First Steps on Space

There were both parallels and differences with respect to the status of the space program at the time John F. Kennedy entered the White House in January 1961 and the arrival of Richard M. Nixon eight years later. Both men as presidential candidates had spoken of the importance of U. S. space leadership. Both had commissioned a transition task force on space that had been skeptical regarding a presidential commitment to a major new space effort, especially one involving human space flight. During both transitions, NASA had ambitious plans for the future, but also was operating with high uncertainty with respect to whether the new man in the White House would embrace those ambitions. NASA at the start of both the Kennedy and the Nixon administrations was being led by an acting administrator, and the new president was having difficulty in finding a person to head the space agency on a permanent basis. In both 1961 and 1968, the new president faced important decisions in his first months in office with respect to the future of the U. S. space effort.

A major difference in the two situations was that while in January 1961 the United States was still four months away from the launch of its first astronaut, Alan Shepard, on a 15-minute suborbital flight, in January 1969 NASA had just sent three astronauts around the Moon and was preparing to make the initial attempt to land Americans on the lunar surface. Once the lunar landing was achieved, there was no clear next step for human space flight. Without such new missions, the U. S. program of human space flight would come to an end in the 1973-1975 period, after Apollo lunar landings missions through Apollo 20 had been carried out and astronaut visits to an already approved orbital workshop based on Apollo hardware, later named Skylab, were completed. At the time of the Kennedy transition, NASA was a relatively small organization with a modest contractor support network; in 1969, as a result of the Apollo buildup, NASA had over 34,000 employees supported by over 200,000 contractors from the aerospace industry. Deciding what to do with this “space industrial complex” and the capabilities it rep­resented was a rather more difficult problem for the Nixon administration than John F. Kennedy had faced as he decided to race to the Moon.