11

I ACCEPT YOUR RESIGNATION

What better way to have a pliant NASA than to have
a Democrat sitting there exposed to his people.
—Hans Mark

The rain was finally letting up. It had been pouring all morning, at times so hard that he could not see the thirty-eight-story-tall Saturn V rocket on Pad 34A three miles away. The clouds were still thick and low and the sky gloomy, but at least the countdown had now resumed. He turned to Pat Nixon and said there were no more planned holds. It would not be long now; the moon rocket should be on its way in less than ten minutes. The First Lady turned and told the president.

The low level of public interest in Apollo 12, America’s second manned moon landing mission, did not concern Paine too much. Even the fact that lightning struck the rocket twice in the first minute of flight as it pierced the heavy clouds of a south Florida thunderstorm on its way to the moon had barely made the news. The New York Times reported in a sidebar that the launch generated what could only be called “scant enthusiasm.” Network television broadcasts of the launch drew only a small, languid audience in the middle of the workday.¹

Just four months earlier, Eagle had landed on the Sea of Tranquility. The anticlimax of the next mission was perhaps predictable, even expected, given the intense national preoccupation with history’s first moon landing. But it was an unmistakable harbinger of the things to come. The American public quickly moved away from the diversion of the moon missions, back to its preoccupation with Vietnam, social justice, and civil rights. An irony was that, this time, there were no longer reports of demonstrations and protests of the kind that had surrounded the first landing. Marchers and antiwar protestors showed little interest in NASA’s second attempt to land men on the moon. The sense in the country was that the Moon Race was over. America should now relax and retract, not only in space but around the globe.

Tom Paine was not about to relax. The year 1969 was a critical one for the space agency. The primary goal of the nation’s first decade in space had been achieved with the Apollo 11 moon landing. Post-Apollo planning had already been well underway for over a year before Apollo 11 and 12 had even left the launch pad. Budget retrenchment was now accelerating throughout all branches of the federal government, as the new Republican White House sought to curb inflation through fiscal belt-tightening. Overseas, the cost of the Vietnam War continued to escalate with no end in sight. At home, the focus was on social priorities—poverty, a new war on pollution, and the state of the inner cities—not outer space.

Paine had recently announced plans for the agency to continue human missions to the moon through Apollo 20, as well as plans for several post-Apollo applications programs for the decade of the 1970s utilizing hardware developed for the moon landings. Proposals ranged from an Earth-orbiting laboratory like Skylab to a manned Venus flyby mission. These received a lukewarm reception on Capitol Hill. He now had to make some critical decisions. Having landed on the moon, NASA now faced major changes in program direction and staffing. What was most important to him was that these changes did not erode or undo the core competencies that the agency had built during the previous decade. Keeping intact the people of NASA, their knowledge, and their experience base were more important than the hardware that was being launched into space.

I think that Thomas Alva Edison would have been a wonderful addition to our space program. We have many “Edisonian” types scattered throughout the space program at the present time, and the kind of inventive genius that he represents we have in NASA. … Anybody who can watch Apollo 12 come down and land within a thousand yards of a preselected landing vehicle that we put on the Moon a couple of years ago [Surveyor 3] and not be impressed about what this says about the reliability of American guidance equipment and the accuracy with which we can put payloads where we say we will put them obviously does not understand things.²

But to attract and keep the best people, NASA had to have another new program to work on. By the end of 1969, Paine was not at all sure what that program was going to be.

He was finding that President Nixon’s approach to the space budget was mainly political, yet quite pragmatic—political regarding what the agency could do for him and his administration, and pragmatic in emphasizing fiscal responsibility and a balanced budget. The fiscal year 1970 budget was a very critical one for NASA. The agency needed enough funding in this first post-Apollo budget to get started on the right track for the 1970s. Paine was never able to get this point across to the White House, however. Nixon tended to treat space and defense together in his budgeting, and he had already decided that both would be cut severely in 1970.

