Transforming the Space Frontier

From a White House perspective, the December 29 meeting on the space shuttle had resulted in a definitive enough decision that there would be a space shuttle program to begin preparing for a presidential announcement of his approval of the shuttle. As those preparations began, there were two open questions: what should the presidential statement say and whether the space shuttle program should be given a distinctive name, just as prior U. S. human space flight programs had been christened Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo.

With respect to the first issue, NASA’s Fletcher had been alerted by the White House during the New Year’s weekend of the possibility of a presiden­tial announcement. The decision to make that announcement was “firmed up” during the January 3 meeting in Shultz’s office, and Flanigan asked NASA to prepare a draft statement. Even before this request, Fletcher and Jonathan Rose of Flanigan’s office had also asked Bill Anders to start work­ing on the presidential statement. Even though Fletcher and Low also pre­pared draft statements, it was the Anders draft that was the primary basis of the final presidential statement. With respect to the second issue, naming the space shuttle program, the decision was left to Richard Nixon himself.18