New Technology Opportunities Effort Collapses

One issue that had been in the background through much of 1971 had been the possibility that President Nixon would decide to broaden NASA’s man­date to include large-scale efforts to apply technology to the solution of vari­ous social problems outside of the aeronautics and space arena. Spearheading the effort to develop such “new technology opportunities” in the White House had been William Magruder, former head of the supersonic transport program. By November, Magruder had come up with a proposal to establish within the Executive Office of the President a new unit with some 300 staff members (many more than staff working for OMB or OST) as an interim step to coordinate planning a major technology initiatives effort, with the possibility that after sufficient planning was completed NASA might be asked to take on some or all of the new activities.

However, there were emerging problems with the Magruder effort. When Low in late November asked Magruder when the NASA people Magruder had requested to help staff the new office should report for duty, “it became quite apparent that he did not yet have clearance to move out with this so-called interim organization.” At about the same time, Rice told Low that “there was a great deal of controversy within the White House as to whether or not Magruder ought to establish this organization.” Rice thought that “nothing much will happen as a result of the New Technological Initiatives” and that “there was no sense in going ahead with the massive Magruder exercise.” Rice was correct; during December both OMB and OST raised strong objections to the Magruder plan, and it was stillborn, with only a few modest efforts in stimulating technological innovation eventually approved. Low thought that “a strong NASA association” with the Magruder effort “would have done us a great deal of harm.”25

The collapse of the Magruder exercise was not explicitly linked to increas­ing the chances of NASA’s getting approval for a full capability shuttle and its other post-Apollo ambitions. The Domestic Council’s Ed Harper said “I was at all the relevant meetings and the two programs [New Technology Opportunities and the space shuttle] were never discussed in terms of a trade-off.” Weinberger suggested that “there was no connection between the two. . . The shuttle was already there on a separate track.” When asked whether the collapse of the Magruder effort got linked to the shuttle deci­sion at the president’s level, Ehrlichman replied “I don’t think so.”26