Category After Apollo?

Splashdown was set for just after 1:00 p. m. on the afternoon of April 17. Haldeman gives a vivid description of the events of the day:

Apollo 13 day. They made it back and the P [President Nixon] was really elated! Started out in the morning with some general details, then into a lot of plan­ning, etc., for his participation in the Apollo return. Had TV, squawk box, and [former astronauts] Collins and Anders set up in Alex’s [Nixon aide Alexander Butterfield] office to keep him posted. Kind of anxious about results but basi­cally confident that they’d make it, and all wrapped up on little specifics about the trip, which we have very well set up on contingency basis.

[material deleted]

For splashdown, P watched in Alex Butterfield’s office with Alex, me, Anders, Collins and K [Henry Kissinger]. Was very cranked up. Ordered cigars for all on success when learned that was Chris Kraft tradition at NASA. Put through call to wives immediately, then waited to call astronauts till they were aboard Iwo Jima [the recovery aircraft carrier] and had called wives. Meanwhile P called all the Congressional leaders and George Meany, saying to all, “Isn’t this a great day.” He was really excited. . . Then talked to astronauts and told them of trip plans, then out to press to do likewise, then over to the EOB [Executive Office Building] at about 3:30, with no lunch. Took a nap.

Nixon biographer Richard Reeves adds an additional detail to the day’s account. He suggests that as Nixon talked to the Congressional leaders after the splashdown, he was “having one drink after another,” and that soon after he reached his hideaway office in the Executive Office Building, “the President was drunk, falling asleep on the couch.” If that were indeed the

case, Nixon recovered quickly; that evening he hosted a White House per­formance by country music singer Johnny Cash.28

On April 18, President Nixon flew to Houston. At the Manned Spacecraft Center, he presented the Medal of Freedom to the Apollo 13 mission opera­tions team. Then he flew to Hickham Air Force Base in Honolulu, Hawaii. There he presented the Medal of Freedom to Lovell, Haise, and Swigert. He told the crew that “this was a successful mission, a great mission on behalf of your country. . . You did not reach the moon, but you reached the hearts of millions of people on earth by what you did. . . We realize that greatness comes not simply in triumph, but in adversity.”29

Richard Nixon’s associates never passed up an opportunity to portray the president in a positive light. Even as they planned how the president would deal with the unfolding crisis, they made sure that his involvement would reflect well on Nixon as a national leader. In the days after the safe return of the Apollo 13 crew, the White House approached Life magazine senior correspondent Hugh Sidey about “doing an inside story on the President’s involvement in and the attitudes, etc. during the Apollo 13 crisis.” It took several months for this suggestion to bear fruit, but eventually Sidey wrote a very positive account, saying that “the near tragedy of Apollo 13, a deeply emotional drama for all Americans, was even more so for the President.” The Apollo astronauts, Sidey suggested, were an “obsession” for Nixon, who viewed them “as more than heroes.” According to Sidey, Nixon, “in his single-minded manner. . . seems to be trying to assess and grasp the spirit of the astronauts.”30

Richard Nixon’s involvement with Apollo 13 has been discussed in some detail because the episode reinforced to his associates the reality that Nixon would never accept a future U. S. space program not including human space flight as an important element. In addition, Nixon’s concern for the astro­nauts’ safety became linked to a political calculus in his mind regarding possible negative political fallout from a similar problem on a future Apollo flight. When he got the impression that Apollo 17 was particularly risky, it is not surprising that Nixon’s first instinct was to cancel the flight.

One study of space shuttle development comments that during 1971 “pres­sures of financial stringency penetrated every aspect of the Shuttle program. Few high-technology development programs, if any, have been subjected to the kind of fiscal pressures and controls which the Shuttle Program endured, and it was during this period that they had the greatest impact on the design process.” Indeed, “the fiscal and political environment influenced the detailed engineering design decisions on a month to month, and at times, a day to day basis.”25

This pressure was already in the background as NASA’s Associate Administrator for Manned Space Flight Dale Myers and his top associates decided in January 1971 to direct NASA’s contractors to restrict their stud­ies to a shuttle design that could meet all national security requirements. Myers convened a January 19-20, 1971, meeting in Williamsburg, Virginia, attended by all those involved in shuttle studies. At the meeting, Myers announced the requirements that would guide the remaining months of the ongoing shuttle studies. Performance requirements included:

• The ability to launch 65,000 pounds into a due east 100 nautical mile (nm) orbit, which equated with the ability to launch 40,000 pounds into a polar orbit, a national security requirement;

