The preferred configuration which is emerging from these
studies is a two-stage delta wing reusable system in which
the orbiter has external tanks that can be jettisoned.
—James Fletcher, describing the planned space shuttle in June of 1971
The space shuttle models looked like something from a science-fiction movie. Machined from polished stainless steel, they were shiny and precise. He picked one up. George Mueller told him that particular design was being proposed by the Boeing Company. More spaceplane than airplane, the scaled replica of the next generation of spacecraft did not look anything like the familiar rockets and capsules that the US, Soviet Union, and the rest of the world had been launching into space when the end of World War II had ushered in the space age. All the shuttle designs looked quite esoteric to him.
He had just walked in the snow across Sixth Street to Federal Office Building 10B, where Mueller’s office was. Coming in from the cold, he sat down with a cup of coffee and continued the conversation that he had started with Mueller on the phone. It was late in the fall of 1969, and Paine was meeting with his associate administrator for manned space flight. The first manned landing on the moon was now behind them. The biggest question facing them now was, what was next?
At $3.3 billion, NASA’s budget was neither bold nor balanced. It was, in fact, the agency’s lowest level of funding since 1961, and more than half a billion dollars below what Congress had appropriated the year before. The agency’s post-Apollo plans were ill-defined mainly because it was underfunded. Congress had made across-the-board budget cuts. Nothing was spared, and NASA was one of the agencies hit hardest. Forty-five thousand layoffs that year had the aerospace industry as a whole hurting badly.
The situation at NASA was not promising. The draconian cuts affected more than just a few programs:
•The Mississippi Test Facility, on the banks of the Mississippi-Louisiana border, had been placed on standby status after having completed the final rocket engine test of the Saturn V.
•Saturn V launch vehicle production was now suspended; no more moon rockets would be made.
•Apollo 20 was canceled, along with the production of all Apollo spacecraft hardware.
•The launch of Skylab, the Earth-orbiting workshop, was postponed.
•Apollo 18 and 19 were now deferred until 1974, after the Skylab missions. They would be canceled altogether in September 1970.
•Launch of the highly anticipated robotic Viking Mars landing missions was postponed from the 1973 to the 1975 launch window.
•NASA’s Electronics Research Center in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was shut down and later turned over to the Department of Transportation.1
Tom Paine was now fighting hard not to lose the remaining three Apollo flights (Apollo 15, 16, and 17). In no small twist of irony, the scientists who for years had deplored the human spaceflight program were now leading the charge to keep Apollo alive. They still wanted a more extensive exploration of the moon’s surface. There were still many unanswered questions about the moon, questions on its origin, mineralogical makeup, the existence of water and proto-biological materials, and soil characteristics. Most important was the question as to whether or not the surface was suitable for mining.2
Since arriving at NASA, Paine’s critics had contended that he did not make organized scientific research a priority. NASA was supposed to be a scientific organization, they argued. He openly admitted that he saw the role of his agency differently. NASA was not the “czar of science,” deciding on the meaning of scientific values. That was the mission of the universities and the academics. He maintained that while large organizations like NASA were needed to take on big challenges like space exploration, the foundation of science “is and must be the individual scientist.”3
Paine was an engineer caught up in a complex infrastructure populated by a lot of scientists. He was, however, quite cognizant of the differences between the two. Engineers, he espoused, must work together as a team to build a bridge, construct an offshore oil rig, or get a five-hundred-ton airliner up into the air. They succeeded as a team or failed as a team. But while the engineer knows he cannot do it alone, the scientist can often afford to think differently and still be very successful. He can be more individualistic, more eccentric, and more theoretical. But since NASA was trying to get to the moon and beyond, engineering had to take priority over science.
The debate over engineering versus science escalated as never before during the Apollo program. A case in point was the elimination of the Apollo Lunar Surface Experiment Package, a suite of scientific equipment and experiments from the first moon landing that was dropped primarily for reasons of weight. “It turned out to be a good thing,” Paine said in hindsight. “Armstrong and Aldrin had enough to do. What more could a scientist-astronaut have done?”4 For him, the chief purpose of the nation’s space program was nothing if not the epic human exploration of outer space.
