A Time of Transitions

.Axting Administrator George Low in January 1971 characterized the NASA Fiscal Year (FY) 1972 budget request sent to Congress as one of tran­sition from the program of the 1960s to the programs of the 1970s. This was indeed the case, as the budget request formalized canceling two Apollo missions and deferring space station development, and suggested that at least in principle the Nixon administration intended to move forward with a space shuttle program as the central U. S. space effort in the 1970s.

This was only one of the transitions taking place in the first months of 1971. The White House finally selected Tom Paine’s successor as NASA administrator. He was Dr. James Fletcher, the president of the University of Utah. Fletcher’s nomination was submitted to the Senate in February, he was confirmed in March, sworn in by the president in April, and took over NASA in the first days of May. Fletcher and George Low, who stayed on as deputy administrator, became a very effective team in leading the space agency through the tortuous process over the second half of the year, ulti­mately resulting in presidential approval of the shuttle that NASA wanted to develop.

In another potential transition, a White House initiative created some­thing of an identity crisis for NASA. President Nixon and his advisers were interested in developing technology-based solutions to major societal prob­lems, and seriously considered transforming NASA into a general applied science agency—a “new NASA”—to take on that responsibility. Fletcher and Low assessed the desirability of NASA’s assuming such a role while still also maintaining its aeronautics and space responsibilities, and decided to respond positively if asked by the president to take on added missions.

Finally, there was a major transition in NASA’s thinking about the char­acter of the space shuttle program it would put forward for presidential approval. At the start of 1971, NASA Associate Administrator for Manned Space Flight Dale Myers had decided to press forward with a two-stage fully reusable shuttle design meeting all national security requirements. But by mid-year the combination of Fletcher and Low recognizing that NASA was very unlikely to get White House approval of the funding required for such a

development and growing concern among NASA’s engineering staff regard­ing the technical challenges associated with simultaneously developing both the shuttle booster stage and the shuttle orbiter led NASA to abandon the fully reusable design. There followed a rather frenzied search for an alterna­tive that presented the best combination of development and operating costs to make the shuttle cost-effective while still preserving all shuttle capabilities that NASA and the national security community sought.