• Nominal cross-range of 1,100 nm, the least amount acceptable to the national security community; up to that point, NASA’s contractors had been studying both a delta-wing orbiter design capable of 1,500 nm cross­range as well as one with straight wings and only 200 nm cross-range;

• Engines capable of generating 550,000 pounds of sea-level thrust. NASA had allowed its Phase A and Phase B contractors also to examine the use of an engine with 415,000 pounds of thrust, and most industry stud­ies had preferred that option. Myers’s directive removed that choice. The more powerful engine would be required to launch the heaviest NASA and national security payloads;

• The ability to return payloads weighing up to 40,000 pounds, also a national security requirement.26

Although the cross-range requirement had originated with the Department of Defense (DOD) and in the early stages of shuttle studies had been resisted by NASA, by this time many of those within NASA and industry involved in shuttle design efforts acknowledged the limitations of the straight-wing orbiter design, which was the preference of NASA’s Max Faget, and recog­nized that a high cross-range vehicle had a number of operational advantages in terms of dissipating energy during return from orbit and of getting the shuttle orbiter to an appropriate landing site from various orbits. Myers’s January 1971 directive eliminated the straight-wing design from further consideration; whatever shuttle design NASA would choose would have delta-shaped wings.

Both OST and those dealing with space issues in OMB had recognized at the start of 1971 that a decision on whether or not to proceed with NASA’s space shuttle program would almost certainly be made during the consid­eration of NASA FY1973 budget request that fall. The two organizations decided that it would be useful to have an external group assess the techni­cal aspects of the NASA shuttle concept and the shuttle’s relationship to likely future space program activities. The Mathematica study was already underway to assess shuttle economics; there was a felt need for a parallel technical assessment by an expert group outside the government. To take on this task, science adviser David decided to constitute a “special panel” of the President’s Science Advisory Committee (PSAC).

David discussed a potential chair for the panel with George Low in April. David’s first inclination was to have Gene Fubini be the chairman. Fubini was a well-known “gadfly” in the Washington technical community, respected for his technical acumen and insight, but notorious for his arrogance and quick temper. Low suggested that “Fubini would not be the right person because

(a) he is too flighty and jumps too much from one thought to another, and

(b) he really does not have any aircraft background to contribute to this.” Low suggested several alternatives among the respected leaders of the aero­space community. Low soon learned that David had selected one of his sug­gested people, Alexander Flax, as chair; Flax was head of the national security think tank Institute for Defense Analysis and from 1965 to 1969 had been Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for research and development and simul­taneously director of the National Reconnaissance Office. Low observed that “Ed David really wants to be helpful in establishing this panel.”11

Fubini was made a member of what quickly came to be known as the “Flax committee.” Other members of the group included both individuals with the aerospace engineering background needed to assess shuttle design and potential users of the shuttle’s capabilities. The Flax committee sched­uled its first meeting for August 13-15 at the National Academy of Sciences summer conference center in Woods Hole, Massachusetts. In advance of the meeting, OMB’s Don Rice sent David a list of questions that he hoped the Flax committee would address. In turn, David forwarded the questions to NASA so that NASA was prepared to respond as they interacted with the Flax committee. Among the ten questions were: [9]

• “How sensitive are the cost benefit relationships to changes in the rate of activity and assumptions about the lifetimes of unmanned satellites?”12

Also in advance of the Woods Hole meeting, Fubini met with Low. He told Low that the committee would work “under the premise that the Science Adviser cannot recommend to the President the cancellation of the United States manned space flight program”; the group should thus ask “what is the manned space flight program that (a) is acceptable from a budget point of view; (b) is clearly a step beyond what has already been achieved; and (c) is not dead-ended?”13

After the first Flax committee meeting, Dale Myers reported that in syn­thesizing his committee’s initial reactions Flax had suggested that the com­mittee “felt that . . . the broad implications of the shuttle had not yet been addressed.” The committee thought that “the peak funding and perhaps the total funding” for the shuttle program were too expensive to be acceptable and that “the program goes on too long before there is a payoff.” (At this point, NASA was still advocating in its external presentations the two-stage, fully-reusable shuttle design.) Flax had added that the committee’s view was that “a smaller, lighter, shuttle vehicle seemed to be in order” and that the “60 x 15 payload compartment may be larger than we need.” With respect to the reactions of other committee members, Myers observed that “Fubini felt that a program this long should have something spectacular every four years.” Committee member Richard Garwin from IBM “felt that there should be more effort on big, dumb boosters, parachute recovered boosters, automatic landing, unmanned flights of the shuttle, and much greater use of the data relay satellites where you can get rid of the men in the orbiter. . . All actions done by men in orbit can be done by men on the ground using a data relay satellite and good data transmission.” Myers said that “most of the other members of the Committee were not very outspoken.” Myers paraphrased the committee’s questions:

1. “Will the users really design cheaper payloads to take advantage of the volume and weight capability?”

