End of an Era
As Aerospace Technology magazine put it in May 1968, "If the political climate in Washington for manned planetary missions is as bleak as the initial congressional budget hearings indicate, the [NAR MEM] study is . . . likely to be the last of its type for at least a year." 12 In fact, it was the last until the late 1980s. As the battle over the FY 1968 budget during the summer of 1967 made abundantly clear, a $29-billion Mars program enjoyed support in neither the Johnson White House nor the Congress. Events in 1968 made even more remote the possibility that the U.S. might take on a new Apollo-scale space commitment.
On 30 January 1968, immediately after Boeing and NAR published their reports, North Vietnam invaded South Vietnam on the eve of Tet, the lunar new year. Though repulsed by U. S. and South Vietnamese forces, the large-scale offensive drove home to Americans and the Johnson White House that American involvement in Indochina would likely grow before it shrank.
At the end of May, the Defense Department asked for a $3.9-billion supplemental appropriation. Of this, $2.9 billion was earmarked to pay for the Tet Offensive—the Defense Department needed, for example, to replace 700 destroyed helicopters—while $1 billion would beef up U.S. defenses in South Korea following the Pueblo incident, in which North Korea seized a U.S. ship. 13 A total of 14,592 American soldiers had been killed in Vietnam by the close of 1968, by which time the total U.S. forces in Indochina stood at more than half a million.
There was also trouble at home. Johnson was a political casualty of Tet and other troubles shaking the nation. On 31 March 1968, he announced that he would not stand for reelection. On 4 April 1968, civil rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. was gunned down in Memphis, Tennessee; his death triggered racial violence across the country. That same month students at Columbia University in New York seized buildings to protest the Vietnam War in one of more than 200 major demonstrations at some 100 universities during the year. On 6 June 1968, Democratic Party front-runner Robert Kennedy was shot in Los Angeles. In August, anti-war protesters disrupted the Democratic National Convention.
Near the start of the FY 1969 budget cycle in early February 1968, as American and South Vietnamese forces pushed back the North Vietnamese, James Webb testified to the House Space Committee, where a $4 billion FY 1969 NASA budget was, according to one committee staffer, a "fait accompli." He reminded the Committee that
NASA's 1969 authorization request, at the $4.37-billion level, is $700 million below the amount requested last year. NASA expenditures for Fiscal 1969 will be down $230 million from the current year and $1.1 billion from the peak year of 1966. 14
Webb added that "the 1969 budget is a holding budget. It provides for the essential work of the Apollo program and for a few other projects of high priority. It does not provide for a number of important projects that we would like to see go forward." 15 Among the "important projects" was the nuclear rocket program. The White House Budget Bureau had slashed the joint AEC-NASA FY 1969 request for NERVA from $132 million to $60 million.
In March, the House Space Committee voted to restore $45 million for NERVA. At the same time, it cut $100 million from Apollo, $13.5 million from the Viking Mars lander program, and $25 million from AAP. In the end, NASA's FY 1969 appropriation was $3.995 billion—the first NASA budget below $4 billion since FY 1963. NERVA received $53 million.
In October 1968, James Webb resigned as NASA Administrator. His deputy, Thomas O. Paine, became Acting Administrator. Paine, a former General Electric executive, was a space visionary who believed that NASA should move aggressively to follow up on its Apollo successes.
On 21 December 1968, Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders became the first humans to ride a Saturn V rocket. They left Earth, reached the Moon, and entered lunar orbit on Christmas Eve. On Christmas Day they fired their CSM's engine to leave the Moon and return to Earth. Apollo 8's success was a much-needed morale booster for the United States at the end of a traumatic year.
On 20 January 1969, Richard Nixon was inaugurated as the 37th President of the United States. He inherited a nation divided by war and social unrest and a space agency that had nearly reached its primary goal but had no clear mandate for the future. In February 1969, Nixon appointed a Space Task Group (STG) to define NASA's post-Apollo goals. The STG was chaired by Vice President Spiro Agnew and included Paine, Lee DuBridge (the President's Science Advisor), and Robert Seamans (now Secretary of the Air Force).
Agnew, a space enthusiast, declared after watching the Apollo 11 Moon landing on 20 July 1969 that NASA should next aim for a piloted Mars landing. Paine, too, was a vocal Mars supporter. In August 1969, he presented to the STG a plan for a 1981 Mars landing. 16 In September 1969, the STG presented its report, The Post-Apollo Space Program: Directions for the Future, to President Nixon. 17 It offered three options for NASA's future, all of which included a space station, a space shuttle, and a piloted Mars landing before the end of the twentieth century.
Nixon, however, was not interested in a new Apollo-scale space commitment. In March 1970, he announced that NASA's budget would continue to decline, and that "we must also recognize that many other important national priorities make their demands upon our resources." 18 He chose the space shuttle as NASA's only new post-Apollo program. The shuttle was cast as a means of reducing the cost of space flight, not as a stepping stone to the Moon or Mars.
The 1970s saw the end of the first era of piloted Mars mission planning. In 1972, the NERVA program was canceled. In 1973, the last Saturn V rocket launched the Skylab space station. In 1975, the last Apollo spacecraft docked with a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft in Earth orbit. In 1976, the Viking 1 and Viking 2 landers reached Mars. They found a world of red rocks and pink skies, but no obvious signs of life.