Paine could already see that the agency was starting to lose the momentum it had gained from the success of the early Apollo missions. However, there was simply no national support for another major space program. With the war in Vietnam approaching a decade and the prospect of double-digit inflation looming, the mood of the country was one of impatience and uneasiness The political right was calling for more spending on defense even as the left called for increasing social spending. Nixon was at least candid with him about the budget for the space program. He viewed NASA as a means by which he could advance the popularity of his administration. While this had worked to perfection with Apollo 11, times were now different, the president told him.³

The nation’s lukewarm response to “men in space” after the first few Apollo flights was due in part to the absence of a viable public response by the Soviet Union. The USSR, which had always answered the US, was now suddenly very quiet. The trouble was that the Soviets had not done anything dramatic in space for a long time. Nixon believed that when they did, it would change the national mood and reinvigorate support for the American space program. The inconvenient truth was that a new Soviet spectacular—an internationally stunning space achievement of the Sputnik and Gagarin kind—was what was needed to get America moving in space again. Until then, space (and defense) was going to suffer.⁴

This stance from the White House came about because Richard Nixon saw other nations as partners rather than competitors. Early in 1970, he asked Paine whether NASA could go as far as to accommodate foreign astronauts on US space missions. Paine quickly ruled this out as impossible for the remaining Apollo flights to the moon. He did shrewdly propose to DuBridge and the White House that if the president were to approve a second Skylab orbital workshop for 1975 or 1976, there might be a chance that a foreigner could fly on it. He never heard back from Nixon on that. The president did not take the bait.⁵

Richard Nixon was particularly sensitive to any action that could be construed by his political adversaries as taking money away from social programs. Paine, exasperated by the dangerously low funding for his agency, told Nixon’s staff on several occasions that he hoped there might be less talk from the White House of the space program having to bear the brunt of cuts as compared to other federal programs in the next budget go-around. The White House had put him in this position, and it was one in which he had no room to maneuver. The White House and the Bureau of the Budget had already told him that it was in the agency’s best interest to take all of the cuts in fiscal year 1971 and not postpone them into the future. The message was clear. Nixon felt that given the prevailing mood of the country, he was simply not going to put forth a daring new challenge in space.⁶

Paine had no choice but to take all the cuts immediately after Apollo 11 and 12. Spreading them out over several years was no longer an option. It would have bled the agency even more.⁷ “The feeling I get … is that most of the senators, most of the representatives, have the feeling that they kind of like to vote for us, but they just don’t feel the public support is there at home for the program.”⁸ He believed that most Americans would in fact support the space program if only they knew what they were supporting. But convincing the public that NASA was valuable to them had become increasingly difficult. Now, an entire generation openly questioned the American establishment. They directed their vitriol and distrust squarely against the government. Embroiled in the conflict in Southeast Asia, America was just not very enthusiastic about anything aerospace- or defense-related.

National party politics also encumbered him. In the early years of the space program, the Democrats had carried NASA. James Webb was very successfully able, by galvanizing strong Democratic support with the help of some Republican support, to move the agency forward. That was before the reversal brought on by the social justice movement and Johnson’s Great Society fundamentally reshaped the nation. By the late 1960s, the social and political landscape of the country had flipped entirely. Now, he found that most of NASA’s support—not counting the home districts of the agency’s field centers—was coming from the Republicans, with help from moderate Democrats. Most ironic to him in the midst of this was the behavior of Ted Kennedy. The senior senator from Massachusetts was now NASA’s biggest detractor, while his late brother, John Kennedy, had been one of the program’s original champions.⁹

He was also in the position of having to deal mostly with Richard Nixon’s inner circle of advisers—Peter Flanigan, H. R. Haldeman, and John Ehrlichman—rather than Nixon himself. (As history has since unveiled, this situation was by no means unique to Tom Paine during Richard Nixon’s time in office.) Being a Democratic holdover from the previous administration did not help. He quickly found out the hard way how tightly Nixon’s staff operated and how closely they guarded the president. As the agency’s link to the president, he had to keep the lines of communication with the White House as open as possible, even if it meant that he had to deal with Nixon’s famously recalcitrant staff—the gatekeepers of the Oval Office—instead of directly with him. This hurt NASA a great deal. Paine could never be sure just what was actually reaching the president’s desk.¹⁰

With two moon landings now completed, Paine turned more of his attention to planning for the future. To assist him, he wanted a strong, large voice in Washington, someone who could immediately upgrade and sell NASA’s strategic plans to Congress and the Nixon White House. He needed help, and Wernher von Braun fit the bill. The fifty-seven-year-old rocket scientist had fulfilled his life’s work of building the rocket that sent the first human beings to the moon and was now seeking his next big challenge. He was unequaled among the NASA center directors, a larger-than-life figure even in an establishment now populated with world-renowned luminaries. Paine asked von Braun to join him in Washington. This he did, transferring from the Marshall Space Flight Center in Alabama on March 1, 1970.

