"Final" Budget Decisions Are Not Final

In the meeting with Mayo, Ehrlichman, and Flanigan on December 5, President Nixon decided to give tentative approval to the BOB recommen­dation of a NASA budget for FY1971 of $3.7 billion, but also decided to suspend production of additional Saturn V boosters. It is likely that Flanigan had significant influence on the president’s views. By the time of the budget meeting, he had become much more cautious with respect to NASA’s future plans than had been the case in the immediate aftermath of the STG report.

He also had become attuned to the reality that there was limited public support for ambitious post-Apollo space activities. On December 6, he sent a memorandum to the president reporting that “the October 6 issue of Newsweek took a poll of 1,321 Americans with household incomes ranging from $5,000 to $15,000 a year. This represents 61% of the white population of the United States and is obviously the heart of your constituency.” Of this group, Flanigan reported, “56% think the government should be spending less money on space exploration, and only 10% think the government should be spending more money.”22

Nixon’s budget decisions were communicated to Paine by Flanigan, not Mayo as would normally have been the case. Flanigan told Paine that “the President says that he doesn’t have enough money within the next couple of years and must accept limitation of activity,” that “the President will agree that at some time we will go to Mars,” that Nixon “did not see the need to go to the moon six more times,” and that “the President was alarmed [in the sense of being concerned about their future costs] about the space station and shuttle.”23 Nixon’s skepticism regarding the value of additional lunar landing missions was to be a recurrent theme during the next two years.

In a December 17 letter to Nixon appealing the tentative budget deci­sions, Paine once again gave priority to getting started on the station and the shuttle, saying “if, because of today’s severe fiscal constraints we must sacrifice some current operations. . . so be it. The important thing is to press forward now with our new program.” Closing his five-page letter, Paine told the president “I believe I would be remiss and do you and your Administration a disservice if I did not place before you as you reach these important decisions on America’s future in space the relevant facts, conse­quences, and potentialities.” He requested a meeting with Nixon to discuss his appeal.24

An indication of the context in which President Nixon would evaluate that appeal came soon after the December 5 Nixon-Mayo meeting. One influence was Flanigan’s December 6 memorandum reporting on the nega­tive public attitude toward increases in space spending. In addition, an entry in the president’s carefully read daily news summary discussed the Hunger Conference taking place in Washington that week. It noted that “constant references were made to space” as an example of spending that “could have been far better spent on hunger.” After reading this report, Nixon asked his advisers Ehrlichman and Daniel Patrick Moynihan “whether you agree that some of our money would be better spent on hunger.”25

Another signal that NASA was not going to succeed in its budget appeal came as the Apollo 12 crew visited President Nixon in the White House on Saturday, December 20. The crew and their wives (except for Alan Bean’s wife, who was ill) had dinner with President and Mrs. Nixon in the White House family quarters, then watched the movie Marooned, a story about three astronauts stranded in orbit. This was a rather odd choice for the occa­sion, given that all three of the Apollo 12 crew hoped to fly in space again, but the movie had just been released to critical acclaim. Like the Apollo 11 crew, the astronaut families stayed overnight at the White House and joined the Nixons the next morning for coffee, then attended a White House worship service. The Apollo 11 visit to the White House the previous month had been a warm and relaxed affair, but Pete Conrad sensed the president’s “apparent lack of interest in the space program.” Conrad was “disappointed and disil­lusioned” after his White House visit. He suggested that “the President paid very little attention to any discussions on space and exhibited no technical interest. He also appeared to have very little knowledge of what had gone on in space and what was going on in the future.” Conrad on several occasions “tried to bring up the future of space, the space station, the space shuttle, Mars missions, and was very quickly turned around and the subjects went back to small talk.”26

Tom Paine had a 20-minute meeting with President Nixon on the after­noon of December 23 to make his case for a higher NASA budget. In advance of that meeting, Flanigan made his recommendations to the president on dealing with NASA. He suggested that Saturn V production should be sus­pended, that study funds for the space station and shuttle should be reduced, that the frequency of Apollo launches to the Moon should be reduced to “an average of 1ЛА per year. . . thereby extending the period of manned space flight beyond the presently planned date of 1974,” that university research funds should be eliminated “as requested by the President,” and that the newly opened NASA Electronics Research Center be closed. Paine in his December 17 appeal letter had once again claimed that the steps NASA would have to take to accommodate a NASA budget of $3.7 billion would mean that “U. S. manned flight activity would end in 1972 with an uncer­tain date for resumption many years in the future.” Flanigan called this claim “unacceptable,” since it would place the “onus” for terminating the current human space flight “on the President,” while NASA would “create commit­ments for very expensive programs that will require excessive outlays in the next few years.” Flanigan was quite aware of NASA’s “crying wolf” strategy in the budget negotiations, and by this point had become extremely skeptical of its validity.27

Notes taken by Ehrlichman at the December 23 meeting dealt with only two issues—whether to continue production of the Saturn V and, if the deci­sion on that issue was to suspend production, whether to “close Kennedy [Space Center] in ’72.” Nixon did not respond to Paine’s arguments at their meeting; rather, the president made what he thought was his final decision on the NASA budget on December 26, approving a $3.735 billion NASA budget that confirmed the suspension of Saturn V production and the clo­sure of the Electronics Research Center. NASA was told that it should launch Apollo missions no more than twice a year in order to extend the time the Saturn V would be in service. Only a low level of study funds for the space station and shuttle was approved. The budget decisions were accompanied by the message that “the President was quite favorably inclined to the NASA program but that he just did not have the money to spend on it.”28