NASA Gets a Low Budget Target

The shuttle’s fate, and with it the character of the post-Apollo NASA, would be decided against the background of continuing problems in the U. S. economy and their impact on the federal budget; those problems included a high rate of inflation, an unacceptable level of unemployment, stock market declines, deficits in international trade, and threats to the U. S. dollar as the basis for international financial transactions. The economic policies pursued by the Nixon administration in its first two years in office had not been suc­cessful in reversing these negative trends.

Meeting with his budget and policy advisers on July 23, Nixon made a tentative decision to cut the budgets of “civilian agencies” by 10 percent from their FY1972 levels. Among those agencies was NASA; it was noted at the meeting that by canceling the last two Apollo missions and the NERVA program and not starting the shuttle program, some $1.32 billion could be saved in FY 1973.16 Nixon’s July decision to reduce the budgets of the civil­ian agencies of the government by 10 percent was reflected in the budget targets provided to NASA by Cap Weinberger in an August 2 letter. Rather than the $3.2 billion per year budget that Don Rice in his May 17 letter had indicated was a reasonable expectation, Weinberger told NASA that its budget authority for FY1973 would be $2.835 billion, with a limit on outlays during the year of $2.975 billion. Weinberger told NASA that “the President emphasized at his 1973 budget planning meetings that it is essen­tial that we do not exceed the overall budget totals he has decided upon” and thus that NASA was required to “submit your budget at or below these figures.”17

Fletcher, upset at these low budget targets, quickly met with Weinberger to get a fuller understanding of the thinking behind them. Weinberger first told him that “things were tough all over” and that NASA should come in with a budget at the targeted level. But when Weinberger was told that the $2.8 billion budget target recommended by his staff meant the end of human space flight, he told Fletcher that it might be possible to bring the budget up to the $3.2 billion level of FY1972.18

Another Rethinking of the Space Shuttle

Fletcher and Low found themselves in a quandary with respect to how to proceed in developing NASA’s budget request for FY1973, given the low budget target and the feedback from the Woods Hole meeting. NASA’s internal planning, led by Wernher von Braun, had been assuming a FY1973 budget at approximately the $3.7-$3.8 billion level, fully $1 billion above the OMB target, with the budget gradually increasing to $4 billion per year; von Braun was warning that it would be very difficult to carry out an ambi­tious shuttle program with that budget outlook. This was a message that Fletcher and Low did not want to hear. They briefed David and Flanigan at the White House on the von Braun plan and got a noncommittal reaction. Flanigan “stated that a transportation system alone, without clearly under­stood objectives (a transportation system to where?) would not get the sup­port” that NASA needed. The “only bright spot” in the meeting was David’s comment “that it would be inconceivable for any President at any time in this age to stop manned space flight.”19

Low’s assessment of NASA’s situation as of August 1971 was sober.

In the course of planning for Fiscal Year 1971 and 1972, we assumed each year that the current year was a bad year but that things would get better on the next year. In effect, we pushed a funding bow wave ahead of us. My view today is that we should no longer build a future program on promises, but that we should, instead, assume that the NASA budget will be confined to the $3 billion level (say up to $3.3 billion) for the next several years. . . We should drop the shuttle right now and come up with a different manned space flight program.

This program should be based on an evolutionary space station develop­ment, leading from Skylab through a series of research and applications mod­ules to a distant goal of a permanent space station. We should also set for ourselves a distant goal of a lunar base. The transportation system for this manned space flight program would consist of Apollo hardware for Skylab; a glider launched on an expendable booster for the research and application modules; and finally, the shuttle but delayed 5 to 10 years beyond our present thinking.20