First Adjustments

All of these final Apollo missions used equipment already in production by 1970. The ability to produce more Apollo spacecraft and Saturn launchers would soon be abandoned.

No More Saturn V Launchers

NASA in July 1969 had awarded 11-month contracts to study the preliminary design of a Saturn V-launched space station to leading aerospace companies North American Rockwell and McDonnell Douglas. The space agency had set the parameters for the studies based on George Mueller’s integrated plan. The initial station module was to be 33 feet in diameter, the size of the first and second stages of the Saturn V booster that would be used to launch it. This “core module” would be able to support a 12-person crew and have a ten-year lifetime; it was to be the first step on a path to having an increasing number of humans living and working in space.

The FY1971 budget decision to suspend for an indefinite period produc­tion of the Saturn V cast an immediate pall over this plan. NASA would need one Saturn V to launch the initial module, and additional boosters if the subsequent low-Earth orbit infrastructure buildup contemplated in the STG report were to be pursued. However, the seven remaining Saturn V vehicles of the original 15 ordered at the start of Apollo were already committed to the six remaining Apollo missions after Apollo 13 and to Skylab, and pros­pects for restarting Saturn V production in a few years appeared dim.

As noted in chapter 2, the process of shutting down the production line for the Saturn V had begun in 1968, even before Richard Nixon had arrived at the White House. Then-NASA Administrator James Webb had rejected a request to begin procuring long lead-time equipment for a next production run of the Saturn V on the grounds that there was no approved requirement for those additional launchers. The Saturn V had received a brief reprieve in early 1969 as the STG recommended adding the funding to NASA’s FY1970 budget needed to keep the production line open in order to preserve President Nixon’s option to approve an ambitious post – Apollo space program. That decision had been reversed in the December 1969 budget negotiations; Tom Paine had chosen to sacrifice funding for additional Saturn Vs in order to obtain White House approval for funds to study the space station and space shuttle. The FY1971 presidential budget proposed “suspending” Saturn V production, with the idea that produc­tion could be restarted if additional heavy-lift boosters were needed in the future.

By mid-June 1970 NASA Deputy Administrator George Low concluded that restarting Saturn V production was an unrealistic hope, given NASA’s budget outlook. This meant that the only way to have the massive boosters available to launch the initial large space station module or a second Skylab mission was to cancel one or more Apollo missions and use the Saturn V boosters assigned to those missions for those launches. Low judged that NASA would “not get the amount of funding we anticipate in 1972 or 1973” and that “there seems to be a disenchantment in America and particularly in Congress with additional flights to the moon.” Low discussed his ideas on canceling one or more Apollo missions with Tom Paine, who “originally was very negative,” but upon reflection “talked about this in a much more positive vein.”2 The final decision that NASA would not retain the industrial capability required to restart Saturn V production was not made until 1972, but by mid-1970 it was virtually certain that there would be no more of the Moon rockets produced. With this decision, the United States gave up for decades to come its capability to launch astronauts for voyages beyond the immediate vicinity of Earth.