Budget Pressure on Viking

Paine brought von Braun to Washington to help him promote a large post – Apollo program to Nixon. The charismatic von Braun won some converts on the body Nixon had established to advise him, the Space Task Group (STG). On September 15, STG met with Nixon in the Oval Office and presented three post-Apollo options. The options entailed a shuttle, space station, lunar base, and a human Mars mission. They varied in the aggressiveness by which to pur­sue these goals, especially Mars. The most aggressive would set a date, 1983, for human Mars flight at a cost of $8 billion to $10 billion a year. The least aggres­sive would cost $4 billion to $6.7 billion a year and would put an astronaut on Mars by the end of the century. Nixon listened to the presentation of the three options, thanked the team for its work, but made no decision.31

While waiting for Nixon to say something definite about NASA’s future, the annual budgetary process continued, with Paine battling the BOB. Viking, like all NASA activities, awaited determinations about how much NASA would have to spend, overall, as well as on it in particular. By Christmas 1969, NASA’s prospective budget for the next fiscal year was down to $3.6 billion, a sharp drop from the previous year. The issue became not whether NASA could begin a post-Apollo buildup, but whether it could even implement existing programs, including Viking. Then, just days later, the budget director, Robert Mayo, re­quired NASA to find additional cuts owing to a last-minute decision to close a government-wide gap in funding.

The budget director went over various options with Paine, including two options involving Viking: cancellation, or delay of launch from 1973 to 1975. Mayo said BOB favored delay and so did Nixon. Paine had little choice. He called Naugle, who was at home, and asked him to come in. It was December 31, New Year’s Eve. To save Viking, Paine told Naugle, they would have to set the launch back to 1975. Naugle left the meeting feeling quite depressed, as though “two years of careful planning for Viking” had been wiped out almost in the blink of an eye.32

In January 1970, Paine announced that NASA would have $3.5 billion in the president’s budget. This was a figure Paine had earlier told Mayo was “unaccept­able.” It entailed not only delay in Viking but ending Saturn 5 production and reducing the number of Apollo Moon landings. Those landings were destined now to end in late 1972, and there still was no new major program to keep NASA going to prevent the agency’s continuing decline.33

George Low, Paine’s deputy, tried to soften the blow to Naugle and the Vi­king team, declaring in a memo to Naugle in early February, “Viking holds the highest priority of any project or program in NASA’s Planetary Program. Viking holds a high priority among all of NASA’s programs.”34

That was an important statement about Viking’s priority from Low, because it indicated that NASA leaders would protect Viking, even if they let other projects go. It was not only a science priority but a NASA priority. In March, Nixon issued his first policy pronouncement on space. His message was that NASA would have to live at a far different level than it had in the 1960s. He announced that “space activities will be a part of our lives for the rest of time,” and thus there was no need to plan them “as a series of separate leaps, each re­quiring a massive concentration of energy and will and accomplished on a crash timetable.” Indeed, he said, “space expenditures must take their place within a rigorous system of national priorities.”35

What this meant, beyond the rhetoric, was that he was not endorsing any of the STG options. There was no decision to build a shuttle, no space station, and certainly no human Mars mission. As a consequence, NASA drifted, its future clouded. Low’s memo notwithstanding, the survival of Viking was uncertain. What was absolutely clear was that Viking could not be justified as a precursor to human flight to Mars, since there would not be anything resembling such a project. Indeed, the whole human spaceflight effort was withering away.

In July, Paine announced he was resigning, effective September. In August, von Braun, who would leave NASA in 1972, complained that NASA was “wait­ing for a miracle, just waiting for another man on a white horse to come and offer us another planet, like President Kennedy.” It was not going to happen.36