“We needed to get a first-class, long-range vision up here so that, as we went down the road of the Space Shuttle and as we answered the question of what was man’s future on the moon, what we were going to do in space stations, when were we going to Mars, we would have a person of real, proven vision,” said Paine. Bringing his friend to Washington did that. In his new position, von Braun could now dedicate himself full-time to advising Paine on how best to position the entire agency so as to garner support for a Mars program; a manned Mars mission was both his and Tom Paine’s top priority. Moving von Braun to Washington also broke up the clout that “the Germans” had built in Huntsville dating back to 1950—even before the formation of NASA. Paine gave him a lot of power at NASA Headquarters. The Offices of Space Science and Applications, Advanced Research and Technology, and Manned Space Flight all had contributing members on von Braun’s management council.¹¹

But bringing von Braun to Washington also garnered its share of criticism. An advantage of having him in Washington was his name recognition. Paine welcomed it as a chance to bring a strong personality to Headquarters. By now, he was finding it increasingly difficult to keep programs moving forward after Apollo 11, and wanted to increase the clout of NASA Headquarters in Washington. But industry observers saw the move as an attempt by Paine to return NASA to what critics called the “old arsenal concept” that Webb had been so successful at—growing government bureaucracy to increase funding. This was not his intention. He simply wanted to make sure that NASA Headquarters had the upper hand over the field centers in post-Apollo planning.¹²

He also called Neil Armstrong in Houston. On July 1, 1970, Paine appointed him as the agency’s new deputy associate administrator for aeronautics. But Armstrong was brought in for a different reason. It removed him from active astronaut status. The first man to walk on the moon had wanted to fly again after Apollo 11 but realized that what had happened to John Glenn was happening to him. After Glenn became the first American to orbit Earth in 1962, NASA considered him “too valuable” to risk sending into space again—a veiled decision (purportedly from Kennedy) that he was not initially aware of.¹³

“I certainly had not said that I would not fly again. I was available,” Armstrong recalled without much delay when asked about it in 2011.¹⁴ Paine would stick to the official line, describing his position on the matter after the decision had been made:

I looked around the agency to see where Neil might have the most interesting job. It seemed to me that that whole area of the new development of flying machines was the thing that might grab him. It seemed a natural. He was ready to leave Houston. He had finished in Houston and Washington seemed to be a good place. We also considered the possibility of putting him out at Edwards [Flight Research Center] which I think he would have liked too, although I do not think Jan [Armstrong] would have liked it so well. It is pretty remote out there.¹⁵

Armstrong oversaw several aviation research projects, notably the seminal development of a fly-by-wire control system (digital computer control instead of analog and mechanical control) for general aviation which was later perfected and adapted for use on the space shuttle. But the man who had the blood of a test pilot in him was now stuck “flying a desk” in Washington. He recalled that, from his vantage point, Paine showed no particular interest in what he had to say about the direction of aeronautics for the space agency. The two, in fact, had no significant program management interaction with each other after he was reassigned.¹⁶ Just a year later, Armstrong resigned from NASA and returned home to teach aerospace engineering at the University of Cincinnati.

An important move involved longtime Associate Administrator George Mueller. On December 10, Mueller resigned and returned to private industry (the General Dynamics Corporation). He had overseen Project Gemini from its inception and was the one person directly responsible at the agency’s headquarters for all human spaceflight programs. Webb had given him full responsibility for human spaceflight when he handpicked him to build up the Office of Manned Space Flight in 1963. But the Apollo 1 fire had put a rift between the two. Their thorny accord became infamous inside the hallways of the agency. Webb then made it a point to bring someone in from the outside who had no prior involvement with the program to be his deputy and bypassed Mueller. When Paine arrived, he had made it a point to try and develop a good rapport with Mueller.

It was clear to him that he needed Mueller’s technical experience and well-known force of personality to keep Project Apollo moving.¹⁷ When Mueller left NASA, space insiders speculated that a rift must have come between him and Paine. The larger disagreement was likely between Mueller and von Braun—who had Paine’s full backing. Mueller believed that NASA’s next step should be the space shuttle; von Braun, like Paine, wanted to go on to Mars. Paine was not disappointed to see Mueller go, but publicly credited him, nonetheless, with “having the creative leadership that enabled NASA to achieve the national goal set by Kennedy.” In a way, Mueller prevailed. Within a year, with absolutely no sign that Nixon would ever sign off on a human mission to Mars, Paine had little choice but to endorse the plans for the space shuttle that Mueller had laid out.¹⁸

On April 11, 1970, Apollo 13 rose majestically from Cape Kennedy into the bright Florida sky. On board were Jim Lovell, Fred Haise, and Jack Swigert.¹⁹ Their destination was the steep mountainous highlands of Fra Mauro on the Western Hemisphere of the moon. From Firing Room 1, Tom Paine, Vice President Agnew, and West German Chancellor Willy Brandt watched the picture-perfect liftoff through the panoramic glass wall of the Launch Control Center. Afterward, he took the microphone and introduced Agnew. The vice president congratulated the roomful of controllers on successfully sending three more American astronauts to the moon.