Apollo was epochal because men, and not machines, went to the moon. Whether people should go into space when robotic probes might suffice had been the subject of debate from the earliest days of the space age. The US had to decide very early on whether it should develop the capability for humans to operate in space or leave this area to the Soviet Union. But the Soviets’ intention was clear: They wanted cosmonauts in space. That had ended the debate, giving NASA a charter and a purpose that allowed the US to eventually succeed in space.
But to send people into outer space, the US had to develop some very advanced technologies. It was an expensive proposition; almost 50 cents on every dollar of the space budget went to human spaceflight. Vocal opposition came from well-respected figures in the space program. Bruce Murray, a cofounder of the Planetary Society, said at the time that a man in space was only meaningful when he was needed for psychological reasons. James Van Allen, discoverer of the radiation belts around Earth that bear his name, declared that the “vaunted advantages” of having human crews in space was “rubbish.” Even President Nixon’s own science advisor, Lee DuBridge, was never fully convinced that human spaceflight was needed for what the country was trying to accomplish in outer space.5
Keeping a balanced space program was important to Paine, but he fully conceded that the success of human flight had to come at the cost of other programs. Recognizing that unmanned programs generally could not evoke the kind of enthusiasm, romance, and deep emotion that manned programs brought, he did not waver in his position. By doing so, he kept the rift open between him and the scientists. (In Houston, Gilruth and Kraft wanted to know the absolute minimum scientific requirement they could get away with on a moon flight.) “It was very difficult to keep a positive constituency among the scientists. … I think some of them adopted a ‘rule-or-ruin’ position: either we did what they said or they would publicly attack us, and then they would. It wasn’t an idle threat.”6
As the 1960s ended and the calendar turned to a new decade, many pressing issues confronted America. There was the ongoing conflict in Southeast Asia, inflation, fiscal instability, and the beginning of the first global energy crisis. All placed competing fiscal demands on government. For most of the decade, Project Apollo had been carried out with success and safety as prerogatives. Cost was secondary, at least in the beginning. But when the time came to decide what would come after Apollo, cost drove everything.7
The United States in 1970 was in no rush to construct a space station. In 1961, when Webb presented Kennedy with options for the United States in outer space, the president chose to go with a moon landing. The decision was bold but not the riskiest. It was, however, calculated enough to mobilize a generation of aerospace workers and capture international attention. Fail or succeed, it would put America front and center on the world stage. Had he elected, instead, to build a space station, the US would presumably have had, by 1970, a large, permanent habitat of some sort circling Earth.8
Paine did not agree with his top advisers on what the next big program should be. He wanted to proceed directly to a moon settlement and a Mars mission, but understood that the timing was wrong. It would not have been politically or fiscally tenable. Others, like Edgar M. Cortright, the director of the Langley Research Center in Virginia, lobbied for a large Earth-orbiting laboratory that could serve both the science and military communities.9
But NASA had no funding or mandate to construct a fantastic “station campus,” as Wernher von Braun called it. From the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, he talked to Paine about building a “spacebase.” It would be quite large, big enough to accommodate fifty or perhaps even a hundred persons. Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey had brought the concept into full living color. Space enthusiasts believed that a giant wheel turning gracefully in the sky could serve as a gateway to the moon and the planets. It was not only believable but plausible. Paine knew Clarke, and was very much taken in by his friend’s visionary prognostications. But in order to get there, an affordable stopgap measure called Skylab was first needed.
