Weinberger Disagrees

As Caspar Weinberger prepared for the director’s review of OMB staff rec­ommendations with respect to the NASA budget, he was uncertain about what precisely Richard Nixon had meant when he wrote “I agree with Cap” on Weinberger’s August 12 memorandum. On October 19, Weinberger asked Nixon’s chief of staff Bob Haldeman to have the president clarify his intent. Haldeman discussed the issue with the president the same day.

Haldeman: “So you do want to cancel [Apollo]16 and 17?”

Nixon: “Yes, I do want to cancel them, and do other things.”

Haldeman: “Do we want to follow his point, coupling [the cancellation with] the announcement that we’re going to fund the space shuttle?”

Nixon: “That’s right, and let the other two [Apollo missions] go. . . the other

two shots___ I just don’t think we should take the risk of a possible goof

off in the damn thing.”

Haldeman: “The other thing you could do is postpone them.”

Nixon: “Postpone and then cancel them, if you could get away with it. . . That’s right, no shots in ’72.”6

Haldeman reported to Weinberger that “the President did agree with your feeling that a public announcement now of the cancellation of Apollo XVI and XVII would have a bad effect,” but nevertheless Nixon “does want to eliminate” the missions, “at least in calendar year 1972,” and had directed that “steps should be taken immediately to implement that decision.” Nixon also agreed with Weinberger’s point that “if we decide to eliminate Apollo XVI and XVII that we couple any announcement to that effect with announcements that we are going to fund space shuttles, NERVA, or other major future NASA activities.” Weinberger in reply told Haldeman that Apollo 16 “was scheduled for mid-March 1972 to secure data on some of the oldest events on the moon” and that Apollo 17 was scheduled for December 1972 (after the presidential election, as agreed in January 1971; it seems as if neither Nixon nor Haldeman remembered that agreement) and would provide “the first opportunity for a geologist astronaut to visit the moon.” He noted the modest cost savings if the missions were canceled, and said that if both missions were eliminated “we would lose about 3,800 jobs by June 1972 and about 6,200 by December 1972.” Weinberger concluded, repeat­ing an idea from his August 12 memo, that “if it is decided to cancel either one or both Apollo missions, it could be announced that we were doing so in order to concentrate our resources on other NASA-planned high-priority space objectives, because the prior Apollo moon explorations were so suc – cessful.”7

The combination of Weinberger’s thinking in his August 12 memo, Nixon’s reaction to the memo, and Nixon’s October guidance to Weinberger boded well for eventual shuttle approval. But the battle that would lead to that approval was just beginning. In a 1977 interview, Cap Weinberger recalled that “the OMB staff was against the shuttle, and I was for it, and that produced a very substantial amount of discussion and debate. . . In pre­vious years it apparently was not necessary to get to a decision point, but in that particular year [1971] . . . it was an active part of the budget, and after the various arguments and presentations, I supported it. . . After the so-called director’s review, I indicated to the staff that I disagreed with them, that I would recommend that particular item, and they protested and we had many more arguments.” Weinberger added that “I had personal feelings that this was something we should be doing. . . If I had not taken as strong a position as I did in favor of it, that ultimately just the force of inertia would have prevailed.” A major influence on Weinberger’s positive views on the shuttle and the space program in general were his interactions with Bill Anders, who “stoked his [Weinberger’s] enthusiasm for space at any opportunity.”8

Weinberger’s support for the shuttle at the director’s review did not trans­late into approval of the Mark I/Mark II shuttle program that NASA was proposing. At the director’s review the alternatives being examined by the Flax committee, including a smaller shuttle and a glider, were also discussed. While Weinberger indicated that he would recommend to the president going ahead with some form of a shuttle program, he was told by his staff “if we wanted to do it, it could be done less expensively, I was delighted to hear that, and. . . they went back and worked with NASA to work out a different configuration. In other words, did we have to have a vehicle that could carry that much on each trip, or couldn’t we have a smaller one that could make more trips. Why did we need one this big?” He added “I could have cut it off at the director’s review, and insist that we are going to do it the way NASA wants it. But the opportunity to do it at a lower cost on additional analysis appealed to me.” Even so, Weinberger added, “I never had any doubt in my own mind but, one way or the other, I wanted to do it.” Weinberger’s will­ingness to let the OMB staff consider shuttle designs different from the full capability shuttle that NASA was proposing, itself still not very well defined, opened the door to a very confusing debate, as multiple versions of a shuttle were examined. According to Weinberger, the OMB professional staff had “a certain degree of pride. The staff doesn’t like to be overridden, and they were firmly convinced that they were right, and that this was not a thing the government should be doing.”9

NASA, as was the practice, was not formally notified of the results of the director’s review, and thus did not realize that there had been a decision that some sort of shuttle program would be recommended to the president by Weinberger. On a very confidential basis, Anders told Low only that the director’s review was characterized by “general discussion only, and no decisions were made.” With respect to the shuttle, Anders reported that “there appears to be a general acceptance that the United States must stay in the manned space flight business,” but “the assembled group still felt that the Mark I/Mark II Shuttle was too much” and that “the Flax Committee has recommended something less than the Mark I/Mark II.”10 The results of the October 22 OMB director’s review thus only muddied the waters with respect to eventual shuttle approval. Weinberger had indi­cated that he would recommend developing a space shuttle to President Nixon, but his willingness to allow his staff to define an alternative, less expensive shuttle design than what NASA was proposing meant that the character of the shuttle he would recommend was still very much up for grabs.