Voyage

Saturday, December 11, 1971 NASA Headquarters, Washington DC

After Fred Michaels hung up, Tim Josephson sat in his office, a glass of whiskey in his hand.

The decision was made.

He supposed he ought to be feeling triumph. Exultation. We’ve got what we wanted, by God. Another huge boondoggle, a program that ought to keep thousands of us NASA employees gainfully employed for a decade or more.

But the truth was, he felt too tired and beat-up to care. He was having a little trouble focusing his eyes. He’d been chained to his desk and phone all day, working in support of Fred Michaels’s machinations. And there were still a hundred and one things to be finished up. But, he told himself, there was nothing that wouldn’t keep until the next day.

So he took his shoes off and got his feet up on his desk, and he started dictating into a pocket tape recorder.

The last few months had given Josephson, working as a close aide of Fred Michaels’s, a startling insight into the way major national decisions were made: at the highest level in the land, with at stake national prestige, tens of billions of dollars spread across many years, and hundreds of high-profile careers in politics, industry, the military. Some day he was going to write a book about all this. Management in the Space Age, maybe.

The decision about America’s future in space had turned out to be extraordinarily painful.

It had been clear to Josephson from the beginning that Nixon wanted to spend as little as possible on space.

The fact was, Nixon – belying his image – had brought a pretty liberal domestic agenda to the White House; in the midst of a debilitating war, he wanted to free up money to pay for expanded social entitlement programs, and wage and price controls.

Space was one place that money could come from. But space was a tough lobby to fight.

So, soon after coming into office, Nixon had allowed Congress to reorganize the standing space committees out of existence, so that now space was the purview of the Senate Commerce and House Science and Technology subcommittees. Losing its special interface to Congress, NASA was in danger of being emasculated, losing its heroic status, becoming just another spending department fighting for funds.

To most people involved in the space program, even within NASA, such changes were all but invisible; but to an insider like Josephson – and Michaels – they were dramatic, a potent signifier of Nixon’s real determination to downgrade the profile of space.

But then the White House had come up against the aerospace industry.

Aerospace was ailing, as ever. In fact technological progress was making life even tougher. New systems were either not deployed at all or had short production runs: if it works, it’s obsolete. Aerospace firms had to bet the farm every time they accepted a contract.

But obviously the government needed a healthy aerospace industry. So ways had to be found to feed the industry in slack times: to spread wealth, and to subsidize research. The civilian space program was perfect for this purpose. It always had been.

So, from the start of 1971, Fred Michaels had started to put it about that the aerospace industry might not be able to survive another year of diminished space work; he spoke particularly to Congressmen from states like California, Texas and Florida, where aerospace depression was an acute electoral issue. And he quietly encouraged the contractors contributing to the various program studies to talk up their estimates of the employment the various options would stimulate. It was all designed to keep the pressure on the White House. 1972 is an election year. We need a space program to keep the aerospace guys in work … But what’s that program going to be?

Josephson was mildly shocked how quickly the scientific and exploratory aspects of spaceflight were discarded as factors in shaping the new program. Nobody with any clout cared about going to Mars, or anywhere else, for the science. And nobody argued – he was more surprised to observe – on the basis of the benefits of space spin-offs. After all, if you wanted the spin-offs, 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 states heavily dependent on aerospace – California, Texas, Florida – wouldn’t look good for Nixon. But we were damn lucky to find an ally in Cap Weinberger. Without Cap’s lobbying inside the Administration, Josephson knew, the manned program could have been lost.

The meeting had started haggling over details, the wording of a Presidential announcement. But the decision was made.

Mars.

Josephson, through his weariness, felt a deep satisfaction growing inside him. It was like the feeling of having enjoyed a fine meal, brandy and cigars.

It was actually unfortunate for Nixon, Josephson thought. Nixon’s thinking had been sensible, really; he’d wanted an affordable program with more than just one goal, a program which would lay a more solid foundation for the future. But it looked like he was going to end up with another footprints-and-flags extravaganza. And Jack Kennedy – or maybe Ted, drawing on the credit of one assassinated and one crippled brother, now making his own way to the White House – was going to get the credit.

Anyhow, thus, in a crucible of social, political, economic and technical forces, wielded by men like Michaels and Nixon and Kennedy, the decision had emerged. And, incremental and contingent though it might be, it was – against all the odds – a decision to send Americans to Mars.

A cleaning woman knocked and entered, towing a heavy vacuum cleaner. Josephson turned off his tape recorder. Millie Jacks grinned at Josephson; she was used to seeing him work as late as this.

‘I hear we’re going to Mars, Dr Josephson?’

‘Looks like it, Millie.’

‘Hoo!’ Millie chortled her disbelief. But then, she’d been shaking her head over everything NASA had done since 1966; Josephson sometimes wondered if she actually believed that men had been to the Moon, that it wasn’t all some kind of stunt.

Of course, what would be unbelievable – what would really make Millie shake her head – would be if we got a few black faces, even female ones, among the Mars crews.

Maybe it will change. Maybe it will be a different world, when we fly to Mars in 1982.

Wednesday, January 5, 1972

… I have decided today that the United States should proceed at once with the development of systems and technologies designed to take American astronauts on landing missions to Mars. This system will center on a new generation of rockets, exploiting nuclear power, which will revolutionize and routinize long-haul interplanetary flights.

The new year 1971 was a year of conclusion for America’s current series of manned flights to the Moon. Much was achieved in the three successful landing missions – in fact, the scientific results of the third mission have been shown to greatly outweigh the return from all earlier manned spaceflights, to Earth orbit or the Moon. But it also brought us to an important decision point – a point of assessing what our space horizons are as Apollo ends, and of determining where we go from here.