None knew then what was awaiting them. Two days later, Apollo 13 would turn into the most perilous flight of the entire lunar program. Four decades later, it is still very well known. “Houston, we have a problem” (although this was not the actual quote) has since become part of the vernacular—an unintended staple in popular culture made famous by social media and Hollywood. But the life-and-death drama, coming just nine months after the epic success of Apollo 11 and five months after the less heralded but equally successful Apollo 12, was very real. It was a sobering reminder that human beings still had a long way to go to conquer the perils of space travel.

Paine had just arrived back at home. He had stayed late to monitor the flight with other managers at NASA Headquarters after returning from the Cape. Still listening to the Mission Control voice circuit coming over the two “squawk box” speakers that the agency had installed in his house, he heard Swigert utter the famous line. Lovell quickly repeated it. There was a serious problem onboard the spacecraft. Fifty-five hours into the mission, one of the two oxygen tanks in the service module had exploded (later determined to have been caused by electrical arcing of damaged wires inside the tank). The powerful blast also gravely damaged the other oxygen tank. Lovell, Haise, and Swigert were running out of oxygen. Since the service module fuel cells used oxygen and hydrogen to produce electricity and water, they soon had neither.

At 2 a.m. EST, some four hours later, Paine took off in NASA One (a twin-engine turboprop airplane for official NASA use) in a driving rainstorm from National Airport. The pilot flew him straight to Ellington Field in Houston. Arriving at MSC, he was briefed on the situation. Bob Gilruth gave him a detailed account of what had transpired over the last eight hours. William Bergen, president of North American Rockwell’s Space Division, and L. J. Evans, president of Grumman Aerospace Corporation, were also there. For the next four days, the team of contractors “froze” their support at three times the level that normally supported a mission. With the world, Congress, and the White House watching, the weight of the agency and the future of the space program would rest squarely on the performance of his people in the next seventy-two hours.²⁰

With a moon landing now out of the question, the mission turned to one of crew survival. The guidance and control software had to be reprogrammed; timelines for consumables (oxygen, water, electricity) had to be reworked in real time. The lunar module had to support by itself a crew of three for three and a half days (it was designed for two people for two days). Engineers and astronauts exercised the simulators at Houston, Cape Kennedy, Downey, California, and Bethpage, New York around the clock. They had to simulate the post-explosion configuration of the Apollo spacecraft to come up with the lowest-risk way to bring the crew home. With the CSM completely powered down, Lovell, Haise, and Swigert relied on the LM as their lifeboat to bring them home. Mission Control created contingency checklists “on the fly,” in real time. They were verified and reverified to make sure nothing had been overlooked.²¹

While the condition that occurred on Apollo 13 had been discussed in technical meetings, it was considered to be so remote that it was never simulated during training. There were a host of uncertainties. Houston could not even be sure that the heat shield covering the back of the command module had not been damaged in the explosion. After three days plus course correction burns using the lunar module descent stage engine, the spacecraft swung around the moon and made its way back to Earth and its fiery reentry into the atmosphere. As the spent service module was jettisoned, the crew saw that the explosion three days before had torn open an entire quadrant of the spacecraft. Tension remained high to the end. The communications blackout during reentry went half a minute longer than what the controllers had expected. But a pinpoint splashdown in the South Pacific eighty-eight hours after the explosion finally had Mission Control breathing again.

Nixon had called him at Mission Control in Houston and told him that he wanted to invite the family of the crew out to Hawaii upon their return. He also told Paine to go easy on the debriefings and to give the three plenty of time to rest and relax with their families. Paine had little desire to see the president turn the occasion into a public relations trip. The next day, the contingent boarded Air Force One at Ellington Field in Houston and flew to Hickam Air Force Base on Oahu to meet Lovell, Haise, and Swigert as they flew in from Pago Pago, American Samoa. With cameras flashing, Nixon presented each astronaut with the Presidential Medal of Freedom. He also declared April 19, 1970, a National Day of Prayer and Thanksgiving.

