After the Moon, Mars?

Nasa Acting Administrator Thomas Paine told a reporter a few days after the November 1968 presidential election that he intended to present the incoming Nixon administration with an ambitious proposal for future human space flight. He was true to his word. In his first communication to President Nixon, on February 4, 1969, Paine urged the new president to “give early personal attention to the question of the future direction and pace of the nation’s space program.” He noted, in words he and his advis­ers thought would appeal to the new people in the White House, that “the future position in space of the United States relative to the USSR is at stake” and that “significant opportunities exist now for new leadership and initia­tives.” Casting space choices in terms of U. S.-Soviet competition was rather tone deaf on Paine’s part, a characteristic that was to persist through his time at NASA. Richard Nixon during his campaign and then in his inaugural address had made it clear that he was seeking areas of cooperation, not com­petition, with the Soviet Union.1

Later in February, Paine followed this plea with proposals to increase the NASA budget for the coming fiscal year in ways that would preserve the abil­ity to produce more Saturn V launch vehicles, allow a second, more scientifi­cally rewarding, phase of lunar exploration, and accelerate the pace of space station development; these were the items that Lyndon Johnson had refused to approve in his final space budget decisions. Paine also sent to the president on February 26 a lengthy and impassioned argument for an immediate com­mitment to a large space station as the first major post-Apollo space goal.

The creation of the Space Task Group (STG) was a blow to NASA’s hopes to get early approval of a major new space initiative; the president not surpris­ingly took the position that he would wait until he received the STG recom­mendations before making any commitment to new space ventures. Thus influencing the STG to take a position supportive of NASA’s aspirations became a very high-stakes objective for the space agency, and particularly Tom Paine.

There were good reasons for Paine’s attempts to get an early decision on a new program to follow Apollo. If no major new start were approved in

the first year of the Nixon administration, NASA was facing both a hiatus in developing new capabilities for human space flight and a shutdown of the production lines for existing capabilities. Subsequent missions to the Moon after the first lunar landing would be based on already developed and purchased Apollo/Saturn equipment, as would the orbital workshop that was the only approved post-lunar landing human space flight project. The workshop and however many lunar landings would be attempted would be completed by 1975 at the latest, and more likely by the end of 1973. After then, there was a real chance that the U. S. program of human space flight would come to at least a temporary end. Paine and his associates were con­vinced that no U. S. president would accept such a situation, and wanted to press their case for quick approval of new human space flight efforts to avoid a lengthy hiatus. They also wanted to preserve NASA’s identity as an engineering and systems development organization, not just as an operator of existing space capabilities, and to maintain as much as possible of the large personnel and facility base developed for Apollo. They thought it self-evi­dent that the nation should continue an ambitious program of human space flight; according to NASA senior strategist Willis Shapley, “it was really a cultural shock, not really realized for many years [after 1969], that you did have to justify” the human space flight program.2