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“It would have been great. A 'house in space', an observatory, a place where we could really learn about how to make use of space long-term. I guess it was too much too soon. Heck, we'd have lost the Apollo-X projects, but we could have had our space station years head of the Soviets, instead of having to wait until the '80s.”

Retired NASA Administrator Thomas Stafford, Interviewed in 1994

Everyone could remember where they were on July 20, 1969. Most of the Space Task Group spent the day in one more meeting; the still-new NASA Administrator Thomas Paine was pushing them hard to get their report ready, and he had Spiro Agnew egging him on from the sidelines, pushing him into grander and grander projects. It was generally assumed that NASA could ride the wave of popularity from the successful moon landing to a new series of ambitious projects for the 1970s – space stations, space shuttles, moon bases...all these dreams of the science-fiction writers seemed on the verge of becoming a reality. It was not to be. When it was finally completed and sent to the President a month later, it presented a series of grand schemes, boiled down to three options for future projects. The first – highlighted in the report as the most favoured option – called for an immediate doubling of the NASA budget with further increases to follow, and for a landing to take place on Mars in 1982, with a series of precursor efforts including the construction of a permanent space station, a space shuttle, and an expanded lunar program. The other two options, though more limited in scale, still called for Mars as the primary end goal, but with targets set further into the future.

Administrator Paine had drastically misread the situation. Nixon mistrusted the space program as Kennedy's legacy, but he was not opposed to it. In fact, he liked the notion of astronauts as 'America's heroes'; the State Department was finding them useful ambassadors during extended public relations visits. A realistic proposal – perhaps for a space station programme, or for a continued lunar programme, might have found favour had it been kept within reasonable budget restraints, but when he saw the proposal that was put across his desk, he immediately dismissed it, calling on Paine to come back with something more appropriate to the financial circumstances. Once again, Paine misread the situation; he went to Washington in a bid to plead the case for the Space Task Group, only to find that he was instead pleading for his job. He was unsuccessful in both, and announced his resignation quietly on September 30th, 1969, stating that he felt that 'with the landing on the moon, my work is complete'. George Low became the Acting Administrator, with a brief from the White House to, “come up with some realistic project, and none of this nonsense about Mars missions, space stations, or anything else!”

With this brief, NASA's future was shattered. Skylab was quietly shelved, the contract with McDonnell-Douglas cancelled; the hardware that was being assigned to it was shuffled back into the one program that seemed to have the continued support of the White House – putting men on the moon. His first act was to affirm that the next two Apollo flights would take place as scheduled, with Apollo 12 to launch in December and Apollo 13 in April. Everything else was now up in the air; he elected to convene a new 'Future Projects Working Group' to work out where NASA should go in the 1970s, requesting the loan of General Samuel Philips, formerly the director of the Lunar Landing Program but recently returned back to the Air Force to head the group. Astronauts Thomas Stafford and Frank Borman were named to the committee from the Astronaut Office, with other key members Wernher Von Braun from Marshall, William Pickering from JPL, and as secretary, George Abbey, who had won significant praise for his role in the review board following the 'Fire', the loss of Apollo 1. Acting Administrator Low had done his best to select the strongest possible board in terms of experience – whatever they came up with, it had to give him the best argument for him to use in negotiating for the very survival of the agency; there were murmurs coming out of Washington that perhaps three landings on the moon were sufficient.

It was immediately apparent to the new group that they were not going to receive any additional funding from Washington; indeed, a budget cut seemed likely. The President had ruled out a space station, which would otherwise have been their first thought; they did not even entertain the notion of a manned mission to Mars, a Venus flyby, or any manned planetary exploration, but did suggest a cost-effective expanded unmanned program. That left the one field where NASA was currently strong, where with the current levels of funding – and most importantly, with equipment that was already in the inventory, they could excel for at least the next few years. That left the Moon. Apollo 8 and Apollo 11 had both been seen as the highlights of 1968 and 1969. At this moment, the moon could definitely be sold to the American public. The Phillips Report, as submitted to the White House by Acting Administrator Low on November 1st, 1969 – it having been felt critical to submit a new report as quickly as possible – called for the approval of nine more Apollo missions, taking the programme up to Apollo 20, using existing hardware, between 1970-74. Additional scientific projects were to be undertaken using the Apollo/Saturn IB combination, with the potential for extended stays in orbit, though no-one used the word 'space station'. These missions could take place in 1971-75. For unmanned projects, probes to Mars, Venus and Mercury were indicated, as well as a potential 'Grand Tour' that could be launched in 1973 to the outer planets.

Controversially, the report called for a small one-off budget increase, in order to complete work on some hardware that was currently unfinished; this was put in terms of a medium-term economy, as NASA could then see significant budget decreases in future years without affecting its medium-term programs. When submitted to the President, this series of proposals proved to be far more in accord with his thinking, and he even acceded to the slight increase in funding, noting the longer-term benefits, and knowing that at least this year, getting some more money out of Congress would likely not be a problem. He signed off on the report by the middle of September, and George Low found himself confirmed as NASA Administrator when the President attended the launch of Apollo 12, another signal that he was now willing to support NASA's projects. Left unstated was the obvious problem; aside from some unmanned space probes, NASA now had no projects planned beyond 1976. Very quietly, Administrator Low encouraged some unofficial studies under the Apollo Applications Office to try and consider a successor program, in the event the political climate changed, though no-one held out much hope until 1972 at the earliest.
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