Category After Apollo?

OMB Director Shultz wrote NASA’s Low on February 27, 1971, to reiter­ate the need for the economic analysis as an input into the shuttle deci­sion process. Mathematica’s final report arrived at OMB only on July 23, even though the report was dated May 31. A major reason for the delay in submitting the report to OMB were Mathematica-NASA interactions on what the report would say. Heiss commented that “there was tremendous pressure by NASA on us to come out and say okay, the two stage shuttle is a good thing.” Drafts of the executive summary were read by NASA “12, 15 times” and Mathematica was asked “why do you need this paragraph in and this is gratuitous and this is sort of not warranted.” Mathematica “stuck with it.” The report’s language, noted Heiss, was “carefully bal­anced.” In particular, Heiss said that the report’s wording was intended to imply that “it’s not clear that the two-stage system is really the one that could accomplish this [fly the projected 1980s missions] at the least cost.”37

The Mathematica report analyzed 23 different “scenarios”—forecasts of future launch demand. One of those scenarios was based on the mission model provided by NASA and DOD, which called for 736 missions over the period 1978-1990, an average of 56 missions per year. The costs of developing a shuttle and the facilities required to operate it was estimated by Mathematica to be $12.8 billion and the incremental cost of a shuttle launch was set at $4.6 million (in 1970 dollars). For this scenario, Mathematica estimated that there would be almost an $8 billion savings in launch costs and an $18 billion savings in payload costs compared to the use of existing expendable boosters. The report concluded that at a 10 percent discount rate, the “allowable” development cost (the maximum amount that would produce economic benefits) of a fully reusable space shuttle, including the space tug needed to move payloads to orbits the shuttle could not reach, was [8]

Since NASA study contractors were estimating that shuttle development (not counting the space tug) would range between $9 and $12 billion, on a purely economic basis the case for investing in the shuttle clearly required a high flight rate for the 1980s, including not only NASA but national secu­rity and commercial missions; it would take over 40 launches per year for the investment in the shuttle to break even financially.38

While there was a relatively firm basis, based on past experience with developing large aircraft and other space systems, for estimating the costs of developing and testing the shuttle, there was no comparable experience in estimating the cost of operating a reusable space system or the payload sav­ings that could result from its use. Yet those costs were an important element in determining the system’s economic payoff. This was a significant flaw in Mathematica’s analysis, since the cost per launch and payload savings inputs to its analysis were based on what one senior NASA engineer would describe only as an “optimistic guess.”39

Mathematica went on to note that the fully reusable shuttle was poten­tially “not the only system” that could achieve these significant payload cost savings, that “other technically acceptable systems should be studied,” and that “the task of identifying the best reusable Space Transportation System among all viable alternatives” had not begun. These points resonated with Don Rice and his staff at OMB, who had been pushing NASA, without much success, to look at alternatives to the fully reusable shuttle. The report com­mented that “the economic justification of a reusable Space Transportation System is independent of the question of manned versus unmanned space flight,” suggesting that the shuttle should be seen as a means of achieving space program objectives, not an end in itself. The report said that a shuttle should be developed “only. . . if can be shown, conclusively, what it is to be used for and that the intended uses are meaningful to those who have to appropriate the funds, and to those from whom the funds are raised.”40

The Mathematica report was hardly a ringing endorsement of the case for developing the two-stage, fully reusable shuttle. Its appearance in mid-1971 was an important added input to the moves already underway within NASA to make major changes in the agency’s approach to developing the space shuttle.

The first step in the budget decision process was a set of “hearings” at which NASA met with those in OMB and other parts of the Executive Office of the President working on space issues to present the thinking behind NASA’s budget request. The OMB hearings took place on October 6, 7, and 8, with the human space flight program being the focus on October 7. Low led the NASA delegation to the hearings and reported that they were gener­ally positive and friendly in tone. Low told Rice and the OMB staff that at the budget level of approximately $3.2 billion that NASA had requested, the agency’s priorities with respect to human space flight were, in order: flying Skylab, starting shuttle development, flying the Apollo 16 and 17 missions, carrying out a docking mission with a Soviet spacecraft, and adding addi­tional “gap-filler” missions using left-over Apollo hardware. But if NASA were held to a budget less that $3 billion as proposed in the OMB August target, said Low, NASA would give priority to flying the remaining two Apollo missions and would “re-examine what to do about future manned space flight.”1

There was one exception to the collegial tone of the October 7 hearing. William Niskanen, head of the OMB Evaluation Division, made two pro­vocative suggestions. The first was to finance the NASA program through revenues raised by selling the material returned from the Apollo missions to the Moon. The second was to have the private sector, using its own financial resources, develop the next generation space transportation system, and then sell transportation services to NASA and the Department of Defense (DOD) to recoup that investment. The staff of the Evaluation Division was in gen­eral even more skeptical of the value of NASA’s human space flight program than were OMB’s mainline budget examiners, and Niskanen a year earlier had been an opponent of any hint of a commitment to the space shuttle. Niskanen was a student of conservative economist Milton Freidman at the University of Chicago and libertarian in political and economic philosophy, advocating a very limited role for government; this perspective made him an opponent of major new government programs justified on economic grounds.