2. “Will the launch rate stay at 40/year or greater during an era when satel­lite life is increasing?”

3. “Is there a firm requirement for a 15 x 60 payload compartment?”

4. “Why crossrange?”

5. “Why not build the booster first?” and

6. “Why not unmanned shuttles, with automatic landings, or para­chutes?”14

Low met with David on August 24 to discuss the results of the commit­tee meeting. It was David’s feeling “that the Flax Committee (with Fubini leading the pack) is going to come in with some interesting options” that “include a shuttle of about $5 billion total investment running about $1 bil­lion per year.” Low told David that NASA “was thinking along similar lines but so far had not discussed them in any detail with the Flax Committee.”15 These budget targets, no more than $1 billion per year and a total invest­ment cost for shuttle development of $5 billion, were by the end of August beginning to be recognized by NASA as defining the limits within which a proposal for presidential approval of the shuttle had the best chance of suc­cess. The question facing Fletcher, Low, and their engineering colleagues was whether a shuttle worth having, particularly one that met both NASA’s institutional needs and the requirements set out by the national security community, could be developed within those budget constraints. It was clear that the reusable two-stage shuttle, with development cost estimates of $10 billion or more, could not be pursued on a $1 billion per year budget; this had led NASA internally to abandon that option during the summer.

To that end, Low and Dale Myers met with Flax on November 12, in advance of the November 17-18 meeting of Flax’s committee. It was still Flax’s view that “the next manned space flight program should involve some techno­logical advance and that operational costs are not all that important,” since whatever system was chosen would not be flown frequently. Throughout the shuttle decision process, neither NASA nor the White House and its external advisors gave careful attention to how much it would cost to operate the shuttle; this would turn out to be the program’s Achilles heel. Flax also sug­gested “that it is Ed David’s view that the shuttle is dead unless David saves it and that the only way he can save it for us is by supporting something that is much less than the previously proposed shuttle; namely, the glider.”

Low by this point had developed a diagram showing a cost curve that compared the development and operating costs of various shuttle designs and the space glider; he was to use a version of that diagram and the trade-off between development and operational costs it depicted as a major selling tool in his frequent meetings during November and December. He drew the curve on Flax’s blackboard and made the point that NASA “now had some very interesting developments in the range of development costs between $4.5 billion and $6 billion, with operating costs around $10 million per flight.” Flax thought that “some” of his committee members might be willing to support a shuttle with those characteristics, and Low and Myers agreed that Myers would present, for the first time, “the small orbiter, together with the parallel-staged pressure-fed booster” at the November 17 Flax committee meeting. This would be the first time the TAOS configuration, the shuttle design ultimately selected, would be briefed to anyone outside of NASA. Low agreed to come to the second day of the committee’s meeting to make the point that “we can buy the kind of shuttle that we are now proposing within a reasonable total NASA budget, while still at the same time having a strong science and applications program.”28

Before the Flax committee meeting Low also interacted with committee members Fubini and Lewis Branscomb. He found Fubini “on the side of a small glider” on the grounds that “the United States should be satisfied with two or three flights per year. He sees no need for routine operations with men.” That perspective, thought Low, “strongly reflects Ed David’s view.” By contrast, Branscomb was “very much on the other side,” believing that “the United States needs routine operations, and to get these it needs a new recoverable space transportation system.” Branscomb didn’t care “whether or not men are on board, but. . . NASA has told a convincing story that men should be on board.” In connection with the Flax committee session, Low also met with DOD’s Johnny Foster, who had been charged with develop­ing a statement of the rationale behind DOD as well as NASA support of the shuttle, only to discover that “Foster had not yet made up his mind on the value of the shuttle” because it was not a response to “the hiatus in United States space activity during a time that the Soviet Union was bound to have major demonstrable advances in their space flights.” Low’s counter­argument was that “having the shuttle well under development and on the horizon. . . will be a far better position to be in than not having anything to show for the future.” He added “once the shuttle is available, we ought to be able to whip the pants off anybody that does not have this kind of a quick reaction, routine capability.” Given his own ambivalence, Foster had made no progress in developing the shuttle rationale statement that NASA and DOD a month earlier had agreed to prepare.29

