Getting Ready for the New President

Paine, like most of the Washington space community, thought it unlikely that he would be kept on as NASA administrator by the incoming Nixon administration. He was a liberal Democrat, and his wife had campaigned for Nixon’s opponent, Vice President Hubert Humphrey. But it was not in Paine’s character to sit back in a caretaker role until his successor was named. On December 23 he briefed the space transition team that had been set up by the president-elect on NASA’s future aspirations. He spent much of his time in the first weeks of 1969 trying to develop a more compelling argu­ment than what was coming out of the Newell planning effort for developing a space station, the program that NASA had chosen to be the centerpiece of its post-Apollo efforts.

There was a problem in developing that argument—the various elements of NASA were not in agreement on what kind of space station the agency should be developing. The BOB had agreed that the FY1970 budget would contain modest funds for studies of a space station by the aerospace industry, and as 1969 began NASA was struggling to outline for potential contractors the characteristics of the station they should study. What had emerged from NASA’s internal planning was a station with a six-to-nine astronaut crew capable of resupply and crew rotation. The goals of such a station were both to qualify astronauts and their equipment for long-duration flights in Earth orbit and beyond and to demonstrate the ability of astronauts to carry out useful engineering and science experiments in the microgravity environment of space.18

Paine found this station concept neither sufficiently ambitious nor excit­ing enough, and on January 27, 1970, called his top managers to Washington for a meeting on what kind of space station NASA should be proposing. By the time of this meeting, Richard Nixon was already president and NASA had received the expected request from Nixon’s new budget director Robert Mayo to reexamine its FY1970 budget proposal, primarily to identify places where it could be reduced. Paine also knew that the White House was con­sidering several candidates to be his replacement as Nixon’s NASA adminis­trator. Even so, Paine continued his push for bolder thinking. He told those invited to the meeting that there was a “need to outline bold objectives for the Space Station program. Modest goals. . . are not worthy successors to those of Apollo. They will neither challenge our people nor draw the support of the nation to retain a space effort of the present size and capability.” These two objectives—developing a technologically challenging program for the NASA workforce and gaining enough public and political support to allow NASA to continue to operate in an Apollo-like mode—were underpinnings of Paine’s approach to the future of NASA.19

At the January 27 meeting, Paine discovered that he was not alone in seeking a more ambitious post-Apollo goal. The director of the Marshall Space Flight Center, emigre German engineer and space visionary Wernher von Braun, observed that NASA should spell out “what we foresee as the ultimate—the long range—the dream—station.” Then, he suggested, NASA could define a first-generation station “as a core facility in orbit from which the ultimate ‘space campus’ or ‘space base’ can grow.” Director of the Manned Spacecraft Center Robert Gilruth suggested that NASA should be looking “at a step more comparable in challenge to that of Apollo after Mercury.”20 Paine found von Braun’s and Gilruth’s advice very much to his liking. Commenting on the space station meeting, he said “We’re trying to get the best talent in NASA focused on setting the right course for the future.” He added that “the Space Station looms very large in post-Apollo manned space flight, but we’ve not yet adequately planned for this.”

Soon after the January 27 meeting, the trade publication Aviation Week and Space Technology reported that “all previous concepts have been retired from active competition in favor of a large station,” with the goal of a “100- man earth-orbiting station with a multiplicity of capabilities” and with the first step the launch “of the first module of a large space station, with per­haps as many as 12 men, by 1975.”21 Paine would soon try to sell to the new Nixon administration an ambitious space station program as the initial large-scale post-Apollo space effort. It would prove to be a tough sell.