Skylab provided the US with its first Earth-orbiting laboratory. Scientists wanted to know how the human body would respond to the prolonged exposure of living and working in space. The largest piece of Skylab was the Orbital Workshop. The spacious 12,400-cubic-foot living module was converted from the S-IVB third stage of a Saturn V rocket. It could accommodate three astronauts in space for up to three months at a time. In October 1968, Paine had made a key decision as the acting administrator of NASA by directing the agency to proceed with Skylab. It was the first project to fly in the so-called Apollo Applications Program.10 From May 1973 to February 1974, three crews would spend a total of 171 days in orbit. The agency wanted to use Skylab for a few years before building a permanent spacebase. That would come later, after the space shuttle was operational.11
He clearly believed that the conquest of space was of such enormity that the United States could not and should not tackle it alone. Speaking in Canberra, Australia, he used Antarctica as an analogy. Paine proposed that the international focus of a space station should be like exploring the icy continent of Antarctica. Like Antarctica, it would be a place where various nations would operate a mix of science stations. Nations would cooperate with one another there to support the mission at large. At the time, the international aspect of a space station was still very poorly defined. The details of the program itself were nebulous. He advocated that while the United States must be the standard-bearer, foreign nations should be invited to participate. Many countries could use it as a shared resource. But NASA had no plans to internationalize the station in terms of ownership, he said in 1970.12
He had written to the president in February 1969, saying that Nixon now had “a unique opportunity for leadership that will clearly identify your administration with the establishment of the nation’s major goals in spaceflight for the next decade.” Paine started out very boldly with Nixon. Dismissing what the Bureau of the Budget had to say, he urged the president to pursue a clearly defined path for America in space. A permanent space station was the first step. A settlement on the moon was next. Human exploration of Mars would complete the equation.13
The recommendation was premature, however. Nixon wanted more options. He wanted something that was less expensive, with more immediate returns, and frankly, not so ambitious. Always thinking politically and already with an eye toward the next election, he wanted a program that would quickly create new jobs for the aerospace industry in key congressional districts.14 On February 13, 1969, he appointed Vice President Agnew to chair the administration’s Space Task Group.15 Their charter was to come up with a plan for the future of the US in outer space for the upcoming decade.
Nixon knew that Agnew, like Paine, favored a large space program. He was counting on his science advisor, Lee DuBridge, and to a somewhat lesser degree, Robert Seamans (representing the secretary of defense), among others, to bring some balance to the group. The State Department, Atomic Energy Commission, Budget Bureau, and Congress all had representatives on the STG. Many issues needed to be made clearer. They affected both the military and the civilian space programs. In a nutshell, the STG’s job was to map out a strategy so that politically tenable, flagship missions could be implemented in a Nixon space policy. Nixon told Agnew to have the report on his desk by the first of September.16
The STG had a very difficult job. Seamans openly questioned the practicality of Paine’s Mars agenda from the beginning. The two were friends, on good terms, and usually supported each other’s positions. But his time away from NASA had convinced Seamans that there was actually little public support for something as lofty as a master plan to establish a permanent human presence in outer space. In his own words, he was “quite at odds” with Paine (and with Agnew).17 He also found, much to his surprise, that even DuBridge, who was usually lukewarm to any calls for a grandiose human space program, wanted to keep the Mars option open.
With less than a month before the report was due, time was running short. Coming out of a particularly heated meeting on August 4, Seamans had had enough. He talked the situation over with his boss, Melvin Laird (Nixon’s secretary of defense), and wrote a letter to the president to explain his position. He urged strongly that the US not commit itself to a manned Mars mission. He also recommended to the president that the country hold off, at least for the time being, developing a space station. Instead, he advocated for a National Space Transportation System, which by all accounts should greatly reduce the cost per pound to launch payloads into orbit for both NASA and the military. As the secretary of the Air Force, it was the most sensible case he could make for the Defense Department. Seamans’s action disappointed Paine when he found out what he had done. He thought his friend was out of line in circumventing the council and going directly to Nixon, and lamented that “we should have recommended to the president a real gung-ho civilian space program for the 1970s.” He was starting to see the writing on the wall.18
Paine also wanted the space shuttle, but merely as part of a much broader plan to build and then service a permanent, large-scale space station. He went on record several times in the STG to say that the station and the shuttle should be built at the same time, and presented numbers that showed it could in fact be done. All that was needed was to restore the agency’s funding to the level that it had during Apollo, at 1 percent of the gross national product.19 He envisioned the finished space station then as a gateway to launch expeditions to the moon and Mars. The space shuttle would have been only one component (in fact, the smallest component) of the whole plan.
