The Space Shuttle Takes Center Stage

Abstract

Based on the decisions made during the previous months, the human space flight program that NASA presented to the White House in September 1970 looked very different from the one put forward a year earlier. NASA hoped that this revised program, focused on beginning to develop the space shuttle, would be seen as sufficiently responsive to White House budgetary and program priorities to gain Richard Nixon’s approval.By shutting down the Saturn V and Apollo spacecraft production lines and by returning the space station to preliminary study status, NASA was in effect giving the Nixon administration only one alternative if there was to be a continuing U.S. human space flight program after the mid-1970s—to approve development of the NASA-designed space shuttle. This was a situation unacceptable to the new space actors in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and the Office of Science and Technology (OST); they would push NASA over the remainder of 1970 and particularly during 1971 to come up with alternative human space flight proposals or, at a minimum, alternatives to NASA’s preferred shuttle design. These two organizations operated under the premise that President Nixon did not want to terminate U.S. human space flights, and thus pushed to find a way of continuing such flights that both made technical sense and also could be carried out in the context of a modest NASA budget, while also maintaining a balance between the human space flight effort and robotic science and application activities. Tensions between OMB and OST on one hand and NASA on the other would be the axis of space policy debates in coming months.