A Related Issue

Even as NASA was receiving White House approval to proceed with the large space shuttle, Fletcher and Low were concerned about whether the shuttle program would gain Congressional approval; that was one of the reasons that Clark MacGregor was at the January 3 meeting. At the same time the shuttle was being approved, the White House had finally decided to cancel the NERVA nuclear rocket engine project after keeping it on life support for the previous several years. The NASA leaders’ concern was that “without NERVA we will not have the political support in the Senate that we need for the Space Shuttle and other programs.” Low’s assessment was “that were we to cancel NERVA we have a 50/50 chance of com­pletely losing all support by Howard Cannon [D-NV].” Fletcher agreed with Low, telling Shultz that other than Cannon, “there are no other spokesmen, on the Democratic side of our [Senate Space] Committee, that would or could carry the NASA bill through the Senate. Therefore, without a meaningful nuclear propulsion program, we are taking the very major risk of losing the space shuttle, as well as other pieces of the NASA program, in the Senate.” Low even suggested that “the NERVA situa­tion is to my mind more complicated and more difficult than the Shuttle question.”15

The final outcome was to cancel NERVA, to allow NASA to carry out a study effort to define a smaller nuclear propulsion system, and to include in the president’s budget request with respect to nuclear propulsion lan­guage intended to be palatable to Senators Cannon and Clinton Anderson (D-NM), another strong supporter of NERVA. Anderson was actually the chairman of the Senate Committee on Space and Astronautics, but he was old and ill, and not able to lead the Senate debate on the NASA budget. These moves may have been essential in assuring eventual Senate support of the space shuttle.