Space and National Priorities

The Space Task Group (STG) report can be seen as a marketing docu­ment. The report recommended as being in the national interest a course of action that could be followed at several levels of investment. Like any other sales prospectus, it made the most positive case possible for investing in its proposed activities, without comparing that investment to alternative uses of available funds. The issue facing the Nixon administration in fall 1969 was how to react to the report’s recommendations. To make that judg­ment, the administration, and ultimately President R ichard Nixon, would have to decide where the post-Apollo space program fit into overall national priorities.

As the Nixon administration in late 1969 and January 1970 formulated its overall budget proposal for Fiscal Year (FY)1971, which would begin on July 1, 1970, the inexperience of Richard Nixon and his top White House staff in actually managing the federal government became evident. There was con­tinuing uncertainty regarding the overall economic and fiscal policy context within which the budget was being formulated. Communication between the president and his top policy advisers, on one hand, and the Bureau of the Budget (BOB), on the other, broke down. There were several errors made in forecasting federal revenues, confounding President Nixon’s intent to submit a balanced budget and forcing a last-minute round of budget reductions to achieve that goal. The cumulative result was a great deal of confusion regard­ing final budget decisions.1

NASA found itself caught up in this breakdown of the budget process. Tom Paine had hoped that the recommendations of the STG report could provide the framework for FY1971 budget choices. There was a conviction on the part of Paine and others in NASA that in the wake of the successful Apollo 11 mission, NASA merited continued high priority among govern­ment programs and thus that the agency should receive funding commen­surate with the STG report’s more ambitious options. Given the chaos of the budget process, coupled with the opposition to the STG recommenda­tions from key White House advisors and from BOB Director Robert Mayo and his staff, this approach did not prove productive. The results of the

FY1971 budget decisions were deeply disappointing to Paine and his associ­ates. NASA’s 1969 series of achievements, including four successful Apollo missions and two flybys of Mars by robotic spacecraft, were not rewarded; rather, the space agency’s future remained almost as uncertain in January 1970 as it had been as the Nixon administration took office a year earlier. According to Paine, NASA “fought a retreating action through the entire budget process, beaten back but fighting lustily at every turn of the road.” However “lusty” NASA’s resistance to budget reductions might have been, it was ultimately unsuccessful.2