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RICHARD NIXON GUTS THE MANNED SPACE PROGRAM
By Jim Werbaneth
History may judge this as his greatest mistake.
When it comes to presidential mistakes, Richard Nixon made some of the biggest. After all, he was the only president forced to resign in disgrace. The Watergate scandal was a third-rate burglary compounded by a first-rate failure of a cover-up and fraught with mistakes, starting with the formation of the “Plumbers” unit that carried out the break-in.
Yet Watergate was not Nixon’s only major mistake. As the scandal was playing out on American televisions, he attempted to assert his power through a process called impoundment; that is, he refused to spend funds allocated by Congress to certain projects. In this sense, it was a kind of takeover of the budget process—after the fact. Impoundment was not a new power, as it dated back to Thomas Jefferson’s refusal to pay for new gunboats that he judged to be unnecessary for the common defense. But Nixon’s use of it proved costly, both to important scientific ventures and to the presidency itself.
The American space program had to overcome an early lead by the Soviet Union to beat the Russians to the moon. In 1957, the Soviets put the first satellites into orbit, beating the hapless American Project Vanguard to this crucial milestone. Adding to the humiliation were jokes about the astronauts being little better than “Spam in a can.” Yet in July 1969, it was Americans who were making that one small step for a man, while the Soviet space program remained in earth orbit.
There is no doubt that soon after Apollo 11, the American program had hit its own doldrums, with public support and even interest fading fast. John F. Kennedy had challenged America to go to the moon, saying that “we do these things not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” By contrast, Nixon took out his pen and cut the space budget. Rather than lead America toward new goals in space, he basically killed what was left of Apollo and dimmed America’s chances of ever returning to the moon.
Several additional missions to the moon were planned but never got off the ground. Some, such as the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project, were retasked as earth orbital missions, for political reasons. Others were canceled and their parts were cannibalized for use in lower-cost experiments like Skylab. Thank the budget-minded Richard Nixon, who thought he could reap political capital by denying humanity its destiny in the stars and denying certain companies of jobs.
One has to consider what might have happened had Richard Nixon fought for the space program, as JFK had done a decade before. Apollo and Saturn technology could have been developed further, into a new generation of spacecraft capable of extended missions on the moon; as it was, two later missions used a new model of the Lunar Excursion Module (LEM), capable of supporting astronauts for extended stays on the lunar surface. Second, new generations of post-Apollo and Saturn launch vehicles could have been developed for manned ventures reaching even farther, even to Mars. Thus Nixon’s tightfisted stance toward space programs forestalled manned exploration of the planets, perhaps permanently.
What programs did survive were of a lesser nature. Skylab was a promising part of the Saturn booster program, building an orbital space station around the third stage of the Saturn V rocket. Due to the failed deployment of a solar energy array, it had to be jury-rigged into functionality by its first crew. Thus the execution did not live up to its concept. Some smaller Saturn IBs were retained for launching astronauts aboard Apollo command and service modules to Skylab, and the last carried three Americans on the Apollo-Soyuz mission of 1975. While this first joint American-Russian flight was of significant political value, it was of limited scientific value.
What really kept astronauts from going beyond earth orbit was the Space Shuttle, the most significant program to survive Nixon’s budgetary agenda. The technology was impressive when it first flew in 1981, and this spacecraft was not only huge, but reusable—a first. Further, it was the primary launch vehicle for the International Space Station, another successful project. However, the shuttle proved more expensive and less efficient to operate than projected, and the loss of the Challenger and Columbia, with their crews, was devastating to NASA.
In effect, the American manned spaceflight program was put on a low-earth-orbit leash. Then, when the shuttle stopped flying in 2011, the United States lost its ability to put astronauts into space. Now NASA relies on Russian equipment to carry its people to the International Space Station. As tensions mount because of Vladimir Putin’s adventures in the Crimea and eastern Ukraine, there is the possibility that the escalation of a new Cold War will ground American astronauts altogether.
As an embattled and increasingly unpopular president, Richard Nixon lost the power of impoundment, which was never to be regained by his successors. In 1974, Congress passed the Impoundment Control Act, stripping the president of the right to exercise this power unilaterally. As evidence of just how embattled Nixon was at the time, he signed it, albeit reluctantly. Because of the loss of impoundment, presidents also lost some of the leverage once employed to act against excessive federal spending.
There was one positive result of Nixon’s mistake in impounding funds, and that was the creation of the Congressional Budget Office in 1974, through the same law that ended impoundment. Besides stripping the chief executive of the power of impoundment, Congress created its own agency for budgetary study. Unlike the White House’s Office of Management and Budget, the CBO is truly bipartisan, and offers analysis without advocacy.
Despite the achievements of NASA in the era of the Space Shuttle, and the political benefits of the CBO, Nixon’s undermining of the American manned space program was an enormous mistake. The road not taken leads to improved booster and spacecraft technologies, taking Americans back to the moon, and almost certainly beyond. It is also one that leaves the president with a tool against real overspending and budgetary irresponsibility. Thus, while we might remember Richard Milhous Nixon chiefly for the grand mistakes of Watergate, they were not the only major miscues of his presidency. The effects of his gutting of the space program still linger forty years later.