Were There Alternative Choices Available?

There were some individuals both inside and outside of NASA who rec­ognized the difficulties in pursuing the full capability shuttle as NASA’s immediate post-Apollo project. NASA’s top spacecraft designer, Max Faget, argued as the shuttle program was gaining momentum in early 1969 that a first step should be a relatively small vehicle, which he characterized as the space equivalent of the first-generation DC-3 commercial aircraft. Secretary of the Air Force Robert Seamans during the Space Task Group deliberations suggested that “it is not yet clear that we have the technology” for a reusable space transportation system that would produce major reductions in the cost of transporting payloads into space, and suggested “a program to study by experimental means including orbital tests” the feasibility of such a system. As NASA awarded shuttle design study contracts in 1970, veteran flight director and then-deputy director of NASA’s Manned Spacecraft Center Chris Kraft warned “I don’t think we should try and build an ultimate vehi­cle the first time. . . I think we’ve got to be extremely careful that we don’t try to build a do-all vehicle. I don’t think we ought to talk ourselves into the fact that the shuttle is to do every job in the space program.”30 The idea that there should be an interim step before deciding whether to develop a full – capability shuttle was present throughout the shuttle debate, but was never embraced by those directly in charge of the shuttle program, who remained convinced that they could design and develop the kind of shuttle approxi­mating the advanced technology vehicle first suggested by George Mueller.

NASA’s leaders themselves, as the final decision on the space shuttle approached, harbored reservations about the viability of the full capability concept. George Low in August 1971, as he assessed alternative courses of action, concluded that “we should drop the shuttle right now and come up with a different manned space flight program.” He added that “this program should be based on an evolutionary space station development, leading from Skylab through a series of research and applications modules to a distant goal of a permanent space station. We should also set for ourselves a distant goal of a lunar base. The transportation system for this manned space flight pro­gram would consist of Apollo hardware for Skylab; a glider launched on an expendable booster for the research and application modules; and finally, the shuttle but delayed 5 to10 years beyond our present thinking.” As Low and Jim Fletcher prepared the NASA budget request due at OMB on September 30, 1971, they “debated whether we should not forego the shuttle entirely and develop instead some alternate manned space flight program.”

Fletcher and Low did not choose this option, getting little support for it from the NASA technical workforce and deciding that it was in NASA’s insti­tutional interests to seek immediate approval of an ambitious shuttle design. This was a fateful decision, since it polarized the shuttle debate; during the rest of 1971 NASA would make its case for approving the full-capability shuttle as a “best buy” rather than seek a compromise with shuttle skeptics in OMB and OST. The decision-making process functioned as it should, elevat­ing two shuttle options for presidential choice. But as the White House made the final shuttle decision, Nixon and his top advisers chose the wrong option. This was the second policy mistake connected to the space shuttle decision.

That going ahead with the full-capability shuttle was a course of action fraught with the potential for future problems was clear to some of those examining shuttle choices. For example, Alexander Flax had reported to sci­ence adviser David in October that “most of the members of the Panel doubt that a viable program can be undertaken without a degree of national com­mitment over the long term analogous to that which sustained the Apollo program. Such a degree of political and public support may be attainable, but it is certainly not now apparent.” Flax added “planning a program as large and as risky (with respect to both technology and cost) as the shuttle, with a long-term prospect of fixed ceiling budgets for the program and NASA as a whole does not bode well for the future.” This was prescient advice, but it was not heeded.

The commitment to NASA’s full-capability shuttle (which carried with it a future decision to develop a space station) created for more than four decades two very expensive “mortgages” on the NASA annual budget. Given that that budget was commanding a decreasing share of federal discretionary spending, the necessity of servicing these mortgages meant that there were limited funds available for other worthy space endeavors. As Bill Anders, a veteran of the shuttle decision process, recently commented, “the shuttle, like a cuckoo in the nest, pushed out many less sexy but higher pay-off sci­ence and commercial programs for lack of funds.”31

It is of course impossible to know what might have happened if the White House had chosen the OMB shuttle option. But it does seem that pursuing a less ambitious shuttle design as an intermediate step in the evolution of U. S. space capability might well have made more technical sense and could have initiated an evolutionary U. S. space program that would have been a better fit to the resources that the political system has made available to NASA over the past four decades.

There is another piece of evidence suggesting that the 1972 decision to develop the full-capability orbiter was a policy mistake. The absence in the wake of the shuttle’s 2011 retirement of any advocacy within the U. S. space community for replacing the NASA shuttle with a second generation system having similar or greater capabilities is striking. After 30 years of operating the shuttle, there is no current demand to replicate in one vehicle the capa­bilities that the shuttle provided.32

My assessment of the space shuttle program as a major element of the Nixon space legacy is a mixture of positives and negatives. It is a matter of judgment whether the former outweigh the latter. But I stand by my 1986 assessment that the decision to develop the full capability shuttle was indeed a “policy failure,” better characterized as a “policy mistake,” in that the con­sequences of that choice have had a strongly negative impact on the evolution of the U. S. space program. Jumping directly from Apollo to developing the full capability shuttle was “a leap too far.” Rather than being a cost-effective system providing highly valued capabilities, the shuttle turned out to be an expensive and difficult to operate vehicle. Arguing that the shuttle enabled the United States to develop the International Space Station is somewhat circular, since it is not yet clear that the station will turn out to produce benefits worth its development cost, and most likely there would not have been a space station (or at least the station that was constructed) without the shuttle.