter’s engines would fire to accelerate it the rest of the way into orbit. Mueller’s ambitious objective of full reusability ruled out of the Phase A studies several promising concepts that were not fully reusable; those concepts reemerged only after NASA abandoned its hope for a fully reusable shuttle in mid-1971, discovering that it was both too expensive to develop within projected budgets and likely too technically risky.23

NASA in mid-1970 had issued, along with the two Phase B preliminary design contracts to North American Rockwell and McDonnell Douglas, three smaller study contracts to examine alternative shuttle designs. While the Lockheed and Chrysler studies were managed by the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama, a Grumman/Boeing study was managed by the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) in Houston. Houston used this study contract as a means of getting industry analysis of various ideas with respect to shuttle design emerging both from within NASA and from the various study contractors. In particular, Grumman began in late 1970 to examine a shuttle orbiter design in which the fuel tanks holding the very low tempera­ture liquid hydrogen needed as fuel for the orbiter’s advanced shuttle engines were moved from inside the orbiter fuselage to the vehicle’s exterior and discarded when the fuel was expended. The idea of expendable fuel tanks was not new; several of the 1969 Phase A contractors had initially examined their use, but George Mueller in August 1969 had mandated that the studies from that point on would only consider fully reusable designs. Because liquid hydrogen is light in weight but accounted for three-fourths of the volume of shuttle propellant, the hydrogen tanks had to be large, and removing them from the vehicle’s internal structure made possible shrinking the size and weight of the orbiter by some 30 percent. Having expendable fuel tanks, Grumman suggested, would lower orbiter development costs by more than $1 billion while not adding significantly to per flight costs; in the budgetary context of 1970-1971, this was a very attractive prospect. NASA on April 1, 1971, added an additional task to the two more in-depth Phase B studies, asking North American Rockwell and McDonnell Douglas to examine an orbiter with two external hydrogen fuel tanks.

As industry studies continued in mid-1971 and NASA’s in-house engi­neering design team at MSC also focused on a smaller, lower cost, less complex orbiter, the idea of using a single large external and expendable propellant tank containing both hydrogen fuel and oxygen oxidizer gained increasing acceptance, and became a part of the consensus orbiter design that was emerging from Houston’s efforts. The cost of discarding the exter­nal tank on each flight was seen as acceptable in terms of the overall costs of both developing and operating the shuttle, given the savings in develop­ment costs resulting from designing a smaller orbiter and the relatively low increase in the cost of each flight associated with using an expendable pro­pellant tank.41

In preparation for the director’s review, Dan Taft, head of the OMB space unit, prepared a lengthy paper on “The U. S. Civilian Space Program: a Look at the Options” that at its core reflected the budget office’s long-held skeptical view of the value of human space flight. The options paper recognized that the “key issue” with respect to FY1973 budget decisions was “the future role of man in space.” It noted that “historically, [the] primary reason for man in space has been the international technological image of the U. S.,” and asked “are our historical reasons for keeping man in space still sufficient to justify keeping man in space? If so, how much extra should the U. S. be willing to pay for manned flight relative to an unmanned program which could pro­duce comparable scientific and practical benefits?” The paper observed that

The contrast between President Nixon’s [March 7, 1970, space] statement and former President Kennedy’s 1961 address on space provides an interest­ing illustration of the change in attitude of the national leadership towards the space program. In contrast to President Nixon’s call for a balanced and orderly space program, former President Kennedy’s address conveys a sense of urgency, international competition with the Soviets, and the battle “between freedom and tyranny.”

With the passage of time and the achievement of successful programs, the importance of international competition and world opinion seems to have diminished. . . And yet, the significance of international competition in space is not over. . . With the Soviets steadily continuing their manned space pro­gram, would the U. S. be willing to terminate manned space flight?3

The paper declared “the objective of the future space transportation system is to reduce the total investment and operating costs (launch vehicles plus payloads) of space operations.” New capabilities provided by the shuttle, a point that NASA was advocating, did not enter into OMB’s evaluation. The paper concluded that “at the 10% discount rate, all of the shuttle options save less systems cost” than a new expendable launch vehicle. To Taft, “only the need to resupply a Space Station begins to justify investing in a reusable shut­tle capability.” Recognizing the reasoning behind NASA’s 1970 decision to give priority to shuttle development, the paper presciently commented: “In a sense, a commitment to a shuttle is an implicit commitment to a subsequent space station program.” Given that station development had been deferred to an undefined future date, this perspective led to the conclusion that there was no justifiable reason for approving shuttle development in the FY1973 budget.4

