Budget Options Assessed

As time for the presidential meeting approached, there were several new inputs into the decision process. One was the OMB paper that Weinberger had requested, putting the staff recommendations in a broader context. The paper compared the employment effects of canceling Skylab, Apollo 17, and NERVA. Job losses if NERVA were canceled were estimated to be 2,600; if Apollo 17 were canceled; 6,000-7,000; if Skylab were canceled, 18,000­20,000, with 9,000 of those job losses coming in California. Science adviser David also weighed in, supporting retention of the Apollo 17 mission. He said that Apollo 17 “is of considerably higher priority” than either Skylab or NERVA and noted that canceling Apollo 17 “would give rise to a consider­able chorus of criticism among the scientific community. In my view, this is the wrong place to cut.”18

Ehrlichman forwarded to President Nixon a memorandum on the employment impact of cuts in the NASA budget that had been pre­pared by Will Kriegsman of Flanigan’s staff, who had taken over most of Whitehead’s responsibilities vis-a-vis NASA. Kriegsman suggested, using the figures in the OMB staff paper, that Skylab not be canceled “because of the employment situation and because we have already invested $1B in the program.” Instead, he proposed, “we should try to save some FY72 money by slipping Skylab’s schedule 6 to 12 months,” and that “we [should] defer the initiation of the Space Shuttle program.” OMB had rec­ommended $133 million to start shuttle engine development; Kriegsman suggested total deferral of this new start. He argued that “the problem with the shuttle is that it will cost $8-$10 B as a minimum over the next 10 years. Neither the economic nor the technical justifications are. . . suf­ficiently defined at this point for us to make such a commitment in the FY1972 budget.” After reading Kriegsman’s memo, Nixon, in a handwrit­ten note on the document’s final point regarding a shuttle commitment, commented “this is persuasive.” That comment likely sealed the shuttle’s fate for FY1972.19

Ed Harper also prepared several background memos to prepare Ehrlichman for his meeting on the NASA budget. Following up on Kriegsman’s memo on aerospace unemployment, Harper told Ehrlichman “the employment fac­tor in the NASA budget decisions is a significant but complicated phenom­enon.” He noted that, while the program that NASA had proposed would “result in a gradual increase in employment throughout 1971,” the OMB recommendation “would result in a sharp decline continuing through calen­dar 1971 for a total cut of 20,000 aerospace employees.” He also noted that while OMB and OST had given retaining the Apollo 17 mission their high­est priority and had given Skylab lower priority, NASA had ranked the lunar mission behind both retaining Skylab and starting the shuttle. His advice to Ehrlichman was “that the optimal budget decisions on the NASA options is to (1) continue Skylab, (2) slip the shuttle engine development, (3) continue with Apollo 17, and (4) cancel NERVA.”20