A Holding Action

As he took over the leadership of NASA in October 1968, one of Tom Paine’s first tasks was to submit to the White House Bureau of the Budget (BOB) a NASA budget request for FY1970, which would begin on July 1, 1969. As acting administrator, Paine was not in a strong position, but that did not deter him from an aggressive posture with respect to NASA’s future. The BOB had given NASA a budget target for FY1970 of $3.6 bil­lion, continuing the downward trend in the NASA budget that had started four years earlier. Paine called the target “a going-out-of-business projec­tion, certainly not a viable program.” Paine argued that a budget at the BOB target level would immediately after Apollo bring “to a halt the great program that was built at such a great cost.” Paine’s arguments did not convince the BOB staff. In a paper commenting on NASA’s request, the staff noted “the resource requirements of the Viet Nam war and of pressing domestic needs, coupled with an apparent acceptance of the Soviet pres­ence in space, have tended to push the civil space program down the scale of national priorities.” The paper recognized that “major decisions must be made in the 1970 and 1971 budgets.” The BOB staff was skeptical of the value of human space flight, suggesting that “the case for a continuation of a manned space flight effort after Apollo is one of continuing to advance our capability to operate in space on a larger scale, for longer duration, for ultimate purposes that are unclear.”16

Based on a judgment that an outgoing administration should not make decisions with long-term budget implications, BOB Director Charles Zwick told Paine that he would recommend a budget of only $3.9 billion to President Johnson. This was not acceptable to Paine; he insisted that he and Zwick meet with the president to allow Paine to argue his case for a higher budget. As Paine correctly saw it, Zwick’s proposed budget would provide only “the minimum levels of funding required to preserve for the next Administration the option, in the next two years, to decide whether and in what areas to move ahead in aeronautics and space.”

When Paine and Zwick met with Lyndon Johnson, the president sup­ported BOB’s position. Lyndon B. Johnson had been a major supporter of the NASA program as a senator, as vice-president, and in the first few years of his presidency. In his 1971 memoir, Johnson would speak of his hope that the United States could build on Apollo to develop “laboratories in space,” “an Antarctica-type station on the moon,” “a spacecraft that can be reused,” and would eventually “move out to other planets.” But in his last weeks in the White House, weary from the turmoil of the late 1960s, he was unwill­ing to do anything but pass the question of the future of the United States in space to Richard Nixon.17