Remind me again but what was Nixon’s attitude to Apollo – was he negative or merely neutral and taking his lead from the public as reflected by Congress?
One of the benefits of the current lockdown is managing to catch up on a lot of reading. After I finish the current one this has prompted me to start Logsdon’s After Apollo.
Reading Logsdon is definitely a must.
Until you get hold of that, if you want something shorter, you should read NASA's
The Space Shuttle Decision on their website.
The short version is that Nixon was...complicated. More complicated than many space advocates assume. He wasn't anti-space as such. In fact, as John Erlichman later wrote,
"I can remember Nixon coming off a phone conversation with the astronauts. And you know, they are up on the moon, and [Nixon was] as high as a kite. He got a big charge out of them. Then when the astronauts would come to the White House for dinner afterwards, he would always be enormously stimulated by contact with these folks. He liked heroes. He thought it was good for this country to have heroes."
That said, he was more sober and more calculating about it. The decision he made for the Shuttle could have been something else - in fact, a couple of our regulars had
a good timeline which make a very good case for that - but what wasn't so easy to change was that the political environment that made limitless funding for Apollo possible was now gone, and there was no obvious imperative (like there is in
For All Mankind) to spend massive political capital to restore that environment. A lot of the responsibility - blame, if you like - for what he did decide to has to go back to senior NASA leadership, especially Tom Paine, who badly misread not only Nixon but the mood in Congress, and then frantically pivoted onto an architecture they felt they had to oversell to close the deal. Perhaps if I was going to sum up:
1) Nixon liked manned/crewed space exploration, and wanted to see it continue.
2) Nixon wanted it done for considerably less money, so it would be sustainable.
3) Nixon wanted a crewed program that had his, rather than Kennedy's, name on it.
4) Nixon needed something new put in the pipeline anyway, since even if NASA followed through on everything Apollo still had planned, it would exhaust the remaining Apollo/Saturn hardware by the mid-70's.
5) Nixon had an additional, cruder reason for wanting crewed space to continue: a need to sustain at least some of the relevant chunks of the aerospace industry, especially in key congressional districts, in the leadup to the '72 election, especially given that military spending had been cut back.
6) The Space Shuttle, as sold to Nixon in 1972, fit the bill for (1) to (5).
I sometimes think too much is made, too, of the story that Nixon wanted to whack all of Apollo (save maybe Apollo-Soyuz) after Apollo 15 - Apollo 16 and 17, and Skylab - since it's not clear to me that he was ever seriously committed to that. When Caspar Weinberger sent him a memo outlining why this would be a bad idea, Nixon needed no real persuasion, and he readily supported Weinberger. (See page 32 of
this pdf here - note Nixon's handwriting on it.)
I'm not a Nixon fan, and I think the decision he made for the Shuttle, or at least the Shuttle we got, was the wrong decision. But the truth is, Nixon's outlook fit hand in glove with where the sentiment of most of the political class and most of the American public basically was. It's too easy to demonize Nixon for what happened. The truth is, there is a lot of blame to go around, and some of the problematic decisions made were only fully evident as such in hindsight.