Paine Leaves NASA

On Saturday, July 25, Tom Paine called the Western White House in San Clemente requesting a ten-minute meeting on the following Monday or Tuesday to discuss a “personal decision.” That decision, it turned out, was to leave his position at NASA to accept an unexpected and apparently unso­licited offer from his former employer, General Electric, to become its vice president in charge of the company’s power generation group. This was a well-compensated position and Paine had the education of four children to pay for, but it is probable that he also was very frustrated by his inability to get the Nixon administration to accept his vision of the future in space. There is no evidence that the White House had encouraged Paine to resign; in fact, Peter Flanigan would later ask Paine to stay on until his successor was ready to take over.17

When George Low learned of Paine’s resignation, he was surprised. In a July 25 telephone conversation, Paine had told Low that he would have “some important information” he would discuss once Low arrived in Washington; Low was in the process of moving his family from Houston. Low “momen­tarily thought that this information might concern Tom’s resignation,” but he “quickly discarded this idea” because Paine had “told me after Apollo 13 that he would not leave the agency until after we had flown a successful Apollo mission.”18

Paine met with the president on the morning of Tuesday, July 28, to submit his letter of resignation, effective on September 15. Even after resign­ing, Paine continued his effort to convince Richard Nixon of the value of an ambitious U. S. space program. On August 10, Paine once again requested a 90-minute appointment with the president to present “NASA’s projection of man’s future in space to the year 2000.” Although Ehrlichman and Flanigan recommended that the president schedule such a meeting, Nixon decided to “wait for [the] new man,” that is, Paine’s replacement. When the search for a new NASA administrator did not produce quick results, the meeting never occurred.19

In attempting to set NASA on an ambitious post-Apollo course, Tom Paine had reversed by almost 180 degrees the approach followed by his predeces­sor, James Webb. According to one of his closest associates, Paine from the start of his time as NASA administrator had “decided to be a promoter. . . a fighter for what he thought ought to be done. He always may have known that he wasn’t going to get it all, but he would never admit it in advance.” Where Webb had believed that NASA should create a broad basis of capa­bility and allow the country’s leaders to select specific missions to use that capability, Paine felt that NASA should take an “uninhibited look at what the program should consist of” and then ask “the public and the nation the biggest question that we could ask, namely, whether the United States was sufficiently wealthy and sufficiently adventurous to continue human explo­ration of the solar system.” As he prepared to leave NASA, Paine continued to believe that NASA had asked “the right question, made the right offer,” but that the country, including Richard Nixon and his associates, “may have made the wrong response.”20

Paine’s 23 months as the head of NASA left a mixed legacy. He brought to the fore those within NASA who had the most expansive view of the agency’s objectives; by doing so, he tried to shake the agency out of what had been its rather cautious approach to the future. He adopted and expanded on George Mueller’s ambitious integrated plan, giving priority to human space flight rather than robotic science and application missions and in the process perpetuating the split between NASA’s human and robotic programs and antagonizing large elements of the external scientific community. Paine was willing to give up the repeated use of existing capabilities, particularly the Apollo/Saturn system, in order to get started on the next generation of human space flight projects. He took the lead in advocating international participation in NASA’s post-Apollo human space flight efforts; that partici­pation has been a hallmark of such efforts since.

Given the desire of those advising the president to avoid committing to major post-Apollo space projects, Paine’s advocacy may have been a necessary counterbalance; he thought that “the responsibilities of leadership. . . required him to get approval for as large a space program as the traffic would bear.” According to NASA’s Homer Newell, there was “a difference of opinion as to whether Paine’s attempts to force the space budget far above the lev­els the administration wanted to see kept it from falling lower than it did, or were counterproductive.” One assessment noted that Paine’s departure was “greeted with relief in the Bureau of the Budget and the White House staff”; another suggested that his resignation “came as a welcome relief to both the executive and legislative branches.” A Bureau of the Budget veteran characterized Paine as a “glory hound” who was “unrealistic and unwilling to compromise.” But to Flanigan, Paine’s aggressiveness was not “counter­productive.” Paine was a “good soldier” who accepted decisions after getting a full hearing. Ehrlichman compared Paine’s bold proposals to a spring that “had to be stretched in order for it to come back to where it belonged.”21