The Planetary JAG pointed out that the MSSR/piloted flyby approach improved the chances for studying living Martian organisms because the Mars samples would reach a trained biologist within minutes of collection. Living organisms collected using a purely automated sample-return lander would likely perish during the months-long flight to a lab on Earth.
The trip back to Earth would last 537 days, during which the astronauts would study the Mars samples and repeat many of the same experiments performed during the Earth-Mars voyage. The flyby craft would penetrate the Asteroid Belt before falling back to Earth, making piloted asteroid flybys a possibility. When farthest from the Sun the flyby craft would be on the opposite side of the Sun from Earth, making possible simultaneous observations of both solar hemispheres.
A few days before reaching Earth, the crew would board the Earth Entry Module and abandon the flyby craft. On 18 July 1977, the Earth Entry Module would reenter Earth's atmosphere, deploy parachutes, and lower to a land touchdown, while the flyby craft would fly past Earth into solar orbit. Just before the landing, solid-propellant rocket motors would fire to cushion impact, ending the 667-day Martian odyssey.
The Fire
NASA's FY 1967 funding request was $5.6 billion. The White House Budget Bureau trimmed this to $5.01 billion out of a $112 billion Federal budget before sending the budget on to Capitol Hill. By the time President Johnson signed it into law, NASA's FY 1967 appropriation was $4.97 billion, more than $200 million less than FY 1966. Programs aimed at giving NASA a post-Apollo future were hardest hit. Of the $270 million NASA requested for AAP, for example, only $83 million was appropriated. Voyager funding start-up was bumped to FY 1968. Apollo Moon program funding, by contrast, barely suffered. In part this was because the agency was flying frequent Gemini missions—10 in 20 months—which kept the Moon goal in the public eye. Kennedy's goal seemed very close, with the first piloted lunar landing expected in just over a year.
In Gemini's last year, however, America's attention was increasingly drawn away from space. In March 1966, protesters marched against the Vietnam War in Boston, San Francisco, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Washington. The summer of 1966 saw race riots in Chicago and Atlanta and racist mob violence in Grenada, Mississippi. In June 1966, President Johnson ordered bombing raids against the North Vietnamese cities of Haiphong and Hanoi. By then, 285,000 Americans were serving in Vietnam. As Gemini 12, the last in the series, splashed down in November 1966, the number of American soldiers on the ground in Vietnam was well on its way to its 1 January 1967 total of 380,000.
Against this backdrop, in January 1967, the Planetary JAG resumed piloted flyby planning, this time with the purpose of developing "a clear statement of the activities required in FY 69 for budget discussions" 21 to place NASA "in a position to initiate a flyby project in FY 1969." 22 Planetary JAG participants had some reason to be hopeful. As they reconvened, President Johnson announced a $5.1-billion FY 1968 NASA budget that included $71.5 million for Voyager and $8 million for advanced planning. He also backed $455 million for a substantial AAP. In presenting his budget, the President explained that "we have no alternative unless we wish to abandon the manned space capability we have created." 23
On 26 January the OMSF presented its ambitious AAP plans to Congress. Barely more than a day later, NASA's plans received a harsh blow as fire erupted inside the AS-204 Apollo spacecraft on the launch pad at KSC, killing Apollo 1 astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee. They had been scheduled to test the Apollo CSM for 14 days in Earth orbit beginning in mid-February. NASA suspended piloted Apollo flights pending the outcome of an investigation. The AS-204 investigation report, issued in April, found shortcomings in Apollo management, design, construction, and quality control. Apollo redesign kept American astronauts grounded until September 1968.
After the fire, NASA could no longer count on a friendly reception on Capitol Hill. The fire, plus growing pressure on the federal budget, meant that all NASA programs were subjected to increased oversight. In March, Aviation Week & Space Technology reported a "growing antipathy from Congress" toward NASA's programs, adding that "[d]elays in the manned program, resulting from the Apollo 204 crew loss . . . will hamper the agency's arguments before Congress since public interest will dwindle without spectacular results." 24 The magazine predicted, however, that Project Gemini's conclusion would free up funds in FY 1968, permitting "a modest start on Apollo Applications and . . . Voyager." 25
As NASA in general came under increased scrutiny, the piloted flyby concept suffered high-level criticism for the first time. The President's Science Advisory Committee (PSAC) report The Space Program in the Post-Apollo Period (February 1967) was generally positive, calling for continued Apollo missions to the Moon after the first piloted lunar landing, as well as planetary exploration using robots such as Voyager. 26 The PSAC reiterated Faget's 1962 criticism of the piloted flyby mission, however, stating that
the manned Mars flyby proposal, among its other weaknesses, does not appear to utilize man in a unique role . . . it appears to us that NASA must address itself more fully to the question, "What is the optimum mix of manned and unmanned components for planetary exploration?" 27
The PSAC also complained that Voyager and the Planetary JAG's piloted flyby plans were "distinct and apparently independent plans for planetary exploration," and criticized NASA for "absence of integrated planning in this area." 28 As has been seen, this criticism reached the Planetary JAG early enough for an integrated plan to be included in its report. NASA officials denied, however, that the PSAC's criticisms had prompted its effort to integrate Voyager and the piloted flyby. 29
The PSAC's critique stung the Planetary JAG. One response was to distance itself from the term "flyby"—a word identified increasingly with automated explorers since Mariner 4's success—by dubbing its mission an "encounter." 30 Planetary JAG members also sought to reemphasize that the encounter mission astronauts would accomplish productive observations and experiments throughout their two-year voyage, not just during the hours of Mars encounter.
