Presidential Decisions

During the early months of the new year, the Space Council staff began devel­oping actual policy directives for the implementation of SEI. Based on direction provided by the full Council during two meetings on the subject, the staff was tasked with drafting two documents. The first would provide general policy guid­ance, while the second would introduce a course of action for including interna­tional partners in Moon-Mars missions. In a sign that the Administration had lost complete faith in NASA, the staff turned to the Department of Defense to conduct most of the analytical work necessary to develop these documents. Although NASA leaders had originally been in favor of re-establishing the Space Council, this view had dramatically shifted now that the new organization had turned to the military to comment on and critique the space agency’s plans and projects.[264] Regardless, over the period of several months, the council staff worked closely with military analysts and the ‘deputies committee,’ a group consisting of high-level representatives from each of the Council’s member agencies, to gain a consensus on the wording of the forthcoming policy statements.[265]

On 21 February, President Bush signed a Presidential Decision on the Space Exploration Initiative. Fully supported by Vice President Quayle and the National Space Council, its public unveiling three weeks later was clearly timed to coincide with the release of the NRC review of the 90-Day Study. The NRC panels’ find­ings and recommendations largely validated the policy guidance found within the presidential directive. The objective of the document was to provide the American space program with near-term guidance for carrying out the long-term SEI vision. The policy consisted of the following components:

• The initiative will include both lunar and Mars program elements

• The initiative will include robotic science missions

• Early research will focus on a search for new and innovative approaches and

technologies

— Research will focus on high leverage technologies with the potential to greatly reduce costs

— Mission, concept, and systems analyses will be carried out in parallel with technology research

— Research will lead to definition of two or more significantly different exploration architectures

— A baseline program architecture will be selected from these alternatives

• Three agencies will carry out the initiative, with the National Space Council coordinating all activities

— NASA will be the principal implementing agency

— DOD and DOE will have major roles in technology development and concept definition

Coming eight months after President Bush first announced the initiative, this direc­tive provided the direction that had clearly been needed within a fractious policy making community.[266] It was among the most significant documents in the chronicle of SEI. It represented an outright skirmish in the battle to gain control of strategic space policy planning within the Bush administration. Mark Albrecht said later, “it took us almost a year to go where we wanted to go directly and it cost us time, it cost confusion on the Hill.”[267] Although this was a criticism of NASA, the Administration itself shared equally in the blame for not providing the required direction earlier. It is unclear whether the ultimate fate of SEI would have changed even if policy guid­ance had been provided much earlier, but it seems safe to conclude that the lack of administration leadership significantly reduced the initiatives chances of success. By the time the council finally supplied the needed direction, it was probably too late to resurrect an undertaking Congress presumed would be outrageously expen­sive. Dick Malow recalled that even with of a presidential directive providing policy guidance for SEI, “the general feeling about the program on the Hill continued to weaken.”[268]

At the end of March, the White House made public a second presidential direc­tive announcing President Bush’s decision to commence discussions with foreign nations regarding international cooperation for SEI. This idea had been encour­aged the previous summer by Carl Sagan, who sought to take advantage of warmer relations between the United States and Soviet Union. The Department of Trans­portation’s (DOT) Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee had likewise recommended cooperation with the U. S.S. R. The committee’s chairman,

Alan Lovelace, said “cooperation with the Soviets is logical given the great desire of the administration to take steps to support developments in Eastern Europe.” Another potential reason to cooperate was to reduce the U. S. contribution to the expensive initiative. It was suggested that the issue should be placed on the table for the Bush-Gorbachev summit planned for the summer.[269] The policy document itself indicated that the nation should pursue negotiations with Europe, Canada, Japan, and the Soviet Union. It was believed that this decision directive would sup­port three important objectives. First, and most importantly, it would expand the coalition of initiative supporters by adding a foreign policy rationale. Second, it would involve partners capable of contributing financial resources to an expensive undertaking. Third, it would involve partners with important technical capabili­ties—most notably Soviet experience addressing the impacts of prolonged space – flight and constructing nuclear space systems.[270]