As Low attended the second day of the Flax committee meeting on November 18, he drew his operations costs versus development costs curve on the blackboard to make the point that “over the past six months the shuttle has become a much more reasonable vehicle in terms of development costs,” since NASA was “now focusing on a shuttle that will cost between $5 and $6 billion to develop” and from $6-1/2 to $12 million to operate. Low argued that the “smaller, and much lower in development costs, glider should not be considered because it will be so terribly expensive to oper­ate.” The main questions, he suggested, were “whether the shuttle should be small or large and whether it should provide for routine operations or one or two flights per year.” Low thought that most committee members understood his argument, “but if a vote had been taken right then, they would have still voted for the small glider simply because they don’t believe in routine space flight operations.”30

This was the final meeting of the Flax committee, and the group never issued a formal report. Perhaps the committee’s most significant contribution was crystallizing the central issue in the shuttle debate. By this point, there was agreement that some new space transportation system was needed. The committee’s deliberations focused attention on the basic issue of whether that system would include a full capability vehicle capable of launching all U. S. payloads on a routine basis or a smaller vehicle, either a powered shuttle or a glider, to be flown occasionally to test various technologies while also keeping a U. S. program of human space flight alive. As the Flax committee met for the last time, that question remained very much undecided.

The NASA leadership was angered by the idea that OMB, rather than NASA, should define the technical characteristics of the shuttle; that anger intensi­fied when NASA discovered that some of the OMB requirements originated from a NASA shuttle study contractor feeding information to OMB on a confidential basis. Senior NASA official Willis Shapley characterized Rice’s seeking advice from an aerospace firm as “dirty pool in the budget wars.” He added “the one thing that really grated people wrong was that they [OMB] began getting engineering and technical information. . . and con­fronting our technical people with technical judgments.” Low reported that Rice “claimed that the basis for the cost estimates he had were from a con­tractor whose name he could not divulge.” Low called Rice and asked him “specifically to let me know who the contractor was so that we could verify his numbers or see where we, NASA, were going wrong. He refused to do so.” Even in internal OMB correspondence related to the shuttle decision, the source of Rice’s information was referred to only as “your contractor source.” However, Low concluded, “based on the information we have and the questions Rice has asked, it is quite clear that he obtained his information from North American Rockwell.”[11] Low reported that NASA Administrator Fletcher “objected to OMB designing the shuttle strongly”; Fletcher agreed, saying that in his dealings with Rice “the only thing I did resent was his try­ing to design shuttles of his own.”22

Fletcher and Low felt that they had little choice but to begin evaluating a shuttle meeting OMB guidelines. On December 13, Low told Dale Myers that “the Office of Management and Budget has set forth certain concepts and assumptions concerning the Space Shuttle program” and that he and

Fletcher had “made a commitment to provide our assessment of the OMB assumptions and guidelines by December 31, 1971.” He added that the eval­uation of the OMB shuttle should compare it to the configurations NASA still was considering and should assume the use of the new shuttle engine and a reusable pressure-fed booster or, as an alternate, solid rocket motors. Low noted that “the initial development cost is of primary concern. . . Is it possible to start out with one of the smaller (or lighter) payload versions, and then grow to a full capability orbiter later on?”23 There was no emphasis on minimizing the costs of operating the shuttle once it was in service.

Fletcher met with Flanigan on December 14 to protest the OMB direc­tive. When Fletcher asked whether the OMB shuttle characteristics and the $4 billion development cost limit in fact were based on a presidential deci­sion, Flanigan, who had not been at the December 3 meeting, said that he did not think so and that it was more likely that Shultz or Weinberger had thrown out the $4 billion figure and Nixon had said “it’s worth a try.” Flanigan also said that he would check whether there was a presidential decision document that included the shuttle characteristics specified in the OMB guidelines. He did check, and on December 17 told Fletcher that his (Flanigan’s) “understanding of the request put to you regarding a smaller shuttle was correct. None of the figures in the paper given to you [by OMB] are set in concrete.” Rather, he said, “they should be viewed as a new way to approach the problem, against which an initial estimate will have to be made in a couple of weeks.” Flanigan added “there is no written directive from the President on this subject.” In his December 14 meeting with Fletcher and later conversations, Flanigan advised against taking the NASA-OMB disagreement to the president for decision; he knew that Nixon tried to avoid refereeing such confrontations.24

There were two major issues with respect to the space shuttle left unre­solved as the January 5 statement was issued. One was what means would be used to boost the shuttle orbiter off the launch pad. The other was the character of the budgetary commitment to the shuttle program being made by the Nixon administration. The first of these was resolved by early March; the second persisted over the next few years.

