“At a stroke, it almost seemed as if NASA was back to square one. We'd been there before a few times in the Sixties, and it always seemed to bring out the best in us then, too.”
Gene Kranz, Director of NASA Mission Operations, Oral History Project interview, 2001
NASA was in turmoil. There had been a few warning signs that the Russians might be planning to attempt something like this in the run-up; the CIA had issued warnings that a big space effort was under way behind the scenes, and key observers had noted that some of their projects – specifically the precision-targeted Luna probes – might be used for something such as this. At the highest level, no-one had really believed that this would be attempted, certainly not after the cancellation of the N1, which had filtered through to Houston by 1971. What made matters worse was when Lunokhod 3 was launched in February, with an official announcement that an element of its mission was sample collection, “to be retrieved by a cosmonaut upon completion of its mission.” Evidently the Soviet space program planned a return to the moon. Furthermore, photographs of Baikonour taken from <censored> indicated that the N1 pads were being stripped down, and the name 'UR-700' was being mentioned – some sort of 'super-Proton'. Evidently the Soviet Union was back in the space business with a vengeance, just as the United States was getting out.
Now, everything changed. Stafford's working group was given a new mandate – plan NASA's comeback, do it quickly, and don't mess it up like the Space Task Group did. Stafford and his deputy, George Abbey, took as their starting point what the Soviets appeared to be doing – missions to the Moon, and space stations. Without the Saturn V, getting back to the Moon would be a difficult task, beyond NASA's exacting measures for safety; an evaluation of Leonov's month-long stay suggested that the risk was far higher than anything that would normally be found acceptable, and the returns too limited. As for the space station, simply moving ahead with Skylab was now out of the question – with no Saturn V, there was no way to launch it, and the 'wet workshop' which was the best that a Saturn IB could do had been ruled out as impractical back in 1969. The working group ended up with a trio of targets for NASA. A 'return to flight' by 1980, the first space station in orbit by 1982, and a return to the moon by 1988. The latter two were presented as options for President Ford; a cynic suggested that this at least gave him a chance of welcoming a few more astronauts home. He immediately signed off on the first option – NASA now had the go-ahead to build its 'house in space', albeit a decade later than originally planned. As for the lunar option, he authorised some studies, but elected to wait and see whether the Soviets persisted. Keeping America in the Space Age was one thing, but committing to an extended lunar exploration programme quite another.
Passing this report to the President was the last act for George Low as Administrator. No-one blamed him for what had happened at NASA; indeed, it was universally acknowledged that he did the best job that could possibly have been done given the tightened financial circumstances, but with a new series of programmes pending, he felt a new man should have the job to see it through. He'd been planning to retire anyway in 1976, the drawdown at the agency having worn him out, and told President Ford that he would be leaving the agency in March. He recommended his successor personally – a man who had shepherded Apollo to the Moon for six years, and was about to retire from the Air Force – General Samuel Phillips. Rocco Petrone, then the director of Marshall Space Centre, was named as Deputy Administrator, both with a mandate to get America back into space. George Low retired on schedule; a year later, NASA renamed its rocket testing facility the George Low Space Centre in his honour.
Administrator Phillips issued quick 60-day contracts to the major contractors, asking firstly for a new capsule, with an aggressive launch target of 1979; it was made clear that an Apollo Block III concept would be favourably listened to, but the requirement that the capsule had to be launched from a man-rated Titan III-E (much work along these lines having been accomplished for MOL; funding was rapidly granted to finish the job, and in the event the booster would be ready in plenty of time) proved extremely daunting. He also indicated that any feasible suggestions would be considered, and that the order would be substantial – certainly at least at the same scale as Apollo. The space station would come next; Apollo Applications was simply redesignated as Space Station Operations, and tasked with producing a design, again within 60 days – he knew full-well that they had unofficially been working on such projects for years, and that it was largely a question of pulling them together. Finally, he recognised that long-term, NASA was going to need a new heavy-lift booster; here he was on very familiar ground, being intimately aware of Air Force plans in this direction. He was willing to take a bit longer on this one, but was determined that there would be more than one customer for this new rocket.
Another direction was to Deke Slayton, now back at his desk at Flight Crew Operations – find some more astronauts. It was strongly hinted that this time, they could not be all white males; some sort of diversity was required, if only to encourage some new sources of support for the programme. Speed was another key factor; he wanted to move quickly, to take advantage of what might prove a brief groundswell of support and reinforce it – for this reason, rather than another recruitment campaign, Slayton opted to reach inside NASA itself. He had nine pilot-astronauts and eleven scientist-astronauts at this point, and with a new capsule program, pilots were going to be key to development, preferably from the earliest possible stage. His first call was to Al Crews; he'd signed up with the agency five years ago on the off chance that 'something might come up'. It had; Al Crews was the first one offered a position. He'd already been selected by the Air Force as an astronaut, and Slayton trusted that judgement.
For the rest of the group, he again reached inside NASA; more than a dozen test pilots had been working on lifting-body projects over the last four or five years. After reviewing their dossiers and having a word with their managers, he phoned eleven of them and offered them the chance to join the new intake of astronauts; eight of them said yes, though it took a little work to free some of them from their services. This had the happy side effect of selecting the first African-American astronaut, in the form of Frederick Gregory, who had started working on the lifting-body project mere months previously. Another, Bill Dana, was technically already a flown astronaut – he had flown the X-15 over fifty miles in 1967, but had never received his wings; this was hurriedly amended before the new group was announced publicly.
The word had gone around NASA fairly quickly that Slayton was picking astronauts, and people were beginning to send in their applications; he elected to select a few new scientist-astronauts to balance out the pool, and moreover to fill the mandate of selecting female astronauts. He ended up with two – Jeanne Crews (no relation), who had worked on trajectory analysis for Apollo, and incidentally was one of the first women to experience zero-gravity, and the photogenic Francis Northcutt, who had worked in Mission Control during the Apollo missions. Both of them had engineering qualifications; it seemed logical enough to Slayton that engineers would be needed for space station development. The other two had both narrowly failed selection in Group VI, but had both ended up working for NASA in any case – their persistence won them the golden ticket.
Group VII, the 'Lucky Thirteen', were introduced to the press on March 2nd, 1975, as the 'men and women to take America back to the Moon'. The group consisted of pilot-astronauts Al Crews, Bill Dana, Einar Enevoldson, Frederick Gregory, Peter Hoag, John Manke, Thomas McMutry, Bruce Peterson, Francis Scobee and scientist-astronauts Donald A. Beattie, Jeanne Crews, R. Thomas Giuli, Francis Northcutt. The scientist-astronauts went to undergo the usual flight training; all of them passed the course of instruction by January 1976. Morale raced up – suddenly NASA seemed to be on the move again.
(I think that's only the second time I've ever done that). I was wondering in some detail just how Carter would navigate the storms of the late 1970s; the answer is of course he doesn't.