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Science --
A Cold War mystery: Why did Jimmy Carter save the space shuttle?
Ars solves the mystery by going directly to a primary source--the
president himself.
Eric Berger - Jul 14, 2016 12:30 pm UTC
The first launch of the space shuttle finally came on April 12, 1981.
The first launch of the space shuttle finally came on April 12, 1981.
NASA
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We'd been chatting for the better part of two hours when Chris
Kraft's eyes suddenly brightened. "Hey," he said, "Here's a story
I'll bet you never heard." Kraft, the man who had written flight
rules for NASA at the dawn of US spaceflight and supervised the
Apollo program, had invited me to his home south of Houston for one
of our periodic talks about space policy and space history. As we sat
in recliners upstairs, in a den overlooking the Bay Oaks Country
Club, Kraft told me about a time the space shuttle almost got
canceled.
It was the late 1970s, when Kraft directed the Johnson Space Center,
the home of the space shuttle program. At the time, the winged
vehicle had progressed deep into a development phase that started in
1971. Because the program had not received enough money to cover
development costs, some aspects of the vehicle (such as its thermal
protective tiles) were delayed into future budget cycles. In another
budget trick, NASA committed $158 million in fiscal year 1979 funds
for work done during the previous fiscal year.
This could not go on, and according to Kraft the situation boiled
over during a 1978 meeting in a large conference floor on the 9th
floor of Building 1, the Houston center's headquarters. All the
program managers and other center directors gathered there along with
NASA's top leadership. That meeting included Administrator Robert
Frosch, a physicist President Carter had appointed a year earlier.
Kraft recalls laying bare the budget jeopardy faced by the shuttle.
"We were totally incapable of meeting any sort of flight schedule,"
he said. Further postponing the vehicle would only add to the problem
because the vehicle's high payroll costs would just be carried
forward.
There were two possible solutions proposed, Kraft said. One was a
large funding supplement to get development programs back on track.
Absent that, senior leaders felt they would have to declare the
shuttle a research vehicle, like the rocket-powered X-15, which had
made 13 flights to an altitude as high as 50 miles in the 1960s. "We
were going to have to turn it, really, into a nothing vehicle," Kraft
said. "We were going to have to give up on the shuttle being a
delivery vehicle into orbit."
On the eve of the 40th anniversary of the first human landing on the
Moon, Apollo 11 crew members, Buzz Aldrin, left, Michael
Collins, and Neil Armstrong and NASA Mission Control creator Chris
Kraft, right, during their visit to the National Air and Space Museum
on July 19, 2009.
Enlarge / On the eve of the 40th anniversary of the first human
landing on the Moon, Apollo 11 crew members, Buzz Aldrin, left,
Michael Collins, and Neil Armstrong and NASA Mission Control creator
Chris Kraft, right, during their visit to the National Air and Space
Museum on July 19, 2009.
NASA/Getty Images
Armed with these bleak options, Frosch returned to Washington. Some
time later he would meet with Carter, not expecting a positive
response, as the president had never been a great friend to the space
program. But Carter, according to Kraft, had just returned from
Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) in Vienna, and he had spoken
with the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, about how the United States
was going to be able to fly the shuttle over Moscow continuously to
ensure they were compliant with the agreements.
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So when Frosch went to the White House to meet with the president and
said NASA didn't have the money to finish the space shuttle, the
administrator got a response he did not expect: "How much do you
need?"
In doing so, Jimmy Carter saved the space shuttle, Kraft believes.
Without supplementals for fiscal year 1979 and 1980, the shuttle
would never have flown, at least not as the iconic vehicle that would
eventually fly 135 missions and 355 individual fliers into space. It
took some flights as high as 400 miles above the planet before
retiring five years ago this week. "That was the first supplemental
NASA had ever asked for," Kraft said. "And we got that money from
Jimmy Carter."
As I walked out of Kraft's house that afternoon in late spring, I
recall wondering whether this could really be true. Could Jimmy
Carter, of all people, be the savior of the shuttle? All because he
had been bragging about the shuttle's capabilities to the Soviets
and, therefore, didn't want to show weakness? This Cold War mystery
was now nearly 40 years in the past, but most of the protagonists
still lived. So I began to ask questions.
Carter's apathy toward space
At the root of my skepticism was this simple fact--Jimmy Carter was no
great friend to the space program or, at least initially, the
shuttle. Less than five months after he became president, on the date
of June 9, 1977, Carter wrote the following in his White House Diary:
"We continued our budget meetings. It's obvious that the space
shuttle is just a contrivance to keep NASA alive, and that no real
need for the space shuttle was determined before the massive
construction program was initiated."
On NASA's own 50th anniversary website, space historian John Logsdon
described the Carter presidency in less than flattering terms. "Jimmy
Carter was perhaps the least supportive of US human space efforts of
any president in the last half-century," Logsdon wrote.
*
In 1978 President Jimmy Carter visited Kennedy Space Center to
check on the space shuttle's progress and participate in an
awards ceremony. Here he is greeted by Kennedy Space Center
Director Lee Scherer.
NASA
*
Carter, with wife Rosalynn and daughter Amy, listens to Center
Director Lee Scherer explain a model of the crawler transporter
during their tour of the Kennedy Space Center.
