Which Shuttle to Approve?

As December 1971 began, Don Rice and his Office of Management and Budget (OMB) space staff remained on a collision course with NASA. Rice had taken Cap Weinberger’s guidance at the October 22 director’s review as license to direct his staff not only to come up with alternative, less ambitious, and thus less expensive, shuttle requirements in terms of payload bay size and weight-lifting capability, but also to present that new shuttle concept in the context of a different program of human space flight than what NASA was proposing. Rice was convinced that the shuttle NASA preferred was “a huge overinvestment for what the country needs,” and believed it was his respon­sibility as a steward of the federal budget to help protect the president from making that overinvestment.1

By mid-November, the OMB staff had drafted a decision memorandum for President Nixon on “the future direction of the U. S. civilian space pro­gram” and was circulating the draft inside the White House and Executive Office of the President for comments. The memo set forth “a description and analysis of NASA’s proposed future manned space flight program and an alternative program.” That alternative program “would gradually decrease NASA’s annual spending from the present $3.2 billion to about $2.5 bil­lion by 1976.” Included would be a “smaller, reduced cost version of the manned reusable shuttle. . . NASA’s larger version would not be developed now because it would probably prove too costly, uneconomical, and risky a venture.”2

George Low on November 14 noted that “we have had no direct interac­tion with OMB. . . since the budget hearings several weeks ago. . . It is clear that there are opposing forces. . . Those who are for space for its own sake appear to be very few in number.”3 Those opposing forces would play them­selves out in the following weeks as final decisions on which space shuttle to develop were made. But first President Richard Nixon twice made funda­mentally the same choice—a choice that would provide the context within which those final decisions would unfold. These two presidential decisions took place in late November and early December; Nixon left the specifics of what shuttle configuration to develop for his associates to decide during

the rest of December. There is no written or recorded evidence of his direct involvement in that decision, although it is probable that he was informed regarding the alternatives under consideration and informally communicated his views with respect to those options to his inner circle.