LBJ and Webb: Seeking Balance for the 1970s

Johnson’s leaving the White House in 1969 did not necessarily end a decade of unflagging executive support to NASA. In their determination to maintain the Apollo landing deadline of 1969, the Johnson administration wound up trim­ming or eliminating other scientifically meaningful projects from the NASA program. As numerous historians have noted, this placed NASA administrator James Webb in a complicated position, forced to prioritize among the Apollo timetable, post-Apollo projects, earth science, planetary exploration, and NASA’s many other pursuits. James Webb fought bitterly for the funds to sustain robotic planetary exploration, fundamental research, the Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application, all the while concerned for the minimum requirements for the Apollo mission.25

As development of Apollo spacecraft neared completion in the mid-1960s, operating budgets dwindled and initiatives cut back. Webb and his colleagues had anticipated flagging support and when negotiations commenced regarding post-Apollo priorities and funding they adopted a cautiously defensive posture. Former NASA chief historian Roger Launius observes that when the Johnson administration pressed Webb for post-Apollo objectives, “Webb was quite reluc­tant to commit NASA to specific goals and priorities in advance of any expres­sion of political support.”26 In his 1965 “Summary Report: Future Programs Task Group” the administrator’s only recommendation was that NASA plot out a “continued balanced program, steadily pursuing continued advancement in aeronautics, space sciences, manned space flight, and lunar and planetary exploration, adequately supported by a broad basic research and technology development program.”27 Webb emphasized that he saw no need to require an “overriding emphasis” in any of the aforementioned fields, nor did he believe that a new Apollo-style space race would secure the administration’s future. NASA required a balanced (if self-contradictory) program, one that would meet demands for cost-effective administration, meanwhile maintaining a “pre-emi­nent role in aeronautics and space.”28

By the mid-1960s and into the years following Apollo, lawmakers and the pub­lic alike frequently questioned the fiscal and political sustainability of speed-driven “crash” programs. Some critics voiced their doubts regarding the worth of space sprints such as Apollo or the rush to respond to Sputnik. Still others questioned the opportunity costs of space exploration as a whole—believing that the same funds that put men on the moon might somehow be reallocated to “urban blight,” for­eign aid, or be forfeited altogether to reduce tax expenditures.29 In such a political environment, projects emphasizing the cost-benefit analysis of spin-off technolo­gies or good stewardship of the earth’s resources promised a logical counter to the harshest criticisms against “space spectaculars” both at home and abroad.