OMSF advanced planner Edward Gray and his deputy Franklin Dixon first publicly proposed the Planetary JAG's Apollo-based piloted Mars flyby as an FY 1969 new start the next month (March 1967) at the AAS Fifth Goddard Memorial Symposium, where they presented a paper called "Manned Expeditions to Mars and Venus." 31 That same month, NASA forecast a stable annual budget of about $5 billion per year through 1970, after which the budget would decline to $4.5 billion annually for the rest of the 1970s. New programs such as Voyager and the piloted flyby would be phased in as the share of NASA's budget allotted to Apollo lunar missions decreased. 32 In May, Aviation Week & Space Technology reported that the $71.5-million new-start funding approved for Voyager by the House Space Committee "does not face serious problems." 33
A New Era for NASA
By the beginning of 1967, 25,000 United States servicemen had died in Vietnam. The summer of 1967 saw racial violence wrack Newark, New Jersey, and Detroit, Michigan. Large sections of Detroit burned to the ground. At least 5,000 people lost their homes, and more than 70 lost their lives. Violence also swept more than 100 other American cities. Detroit alone suffered up to $400 million in damage. Needless to say, most Americans focused more on Earth than on space.
The cost of the Vietnam War soared to $25 billion a year—the entire FY 1966 NASA budget every 10 weeks. This, plus the cost of President Johnson's Great Society social welfare programs, led to spiraling Federal budget deficits. Congress approached the Johnson Administration's 1968 Federal Budget with its scissors out, and NASA was an easy target.
In early July, Aviation Week & Space Technology reported that the House and Senate had "sustained the pace of spending in the Apollo program but seriously cut into NASA's plans for both manned and unmanned space programs of the future." 34 The Senate voted down all Voyager funding, while the House cut the program to $50 million. House and Senate conferees settled on $42 million for the automated Mars program. In response, NASA announced that a 1971 Voyager mission was out of the question. A 1973 landing was, however, still feasible if the program was funded adequately in FY 1969. 35
In early July, the Senate report on its FY 1968 NASA authorization bill specifically advised against piloted planetary missions, stating that "all near-term [piloted] missions should be limited to earth orbital activity or further lunar exploration." 36 Later that month, in testimony to the Senate Appropriations Committee, James Webb refused to "give aid and comfort to those who would cut our program" when asked by Spessard Holland (Democrat-Florida) to choose between $45 million for AAP and $50 million for Voyager. Holland chided Webb for "failing to see that Congress is faced with dilemmas in applying all its economies." 37
That some in the aerospace world were sympathetic to Holland's plight is telling. In an editorial titled "New Era for NASA," for example, Aviation Week & Space Technology editor Robert Hotz wrote,
We have no quarrel with reductions imposed so far by Congress . . . . They reflect a judicious and necessary pruning of NASA's budget . . . . [Space exploration] cannot hope to occupy such a large share of the national spotlight in the future as it did during the pioneering days of Mercury and Gemini when the war in Vietnam was only a tiny cloud on a distant horizon; when no American city cores had yet glowed red at night, and when a tax cut was the order of the day instead of the tidal wave of tax rises that now threatens to engulf the nation. 38
Though none of this augured well for piloted planetary missions, the Planetary JAG continued planning its piloted encounter mission with the aim of seeing it included as an FY 1969 new start. The revised Planetary JAG plan called for just two MS-IVBs. 39 This meant that only two Saturn V rockets would need to be launched in rapid succession, so the costly new Pad 39C was no longer required.
The encounter spacecraft would again include an Experiment Module with an automated probe suite based on Voyager technology. This time, however, the probes, including at least one large MSSR lander, would be sealed in the Experiment Module before launch from Earth and sterilized to avoid biological contamination of Mars. Previous piloted flyby studies had justified the presence of astronauts in part by their ability to service the probes during flight. This would now be impossible because servicing would introduce contamination.
The Planetary JAG realized that the MSSR was the most challenging element of its encounter mission plan—the one demanding the earliest development start if the first piloted encounter mission was to be ready for flight in 1975. On 3 August 1967, therefore, MSC issued a Request for Proposals for a "9-month engineering study . . . to perform a detailed analysis and preliminary design study of unmanned probes that would be launched from a manned spacecraft on a Mars encounter or a Mars capture mission, [and] would retrieve samples of the Mars surface and atmosphere and rendezvous with the manned spacecraft." MSC added, "The results of this study" would "aid in selecting experiment payload combinations of these and other probes and in configuring the Experiment Module section of the manned spacecraft used in the Mars . . . Reconnaissance/Retrieval missions in the 1975-1982 time period." Cost and technical proposals were to be submitted to MSC by 4 September. 40 At the same time, MSC released an RFP calling for a piloted flyby spacecraft design study.