Rallying Support for the Shuttle

Soon after submitting its budget proposal to OMB, the NASA leadership set about seeking support for the space shuttle from the aerospace industry, members of the Congress, and the DOD. Fletcher and Low in October held a meeting with the top leadership of the companies involved in the shuttle studies to explain to them NASA’s current plans and the reasoning behind them. The executives welcomed this information, and told NASA that “it was imperative to move out with the shuttle as soon as possible.” Low noted that “the meeting was frank and open, and perhaps the first of a kind in NASA history.”

With respect to the Congress, Low thought that “support will be a little more difficult to obtain because there really is no center of power within either the Senate or the House.” As NASA leaders began to visit individual members of Congress, they discovered that since they were “now deeply involved in so many other things, that most members would just as soon not hear about NASA until after the first of the year.”20