The End of the Apollo Era

In his press conference after the March 7 release of the presidential space statement, NASA Administrator Paine tried to put a positive spin on the document, calling the program that the president had announced “bold, diversified, very wide ranging.” But Paine in a rare note of realism did rec­ognize the challenge of reorienting NASA to new objectives, saying “what we are really faced here in this change as President Nixon’s space program replaces the old space program of the 60’s is we are essentially taking a $3.5 billion enterprise which has been going in one direction, a very single­minded purpose, and completely changing it around and moving in a new direction. That is a tough job.”1

The reality—that a new direction was needed and that it was not going to be based on accepting the recommendations of the Space Task Group (STG)—sank in fairly quickly. As it defended its FY1971 budget request to the Congress in spring 1970 NASA was publicly persisting in its hope to develop simultaneously both the space shuttle and the space station, present­ing them as a single, inseparable “station/shuttle” program. NASA also told the Congress that it intended to launch seven more Apollo lunar landing missions, Apollo 13-19. But even as these programs were being justified, to mixed Congressional reaction, behind the scenes the NASA leadership was beginning to recognize that there was essentially no possibility of get­ting the budget allocations over the next several years needed to support the agency’s ambitions. Something would have to give, and over the sum­mer of 1970, that “something” became both abandoning plans to develop the space station and the space shuttle in parallel and canceling two of the six Apollo missions remaining after Apollo 13 was launched on its fateful flight in April 1970. By the time NASA submitted its budget request for Fiscal Year 1972 in September 1970, the only major new program for which the space agency was seeking approval was the space shuttle. In a little over 12 months, the shuttle had transitioned from a necessary complement to the top-priority space station to the single large program on which NASA was staking its future. The totality of the changes in the NASA program made during the first nine months of 1970 added up to the end of the Apollo era

in NASA’s history, even though four more Apollo launches to the Moon would take place in 1971 and 1972, a Skylab orbital workshop based on Saturn V hardware would be launched in 1973 and visited by three astronaut crews using Apollo spacecraft, and an Apollo spacecraft would rendezvous and dock with a Soviet spacecraft in 1975. After those missions, there would be no more use of the launchers and spacecraft developed for Apollo. Unless NASA could get presidential approval for the space shuttle, the U. S. human space flight program would come to an end.