NASA also tried to talk up the benefits of state-managed R D, but this, too, was a mistake. There was no doubt that NASA was an astonishing success as a giant technocratic exercise in management science and project control. And only a fifth of Kennedy’s 1961 speech had been devoted to spaceflight: Kennedy had been promoting the space program as part of a greater technocratic solution to perceived threats and problems — eliminating poverty, resisting communist expansion, promoting development abroad.
But by 1969 it was clear that technocracy had failed in its greater objectives. Instead there was only the maturation of the power complex of the technocratic state. Nixon seemed to understand the antitechnocratic mood of his day, and also how technocracy was in opposition to America’s older Jeffersonian tradition of local politics and democratic responsiveness.
Meanwhile, during 1969, funding cuts were made in the NERVA nuclear rocket research program, which had been proceeding in Nevada since 1957. Although the Nevada test station would not be shut down until 1972, the 1969 cuts ended any hopes of flight testing nuclear rockets. Without NERVA, a component NASA believed was vital to a Mars expedition, the case for Mars was essentially already lost. (In the novel, NASA manages to fend off these cuts.)
Against this background — and without a strong and articulate champion, the role served by Jack Kennedy in the novel — the Agency was soon forced to back off from its more aggressive proposals. The language in NASA’s draft report to the STG, prepared in April 1969, read: “We recommend that the U.S. begin preparing for a manned expedition to Mars at an early date.” By the published version the sentence had been watered down to: “Manned expeditions to Mars could begin as early as 1981” (my emphasis).
Agnew himself was, however, a champion within the White House of aiming for Mars — even though he was booed when he spoke of the project in public. White House counsel John Ehrlichman later described how he was unable to dissuade Agnew from including a 1981 landing in the STG’s list of recommendations, even though it was already clear that the Mars mission did not fit with the Nixon administration’s overall budget priorities. Agnew insisted on taking the argument in to Nixon. We do not know what Nixon said to Agnew, but fifteen minutes later, Agnew called Ehrlichman to explain that the Mars mission was being moved from the list of “recommendations” to another category headed “technically feasible.”
The proposals of the final STG report, as delivered to the President in September 1969, were much as depicted in the novel.
The STG proposed a series of common elements: a shuttle, space station modules, a space tug, nuclear shuttles, and a Mars Excursion Module (MEM). The modules could be put together into a series of mission profiles to achieve a variety of goals; only the MEM would have been Mars-specific.
The earliest Mars mission would have left Earth on November 12, 1981, consisting of two nuclear-boosted ships each carrying six men. The expedition would return home on August 14, 1983, and the astronauts brought back to Earth by shuttles.
A series of funding options were presented, ranging from a maximum-pace sprint to Mars by 1982 to a lowest-level funding option which would curtail all manned flight after Apollo. Three central options were presented: Option I aiming for a 1984 Mars landing at a peak cost of $9 billion per year, Option II for 1986 at $8 billion per year, and Option III for no firm landing commitment at $5 billion per year.
The STG proposals were designed to allow incremental near-term decision making, while decisions on more ambitious programs — such as Mars — could be deferred.
It was widely expected that, given the heavy lobbying by NASA and the U.S. aerospace industry, some elements at least of this vision would survive. But public and political reaction was swift and negative.
While it awaited Nixon’s formal response to the STG, further pressure on NASA came in the FY1971 budget process.
Facing further cuts, Paine scrambled to reprioritize. One Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) were the sole survivors of the Apollo Applications Program. Apollo 20 was canceled to free up a Saturn V for Skylab. The remaining Apollo missions, 13 through 19, would be stretched out to place two missions after Skylab. There was no prospect of a post-Apollo lunar program. Viking was postponed to 1975.
In January 1970, Nixon somberly told Paine of a Harris poll reporting that 56 percent of Americans believed the costs of Apollo were too great. Nixon said he regretted cuts but could not make an expansive space program a priority. Paine, however, kept up pressure on the President for a greater commitment to NASA’s activities, and this led to hard feelings between them. White House officials concluded that: “We need a new Administrator who will turn down NASA’s empire-building fervor… someone who will work with us rather than against us, and… will shape the program to reflect credit on the President rather than embarrassment.”
In March 1970 Nixon formally endorsed the STG’s third and least expensive option. His language was cautious. “With the entire future and the entire universe before us… we should not try to do everything at once. Our approach to space must continue to be bold — but it must also be balanced.”
Nixon set out six specific objectives: the remaining Apollo missions, Skylab, greater international cooperation in space (essentially ASTP), reducing the cost of space operations (Space Shuttle studies), hastening space technology’s practical application, and unmanned planetary exploration. Nixon made mention of one “major but long range goal we should keep in mind… to eventually send men to explore the planet Mars” (my emphasis). Nixon distanced NASA organizationally from its Apollo past: “We must think of space activities as part of a continuing process… and not as a series of separate leaps, each one requiring a massive concentration of energy and will and accomplished on a crash timetable.”
Essentially, NASA had lost the argument for Mars, and Nixon had (provisionally) chosen the Space Shuttle. In this short but crucial statement, Nixon summarized virtually all of U.S. space policy through the 1970s.
In the Voyage time line, Nixon withdraws this statement before publication; after this crux point, history diverges decisively.
Even after Nixon’s response to the STG, the future of U.S. manned spaceflight was far from assured. To save funds for future programs, on September 2, 1970, Paine cut two more Apollo missions. Paine was out of place in the Nixon administration, and he resigned on September 15.
Congressional critics still wanted more of NASA’s budget trimmed. The familiar partially reusable Shuttle concept emerged in response to the need to halve development costs. But even this did not win automatic approval. In November 1971 the new NASA Administrator, James Fletcher, sent a testy memo to the President arguing that the U.S. could not afford to forgo manned spaceflight altogether, that the shuttle was the only meaningful new program that could be accomplished on a modest budget, and not starting the Shuttle would be highly damaging to the aerospace industry.
But Fletcher did not know that NASA had gained a powerful ally inside the administration in Caspar Weinberger, Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget, who wrote to Nixon on August 12, 1971, in support of the Space Shuttle (not of a Mars program!). NASA’s budget was still under threat simply because it was cuttable, Weinberger said. Further NASA cuts would confirm “that our best years are behind us, that we are turning inward, reducing our defense commitments, and voluntarily starting to give up our superpower status and our desire to maintain world superiority.” In a handwritten scrawl on the memo, Nixon added, “I agree with Cap.”