Paine was relieved. Nixon appeared to him to at least relish the moment. The president looked convincing as he expressed his strongest support yet for a vigorous, ongoing human spaceflight program. When Paine finally returned home to Washington a week after the accident, Barbara noticed that he had visibly lost more than a few pounds. (Tom Paine used to keep daily track of his weight on a graph. One can tell from the sharp dip on the graph when Apollo 13 happened.²²)

But he had to accept the reality that a moon mission had actually failed on his watch. The backlash was coming, and it was going to be directed at him. Before leaving Houston, he had directed George Low to put together an Investigation Review Board. He also ordered Dale D. Myers, who had taken over for George Mueller, to delay his return to Washington and remain in Houston and conduct his own independent study. What he specifically wanted from Myers was a recommendation regarding what to do about Apollo 14.

One week after splashdown, on Friday, April 24, he went before the Senate Committee on Aeronautics and Space Sciences. Apollo Program Director Rocco Petrone, Flight Director Glynn Lunney, Jim Lovell, and Jack Swigert followed him into the chamber. (The flight surgeon had requested that Fred Haise be excused from making the trip to Washington. He had developed a severe infection while on the mission.) Paine summarized the mission in two sentences: “The Apollo 13 mission was a failure. We did not succeed in America’s third lunar landing attempt.” Although the mission had failed, he endorsed before Congress the already emerging, increasingly widely held view that the recovery action following the explosion was a partial vindication. The fact that people had come through in the most stressing of situations turned out to be a “remarkable testimony” to the NASA team. He concluded his testimony by asking that Congress would at least not overlook that.²³

Following a two-month investigation, on June 15, 1970, the agency released the findings of the Apollo 13 Review Board. He had already previewed the report twice. Before sending it to Capitol Hill, he had called the director of each NASA field center, telling them not to jump to conclusions. He also issued an agency-wide directive for managers at every level to disseminate the report as widely as possible throughout the aerospace industry. He personally signed a copy for Keldysh and sent it to Moscow; perhaps the lessons learned might help prevent a similar occurrence in the Soviet space program. To the US Congress, he stressed that the lessons from Apollo 13 could be applied to disaster recovery in general. Complex engineering endeavors will always invite accidents. The most important long-term significance of Apollo 13, he testified, was in the lessons learned.²⁴

What troubled him about Apollo 13 was the systemic failure inside his agency that had allowed the accident to happen. Despite all the rigorous management checks and quality control procedures, a hazardous condition had made its way 200,000 miles into space. It had nearly killed three astronauts. Privately, he told Low that he did not blame any one person or group for the failed mission. It would have been pointless. He had earlier told Congress that Apollo 13 was an unwanted case study on the inherent vulnerability of a large government organization to stumble. By itself, the agency could not have put a man into space, let alone land on the moon. Unlike the precise mathematics that govern the orbit mechanics of space travel, no equation could dictate whether NASA would succeed or fail. Rather, NASA’s fate rested in the hands of a 300,000-person workforce. A breakdown in any phase of design, manufacturing, testing, or flight operations made the agency vulnerable.

Apollo 13 had exposed a weakness of NASA. The agency had to reevaluate the way it operated. He asked publicly whether it could reliably foresee, detect, and regroup to correct the deficiencies in this process. The Washington Star got it right with the headline “Paine Sees Setback to Program.”²⁵ Just how much of a setback, he had no idea. He was still talking to the White House, but the dialogue became one-sided overnight. The damage was done. The ill-fated flight of Apollo 13 was the last manned mission with him as the head of the country’s space program.

Tuesday, July 28, 1970, was much like any other hot, humid summer day in the nation’s capital. It was also the day Paine announced that he was resigning as the third administrator of NASA. The Friday before, just as people were leaving their offices for the weekend, he had gone down the hall and asked George Low and Homer Newell to stay. They went to his office. He closed the door, sat down, and told them that he would be leaving the agency to go back to private industry. Having given no forewarning, he asked that they keep the discussion confidential until it was announced.²⁶ Over the weekend, he wrote his letter of resignation:

Dear Mr. President:

Please accept my resignation as Administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration effective 15 September 1970. Now is an appropriate time for a change of command at NASA, and this coincides with my wish to return to private life.

During my direction Americans orbited the Moon and walked on its surface, achieving our boldest national goal on time and within budget. We have made the transition to the post-Apollo internationally oriented space program of the 1970s, and the Congress has approved the new direction and pace in the 1971 budget. We will shortly publish a prospectus for man’s conquest of space through the year 2000 which charts a long-range plan for future progress.

The world can well be proud of the NASA team’s incredible space achievements accomplished under four Presidents of the United States in twelve short years. Now the nation should press on boldly with the exploration of the universe as well as with the solution of man’s problems here on the blue planet.