Which Booster?

NASA after January 5 began a rapid examination of four alternatives for lifting the shuttle orbiter off the launch pad: parallel burn solid rocket motors, series burn solid rocket motors, parallel burn recov­erable pressure-fed boosters, or a single series burn pressure-fed booster. The two parallel burn configurations had their origin in the studies carried out by McDonnell Douglas and Grumman and resem­bled the thrust-assisted orbiter shuttle (TAOS) design suggested in Mathematica’s October memorandum.

The preference of NASA engineers as intensive booster studies began in January 1972 was one of the pressure-fed alternatives. The pressure-fed design was an invention of NASA’s engineers at the Marshall Space Flight Center; the German members of the engineer­ing group who had been brought to the United States after World War II had career-long experience with liquid-fueled boosters. A division of labor between Houston, which would be in charge of developing the new shuttle orbiter, and Huntsville, which would be in charge of devel­oping the new pressure-fed boosters in addition to the shuttle main engine and external propellant tank, made institutional sense. But the booster studies soon showed that developing the new pressure-fed booster would be more difficult than it had appeared at first glance and thus carried the possibility of higher costs and more technical risk than had been anticipated. The OMB kept pressure on NASA to select the booster option that had the least chance of cost overruns. Since there was extensive Air Force experience with solid-fueled rockets, OMB leaned in that direction. OMB was concerned whether "NASA could overcome its instinctive dislike" of solid rocket motors. But Don Rice’s "contractor source" told OMB that NASA headquarters was "insisting on an honest comparison."3

By early March NASA headquarters had made its choice—to go with solid rocket motors fired at liftoff in parallel with the orbiter’s engines to boost the shuttle off the launch pad. The "principal reason for going to the solids was the low technical risk and the approximate one half billion to one billion [dollar] savings" in development costs.

In addition, NASA had discovered that it might be possible to recover, refurbish, and reuse the casings of the solid rocket motors; this "tilted the scales because they made the operational costs reasonable." On March 13, Don Rice told OMB’s George Shultz and Cap Weinberger that "we recommend acceptance" of the NASA choice; that recom­mendation was accepted, and the basic space shuttle configuration that would become so familiar over thirty years of shuttle flights was given a green light for development.4

In an article published soon after the 1986 Challenger accident, I suggested that “the space shuttle program must be assessed as a policy failure, at least in terms of meeting the objectives [lower cost and routine operation] that have been its articulated rationale since 1972.” In deciding to approve the NASA shuttle, “too much attention was paid to the short term, while longer range considerations were inadequately considered. . . The shuttle decision stands as a powerful example of how not to make a national commitment to an undertaking on which many other significant projects depend.”28 Do these judgments still stand up, almost three decades later? Was the shuttle program itself a failure? Or was it the Nixon administration decision to approve the NASA full capability space shuttle that was the policy failure? I was not very clear in what I wrote in 1986, but it was my judgment then, and now, that the latter alternative is the case. As the preceding paragraphs have suggested, the record of the space shuttle program is a mixture of success and failure. But there were in 1971 better alternatives to approving development of the NASA full capability shuttle, and thus that approval is better described as a policy mistake, rather than a policy failure.

President Nixon made his decisions on various budget appeals in the days following Christmas. Included in Nixon’s December 28 choices with respect to NASA were the decisions to slip the Skylab schedule, to restore NERVA to the budget at a low funding level, not to approve shuttle airframe devel- opment—and to cancel Apollo 17. Meeting with Ehrlichman and Shultz, the president first suggested shifting funds intended for Apollo 17 to the Skylab and shuttle programs. As he discussed his options, he suggested that “politi­cally” it was better not to launch the mission, or at least slip it, “at whatever cost,” until after the November 1972 election. His final decision was to cancel the mission.31

These decisions were communicated by Weinberger to Low on December 31. To Low, the slip in the Skylab schedule and especially the cancelation of Apollo 17 “were a complete surprise.” Weinberger let Low know that these decisions were made “by the President himself, without any input from OMB.” Meeting with his NASA colleagues to discuss how to respond, Low was told by Dale Myers that canceling Apollo 17 so soon after two other Apollo missions had been eliminated would be “a devastating blow to morale.” After phone calls to David and Rice to get more background on the budget decisions, Low decided to “do no more about this on New Year’s Eve (By this time, it was 7 o’clock in the evening and we were in the midst of the biggest snowstorm in three years).”32

