ASTP, Fletcher, and NASA’s "Balanced Program&quot

James Fletcher, too, was coping with a weakened national economy and like­wise anticipated that the ASTP might function as a public relations windfall. In the years of ASTP planning, Fletcher’s personal papers reveal a time of intense reflection on the operation and direction of NASA in the long run. ASTP held a crucial role in Fletcher’s NASA and his vision for a long-term balanced space pro­gram. Communicating with President Nixon in 1973, Fletcher identified ASTP as one of several long-lead time “major visible space accomplishments” such as Skylab, Viking, and the Space Shuttle.68 He suggested the programmatic comple­ment to this would be a collection of short-lead time projects with “earlier practi­cal return” such as remote sensing for earth resources, agricultural yield, forest preserves, hydrology, and minerals. Weather satellites, which “must be an inter­national endeavor,” may “in the long run have the biggest impact of any direct application satellite,” he postulated. Regarding the environment and pollution studies, Fletcher observed a “growing interest both in this country and abroad for a move” in the direction of a global environmental monitoring system.69

Due to what Fletcher perceived as temporary budget shortages, he trusted that remote sensing and robotic exploration would sustain NASA (and the public’s need for “a morale boost and an increased confidence in themselves”) until the long – lead time Shuttle was operational and the federal budget had recovered. ASTP, the Shuttle, and Europe’s Spacelab (see chapter 6) were crucial investments in the future of human exploration and Fletcher opined that “we should leave open the option of returning to the moon to establish permanent bases or to pursue further scientific investigations” or even a manned exploration of Mars.70

Thus, 1973 was something of a crossroads. Writing Roy Ash, director of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB), Fletcher indicated an understanding of the logic behind the mid-1960s budget cuts that accompanied the phasedown of heavy Apollo requirements. Yet, the trends that concerned Fletcher were tem­porary spending cuts turned permanent. NASA had made “major programmatic reductions” for FY1973 and 1974, but OMB and NASA were both aware that these cuts were made on the assumption that they were “temporary and that future budgets would again approach the ‘constant budget’ level” set in 1971 as $3.4 billion.71 FY1975 “will become decisive,” Fletcher predicted, explaining that at that point, it would be in NASA’s best interest to forego the Shuttle, sci­ence, exploration, applications, or aeronautics, since cuts across the board were no longer tenable. At one point, using the term “balanced program” five times on one page, Fletcher asserted that there was a great deal of support for the cur­rent balanced program, but that “without this balance we would lose support for the remaining program in Congress, by the public, and by the scientific and user communities.”72

In an economic climate that had cut the post-Apollo program short and post­poned Shuttle development, ASTP functioned to help preserve the engineering know-how and managerial expertise of the Apollo program into the dawning Shuttle years. ASTP and Skylab might be taken as evidence of Apollo’s sustained “vitality” in the US space program, a notion supported by Ezell and Ezell who asserted that in the closing days of ASTP, most staff transferred directly to the Shuttle program.73

The shared resources and expenditures implicit to international cooperation rendered it both diplomatically and fiscally attractive. NASA was entering a “new generation of space activity when we are called upon to do much more with considerably less money.”74 Whereas the Apollo program had cost $25 billion, the Shuttle was a mere $5.5 billion. “We are going to have to do more for less,”

Fletcher observed and again, ASTP was an important factor in years to come. To Fletcher, ASTP was

an important step toward long-term, large-scale cooperation with the Soviet Union and other countries, such cooperation is, in my opinion, the only likely hope in this cen­tury for large future steps in space, such as establishing a base on the Moon or landing men on Mars. If we had to go it alone, my guess is that we would have to wait until the 21st century.75

However history and hindsight render a very different—and oftentimes far more critical—narrative of what ASTP has wrought. Through the course of ASTP, George Low and Soviet Academy of Sciences’ academician Keldysh consulted one another on possible expansion of cooperation. They wrote of a joint Shuttle – Salyut mission (which used the last Apollo and last Soyuz craft that orbited the earth, and therefore posed no great risk of technology transfer) that would offer a much more meaningful and possibly sustained collaboration. They dis­cussed a joint robotic mission to the Moon, retrieving soil samples from the far side. In 1977, the two nations signed an agreement for cooperation in human spaceflight, designating 1981 as a target year for a Shuttle-Salyut mission and establishing a joint task force studying the possibility of a joint space station.76 Neither of these ever happened, only augmenting the accusations of some that the joint ASTP mission was, from an engineering and diplomatic standpoint, a dead end.

Even Walter McDougall, otherwise relentlessly pragmatic and eloquent in his assessment of the respective space programs, takes pause to observe of ASTP and contemporary manifestations of detente: “None of this did much to hobble Soviet technocracy,” he groused. Rather, he asserts, the program “gave Soviet technicians the chance to traipse through US space facilities and study the hard­ware and flight operations first hand” (paralleling the visits of US engineers to Moscow and Star City). In conclusion, for McDougall, cooperation such as ASTP was nothing more than a “double boon” to the Soviets, appearing to restore their space program to an equal of the United States and “also provided access to American technology.”77

In light of these plans that came to naught, a critic with an eye on human spaceflight alone (and not biosatellites or the rich field of remote sensing) might otherwise look to the years following ASTP as a “lapse” in cooperation alto­gether. While ASTP had debatable long-term positive influence on the American end (from the perspective of funding, follow-on projects, or perhaps even public relations) it does to some degree function as a foreshadowing of a warming and loosening of relations at personal and middle-managerial levels. These notions are explored in the pages that follow, under the 1982-1984 “lapse” in cooperation.