It has been a privilege and honor to have led the nation’s space program through critical times under two presidents. You have shown me every courtesy and consideration, as have your staff and the Congress. I am most grateful to you for having given me this unique opportunity to serve my country during mankind’s first journey to another world.

Respectfully yours,

Tom Paine

Two days later, he called Willis Shapley, Julian Scheer, Clare Farley (special assistant to the administrator), and his secretary Betty Covert to his office. It was a Sunday. They suspected that something important was up. After he broke the news to them, he asked a stunned Scheer to review the letter and asked Covert to type it up. He also asked Covert to call Dwight L. Chapin, the deputy assistant to the president, requesting an appointment to meet with Nixon as soon as possible. Nixon, who was in San Clemente at the time, replied that Paine should fly out to California. The next day, he flew to Los Angeles with Julian Scheer. The following morning, they drove up the hill and met Nixon at the Western White House, where the president was vacationing. In a private meeting that Paine later described as short and cordial, the president accepted his resignation.²⁷ That afternoon, White House Press Secretary Ron Ziegler called a press conference and announced the news. Nixon accepted his resignation with the following letter:

Dear Tom:

I deeply regret that you will be leaving the government, but I accept your resignation as Administrator of NASA effective September 15, as you have requested.

You have earned the gratitude of every one of your fellow citizens many times over for the outstanding leadership you have given to the nation’s space programs. Your contribution to man’s knowledge of the Earth as well as the heavens has been major, and the course you have done so much to set will help guide our efforts for years to come. The respect and affection of the colleagues and associates you leave behind will accompany you wherever you go, and I hope you will always take pride in your splendid achievements in behalf of every American and, indeed, in behalf of all mankind.

You have earned a unique and permanent place of honor in the history of man’s exploration. It has been a privilege to know you, and to work with you, and to share with you the sense of excitement, adventure, and achievement that has marked this time of triumph in the nation’s space program.

With warm personal regards,

Sincerely,

Richard Nixon²⁸

Coming with no forewarning, his resignation shocked the agency. Even those closest to him had not expected it. Wernher von Braun professed that he was “totally surprised” when he heard the news. Directors of the NASA field centers expressed similar disbelief. “[He] bugged out,” recalls Hans Mark, at the time director of the Ames Research Center. “At least [he] should have told us why he was leaving. He did not; he just left.”²⁹ The immediate reaction among space insiders was that only a major disappointment of some sort could have made him walk away from leading the nation’s space program, which was still near its zenith. But there were undeniable signs. Several major cuts had indeed been made recently, cuts that took away much of the program’s momentum. The White House, while still publicly endorsing the rest of the ongoing Apollo missions to the moon, was privately quite worried about another high-profile accident. Paine’s influence had been fading fast.

Nixon blamed him for Apollo 13. The president could not have been less enthusiastic about the grand post-Apollo plans that Paine was pitching around Washington. The canceled NERVA nuclear rocket engine program and the much-reduced space shuttle program had been major blows to the space transportation capability that Tom Paine had been counting on. NASA’s proposal for a large-scale space station in Earth orbit also rang hollow. Nixon had already moved on from the tangent of space exploration, back to finding a way to extricate the US from involvement in Vietnam, assuage the civil rights demonstrators, and most importantly, win the upcoming presidential election.

He clearly left NASA before he was ready. Running NASA had become less rewarding in a time of draconian fiscal belt-tightening and disappointing public disinterest. To him, the space agency had taken more than its fair share of cutbacks. It had clearly responded to the request from the administration to cut its budget in a shift away from space to social issues. Nixon’s primary interest in NASA was the prestige it brought to his administration, and while Paine had no problems with that, the president’s commitment to a balanced and robust space program had to be called into question as reductions kept mounting despite his personal assurances to the contrary. Nixon had told Paine that America would continue to have a bold and balanced presence in space, yet did not point the country to any specific direction in space. Paine was thus left implementing a Nixon space policy with goals quite different from his own. There was more than a trace of irony to the whole situation. In the early days of the Apollo program he was never made to feel that the White House was looking over his shoulder or not supporting his decisions. But all that began to change as he tried to persuade the administration to start committing funds for the post-Apollo era. There was resistance on every level. The White House was simply no longer interested in what Tom Paine had to say.

