Washington -- Former U.S. President Richard Nixon saw astronauts as modern-day heroes. He personally greeted the Apollo 11 astronauts on the USS Hornet after their triumphant return from landing on the Moon. But ultimately, it was Nixon who made the call to transition the U.S. space program from Apollo to the more somber shuttle era.

 

On Feb. 13, 1969, Nixon established a Space Task Group to study possible projects for NASA to take on following the end of the Apollo program.

 

Since former U.S. President John F. Kennedy's mandate to send a U.S. astronaut to the Moon by the end of the 1960s, NASA escaped the typical funding fight federal agencies endure, said space historian Roger Launius in his 1994 paper "NASA and the Decision to Build the Space Shuttle, 1969-1972." Instead the space agency's budget was determined by the amount of funding needed to meet its ultimate goal.

 

But as the agency closed in on landing astronauts on the Moon, the Nixon administration sought to find new objectives for NASA.

 

The president's goal was to make NASA economically stable, Launius said. Nixon appointed Vice President Spiro Agnew to head the Space Task Group, which met throughout the spring and summer of 1969 to determine the space agency's 1971 budget. Their report, submitted Sept. 15, 1969, proposed three sets of objectives for post-Apollo NASA projects:

 

§   The least ambitious plan, estimated between $4 billion and $5.7 billion annually, called for the creation of a reusable space shuttle, a space station in Earth orbit and a manned mission to Mars at a future, unspecified date, according to the NASA History Web site.

 

§   The middle-of-the-road plan called for a "program providing for evaluation of an unmanned Mars landing before setting a date for the manned mission," the Web site said.

 

§   The most costly suggestion — estimated at $8 billion to $10 billion annually — called for maintaining Apollo's momentum by creating a Moon base, sending humans to Mars by the mid-1980s and creating a 50-man space station in Earth orbit, the NASA History Web site said.

 

In the end, Nixon found even the least ambitious option to be too expensive.

 

Amidst turmoil throughout the country stemming from the Vietnam War protests, urban riots and interracial violence, the public also did not support a big NASA budget. A 1969 Harris Poll found that 64 percent of U.S. citizens polled thought NASA's then-current $4 billion annual budget was too much, Launius said.

 

Some in the science community were against a manned Mars mission as well. Several scientists at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science denounced a manned Mars mission as little more than a stunt and sought to focus NASA on more science-oriented pursuits, the NASA History Web site said.

 

In the end Nixon set the 1971 NASA budget at $3.3 billion, below any of the Space Task Group's options. The agency would not return to its 1969 budget level of $4 billion until 1978, according to the NASA History Web site.

 

"NASA had the will and the expertise to pursue a pathbreaking program, but it lacked the acumen to gain funding in a political arena where space was not an urgent priority," Launius said.

 

The space shuttle was envisioned as a low-cost, reusable vehicle, Launius said. The shuttle was to replace expendable launch vehicles in transporting payloads to and from Earth orbit, according to a paper titled "Launch Vehicles: An Economic Perspective" from the Washington-based Space Policy Institute.

 

Nixon approved the space shuttle in 1972 as the primary element to survive the Space Task Group's recommendations for a post-Apollo program.

 

"Struggling to create a viable, low-cost shuttle program eventually resulted in a decision to build a shuttle far different from the one NASA originally envisioned," Launius said.