Low met with OMB Director Shultz and Rice on the afternoon of January 2, 1971, to get more information on the reasoning behind the budget deci­sions and to reemphasize NASA’s perspectives regarding the relationship between the space program, Soviet competition, and aerospace unemploy­ment. He also wanted to make a last effort to preserve the Apollo 17 mission. He found that “Shultz was not all that interested in unemployment in the aerospace industry. . . He apparently still believes that the U. S. R&D capa­bility can be maintained by retraining the aerospace scientists and engineers into other fields.” Shultz asked Low whether there was a possibility “of using some of NASA’s R&D capability to solve domestic problems.” This was an idea that would rise to prominence in White House thinking during 1971.

In his apparent lack of concern about aerospace unemployment, Shultz was running counter to the president. Nixon had read a December 30 mem­orandum from the chairman of his Council of Economic Advisers, Paul

McCracken, which noted “unemployment among scientists and engineers in California increased from 0.9 percent to 2.4 percent in the past year as national priority changes reduced defense and aerospace spending.” Nixon wrote a message to Ehrlichman and Weinberger on the memo: “As a matter of top priority, we must move with maximum publicity on all these fronts & any others which occur—get a real plan & act on it.”33

Regarding the decision to cancel Apollo 17, Shultz reiterated to Low that “it was not a budgetary one, but was based on the fact that the President had been informed that Apollo 17, as the last Apollo mission, was of considerably higher risk than the previous one and that he [Nixon] did not want to under­take such a mission just before the elections.” In response to Shultz’s ques­tions, Low said that that while the risk of flying Apollo 17 was “substantial,” it “may not be any higher than that for all other missions.” Low told Shultz that it was possible, with “a good technical justification,” to delay Apollo 17 until December 1972, after the presidential election. Low recommended that a decision on whether or not to cancel Apollo 17 be deferred for a year, but Shultz preferred the option of deciding immediately to slip the mission to December 1972, since such a decision “would save some money in Fiscal Year 1972,” even though it would increase the overall cost of the mission. Keeping government spending down during the election year was an impor­tant objective to the Nixon White House. Shultz told Low that the president was aware of their meeting and that he would get in touch with Nixon “right away and let me know before the end of the day” whether he would reverse his cancelation decision if the Apollo 17 flight were slipped until after the 1972 election. “About an hour later,” Don Rice, rather than Shultz, called Low to say that “the president had accepted the delay in Apollo 17.”34 As he met with Low, Shultz may have already known that the president had had second thoughts about canceling Apollo 17. The weekly magazine Newsweek in mid-December had noted the possibility of such a cancelation. This publicity had produced messages to Ed David from the scientific com­munity opposing such a step. Writing the president on December 31, David argued that canceling the mission would “give the Administration an unfor­tunate image among opinion-makers in society” and was “likely to result in strong protests from responsible and influential people.” David did not base his recommendation against canceling the mission on its scientific merit, an argument he knew carried little weight with Nixon. Rather he suggested that such a step would “make it much more difficult to rally the responsible elements to support the Administration’s other forward-looking programs.” Apparently independent of NASA’s internal thinking, David suggested that “to counter many of the concerns that have been raised about the flight of the last Apollo mission in the few months before November 1972 [the election period],” the Apollo 16 mission could be launched in February 1972 and the Apollo 17 launch could be scheduled “in mid-November or December. This would have the double advantage of maintaining critical employment levels through this period and better phasing of launch and support personnel.” Nixon in the margins of David’s memo wrote “GS [George Shultz]—good.

Do.” Nixon communicated this decision in a December 31 meeting with Ehrlichman, directing him to tell Shultz to take another look at the Apollo 17 issue. Given this directive, it is not clear that Shultz actually called Nixon after his meeting with Low or had learned before the meeting that Nixon had decided to reverse the decision.35