But Paine knew Nixon, and knew that space exploration was not a priority for him. He had no choice, however, but to operate within the confines of the STG. The president got the report, and on March 7, 1970, a Saturday, presented his plan for the US in space to Congress. He asked that the country develop a reusable space shuttle as its next flagship program in space. This was to be followed by a space station at some later time. Paine had lost. Most disappointing to him was the part of the plan that called for the US to wait on a Mars mission until the year 2000 (thirty years in the future). By deferring a Mars landing to the end of the century, Nixon did not have to address the issue at all. Paine’s inability to win over the White House also doomed the space station.20 The recommendation that the White House went with was the most conservative and least ambitious of all the options that the group had considered. With his hands tied, Paine had little choice but to go along with the recommendation if NASA wanted to continue at all with human spaceflight. Nixon really had no interest in the space program beyond the acclaim that Apollo brought. While he would not kill the space program, he did not have to be lavish with it either. Paine’s one great failure as the administrator of NASA meant that there would be no gateway in low-Earth orbit that astronauts could use to go back to the moon and on to the Red Planet in the foreseeable future.21
He did not like the decision, but the go-ahead for the space shuttle meant that NASA at least had its flagship program for the decade of the 1970s. In 1970, predictions of what the space shuttle could do ranged from the sanguine to the fantastic. Most space insiders presumed that a fleet of reusable shuttles would provide easy and routine access into space. In a December 1969 Air Force and Space Digest article, the space shuttle was hailed by the United States Air Force as the key that would open the doors of space just as the intercontinental railroad opened the American West for the common man. Astronauts would be as numerous as airline pilots. Flights into orbit would be scheduled almost weekly; virtually any healthy person who could afford to travel into space could do so.22
Paine echoed the seemingly ubiquitous thinking at the time that access to space would be very routine using the space shuttle. His high expectations regarding what the shuttle might do were primarily pragmatic. To him, the shuttle was a means to an end, a way to access LEO cheaply. “We are not interested in this as a Buck Rogers technique,” he said. “Our principal interest is the fact that this promises to reduce by a factor of 10 the costs of operating in space.”23
His enthusiasm was based in no small part on initial technical studies done at the time. Competing aerospace giants Boeing, Convair, Lockheed, Martin Marietta, McDonnell Douglas, and North American Rockwell all eagerly and rightly wanted the shuttle prime contract. Their competing numbers all showed very low cost projections to operate the spaceplane, which was not surprising to anyone. Industry reports boasted that it might even be possible to do better than the goal of $100 per pound-to-LEO price tag that NASA and its contractors had projected (a figure that the space program is nowhere close to even today). If that goal were achieved, the space shuttle could have replaced, based on cost alone, all of the mid-to-heavy expendable launch vehicles that were then in production.
The design also became tied to the Department of Defense (specifically the US Air Force). For funding appropriations to be approved, Congress had stipulated that the shuttle be used by both NASA and the military. Paine and Seamans signed an agreement in December of 1968 for dual use of any shuttle that NASA would develop. The Air Force had equal ownership in the program. The final wing design of the space shuttle and the size of the payload bay were, in fact, dictated not by NASA but by Air Force requirements. Like NASA, it planned to launch its own fleet of shuttles into orbit. A massive launch complex at Vandenberg Air Force Base on the coast of California would launch dozens of missions a year into polar orbit around Earth.24 Paine signed the agreement believing that the synergy would help NASA secure its portion of the annual funding needed to operate its fleet of vehicles.25
Two years later, in 1972, new NASA administrator James Fletcher would officially inaugurate the space shuttle as the nation’s flagship program in space. He cited four reasons the space shuttle was important and was the right next step in human spaceflight:
1.It was the only meaningful new human space program that could be accomplished on a modest budget.
