Apollo, Kennedy, and Nixon

During the 1960s, the United States had spent close to $25 billion to develop the capability to launch large payloads into orbit and beyond and to land on another celestial surface. This capability included not only the production facilities and tooling for the Saturn V launch vehicle and the Apollo space­craft but also the gigantic complex at the Kennedy Space Center required to launch the Apollo/Saturn combination to the Moon. To those such as James Webb who had fought for the political support and funding to create and use it, this capability represented an extremely valuable element of U. S. national power, not only in the context of the Cold War competition with the Soviet Union but also in terms of being a concrete and very visible symbol of U. S. ability to do in space whatever it decided was in its national interest. Sending astronauts to the Moon, Webb had argued throughout the 1960s, was only the first use of this capability. It could also enable a variety of other large – scale national security, exploratory, and scientific undertakings.

Richard Nixon and most of his policy and budget advisors did not share this concept of continued large-scale space undertakings as being important to U. S. power and pride. The March 1970 presidential statement on space had said that U. S. space activities should be viewed “as part of a continuing process—one which will go on day in and day out, year in and year out— and not as a series of separate leaps, each requiring a massive concentra­tion of energy and will and accomplished on a crash timetable.” Based on this perspective, through its post-Apollo budget and policy decisions the

Nixon administration made a conscious decision to abandon the capability that had been so expensive to develop and that had given the United States the possibility of an expansive future in space. John F. Kennedy in 1961 had characterized his decision to send Astronauts to the Moon as a “great new American enterprise. . . which in many ways may hold the key to our future on earth.” A year later, Kennedy declared that the he had chosen “to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things not because they are easy, but because they are hard,” and “because that goal will serve to organize and measure the best of our energies and skills.” R ichard Nixon did not share this view of the importance of space achievement; in sharp contrast to John Kennedy, Nixon in 1970 made the mundane proposal that “what we do in space from here on in must become a normal and regular part of our national life.” Although Richard Nixon as he discussed the space program frequently linked “exploring the unknown” to continuing national vitality, there was little of such a grand vision in his actual approach to space decisions.