Taft’s paper set out “an illustrative future space program.” That program would complete the remaining scheduled Apollo and Skylab manned space flights, but would “postpone the space shuttle indefinitely.” It acknowledged “the possibility that the shuttle might become more economically attractive and be initiated in the 1980’s,” but until then a slow-paced human space flight program would use expendable launch vehicles. With the deferral of shuttle development, NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, could be closed; reducing NASA’s institutional base by closing Marshall was a particular OMB objective. Taft’s proposed program would reduce NASA’s budget to $2.6 billion per year by the mid-1970s.5

As December 1971 began, Don Rice and his Office of Management and Budget (OMB) space staff remained on a collision course with NASA. Rice had taken Cap Weinberger’s guidance at the October 22 director’s review as license to direct his staff not only to come up with alternative, less ambitious, and thus less expensive, shuttle requirements in terms of payload bay size and weight-lifting capability, but also to present that new shuttle concept in the context of a different program of human space flight than what NASA was proposing. Rice was convinced that the shuttle NASA preferred was “a huge overinvestment for what the country needs,” and believed it was his respon­sibility as a steward of the federal budget to help protect the president from making that overinvestment.1

By mid-November, the OMB staff had drafted a decision memorandum for President Nixon on “the future direction of the U. S. civilian space pro­gram” and was circulating the draft inside the White House and Executive Office of the President for comments. The memo set forth “a description and analysis of NASA’s proposed future manned space flight program and an alternative program.” That alternative program “would gradually decrease NASA’s annual spending from the present $3.2 billion to about $2.5 bil­lion by 1976.” Included would be a “smaller, reduced cost version of the manned reusable shuttle. . . NASA’s larger version would not be developed now because it would probably prove too costly, uneconomical, and risky a venture.”2

George Low on November 14 noted that “we have had no direct interac­tion with OMB. . . since the budget hearings several weeks ago. . . It is clear that there are opposing forces. . . Those who are for space for its own sake appear to be very few in number.”3 Those opposing forces would play them­selves out in the following weeks as final decisions on which space shuttle to develop were made. But first President Richard Nixon twice made funda­mentally the same choice—a choice that would provide the context within which those final decisions would unfold. These two presidential decisions took place in late November and early December; Nixon left the specifics of what shuttle configuration to develop for his associates to decide during

the rest of December. There is no written or recorded evidence of his direct involvement in that decision, although it is probable that he was informed regarding the alternatives under consideration and informally communicated his views with respect to those options to his inner circle.

Even as NASA was receiving White House approval to proceed with the large space shuttle, Fletcher and Low were concerned about whether the shuttle program would gain Congressional approval; that was one of the reasons that Clark MacGregor was at the January 3 meeting. At the same time the shuttle was being approved, the White House had finally decided to cancel the NERVA nuclear rocket engine project after keeping it on life support for the previous several years. The NASA leaders’ concern was that “without NERVA we will not have the political support in the Senate that we need for the Space Shuttle and other programs.” Low’s assessment was “that were we to cancel NERVA we have a 50/50 chance of com­pletely losing all support by Howard Cannon [D-NV].” Fletcher agreed with Low, telling Shultz that other than Cannon, “there are no other spokesmen, on the Democratic side of our [Senate Space] Committee, that would or could carry the NASA bill through the Senate. Therefore, without a meaningful nuclear propulsion program, we are taking the very major risk of losing the space shuttle, as well as other pieces of the NASA program, in the Senate.” Low even suggested that “the NERVA situa­tion is to my mind more complicated and more difficult than the Shuttle question.”15

The final outcome was to cancel NERVA, to allow NASA to carry out a study effort to define a smaller nuclear propulsion system, and to include in the president’s budget request with respect to nuclear propulsion lan­guage intended to be palatable to Senators Cannon and Clinton Anderson (D-NM), another strong supporter of NERVA. Anderson was actually the chairman of the Senate Committee on Space and Astronautics, but he was old and ill, and not able to lead the Senate debate on the NASA budget. These moves may have been essential in assuring eventual Senate support of the space shuttle.

