Evaluating the Space Task Group Report

On September 19, 1969, Thomas Paine recommended to President Nixon that he endorse Option II of the STG report, which led to a first mission to Mars in 1986, and suggested to the president that he soon make a statement to that effect. Before he forwarded Paine’s letter to the president, Assistant to the President Peter Flanigan, the senior Nixon staff person with space policy responsibility, asked Robert Mayo for his comments on Paine’s rec­ommendations, which Flanigan supported. Flanigan was planning on pre­paring a presidential statement on space, as Paine had suggested, “in the near future.” As he considered recommending to the president an immediate commitment to an ambitious space effort including a 1980s mission to Mars, Flanigan was concerned about whether such a commitment was politically sustainable. He wrote David Derge at the University of Indiana, the Nixon White House’s preferred pollster, asking him to make sure that “the next Republican National Committee survey of public opinion include a question as to whether the public prefers the space budget to stay at the current levels, go up or go down, recognizing that an increase means an earlier Mars land­ing at the cost of expenditures at home.”3

Budget Director Mayo was also preparing a memorandum for the presi­dent commenting on the STG report; he was basing that memo on an in­depth and skeptical analysis of the STG report prepared by the BOB staff. According to NASA’s Willis Shapley, who had spent over 20 years at BOB before joining the space agency, “the budget people were terrified at the possibility of the public enthusiasm” in the aftermath of Apollo 11 result­ing “in another major commitment of some sort. . . With all the enthusi­asm, the parades and all that, and with Tom Paine trying to exploit that, very clearly the whole name of the game from the budget side and from the people who were just afraid of an irrational decision of some sort, was to contain NASA.”4 In his September 25 memo, Mayo recommended that Nixon “withhold announcement of your space program decision until after you have reviewed the report recommendations specifically in the context of the FY1971 budget problem.”

It was Mayo’s recommended course of action that Richard Nixon chose to follow. Announcement of the overall Nixon approach to the post-Apollo space program would have to wait until after the review of NASA’s Fiscal

Year 1971 budget proposal was completed, then anticipated to be sometime in December. It would be during that budget review that the NASA pro­gram would be evaluated in the context of national priorities.5