There was one more contentious NASA-OMB interaction before the NASA FY1972 budget was made public on January 29, 1971. As the budget message was being finalized, there was a dispute between OMB and NASA about what it should say with respect to the space shuttle. After the initial budget decisions in early December, NASA suggested including language in the budget message indicating an administration commitment in principle, not just to the engine, but to the shuttle program overall. Low had sug­gested that the space shuttle “posture” should be that “the FY1972 budget provides for proceeding with the development of a space shuttle system,” that “detailed design and development of the shuttle engine—the longest lead time component” would begin in FY1972, and that “airframe design and development will proceed on an orderly step-by-step basis leading to detailed design or initiation of development in FY1972.” The OMB space staff objected to this language as reflecting a commitment to the shuttle that had not been made, and suggested that “the Administration preserve flex­ibility” by “making no commitment to proceeding with the development of the entire shuttle system” and “making no commitment to an FY1972 decision on initiation of development of the airframe.” The OMB Evaluation Division, headed by Assistant Director William Niskanen, was even stronger in its objections, telling Rice “it is important that the commitment to finance an advanced space engine not imply a commitment to the space shuttle.” Niskanen suggested that the language “in all sections of the budget docu­ment” should describe “this engine as an advanced lower-cost space engine rather than as a shuttle engine.”

This difference in views persisted into January as the budget documents were being sent to the printer. The OMB staff noted that while “NASA is firmly convinced that the lower-cost earth to orbit launch vehicle will be at least partially reusable and hence a ‘shuttle,’” it would be “desirable from our position” to use “a term with broader meaning than ‘space shuttle,’ which could cover low cost expendable rockets.” The staff noted that “the key issue is not really the term ‘shuttle,’ but rather achieving an understanding on Dr. Low’s part that the Administration is not now committed to a reus­able space shuttle.” The staff predicted that NASA would “strongly resist” a change in budget language.36

This prediction was accurate. Low considered the staff suggestion as a reversal “of the words Don Rice and I agreed to concerning the space shut­tle” and was upset to discover that at one point the “words space shuttle had been completely deleted from the President’s budget and, in their place, the words future launch vehicle had been inserted.” Low met with Rice on January 9. He told Rice he “fully understood the extent of the commitment (or lack thereof) by this Administration to the space shuttle, but that I also understood that such a commitment would be forthcoming if our studies so indicated during the spring and summer.” Low suggested that “Rice appar­ently agreed with me, but mentioned that he had internal problems within OMB and that the evaluation group in OMB had insisted that far more restrictive language be included.” Low and Rice “argued about this for some time”; Rice finally agreed that the language Low wanted “would be rein­stated in the budget book.” When NASA received its official budget allow­ance declaration from OMB on February 19, included was the statement, echoing Low’s preferred language, that “shuttle airframe development should proceed on an orderly step-by-step basis which may lead to continued detailed design or initiation of development of a specific design, depending on the progress in studies now underway.”37

The final NASA FY1972 budget request that President Nixon sent to the Congress was for $3.271 billion in budget authority (compared to the FY1971 budget of $3.298 billion) and $3.152 billion in outlays (com­pared to the FY1971 budget of $3.368 billion). Although there would be $200 million less to spend during FY1972 than a year earlier, the overall FY1972 budget authority for 1972 and projected for future years would be basically the same as for FY1971, thus arresting the half-decade long cuts in NASA funding. As he met with Tom Paine in January 1970, Richard Nixon had indicated that he might be willing to approve a NASA budget of as much as $3.9 billion for FY1972, but continuing economic and fiscal problems had made such an increased allocation for NASA politically and fiscally impossible. Reflecting on the final budget, George Low suggested that “although I am personally disappointed that we did not do better, the general feeling around NASA appears to be that we did considerably better than people had expected us to do.”38

While NASA may have “done better than people expected,” a decision crucial to the space agency’s future remained unmade. That was whether NASA would get presidential approval to proceed with the space shuttle as its major program during the 1970s. NASA’s hope, embodied in the budget language that Low had fought to preserve, was that such approval would come at the end of the ongoing shuttle studies in June 1971. Then NASA would quickly invite bids on developing the shuttle airframe and select the winning contractor by the end of 1971. However, not including funds for airframe development in the FY1972 budget request almost certainly meant that this plan was not viable. While White House approval of funds for devel­oping the new rocket engine intended for shuttle use was a significant step to shuttle approval, there remained major obstacles, budgetary and technical as well as political, to a final go ahead. NASA’s uncertainty about its future continued, and 1971 became a make-or-break year for what was left of the space agency’s post-Apollo aspirations.