The Soviet reaction to President Bush’s call for international cooperation was extremely positive. Four years earlier, President Gorbachev had asked President Reagan to join his nation in a joint mission to the red planet, which would have met a long held ambition within the U. S.S. R. for human space exploration focusing on a voyage to Mars. After the release of the presidential directive, the spokesman for the Soviet embassy in Washington stated, “we have always been for cooperation with the United States in this area.” Despite this encouraging response, by the end of the month, the NRC panel that had been evaluating SEI publicly warned against any cooperative robotic sample return missions to Mars with the Soviets. While the NRC did not address human exploration, it found that a highly interdependent undertaking could make planetary science “a potential hostage to political events.” In the long-run, the potential benefits sought from exploring international coopera­tion were never realized.[271]

While the Space Council was working to provide long overdue policy guid­ance for SEI’s implementation, senior NASA officials were appearing on Capitol Hill to defend the proposed increase in the agency’s budget. In late March, the House Appropriations subcommittee with authority over the NASA budget held two days of hearing on the matter. It became apparent very quickly that the com­mittee, chaired by Representative Bob Traxler (D-MI), was committed to identify­

ing and eliminating all funding associated with SEI. Chairman Traxler began the SEI-related questioning by asking NASA if the net increase in spending associated with the initiative was approximately $300 million—if on-going programs such as the National Aerospace Plane, Space Station Freedom, and Mars Observer were not included. NASA Comptroller Thomas Campbell answered that this was cor­rect. Traxler then asked a series of questions regarding the technologies included in the 90-Day Study, which led to a long response from Admiral Truly defending the report—he concluded that the $188 million in funding for new technologies were dedicated to ascertaining what innovations would be required to efficiently explore the Moon and Mars. An undeterred Traxler followed-up by asking whether Truly agreed with the NRC report, which concluded that SEI as envisioned in the 90-Day Study would be technically challenging and very expensive. After Truly answered in the affirmative, Traxler got to the heart of the Congressional concern by asking whether fully implementing the TSG plan would require more than doubling the NASA budget. Once again answering affirmatively, Truly stated that regardless of what technologies or strategies were selected, exploration of the Moon and Mars would be an expensive undertaking. Truly suggested that the technological, educa­tional, and spiritual benefits derived from such an endeavor was worth the cost.

After a brief foray into technical details, Traxler returned to budgetary concerns, questioning the space agency’s ability to accurately forecast programmatic costs for long term projects. He asked whether Truly was confident in NASA’s estimate for reference approach A ($541 billion). The administrator simply said it was prema­ture to make this determination, but that he believed the program would be “very expensive.” Traxler followed-up by asking when NASA would be able to provide firm numbers, to which Truly said it would take three or four years of focused technology development to provide a more definitive estimate. In essence, Truly was suggesting that Congress should invest billions of dollars in technology development programs before the agency could tell it how much the long-term project would cost. During the second day of testimony, with many Congressional concerns presumably con­firmed, Chairman Traxler only returned to SEI in an attempt to accurately identify exactly where new money for SEI could be found within the NASA budget request. This was an ominous sign, calling into question whether Congress would provide any funding for implementation of the initiative.[272]