2.It was needed to make space operations less complex and less costly.
3.It was needed to do useful things.
4.It would encourage greater international participation in spaceflight.26
Points 1 and 2 were never realized, because each flight cost nearly half a billion dollars. In fact, it was more expensive in actual dollars to launch the space shuttle than the Saturn V to the moon. The shuttles, which eventually flew 135 times, beginning with the launch of Columbia on April 12, 1981, turned out to be a much-reduced system compared to what Paine, Mueller, and just about every other expert had envisioned.
Mueller, in particular, had aggressively championed a fully reusable, multifaceted vehicle. His original design had an orbiter vehicle the size of an Airbus A320 commercial airliner equipped with jet engines so it could fly under its own power instead of gliding to the ground after reentry. A true spaceplane, it would have been mounted on the back of a booster the size of a Boeing 747 jumbo jet, which could also land on a spaceport runway under its own power. The critical selling point was that the planned rate of one flight a week would have amortized the cost of each mission low enough to justify its existence. Early projections were lofty by all accounts. Each vehicle was projected to fly into space one hundred times before being retired.
By these projections, the space shuttle could have been the first step in Paine’s lofty plan to settle the moon and send human beings to Mars—the real goal behind his plan. In essence, it would have been a space taxi that ferried passengers and cargo between the ground and a space station in LEO. The station would have been assembled in orbit using shuttles as construction trucks. Astronauts with Buck Rogers-style portable jet packs (manned maneuvering units) would have served as construction workers. Once finished, the space station would have been an on-orbit Grand Central Station for launching missions to the moon, and later Mars, using the NERVA nuclear-powered rocket.27
The shuttles that eventually flew turned out to be marvels of aerospace engineering that did truly wonderful, useful, and unique things in space. They simply could not meet all of the far-reaching expectations and lofty goals that NASA and the aerospace industry had envisioned, however. With its design and development mired in delays caused by the late funding (coupled with Skylab’s orbital decay, reentry, and demise in 1979), the shuttle had no place to go when it finally started flying. After just a handful of flights, decision-makers inside and outside of the space agency realized that it would never come close to achieving its operational cost objectives. With no space station in sight, the shuttles became the world’s most amazing flying machines, without a convincing purpose. By 1990, Paine was one of the program’s most vocal critics. When Vice President Dan Quayle asked him what the country should do about the space shuttle, he told him in no uncertain terms that NASA should phase it out “as quickly as possible.”28
Besides the space shuttle and a space station, the third leg that would have completed Paine’s triad to explore the inner solar system was human spaceflight beyond the moon, specifically, to Mars. Vice President Agnew was among the few in Washington who had gone on record to say that America, having gone to the moon, should now proceed to Mars. A Mars mission based on von Braun’s research when he was at the Marshall Space Flight Center actually seemed doable for the 1979 launch window. But even if the technology were there, public sentiment was not. The lack of any real support on the part of the public prevented any action from taking place in fulfillment of the “Now on to Mars” charge.
