Space Station Exits the Stage

However, the shuttle-based approach to keeping space station development alive as an immediate post-Apollo prospect had a short lifetime. The NASA leadership in mid-July 1970 met to formulate the agency’s program for the next five to ten years. They took into account the president’s March space statement, the funding the agency would request in its FY1972 budget submission, due on September 30, and an estimate of the budget it could expect in the subsequent few years. A key result of these discussions was a decision to return the space station to preliminary study status rather than seek FY1972 approval to begin its detailed design and development. This decision effectively postponed the station for a number of years. Associate Administrator for Manned Space Flight Dale Myers, who had joined NASA in January 1970 as George Mueller’s successor, told Low that he was “mov­ing out to the shuttle first because. . . an interim space station, without a proper logistics system, would be dead-ended.” Low agreed, recognizing that “a space station without a shuttle makes no sense at all. . . a shuttle with­out a space station does.”4

This was a momentous choice. It meant that NASA would abandon its plan for simultaneous development of the station and shuttle that had been at the heart of its post-Apollo aspirations; rather, NASA would first seek approval to develop the space shuttle, postponing station development until after the shuttle began flying later in the 1970s. It also meant that the shut­tle would have to be sold as a general-purpose, lower-cost launch system and as the way of keeping astronauts flying in space, not as a logistics vehicle for a space station, its original rationale.

Even with the decision to give shuttle schedule priority vis-a-vis the station, the link between the space shuttle and an eventual space station remained unbreakable; in NASA’s view, one of the highest priority require­ments driving space shuttle design would be its ability to launch modules large enough to be assembled into a viable space station. NASA told the White House as it submitted its budget request in September 1970 that “we have made a major decision to defer development of a space station. . . to a later time and to orient the space station studies we will continue in FY1972 toward modular systems that can be launched as well as serviced by the space shuttle.”5 The space station for the time being might be postponed, but it would not be forgotten.