For the next decade, NASA's attention was focused on the space shuttle. Piloted Mars mission planning became the province of a few dedicated individuals and small groups, both inside and outside NASA. They kept the dream of Mars exploration alive until a new era of Mars planning began in the mid-1980s.
Chapter 5: Apogee
from this year, $850 million from last year, and $1.3 billion less than in Fiscal 1966. The NASA program has been cut. I hope you will decide it has been cut enough . . . . 14
In testimony to the Senate Appropriations Committee in May, after the House approved a $4-billion NASA budget, Webb told the Senators that President Johnson had directed him to acquiesce to the cut, then expressed concern over NERVA's future. 15 The nuclear rocket stayed alive in early June 1968 only after a lengthy Senate floor battle waged by Howard Cannon (Democrat-Nevada), whose state included the NRDS. Webb told the Senate Appropriations Committee later that month that the $4-billion NASA budget would require halting Saturn V production for a year and canceling NERVA. In an attempt to rally NERVA supporters to approve their engine's ride into space, he added that "to proceed with NERVA while terminating Saturn V cannot be justified." 16
On 1 August 1968, Webb turned down George Mueller's request to make long lead-time purchases for manufacture of two more Saturn Vs, the sixteenth and seventeenth in the series. He informed the OMSF chief that production would halt with the fifteen already allotted for the Apollo lunar program. 17 A week later Webb told Congress that "the future is not bright" for the Saturn rockets. 18
At a White House press conference on 16 September 1968, Webb announced that he would step down after nearly 8 years as NASA Administrator. He told journalists that he left the Agency "well prepared . . . to carry out the missions that have been approved . . . . What we have not been able to do under the pressures on the budget has been to fund new missions for the 1970s . . . ." 19
Thomas Paine Takes Charge
The final FY 1969 NASA budget was $3.995 billion, making it the first below $4 billion since 1963. This was more than $370 million below NASA's request, but almost exactly what Johnson had told Webb to accept in May. The Saturn V production line went on standby. The nuclear rocket program received $91.1 million, of which $33.1 million came from NASA funds.
NASA Deputy Administrator Thomas Paine became Acting NASA Administrator upon Webb's departure on 7 October. Webb, a 25-year veteran of Federal government service, had described Paine as one of a "new breed of scientist-administrators making their way into government." 20 Formerly director of General Electric's TEMPO think tank, he had entered government service through a program for recruiting managers from industry. Paine had become Webb's Deputy Administrator in March 1968, replacing Robert Seamans. When he took over NASA from Webb, Paine had seven months of Federal government experience.
Immediately after taking NASA's reins, Paine told the Senate Space Committee that he would seek a $4.5 billion NASA budget in FY 1970, followed by annual increases leading to a $5.5-billion budget in FY 1975. Paine said that he wanted a six- to nine-man space station serviced by Apollo CSMs in the mid-1970s. George Mueller also testified, calling for a $4.5-billion NASA budget in FY 1970. He said that this was necessary to avoid a gap in piloted flights after the Apollo lunar landings. 21
On 30 October 1968, the Budget Bureau completed a "highlights" paper on "major aspects of National Aeronautics and Space operations which warrant attention at an early point in 1969" for President Johnson's successor. The paper noted that "pressure is mounting to budget significant sums for follow-on manned space flight activities." It stated that "the advantages of nuclear propulsion do not begin to approximate the costs for missions short of a manned Mars landing. No national commitment has been made to undertake this mission which would cost $40–$100B[illion] . . . nevertheless, pressures are strong in NASA, industry, and Congress to undertake the development of the nuclear rocket." 22
Republican Richard Nixon defeated Hubert Humphrey, Johnson's Vice President, for the White House in November. Though Apollo 7 had triumphantly returned NASA astronauts to orbit in October, space had been overshadowed as a campaign issue by the war, the economy, student revolt, and many other "down-to-Earth" issues. Nixon had promised a tax cut, which promised to place yet more pressure on Federal agencies to cut spending.
Six weeks after the election, in the Johnson Administration's twilight days, space flight won back the front page. On 21 December 1968, Apollo 8 astronauts Frank Borman, James Lovell, and William Anders became the first people to launch into space on a Saturn V rocket and the first humans to orbit a world other than Earth. The Apollo 8 CSM dropped behind the Moon early on 24 December and fired its engine for four minutes to slow down and allow the Moon's gravity to capture it into lunar orbit.
Thirty-five minutes after the spacecraft passed beyond the Moon's limb, it emerged from the other side. As it did, Earth rose into view over the hilly lunar horizon, and the crew snapped their planet's picture. Lovell described the Moon to people on Earth as "essentially gray, no color; looks like plaster of Paris or sort of grayish deep sand." 23 Later, in one of the most memorable moments of the space age, the crew took turns reading to the world from the biblical book of Genesis. Early on Christmas Day 1968, after 10 lunar orbits, the Apollo 8 crew fired their CSM's engine to escape the Moon's gravitational pull and fall back to Earth.