By the end of April, with Congress preparing to eliminate all SEI-related funding from the NASA budget, the Space Council set into motion a concentrated lobby­ing effort aimed at garnering support for the space program and SEI. The first step

in the strategy was to hold a “space summit” at the White House. While President Bush met weekly with the senior Congressional leadership to discuss selected sub­jects, this meeting was notable because it was the first time in American history that space policy would be the sole topic on the agenda.11 According to an internal White House memorandum, the primary purpose of the summit was for Bush to show support for the FY 1991 space budget. Secondarily, the gathering provided an opportunity to discuss SEI. Not since the initiation of the Apollo program had a president given such high priority to the space program. During the intervening period, space activities were kept alive by a select group of congressional appropria – tors and top-level NASA officials. The belief within the administration was that this traditional coalition would not be able to deliver on President Bush’s ambitious request for a 24% increase in funding for the space agency or obtain approval to implement SEI. Senator Barbara Mikulski and Senator Jake Garn (chair and rank­ing member of the Appropriation Subcommittee on VA, HUD, and Independent Agencies) had confirmed this opinion, warning the White House that the Moon – Mars initiative was particularly vulnerable in the current budgetary environment, absent strong intervention by the White House. Based on this advice, the White House plan was to have President Bush actively promote the initiative, both pub­licly and with top congressional powerbrokers.[273] [274]

On 1 May, after being delayed in mid-April by the death of Senator Spark Mat – sunaga (D-HI),[275] the summit took place at the Old Executive Office Building. The event was attended by sixteen congressional participants[276] and nearly twenty mem­bers of the White House staff.[277] President Bush opened the meeting by affirming his personal commitment to the American space program, which he believed to be of vital importance to the nation’s future. He contended that space leadership was crucial to maintaining national leadership in the high tech world—in particular, he lauded the launch of the Hubble Space Telescope (HST) aboard the Shuttle Discovery in late April as an example of U. S. accomplishments in space science. He further argued that there were real and tangible benefits derived from invest­ments in the national space program, including revolutions in communications and computerization, advances in industrial materials and medical knowledge, the cre­ation of millions of high-tech jobs, and inspiring future generations of scientists and engineers. President Bush then appealed for congressional support for his increase in civil space spending—which he asserted would put the nation on the path of recovery from many years of underinvestment in space. He made the case that Mis­sion to Planet Earth and SEI embodied what the space program was all about—to use space to examine Earth from above and to push outward to new frontiers. In conclusion to his remarks, Bush acknowledged that Congress was concerned about the proposed investment in the Moon-Mars initiative. To address these issues, he turned the meeting over to Vice President Quayle.[278]

Vice President Quayle began by emphasizing the Space Councils priorities, including: a balanced mix of human and robotic, scientific and exploratory mis­sions; pursuit of challenging initiatives; and pushing space innovation designed to ensure national leadership in cutting edge technology. He then launched into a defense of SEI. Stating that the Council had dedicated significant effort to creating a strategy for SEI, Quayle argued that it was fundamentally in the national interest to implement a new round of exploration that would produce countless direct and indirect benefits. He told the attendees that the councils approach for SEI was to begin a multi-year technology research effort. The administration was asking Con­gress for the funding ($188 million in FY1991) and the time to examine alternative ways for better, faster, cheaper, safer ways of reaching the Moon and Mars. Quayle made clear to the assembled congressional leaders that this should not be considered a new program start, but an opportunity to investigate what was involved in achiev­ing the initiative and ultimately to save money. He was adamant on this point, stating unequivocally that the White House was not asking Congress to commit to a new program. Quayle argued, however, that it was important to start the technol­ogy research needed to initiate the program immediately, rather than waiting for the program to get bogged down in bipartisan politics during an election year. He also suggested that SEI offered an exceptional opportunity to showcase U. S. leadership during a time of rapid political change around the globe.

Mark Albrecht remembered the congressional position during the summit “hadn’t changed much, it pretty much remained the same—highly skeptical.” The participants indicated that while they were willing to provide money for studies, they did not believe there was enough justification for a major new program start. Instead, they wanted to see more detail regarding what the actual initiative would look like before they got fully behind the program.[279] One senior congressional aide recalled, “By this time, Chairman Traxler was carrying the message around that ‘we can’t afford this given our allocation. We can’t do it.’ He was already negative about it, so coming out of there I don’t think he was convinced differently. Congress had already pretty much made up its mind.’”[280]