NASA Continues to Seek DOD Support

Although NASA’s Fletcher and Deputy Secretary of Defense David Packard had agreed in October that NASA and DOD would work together to develop a restated rationale for the shuttle, by the start of December little progress had been made in this effort. One problem was that Johnny Foster, DOD’s director of defense research and engineering, who had been charged with preparing the rationale paper, remained ambivalent about a DOD commit­ment to the shuttle and to NASA’s approach to selling it. Talking with George Low at a December 1 dinner party, Foster had suggested that NASA was “doing the wrong things,” saying that “NASA should not let OMB impose an arbitrary cost limit on the shuttle. Dictating technical decisions through the budget process is just plain wrong.” He added “it is even worse if NASA lets OMB dictate the shuttle configuration.” Foster suggested that “NASA has decided to build a taxi to nowhere on faith. We should instead have a flight program that demonstrates the need” for the shuttle. Low’s retort was that “the main lack was in presenting an imaginative military space program taking advantage of the new capabilities that the shuttle would represent.”9 Foster’s advice was hardly useful to NASA, faced as it was with what seemed to be an unchangeable upper limit on the budget that the White House was willing to allocate for its activities. But NASA did not give up its attempt to get DOD support; rather, it took on itself the role of suggest­ing the “imaginative military space program” that Low had suggested was needed. That program came in the form of a memorandum for Fletcher to send to Packard. The memo was drafted by NASA’s Assistant Administrator for DOD and Interagency Affairs Jacob Smart, a retired four-star Air Force general. Smart’s draft noted that “in the next few weeks the President will make decisions relating to national objectives in space” that would be of “critical importance, because the nation’s military security, its political, eco­nomic and social well being in this and succeeding decades, are inextricably interwoven with what we do and what we fail to do in space.” He forecast dire consequences if the United States did not maintain a position of space leadership: “the self confidence of our people would diminish, our posture in the world community will be overshadowed, and our trade in world markets will be reduced,” resulting in “problems of great magnitude and complexity” which would “likely face this government, particularly DOD.” As noted in chapter 9, Smart in his draft detailed a number of ways in which “the space shuttle can deliver, with few exceptions, the total traffic of presently-planned military spacecraft to useful earth orbits.”10

Smart’s suggestions for potential national security uses of the space shut­tle were very similar to the ideas in the initial June 1969 DOD-NASA study of shuttle uses. They had been in the background of the discussions between the two agencies over shuttle design ever since, but apparently had had little influence on the assessment of the shuttle by the OMB civilian space staff. However, those potentialities were indeed known to and of interest to the top levels in the White House, including Richard Nixon. Ehrlichman in a 1983 interview suggested that “what the military could do with the larger bay in terms of the use of satellites” and the fact that “the space shuttle would have the capability of capturing satellites or recovering them” had “a strong influence on me” and “weighed into my attitude toward the larger shuttle. And I feel it is valid to say it also weighed into Nixon’s” attitude.11 What is not clear was how, and when, Nixon, Ehrlichman, and perhaps also Flanigan, Shultz, and Weinberger, were made aware of the national security potentials of the shuttle; because the issues involved were highly classified, any relevant documents are not contained in accessible archives. But as final decisions on shuttle size were reached at the end of December, the presi­dent’s interest in national security uses of shuttle capability were known to his other senior associates and very likely influenced their willingness to go forward with NASA’s full capability space shuttle.

It is not clear whether the Fletcher-Packard memorandum was ever sent; a final copy does not appear in NASA’s files. But the memo stands as an example of the arguments that NASA was using in its effort to insure DOD support of the shuttle program. Fletcher and Smart did meet with Foster and several of his associates on December 3. But no formal statement of DOD views on the shuttle sent to the president in December 1971 was located in research for this study, and there is no record of a meeting with the president to discuss this issue.12