Although the Nixon decisions to treat the space program as just one of many government activities and to defer human space exploration for the indefi­nite future have had lasting impacts, the space shuttle program stands as Richard Nixon’s most recognized space legacy. Thus any assessment of that legacy must give particular weight to the shuttle’s influence on the evolution of the American space program.

Once NASA decided in 1970 to focus on developing the space shuttle as its major post-Apollo effort, there were many designs considered and a num­ber of alternatives to going ahead with a shuttle suggested. During 1971, there was a somewhat confused sorting out of these various possibilities, but as the debate over developing a shuttle reached its final stage, there was little doubt that the White House would approve some version of a shuttle rather than pursue an alternative course. Other options, such as deferring a shuttle decision and carrying out an interim program of human space flight using surplus Apollo hardware or developing an unpowered space glider or a new crew-carrying capsule, had fallen by the wayside. The key decision to be made was thus what kind of shuttle, to carry out what missions, and with what rationale, would be approved.

The options for choice were clearly understood as the decision process reached its climax. As George Low observed in December 1971, “the basic issue on the space shuttle concerns whether or not the shuttle should capture a majority of the payloads that will be flown in the 1980’s” and “whether the shuttle should be small or large and whether it should provide for routine operations or one or two flights per year.” These two alternative approaches were embodied in two competing shuttle designs, called here the “NASA shuttle” and the “OMB shuttle.” The NASA shuttle—the design ultimately selected—was the end product of more than two years of study by NASA and its aerospace contractors; that study effort had been guided by a com­bination of national security and NASA’s own requirements and the OMB pressure to make the shuttle “cost effective.” The NASA shuttle was a full capability vehicle incorporating advanced propulsion, thermal protection, and electronic systems technologies. It would have a 15 x 60 foot payload bay, be able to carry a 65,000 pound payload to a 100 nautical mile orbit due east from the Kennedy Space Center, launch or return a 40,000 pound payload from a polar orbit, and be capable of 1100 nautical miles of cross­range maneuvering. With these capabilities, the NASA shuttle would be able to carry out all planned and potential U. S. civilian, national security, and commercial missions. NASA claimed that it could be launched on a routine basis and at significantly lower cost than any alternative launch system and that it would provide valuable new capabilities for space operations. Such a shuttle, NASA claimed, could be developed for a budget of between $5 and $6 billion.

The staffs of the White House Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and Office of Science and Technology (OST) were deeply skeptical of the validity of these claims and indeed of the need for a system with the capa­bilities NASA was promising. Although many in the two staff offices were indeed skeptical of the value of human space flight itself, they recognized that no American president, and in particular not Richard Nixon, with his emotional view of NASA’s astronauts, would choose to end the U. S. human space flight program. They therefore resonated to the advice given by Alexander Flax, chair of the ad hoc panel of the President’s Science Advisory Committee set up to examine the NASA shuttle, that “serious consideration must be given to less costly programs which, while they provide considerably less advancement in space capability than the [NASA] shuttle, still continue to maintain options for continuing manned spaceflight activity, enlarge space operational capabilities, and allow for further progress in space tech­nology.” This perspective led to OMB recommending to President Nixon in early December 1971 that he direct “OMB and OST to work with NASA on the reorientation of the space program,” with a central feature of that reorientation a “smaller, reduced cost” shuttle design. Nixon approved this recommendation on December 3, 1971, and a few days later OMB presented NASA with its concept for a less ambitious shuttle, with a 10 x 30 foot pay­load bay and 30,000 pound payload lifting capability, to be developed at a budget of no more than $4 billion.

The question of which of these two alternatives to approve was debated through most of December 1971. Even as the final choice to approve the NASA full capability shuttle was being made over the New Year’s weekend, Don Rice, assistant director of OMB, and science adviser Ed David were still arguing strongly against that step. While Rice focused his opposition on the excessive cost of the NASA shuttle, David took a broader view, arguing that “the large space program implicit in the large shuttle decision is not consis­tent with the best interests of the nation.” The opposition of Rice and David was well-founded and subsequently validated, but they were overruled by their White House bosses and ultimately by President Nixon. Nixon and his associates gave less weight to cost and technical issues than to other politi­cal and policy considerations as they decided to approve NASA’s preferred shuttle design.

