NASA Resistance to Facing Its Future

James Webb had been NASA administrator from 1961 until he resigned in October 1968. Webb had seen as his overriding responsibility making sure that the Kennedy commitment to a lunar landing was carried out. With this as his focus, Webb had resisted agency-wide planning for what NASA should undertake in the post-Apollo period. According to Willis Shapley, one of Webb’s close associates at NASA, Webb “refused to the extent possible to recognize the importance” of post-Apollo planning. Webb did believe, as a “fundamental tenet,” that “we could not or should assume that the Apollo program would be a total success, and certainly not assume that it would be a total early success.” Webb felt “that nothing should be allowed to dilute the focus of the program we had taken on already, and that we should not start dreaming about what would take place after that.”6 (Shapley as NASA associate deputy administrator had a major role during the period examined in this study in developing NASA’s strategy and policies and articulating them to the White House and Congress. He was a prime example of a “face­less bureaucrat” who plays a key behind-the-scene policy role, in this case with respect to the nation’s civilian space program.) Webb’s perspective also reflected political reality. President Lyndon B. Johnson had made sure that the NASA budget remained adequate to assure Apollo’s success, but faced with spiraling costs of the Vietnam War and of his Great Society programs as well as with widespread domestic unrest, he was unwilling to approve a NASA budget at a level that could support major new space initiatives. NASA itself was a badly divided organization, with its Office of Manned Space Flight and its human space flight centers in Houston, Texas and Huntsville, Alabama planning their own course for the future, while its Office of Space Science and Applications worked with the external scientific community to define a different preferred future, one which would redress the perceived imbalance between human and robotic space missions. As a result of Webb’s resistance, agency-wide planning for the post-Apollo period began only in early 1968, and its early results were disappointing, reflecting the divisions within the organization.