why go into space at all? Why not turn the R&D money and NASA’s fabled management skills directly to other, more worthy programs?
These were hard questions to answer. So Michaels, bluntly, avoided them.
In public, Michaels played up space as an adventure – something a nation like the US ought to be able to afford, damn it. Astronauts from the heroic days, including Joe Muldoon, were wheeled out to serve as living reminders of good moments gone. After Michaels’s skillful PR hoopla, Mars came to seem a little more acceptable. There was a snowball effect, and some support for the option started to appear on the Hill.
And, slowly, the opinion polls showed public opposition to a Mars option dropping.
But NASA’s budget was still far too high. In July, members of Congress had moved twice to delete manned spaceflight altogether from the FY1972 budget.
It was a dangerous moment in history, and the hard bargaining continued.
What can we drop?
At one point Josephson had believed Nixon was coming close to approving the Space Shuttle system – just that one item, out of all the options his Task Group had presented. At least the goal of the Shuttle was to do with reducing costs, and the Shuttle would actually have been the favored option of the aerospace lobby because of all the new development it would have entailed.
But the Shuttle program had quickly become a mess. It was obvious, Josephson thought, that the final, low-cost Shuttle design was a bastardized compromise, put together by committee to satisfy conflicting interests. And Michaels wasn’t above drafting in his predecessor, Paine – a great lover of the Mars option whom Michaels had replaced in September – to point out the Shuttle’s strong military flavor: it was no accident that the low, hundred-mile orbits which were all the Space Shuttle was capable of, and its wide-ranging flyback capabilities, were ideally suited to Air Force missions.
The Space Shuttle would be cute technology, with nowhere to go except low Earth orbit reconnaissance missions. In an era in which detente was becoming the fashion, the military taint of the Shuttle was unpalatable. And besides, Kennedy and others never ceased to remind the public, there was nothing heroic about it.
So Josephson had watched, not unhappily, as the Shuttle quietly faded from Nixon’s thinking. The next generation of launch vehicles for manned flight, instead, would probably be a series of upgraded Saturns.
It looked as if there would be no elaborate space station modules, either, as the Space Task Group had proposed; just an extended series of Skylabs, improvised from Saturn fuel tanks. The engineers inside NASA screamed like hell at this, especially Mueller and his space station lobby. But it all brought the cost profile closer to something the White House might be able to endorse.
Of course, contained in the final program there would be tradeoffs. Rockwell had been hot favorites as lead contractors for the canned Shuttle. And now it looked as if their big rivals Boeing were going to get the largest piece of the new space booster pie, because Boeing, manufacturers of the huge Saturn S-IC first stage, were going to be lead contractors in the new enhanced Saturn project. Boeing had all sorts of ideas for reducing the costs of the Saturn V system, for instance by adding strap-on reusable rockets to it, and even making the S-IC itself recoverable, including wings, parachutes, hydrogen-filled balloons, drag brakes, paragliders, and rotary systems of spinning parachutes.
So Rockwell – manufacturers of Apollo – looked, to everyone’s surprise, like being left with very little out of all this. They were offered a consolation: they would be allowed to proceed with a program to turn the S-II, their hydrogen-fueled Saturn second stage, into a heavyweight interplanetary injection engine. But this, of course, was the job that NERVA would perform, so strictly speaking the S-II program was redundant before it started, and questions were already being asked about its requirement and viability.
Still, Josephson thought wryly, Rockwell were bound to pick up other compensations along the way. Already they were hot favorites for the one big new start-up spacecraft program to emerge from today’s decision, even before it had been announced …
Meanwhile the military had been bought off, to Josephson’s way of thinking, with a promise of a presence on the new long-duration Skylabs, a restoration of their old Manned Orbital Laboratory mission objectives.
The new space program, then, was going to be a balance of forces, a compromise among the warring factions lobbying the White House and Capitol Hill. Thus, Josephson thought, as it always was.
But it wouldn’t have come together without Michaels’s string-pulling and favor-calling, exploiting the web of political alliances he’d built up over the years. A less astute Administrator – Thomas Paine, for instance – wouldn’t have had a prayer of delivering this. And yet Josephson knew that Michaels’s work was only just beginning. Michaels had worked to obtain the initial commitment to a new program; the challenge now would be to keep that commitment in the long, wearying years ahead.
Fred Michaels had known Nixon all the way back to the Sputnik days, when he’d been Eisenhower’s veep. Michaels believed that Nixon was a man who grasped the symbolism of the space age, right from the beginning. ‘Politics is frankly more important than science,’ Michaels had told Josephson, and Josephson repeated it now into his tape recorder. ‘The real motive for space is prestige. Nixon understands that. He’s the right clay to be shaped. I tell you, Tim; I’m not so surprised at the way all this has turned out. All he needed was the right argument …’
Maybe, Josephson thought. But Nixon was also pragmatic, highly intelligent, a man who saw space as fairly low down his priority list.
He might have chosen to shut down the manned program altogether.
And yet, and yet …
And yet there was dear old Jack Kennedy, speaking like a ghost from his study in New England, quietly telling Americans that they were better than their pessimistic visions of themselves: that they had, after all, succeeded in landing men on the Moon, and in the full view of the world; that they should not pause now, but should go on, endlessly reinventing themselves in the light of the fiery dream that was space travel, a dream of which Kennedy had become the living embodiment …
It had come to a head, at last, today. Michaels had been asked to a meeting with Agronski, other Presidential aides, and representatives of the Office of Management and Budget.
Agronski, Michaels told Josephson, had opened the meeting briskly. ‘You’re going to get your Mars boondoggle, Fred. Against my better judgment.’
‘The President’s approving the program.’
‘Yes.’ Agronski shuffled papers. ‘There are still some decisions to be made about size and cost …’
Michaels grunted. ‘What decided him?’
‘A number of factors. The point that we can’t afford to forgo manned spaceflight altogether, for our prestige at home and abroad.’ He sounded rueful. ‘We’re stuck with you, Fred. That the Mars mission is the only option we have that is meaningful and could be accomplished on a modest budget. That we were only thinking of cutting NASA anyway because we could. That not starting the program would be damaging to the aerospace industry …’
Michaels had understood, and Josephson wasn’t surprised. Kennedy’s lobbying, and his own machinations, had swung public opinion just enough. And 1972 was going to be an election year; unemployment queues in