That Mueller was not fully committed to a space shuttle design responsive to the performance requirements proposed by the NASA/DOD report soon became evident to the Air Force. In a September 15, 1969, memorandum to Secretary of the Air Force Seamans, Air Force Chief of Staff General John Ryan suggested that Mueller had “redirected the activities of the NASA and responsive contractors to a Space Transportation System/Space Shuttle which is knowingly inadequate for the Air Force.” This harsh judg­ment was based on Mueller’s August directive to those studying shuttle designs and Mueller’s comments at a September 10-11 meeting attended by shuttle study contractors and Air Force representatives. At that meet­ing, Mueller had indicated that designs with a payload of 20,000 pounds to the space station orbit, not the 50,000 pounds minimum, which was the national security requirement, should be studied. He also identified cross-range “as desirable but not required.” Mueller was reported as saying that the Air Force position regarding cross-range and payload weight was “soft.”24

Seamans was in a difficult position. On one hand, in his role as STG member he had taken a “go slow” stance with respect to shuttle develop­ment; in his comments at the August 4 STG meeting and the letter he had given Vice President Agnew at that meeting, Seamans had recommended that “we embark on a program to study by experimental means including orbital tests the possibility of a Space Transportation System that would permit the cost per pound in orbit to be reduced by a substantial factor.” Seamans added “it is not yet clear that we have the technology to make such a major improvement.” On the other hand, Seamans recognized that NASA was not taking his advice and instead was pushing for rapid development of an operational shuttle. Given the possibility that a shuttle not meeting national security requirements might be approved, Seamans proposed an action to make sure that those requirements were accommodated in which­ever shuttle design was eventually approved. In November 1969, Seamans wrote NASA Administrator Paine, suggesting “a senior-level management policy board” to guide the shuttle program; such a board would “insure that the interests and objectives of both the DOD and NASA are fully rep­resented and maximum cooperation between the agencies is achieved.” The board, said Seamans, “would be essentially the Board of Directors for the STS development and would be concerned with requirements, technol­ogy, funding, and management.” Given what was happening under George Mueller’s direction at NASA, Seamans added “I am convinced that such a policy board is necessary.”25

In his letter Seamans referred to the Gemini Program Planning Board as a desirable model for the board he had in mind. That board had been set up in 1963, after Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara had attempted to seize control of NASA’s Gemini program. Seamans, in 1963 NASA’s associate administrator, had been on the other side of the table negotiating with McNamara to create an arrangement that retained NASA’s lead role in Gemini while still providing a channel for making sure that the program also served DOD interests. As a senior DOD official six years later, he wanted to make sure that whatever shuttle NASA might propose also served national security interests.26

One challenge in designing a smaller orbiter using an expendable propel­lant tank or tanks was maintaining the 15 x 60 foot payload bay required to launch the largest national security payloads. As NASA began to explore what it called the “drop tank” design, Dale Myers on May 25 wrote Grant Hansen, asking him to “determine if Air Force requirements [which included National Reconnaissance Office payloads] could be accommodated” in a 12 x 40 foot payload bay. He added that “if this is not possible, I would appreciate some thoughts as to what missions must exceed these dimensions and what alternate launch capabilities could be used.”42

Hansen’s reply was negative in tone, saying that a shuttle with the smaller payload bay would “preclude our full use of the potential capability and operational flexibility offered by the shuttle” and would “degrade the pay­load cost savings” that were an important part of the national security inter­est in the shuttle. Maintaining the Air Force Titan III expendable boosters to launch the largest national security payloads would mean that “the potential economic attractiveness and the utility of the shuttle to the DOD” would be “severely diminished.” Hansen estimated with the shorter payload bay “71 of the 149 payloads forecasted for the 1981 to 1990 time period in option C and 129 of the 232 payloads forecasted in Option B of the mission model will require launch vehicles of the Titan III family.” Hansen also noted the negative consequences of a narrower payload bay, especially in terms of the use of a large “transfer stage” to carry national security payloads to geosyn­chronous orbit.43 This response reflected the continuing national security community pressure on NASA to maintain a shuttle design with a large payload bay, even as NASA was seeking an approach to minimize shuttle development costs.