Reacting to the first of Niskanen’s ideas, the Space Council’s Anders com­mented that “unless the President himself ordered us to consider the selling of lunar material for profit, we should not even discuss the subject because it would be embarrassing to the Administration.” With respect to a commercial shuttle, Low told Niskanen that “the reason for not doing it is that it simply won’t work: if the idea is to cancel the space program, this might be a way to do it.” Whereupon, Low reported, Niskanen and his staff left the room, “but not without making a fairly strong threat about NASA’s budget.”

OMB’s Rice was personally sympathetic to the idea of not going ahead with the shuttle, noting that Niskanen and his group “wanted to kill it, just kill it off,” but that he had “adopted the view fairly early on that while that may well be the desirable thing to do from a broader public interest point of view, I didn’t believe that the President was in fact going to take the country out of manned space flight.” This skeptical perspective would lead Rice in the following weeks to seek the least costly shuttle program possible, putting him in direct opposition to NASA’s insistence that only a large space shuttle made sense. Rice’s background was in the type of systems analysis that had been developed at the Rand Corporation (which he would later head) and applied during the 1960s under Robert McNamara at the DOD; both Rice and Niskanen had worked at DOD then. Rice had pushed NASA to take a “whole systems” approach to evaluating the shuttle and possible alternatives for space transportation in terms of their cost-effectiveness. This approach, with its emphasis on quantitative measures, gave primary importance to eco­nomic factors. NASA’s Fletcher, believing that the primary reason for going ahead with the shuttle was the new capabilities it would offer and the intan­gible values associated with human space flight, was skeptical of a systems analysis approach to evaluating the shuttle, believing that “you can make systems analysis prove anything you want. . . it was just a lot of hocus-pocus,” since it could not assign a quantitative value to those new capabilities or to the value of the shuttle in terms of national prestige and international coop­eration. NASA’s Willis Shapley described Rice as “a strong believer in the religion of systems analysis” who took the shuttle issue on “to prove. . . that you could really get a better decision by really giving this the full systems analysis treatment.” Shapley, himself a long-time Bureau of the Budget staff person before joining NASA, observed that “analysis becomes a weapon in a controversy rather than a search after some abstract kind of truth.”2

NASA’s primary link to President Nixon and other senior White House decision makers was through Peter Flanigan and his assistant Jonathan Rose. George Low drafted a “best case” essay on the shuttle for Rose and Flanigan to use within the White House; it was edited by Willis Shapley and sent to Rose by James Fletcher on November 22. The essay made five points:

1. The U. S. cannot forego manned space flight.

2. The space shuttle is the only meaningful new manned space program that can be accomplished on a modest budget.

3. The space shuttle is a necessary next step for the practical use of space.

4. The cost and complexity of today’s shuttle is one-half of what it was six months ago.

5. Starting the shuttle now will have a significant positive effect on aerospace employment. Not starting would be a serious blow to both the morale and health of the Aerospace Industry.

The paper observed that “man has learned to fly in space, and man will continue to fly in space. This is fact. And, given this fact, the United States cannot forego its responsibility—to itself and to the free world—to have a part in manned space flight. . . For the U. S. not to be in space, while others do have men in space, is unthinkable, and a position which America cannot accept.” It suggested that the shuttle “can provide transportation to and from space each week,” and that “space operations would indeed become routine.” The link to an eventual space station and other long-term space activities was made explicit: “In the 1980’s and beyond, the low cost to orbit [that] the shuttle gives us is essential for all the dramatic and practi­cal future programs we can conceive. One example is a space station.” The paper argued that “the shuttle helps our international position—both our competitive position with the Soviet Union and our prospects of coopera­tion with them and other nations. . . With the shuttle, the United States will have a clear space superiority over the rest of the world.” It claimed that the shuttle could be developed for an investment of $4.5-$5 billion, with an operating cost of “around $10 million or less per flight.” It noted that the shuttle orbiter “has been dramatically reduced in size—from a length of 206 feet down to 110 feet,” but “the payload carrying capability has not been reduced.” In terms of employment effects, “an accelerated start on the shuttle would lead to a direct employment of 8,000 by the end of 1972, and 24,000 by the end of 1973.”46

With this paper, NASA stated its arguments for shuttle approval in what its leaders hoped would be a convincing fashion. Unlike the somewhat nega­tive arguments in support of the space shuttle that George Low had put forward in October 1970—that shuttle development could be justified “as a versatile and economical system for placing unmanned civil and military satellites in orbit, entirely apart from its role in conducting or supporting manned missions” and that “with the shuttle the U. S. can have a continuing program of manned space flight. . . without a commitment to a major new manned mission goal”—NASA in November 1971 made a much more posi­tive case for the shuttle as a human space flight system serving important national interests.47 Key to this case were not only the claim that the space shuttle would make space operations routine and less expensive but also the proposition that the shuttle would advance intangible values such as U. S. space leadership and international cooperation and that it was thus essential for the United States to continue a vigorous program of human space flight based on the shuttle and its new capabilities.

As NASA put forward this case for approving the shuttle, Rice and his OMB staff in parallel were preparing a decision memorandum for Richard Nixon that took a very different tack, suggesting that the president should approve a much smaller and less frequently used shuttle than the system that NASA had in mind. That memorandum questioned the economic argument for shuttle development and assigned only limited value to potential benefits such as space leadership and new capabilities for space operations. The fol­lowing few weeks would determine which point of view would prevail.

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.