Terminating Voyager

Webb’s reason for concern—the diminution of political support for space— was glaringly obvious, and that worry was magnified by a disastrous unforeseen event. Shortly after the budget submission in early January 1967, the Apollo fire of January 27 occurred. It killed three astronauts while they were training at Cape Canaveral. Immediately, almost everything at NASA was put on hold, while the agency coped with the disaster and its aftermath. Webb personally dealt with the president and the congressional investigation. He got Apollo through the six-month ordeal following the fire relatively unscathed and made personnel and organizational changes that strengthened the agency and con­tractor system for completing the Apollo project. But he himself was weakened as he drew the media and political focus of the investigation to himself and shielded the organization, thereby expending much of his political capital.9

Also, opponents of NASA in Congress from both the right and left used the Apollo fire to attack NASA and siphon funds from space to other areas of spending (such as the Vietnam War and social programs for the cities). Congress wanted to make substantial cuts, not in Apollo but in other space programs, including Voyager, projected to cost in the billions over time. In the summer and fall of 1967, debate raged in Congress over the NASA budget. Johnson, meanwhile, grew desperate to find money for Vietnam and domestic priorities and to deal with a soaring federal deficit. He was even proposing a tax increase. In August, he declared that the country’s financial situation had changed over the months since he had submitted his budget. He had “to distinguish between

the necessary and the desirable.”10 Apollo was protected, but Webb had to de­cide what other priorities to keep and what to let go. Johnson gave him leeway to choose, and Congress pushed the NASA Administrator to state his priorities unequivocally. Webb strongly resisted.

The NASA Administrator wanted to keep Voyager, a key to NASA’s future after Apollo. But several senior academic scientists testified against it. Even more damaging, Webb was undermined by his own agency, or at least the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC). In July, the Houston center had sent out a request for proposals for human missions to Mars and Venus. Webb was aghast, furi­ous with the political insensitivity of MSC. In fighting to keep Voyager against congressional budget cutters, Webb had taken great pains to link it rhetorically with scientific discovery, not human spaceflight. His allies in Congress had done the same. Virtually everyone knew that the mood of Congress and the country was against Mars decisions involving human spaceflight at this point.11

But Houston did not get the bureaucratic strategy. Legislative opponents of NASA immediately seized on the Houston announcement as ammunition in the context of Johnson’s statement about deciding “between the necessary and the desirable.” They charged that Voyager was a “foot in the door” for human spaceflight to Mars.12 Now they had what they considered the smoking gun of evidence. Support for Voyager, tenuous at best, evaporated. Saying they had to nip a covert human Mars program in the bud, legislative opponents persuaded Congress to kill Voyager in late October 1967. To make their point unmistak­ably clear, they also terminated a Mariner orbital flight of 1971 which NASA had proposed to help locate a place for Voyager to land. The only planetary mission remaining was a two-Mariner flyby of Mars for 1969. The Mars advocates and planetary science community in general were shocked, devastated, and, to some degree, chastened.