He had come to NASA just before the social justice platform that defined the 1960s became an all-consuming fire that permanently changed the country. Although the administrator of NASA was, at least in theory, one of the least political jobs in Washington, he was a Democratic holdover who had served under President Johnson. After Nixon was elected, Paine had to transition the agency between two very different White Houses. He did this, and kept it on track for a moon landing. Having done that, he had fulfilled one of his own chief reasons for being at NASA.³⁰

Despite never saying so openly, he was clearly bedeviled by the budget process. The continual burden of having to justify and defend new propositions in an ascetic environment took its toll.³¹ As the Chicago Tribune wrote, he was “both disturbed and optimistic about America’s future in space.”³² Paine was an able administrator, but he was at his best as a visionary. He was able to discharge the responsibility that landed a man on the moon, but could not push through a strong American presence in space after Apollo.

The moon landing had been an unequivocal success. Following the return of Apollo 11, he turned his attention to a broad yet specific set of goals for the decade of the 1970s. Congress took a small step forward by accepting the fiscal year 1971 NASA budget. While it lacked a sustained, major flagship program, NASA essentially received all the money it was likely to receive under the austere fiscal circumstances. In fact, Congress had appropriated 99 and 98 percent, respectively, of his budget requests for 1969 and 1970. After taking office, Nixon was able to exercise much tighter control of the budget. He reorganized the Bureau of the Budget into the Office of Management and Budget (OMB). This did not help the agency. Paine’s frustration mounted as his priorities became impossible to reconcile with those of the White House. Strangling resistance by the OMB eventually left NASA with no flexibility for new plans or programs—a frustration that is still felt at the agency today.³³

After Apollo 13 failed to land on the moon, Paine’s voice with the White House waned quickly and considerably. “We were so damn suspicious of each other,” said Paine candidly two weeks after tendering his resignation. More at ease now with his decision, he continued. “We in NASA knew that we could not leak any attacks on the president to the press, and we knew that we were being watched very closely. We had to be in a ‘Caesar’s wife’ position; we darn well had to cooperate and we darn well had to demonstrate our loyalty to the president if we were going to be able to have the influence we needed to get the new program laid out and accepted by the White House.”³⁴

In retrospect, the most uncertain time for him in Washington was early on in the Apollo program. He had just arrived at NASA. The embers of the Apollo 1 fire were still warm. The spacecraft was being redesigned from the inside out, the lunar module was overweight, and the Saturn V rocket was progressing with known difficulties. Just two months later, Apollo 6, the second unmanned, all-up test flight of the entire Saturn V rocket stack, had experienced all kinds of problems. At that point, the setbacks could easily have derailed the program:

There were some awful tough days. It really raised questions whether we knew what we were doing. When you had that many different failures in that many different areas, the question of whether or not we ought to fly a man on Apollo 8 was very much left open. In fact, we refused to take a position at The Cape, and the reporters all took the position that “you nuts would not dare fly a man on the next [Saturn] V mission.” We said we cannot answer that, but would dig in and see what happened. So I remembered one of the first things as Deputy that I tackled, outside of getting to know the whole agency and trying to get the overall feel, was to dig into that Apollo 6 and satisfy myself as to whether or not these guys knew what they were doing. … You could not solve them all by always taking the conservative view. I think if we had not sent Apollo 8 around the moon, we could have had the Apollo 13 thing on the moon landing [Apollo 11].³⁵

Tuesday, September 15, 1970, was the last day he walked the halls of NASA Headquarters as the administrator. As on his first day on the job thirty-one months earlier, he found a stack of papers waiting for him on his desk. He went through them and signed off on a few actions and contracts. Picking up the phone, he spent the rest of the morning talking to managers and colleagues from around the country. A final signature before leaving the building approved the prime contractor down-selection of either Bendix or Boeing to build the “moon buggy.”³⁶ (Boeing would end up winning the competition over Bendix. The company would make four flight-ready lunar roving vehicles, three of which were driven by astronauts on the moon on Apollo 15, 16, and 17.)

Walking by Betty Covert, he asked if she had sent his farewell letter to all members of the House and the Senate. Over the weekend, he had also written letters of appreciation to General Antonio Perez-Marin of Spain, academician Mikhail Dmitrievich Millionshchikov of the Soviet Academy of Sciences, Henry Kissinger, and Under Secretary for Political Affairs U. Alexis Johnson. (It had been Johnson had who suggested the commemoration plaque and a goodwill recording be left on the surface of the moon on Apollo 11.) He then went over to Capitol Hill and, starting with Clinton Anderson, personally thanked each member of the Senate Committee on Aeronautical and Space Sciences and the House Committee on Science and Astronautics.

