The Space Shuttle and Aerospace Employment

The space shuttle prime contract was awarded in mid-1972 to North American Rockwell, a company with its space operations based in Southern California. This award meant that the projected California employment impacts, both in advance of the 1972 presidential election and subsequently, were achieved. Although Rockwell barely beat out New York-based Grumman Aerospace for the contract award, there has been no evidence discovered in the course of research for this study that Richard Nixon’s expressed wish to put a large share of shuttle work in California and his personal relationship with Willard “Al” Rockwell, the head of North American Rockwell, translated into an overt White House attempt to influence NASA as it selected the shuttle prime contractor. But NASA certainly was fully aware of the president’s interest as that decision was made.

Basing shuttle approval on its job-creating impact set an unfortunate prec­edent for many subsequent space decisions. (In 1961, the politically driven decision to locate the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Texas, as a new NASA facility for the Apollo program was a forerunner of this prec­edent.) From 1972 on, the employment and institutional impacts of various space program choices have been an important, sometimes overriding, factor in reaching a decision on how to proceed. This is especially the case since most decisions on large space projects since 1970 have been made through the normal political process, where such parochial considerations play a sig­nificant role. The widely accepted view of the civilian space effort as a “jobs program” had its origins in the Nixon administration’s decision to “save the aerospace industry” by approving development of the full capability shut­tle. The job-maintenance or job-creation impact of various space program options continues as a strong influence on twenty-first century decisions.

In terms of the proximate reasons for its White House approval, then, the space shuttle program must thus be judged a mixture of success and disap­pointment. In particular, the shuttle during its three decades of operation served the nation well as a focus for U. S. space leadership and the resul­tant prestige and pride. In terms of its role in U. S. military and intelligence efforts in space, some of the still classified national security missions launched aboard the shuttle are likely to have produced useful results, but overall the space shuttle program turned out to be a very expensive detour for the national security space program. The shuttle program’s success in producing aerospace jobs in advance of the 1972 election and in the longer term help­ing revitalize the aerospace industry has been a mixed blessing; it achieved Richard Nixon’s short-term political objectives while creating the image of the space program as a “public works” effort.