The Phase B preliminary design studies of a two-stage, fully reusable shuttle being carried out by North American Rockwell and McDonnell Douglas continued until mid-1971. There were a wide variety of orbiter and booster designs considered and cost estimates also varied widely as industry engi­neers struggled to meet the requirements set out by NASA. There was one

constant: the shuttle designs being considered involved developing two large and expensive vehicles. For example, one version of the North American Rockwell orbiter was 206 feet long and had a wing span of 107 feet, about the size of the four-engine Boeing 707 commercial airliner then in use. The booster was 269 feet long and had a wing span of 143.5 feet, about the size of the Boeing 747 jumbo airliner then just entering commercial service; it had 12 rocket engines to provide the initial power to lift itself and the orbiter off the ground to what was called a “staging velocity.” The vehicles would then separate and the booster’s two-person crew would fly it, using a dozen air-breathing jet engines, back to a runway landing. The orbiter, also oper­ated by a two-person crew, upon separation would fire its two engines of the same design as those used on the booster and accelerate to orbital velocity. One contractor’s estimate of the cost of a fleet of four boosters and five orbiters flying 445 missions through FY1989 was $9.6 billion.27

The shuttle’s fate, and with it the character of the post-Apollo NASA, would be decided against the background of continuing problems in the U. S. economy and their impact on the federal budget; those problems included a high rate of inflation, an unacceptable level of unemployment, stock market declines, deficits in international trade, and threats to the U. S. dollar as the basis for international financial transactions. The economic policies pursued by the Nixon administration in its first two years in office had not been suc­cessful in reversing these negative trends.

Meeting with his budget and policy advisers on July 23, Nixon made a tentative decision to cut the budgets of “civilian agencies” by 10 percent from their FY1972 levels. Among those agencies was NASA; it was noted at the meeting that by canceling the last two Apollo missions and the NERVA program and not starting the shuttle program, some $1.32 billion could be saved in FY 1973.16 Nixon’s July decision to reduce the budgets of the civil­ian agencies of the government by 10 percent was reflected in the budget targets provided to NASA by Cap Weinberger in an August 2 letter. Rather than the $3.2 billion per year budget that Don Rice in his May 17 letter had indicated was a reasonable expectation, Weinberger told NASA that its budget authority for FY1973 would be $2.835 billion, with a limit on outlays during the year of $2.975 billion. Weinberger told NASA that “the President emphasized at his 1973 budget planning meetings that it is essen­tial that we do not exceed the overall budget totals he has decided upon” and thus that NASA was required to “submit your budget at or below these figures.”17

Fletcher, upset at these low budget targets, quickly met with Weinberger to get a fuller understanding of the thinking behind them. Weinberger first told him that “things were tough all over” and that NASA should come in with a budget at the targeted level. But when Weinberger was told that the $2.8 billion budget target recommended by his staff meant the end of human space flight, he told Fletcher that it might be possible to bring the budget up to the $3.2 billion level of FY1972.18

Another Rethinking of the Space Shuttle

Fletcher and Low found themselves in a quandary with respect to how to proceed in developing NASA’s budget request for FY1973, given the low budget target and the feedback from the Woods Hole meeting. NASA’s internal planning, led by Wernher von Braun, had been assuming a FY1973 budget at approximately the $3.7-$3.8 billion level, fully $1 billion above the OMB target, with the budget gradually increasing to $4 billion per year; von Braun was warning that it would be very difficult to carry out an ambi­tious shuttle program with that budget outlook. This was a message that Fletcher and Low did not want to hear. They briefed David and Flanigan at the White House on the von Braun plan and got a noncommittal reaction. Flanigan “stated that a transportation system alone, without clearly under­stood objectives (a transportation system to where?) would not get the sup­port” that NASA needed. The “only bright spot” in the meeting was David’s comment “that it would be inconceivable for any President at any time in this age to stop manned space flight.”19

Low’s assessment of NASA’s situation as of August 1971 was sober.

In the course of planning for Fiscal Year 1971 and 1972, we assumed each year that the current year was a bad year but that things would get better on the next year. In effect, we pushed a funding bow wave ahead of us. My view today is that we should no longer build a future program on promises, but that we should, instead, assume that the NASA budget will be confined to the $3 billion level (say up to $3.3 billion) for the next several years. . . We should drop the shuttle right now and come up with a different manned space flight program.

This program should be based on an evolutionary space station develop­ment, leading from Skylab through a series of research and applications mod­ules to a distant goal of a permanent space station. We should also set for ourselves a distant goal of a lunar base. The transportation system for this manned space flight program would consist of Apollo hardware for Skylab; a glider launched on an expendable booster for the research and application modules; and finally, the shuttle but delayed 5 to 10 years beyond our present thinking.20