That evening, he and Barbara went to a dinner hosted by George and Mary Ruth Low at the Bolling Air Force Base Officers’ Club. Overlooking the banks of the Potomac River, he eloquently addressed a large gathering of professional and personal friends from around the country, thanking them for their hard work and dedication to the nation’s space program. It was not a poignant farewell. He admitted not knowing whether or not he was going to miss government life and Washington, but said he was sure that he could not have done anything better with his life during the previous two and a half years. The ideal time to quit a job never comes, he said, but this was the best time to do it. It was clear to the guests that evening that he did not want to leave NASA.³⁷ Finishing his speech, he looked up from the podium, smiled, and said, “Looking back at the things we have done, there is little to be said; perhaps wait and let history be the judge of decisions that have been made.”³⁸

Four more Apollo flights landed on the moon after he left NASA. He spoke through his writings, speeches, and interviews, saying that the epochal achievement of human beings journeying away from the planet was about more than just the breakthroughs in engineering and science. Those were impressive, for sure, and would be remembered long after the strange hardware in museums had awed the curious of the coming generations. But twentieth-century history would record that Americans, working together purposefully in a time of peace, had opened the age of human exploration of the solar system. Aware that it was probably too early to comprehend the full meaning of the achievement, he proposed that the same history would inevitably draw one of two conclusions from the moon landings. One would attribute to them the Columbus type of legacy, as a trail blazed on a new ocean that others then followed and pushed forward. The other would compare them to the spectacular but one-time conquest of Mount Everest.³⁹ Would the NASA astronaut of the twentieth century be remembered as Christopher Columbus or as Sir Edmund Hillary? Now that America showed that it could go to the moon, would it still aspire to? Paine never saw the moon as a celestial Mount Everest. For the Apollo program to realize its full legacy, it had to be the Columbus type of undertaking, he reflected. Earth’s moon was but a stepping-stone to the planets. Interplanetary travel was next; Apollo was just the beginning. The fact that America had met such a challenge in the past by no means portended that the country would choose to do so in the future.⁴⁰

He once pointed out to NASA historian Gene Emme that the United States landed on the moon in less than ten years under the same civil service regulations that ran the Post Office. Why had the country embraced Kennedy’s lunar challenge? It may have been that the United States believed that such a success would give the nation greater world recognition than the Soviet Union. It mostly did. He also believed that the United States, as a world superpower, needed to undertake great endeavors and give itself the great challenge to lead humanity outward in a new age of discovery. Marco Polo, Magellan, Balboa—all would have applauded President Kennedy’s bold challenge, he believed.⁴¹

In 1961, Kennedy was able to do the kind of convincing that usually took a great war or a national crisis to be effective. “In the sense that the space program mobilizes the energies of hundreds of thousands of skilled people and gives direction to their work,” said Paine, “it is a kind of warfare without loss of life, a kind of war effort that adds enormously to our wealth.”⁴² “In many ways, the most interesting aspect of the Apollo program is that you [had] 300,000 people who worked together for a number of years and worked together in a way that truth and honesty and technical rigor were absolutely essential to the success of the program. … But any place where we allowed any lack of rigor to enter in, as in the Apollo 13 … incident, we were going to get found out and the program would not succeed.”⁴³

To him, the nation’s goal in the 1960s to put a man on the moon by the end of the decade was the right objective at the right time. Had a bolder objective like a human Mars mission been tried, the cost and difficulty would have probably been too much. And had a less ambitious course been taken, the US would not have been in as strong a position. Beyond reaching that goal, the real, long-term payoff of the moon landings was that the United States learned how to develop the enabling technologies that could one day be used to move human beings farther into the solar system.⁴⁴

He gave three reasons as to why the Apollo program worked. First, people knew what NASA was trying to do, and it was widely accepted as a national commitment, even by the ordinary “man on the street.” Second, bold yet feasible goals were set and the end dates publicly announced. Finally, the progress toward these goals was dramatically visible to all. There was no way for the agency to back out unless it admitted failure. As a well-accepted, long-term national commitment, Project Apollo was thus able to command adequate resources and attract the best talent of that generation. Once it got started, a challenging deadline maintained the pace. This forced tough decisions. And most importantly, milestones were visible to an entire nation, if not the world, as a measure of progress.⁴⁵

In the autumn of 1970, he left behind that challenge, the awesome responsibility that went with it, the weight of the space program, with its triumphs and setbacks, and the burden of captaining that ship known as NASA. For now, they were in his rearview mirror. For a little while, at least, he could relax a bit and take a break from all of that.