In the months following Apollo 11, Paine began to come to the same disappointing realization. The public’s reaction—a mere month after Armstrong and Aldrin walked on the moon—told him there was little chance that Congress would fund a Mars program any time in the near future. Furthermore, Nixon wanted nothing to do with Mars. Unlike the Kennedy and early Johnson years, there was no longer any deference toward the space agency on the part of the White House. NASA’s fiscal year 1970 budget had, in fact, declined by 15 percent from the previous year. In 1971, it fell by another 15 percent. Any hope for a Mars mission died before it had a chance to be seriously debated on Capitol Hill.29
Congress clearly urged Paine to avoid extremes as well. Even Representative George Miller, chairman of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics and a friend of NASA, cautioned him:
I understand very well the enthusiasm of those who draw on the experience of 1961 and propose a manned landing on Mars as our next great national goal. … But I do not at this time wish to commit ourselves to a specific time period for setting sail for Mars. I believe that there are many tasks that can be accomplished that will ultimately provide that capability, but will be less costly and will be necessary in meeting short term objectives. … I think it highly probable that five, perhaps ten years from now we may decide that it would be in the national interest to begin a carefully planned program extending over several years to send men to Mars.30
Paine was exasperated by now. The STG had deferred a much-needed decision on Mars until 1980 at the earliest. Worse yet, the White House and the Congress wanted no part of it. While it was a subject of long-range studies, the consensus in Washington was that any commitment to such a plan would be premature. There were still just too many unknowns about a long-duration space voyage. Instead, the “slow-paced approach” forced him to emphasize programs that had the best chance for support on Capitol Hill: earth sciences, technology applications, robotic planetary missions. These smaller programs ended up sustaining the agency. They bought time for NASA as it worked through the plethora of problems plaguing the space shuttle. In his view, dialogue on future plans for America in space had taken on a most pedestrian view. It had become too unimaginative and downright bureaucratic; the STG was the worst thing that could have happened to NASA at a time when it was trying to hold on to the momentum of Apollo, he vented in an interview in the fall of 1969.
He compared the critics of Mars exploration to those who, 170 years before, opposed the Louisiana Purchase. Daniel Webster declared then that the American West was a “howling wilderness fit for nothing but savages.” Politicians nestled comfortably in their cocoons on the East Coast predicted that the West was “impossible for the young nation to ever inhabit.” The purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867 was derided as wasted money and “Seward’s Folly.” Even the exploitation of electricity was chided by a frustrated Michael Faraday as being “worthless as a newborn babe.”31
Every time work was done in the process of exploring space, he continued, people on Earth benefited in ways that could not have been predicted. He spoke of Louis Pasteur’s experiments in microbiology that led to pasteurization, vaccines, and reduction of epidemics in the field of medicine. “A jet engine is developed because the Nazis are shooting down our B-17s. We did not know then that it would lead to a global network of jet transportation and one of California’s biggest industries. When Marconi studied radio signals, he did not know it would lead to color television. … If you believe the result of the Apollo program was that we brought back 800 pounds of rock, you really missed the whole point.”32
His best ally in the Mars campaign was Wernher von Braun, one of the space program’s most persuasive and visionary supporters. A series of articles by von Braun and science writer Willy Ley, published in Collier’s magazine in 1952, had inspired people from all walks of life, from Walt Disney to Tom Paine. They had ostensibly turned science fiction into science, and encouraged readers to contemplate the limitless potential of space travel beyond LEO. Von Braun had lobbied for decades that the United States should establish a long-term infrastructure in space. The US, he said, should have the capability to do things and build things in space so that human beings could conquer outer space. With astronauts on jet packs, space taxis, and a mega space complex circling Earth, the US could be in a position to lead an armada into the vast expanse of the inner solar system. It would be much like the great voyages of Christopher Columbus half a millennium earlier.
A human mission to Mars was now the natural extension of having gone to the moon. Paine, as the leader of the country’s civilian space program, believed the nation made a paramount mistake by not seriously considering it on the heels of Apollo. To him, asking the country whether or not it should go to Mars was another way of asking whether or not America was still confident enough to accept the most demanding challenge that it could.
He defended NASA’s right to ask the president to “take the offer” to the American people:
We made the offer … to put together a program and devote a decade or so of our lives to this tremendously difficult field, if the nation wished us to do so. I do not feel bad about having … put the offer to the nation. In spite of the fact that they turned me down, I suspect that we asked the right question or made the right offer, but they may have made the wrong response. … When you look at Mars, you cannot help but realize that Mars is not going to be settled as a national enterprise. Indeed, that would be grossly unfair to mankind as a whole. Everybody will want to participate and I think it is up to us to provide the leadership.33
He found himself in a quandary. He had a master plan for America in space all laid out, but Richard Nixon, and now even some of his own supporters, would not buy into it. He had no doubt that there would be footsteps on the surface of the Red Planet by the end of the twentieth century. The only question for him was whose boot prints they were going to be.