Crafting a Presidential Space Statement

Almost from the start of his administration, there had been suggestions that President Nixon spell out his views on the future in space in a formal state­ment or speech. As the STG report was submitted, one of the NASA senior staff who had been working with the group, Milt Rosen, observed that “the President is going to make. . . a policy statement on space, and presumably one comparable in importance with the statement of President Kennedy in 1961.”2

It was the need to respond to the STG report that ultimately led to the formal statement of Richard Nixon’s post-Apollo space policy; that pro­nouncement is called here the “Nixon space doctrine.” But the presidential statement, issued only on March 7, 1970, six months after the STG report had been submitted, was hardly the kind of clarion call to leadership in space that President John F. Kennedy had proposed to the Congress and the nation on May 25, 1961.3 Rather, it was carefully balanced between provid­ing a positive but very general vision for future space development and mak­ing it clear that the space program would no longer be treated as it had been during Apollo, as “special,” operating outside the normal process for setting national priorities and based on highly mobilized efforts to achieve chal­lenging goals. In a rather negative way, the Nixon space doctrine was indeed comparable in importance to Kennedy’s 1961 setting of a lunar landing as a national goal, for it set out a framework for making space decisions that not only Richard Nixon, but most subsequent occupants of the White House, have used over the past 40 plus years. The framework put in place by Richard Nixon on March 7, 1970, has thus had a far more lasting impact on national space policy than John Kennedy’s 1961 decision to go to the Moon.