The Nixon Space Heritage

The space shuttle may be the most visible Nixon space legacy, but the con­sequences of the other Nixon administration decisions in the 1969-1972 period have also had pervasive and lasting impacts. A 2012 assessment of NASA’s “strategic direction” observed that:

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) is at a transi­tional point in its history. . . The agency’s budget. . . is under considerable stress, servicing increasingly expensive missions and a large, aging infrastructure established at the height of the Apollo program. Other than the long-range goal of sending humans to Mars, there is no strong, compelling national vision for the human spaceflight program, which is arguably the centerpiece of NASA’s spectrum of mission areas. The lack of national consensus on NASA’s most publicly visible mission, along with out-year budget uncertainty, has resulted in the lack of strategic focus necessary for national agencies operat­ing in today’s budgetary reality. As a result, NASA’s distribution of resources may be out of sync with what it can achieve relative to what it has been asked to do.

This review concluded that “there is no national consensus on strategic goals and objectives for NASA.”33 This judgment was echoed in the most recent review of the human space flight program, which observed that “a national consensus on the long-term future of human spaceflight. . . remains elusive.”34

To a significant degree this unsatisfactory condition of the U. S. human space flight program in the second decade of the twenty-first century is a heritage of the policy decisions made by Richard Nixon more than 40 years ago. Approving the space shuttle came without a meaningful national com­mitment to post-Apollo space program objectives—there was no “strategic focus.” George Low in October 1970 had suggested that “with the shuttle the U. S. can have a continuing program of manned space flight. . . without a commitment to a major new manned mission goal.” This proved to be a winning argument; by approving the space shuttle, a capability-justified means for carrying out a variety of space activities, Richard Nixon avoided having to define the long-term space objectives which the shuttle would serve. This lack of guiding goals for the U. S. space program has persisted for more than 40 years, causing many to characterize the program as “adrift.” If this characterization is accepted, it was Richard Nixon that set NASA on that goal-less voyage.

Nixon and his closest advisers gave little attention to the longer term consequences of their decision to put the NASA full-capability space shuttle at the center of the post-Apollo space program. Those consequences were compounded by approving a shuttle design that from NASA’s standpoint was a step toward an eventual space station. The consequences were exacer­bated by setting out an approach to determining the NASA budget that was very likely to result in funding insufficient to support efficient development and operation of both the space shuttle and space station while also fund­ing the space activities they were designed to serve. It was difficult to rally public and political support for the capability-driven approach inherent in the Nixon approach to the post-Apollo space program, and the lack of broad public support for the space program has persisted. The absence of a compel­ling exploration objective or other widely accepted goal has resulted for four decades in a human spaceflight program focused, for uncertain purposes, on developing and operating the shuttle and assembling the space station. Attempts in 1989 and 2004 to set an exploration goal to guide the space program have not taken root, and the fate of the current NASA exploration program is unclear.

There is no simple or immediate remedy to the current situation with respect to the U. S. space program. It will be very difficult to undo the conse­quences of flawed or mistaken policy decisions made more than four decades ago. Some suggest that the government should step aside and allow the U. S. private sector to take the leading role in the U. S. space program, including human exploration. My judgment is that such an approach is unrealistic; only governments can provide resources sufficient to lead the initial stages of a long-term exploration effort, although government-private sector partner­ships (and international cooperation) should certainly be part of that effort. In my view, if the United States is to remain the leader in human space explo­ration it will take committed and continuing presidential leadership of the character provided so long ago by John F. Kennedy, once again singling out the space program for special priority and setting challenging goals, convinc­ing a reluctant public and their representatives in Congress to accept those goals, and then, crucially, committing on a sustained basis the political, human, and financial resources needed to achieve them.35 The alternatives are to continue to drift along, trying to do too much with too little, or, less likely, to lower U. S. ambitions in space to match the funding available. A comprehensive review of the U. S. space program in 2014 once again con­cluded, as had its 2009 and 2012 predecessors, that “the human spaceflight program conducted by the U. S. government today has no strong direction” and that “the long-term future of human spaceflight. . . is unclear.”36 That situation is Richard Nixon’s most fundamental space heritage.

[1] Actually, Borman was joined in the reading by his astronaut colleagues Lovell and Anders.

[2] The Department of Defense also prepared an extensive report on its proposed plans for the 1970s and submitted it to the Space Task Group. That submission, and DOD-specific space issues, will not be discussed in this study.

[3] a “vigorous” program along the lines presented at the meeting by Paine and von Braun, with funding for NASA increasing to between $7 billion by the mid-1970s and $8-10 billion in the latter half of the decade;

[4] The “Grand Tour” mission would fly by Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and perhaps even Pluto. This was possible because of a once-every-175-years alignment of the outer planets. Whether to undertake such a mission was a controversial issue in NASA-White House dealings between 19 69 and 1973, but will not be discussed in this study, which focuses on issues related to post-Apollo human space flight.

[5] “Low – cost opportunities for Presidential initiatives have been suppressed.” Those opportunities included the “prosaic-sounding Apollo Applications

[6] “We should continue to explore the Moon.”

• “We should move ahead with bold exploration of the planets and the uni­verse.” The statement identified as a “major but longer range goal. . . we will eventually send men to explore the planet Mars.”

[7] After NASA decided in 1970 that a future space station would be assembled from shut­tle-launched modules and other components, the 15-foot width also became a requirement related to the size of those space station elements.

[8] $15.4 billion for a flight rate of 56 launches per year, the NASA/DOD mission model;

• $14.6 billion “for the historic flight level of the unmanned U. S. space program of the 1960’s,” corresponding to 51 launches per year; and

• $12.9 billion at a flight rate of 46 launches per year.

[9] “What are the major high risk technology areas?”

• “What trade-offs are implicit in the manned vs. unmanned operation of the space shuttle?”

[10] The space shuttle program. . . represents a technical synthesis which, to a remarkable degree, integrates into a single vehicle system and proposed mode of operation the means for potentially achieving improvements and advances relevant to virtually all foreseeable space program objectives. . . If an enthusiastic, optimistic, and expansionary view is taken of the probable growth of the nation’s military and civilian space programs over the next twenty years. . . the development of the space shuttle as proposed by NASA is undoubtedly the most important and valuable major new space program which could be undertaken at this time.

• The Mk I/Mk II approach [is] a very dubious course of action.

• The Panel has been impressed by the large amount of effort which has been put into the cost analysis of the shuttle program and into the study of the economic cost-benefit justification for the program. Nevertheless, we are unconvinced that such analyses have sufficient credibility to serve as

[11] The author has not been able to find independent evidence supporting Low’s conclusion that North American Rockwell was providing information to OMB counter to what NASA was advocating. This conclusion seems a bit questionable, given that in late 1971 the head of North American Rockwell, Willlard “Al” Rockwell, was visiting the White House to lobby for shuttle approval. But perhaps Rockwell was not aware of the fact that people at the working level within his company were cooperating with OMB.