NASA
*
Astronaut Neil Armstrong receives the first Congressional Space
Medal of Honor from President Jimmy Carter, assisted by Captain
Robert Peterson, in 1978.
NASA
*
President Jimmy Carter presents the Congressional Space Medal of
Honor to Neil Armstrong, Frank Borman, Charles Conrad, John
Glenn, Betty Grissom, and Alan Shepard in 1978.
NASA
*
Former President Jimmy Carter, in 1980, presents the National
Space Club's Goddard Memorial Trophy to NASA Administrator Dr
Robert A Frosch on behalf of the team that planned and executed
the Voyager mission to Jupiter and beyond.
NASA
*
Carter returned to Kennedy Space Center in 2002. Here Center
Director Roy D Bridges Jr welcomes him. Behind Carter, at right,
is Rosalynn Carter, Jimmy Carter's wife.
NASA
*
Rosalyn and Jimmy Carter talk with Bridges and the director of
external affairs and business development, JoAnn H Morgan, in
2002
NASA
*
In the Space Station Processing Facility, the Carters listen to
an explanation of the station's different modules.
NASA
*
In the Space Station Processing Facility, former President Carter
pauses for a photo with astronauts Scott Kelly (left) and Joseph
Tanner (right). Kelly would go on to become one of NASA's most
recognizable astronauts after his one-year mission in 2015.
NASA
*
Carter is shown packages of food that are used on the
International Space Station. Astronaut Scott Kelly (far left)
relates how the food is prepared and how it tastes.
NASA
*
Carter, Ted Turner, and Virgin Galactic's Sir Richard Branson
participate in an event during the Captain Planet Foundation's
benefit gala at Georgia Aquarium on December 7, 2012.
Ben Rose/Getty Images
Then there was Carter's vice president, Walter Mondale, who in 1972
had called the space shuttle a "senseless extravaganza." A senator
from Minnesota at the time, Mondale had vigorously opposed early
funding measures to begin development of the shuttle. His views
exemplified those who believed the United States had more pressing
needs for its money than chasing the stars.
"I believe it would be unconscionable to embark on a project of such
staggering cost when many of our citizens are malnourished, when our
rivers and lakes are polluted, and when our cities and rural areas
are dying," Mondale argued during one debate over shuttle funding.
"What are our values? What do we think is more important?"
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Now these two men were responsible for establishing priorities for
the government's budget and supporting a shuttle that was already
years behind schedule as it faced cost overruns of hundreds of
millions of dollars. They were going to keep the program afloat?
The shuttle, canceled?
If Kraft is to be believed, cost overruns began really catching up to
the shuttle program in 1978, necessitating the big meeting at Johnson
Space Center. By then the Enterprise had already made its first free
flight in the atmosphere, and the test vehicle was a public relations
success. However, the programs to develop the space shuttle's main
engines and its thermal protective tiles remained far behind
schedule. It does not seem beyond the realm of possibility that the
program might be canceled altogether and that program managers might
have worried about this.
John Logsdon, the eminent space historian who has written books about
Nixon's space policy and is working on one about Reagan, told
Ars that as costs mounted, the White House Office of Management and
Budget suggested to Carter that he might want to cancel the program
in 1978 and 1979. This set off a series of White House meetings that
culminated in an influential memo to Carter from Brigadier General
Robert Rosenberg, of the National Security Council. Titled "Why
Shuttle Is Needed," the Rosenberg memo offered an effective
counterpoint to the OMB concerns about cost, according to Logsdon.
Written in November 1979, it helped lead Carter to a decision to fund
the vehicle.
The crew of Star Trek gathers around space shuttle
Enterprise in 1977.
Enlarge / The crew of Star Trek gathers around space shuttle
Enterprise in 1977.
NASA
"Strong national support and prestige is focused on Shuttle as a
means for maintaining space dominance as evidenced by broad user
interest and recent space policy statements," Rosenberg wrote.
"Significant delay or abandonment of the Shuttle and manned space
capabilities at this time would be viewed as a loss of national pride
and direction. The notion that we are forced for short term economic
reasons to abandon a major area of endeavor in which we have achieved
world leadership at great cost is simply not credible."
A key player in the shuttle program at this time, Robert Thompson,
pushed back on the idea that the shuttle was ever at any real risk of
being canceled. Thompson and Kraft are contemporaries. They were
classmates at Virginia Tech University in the early 1940s, and later
both were original members of the Space Task Group that put together
Project Mercury. When Kraft managed flight operations during the
Apollo Program, Thompson was in charge of capsule recovery.
Ultimately Thompson became the first shuttle program manager in 1970,
a post he headed until 1981. Today, Thompson lives about a mile away
from Kraft, and his home overlooks the same golf course.
"I never worried an instant about Carter cutting the funding off," he
said in an interview at his dining room table. "You'd have to be an
idiot to get up in front of people and say, 'I'm now going to trash
$5 billion even though we're that close to the finish line, and I'm
going to quit human spaceflight.' Carter was kind of an oddball guy
to be president, but he wasn't stupid."
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Eric Berger Eric Berger is the senior space editor at Ars Technica,
covering everything from astronomy to private space to NASA, and
author of the book Liftoff, about the rise of SpaceX. A certified
meteorologist, Eric lives in Houston. Email
eric.berger@arstechnica.com // Twitter @SciGuySpace
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