After Apollo? Richard Nixon and the American Space Program by John M. Logsdon (review)

In 1970 John Logsdon published The Decision to Go to the Moon: Project Apollo and the National Interest. This book would become the standard text on the decision-making process within the Kennedy administration that sent humans to the Moon. Logsdon's new book, which can be viewed as a sequel to the first, takes on a question that has remained more elusive over the intervening years: What decisions were made within the Nixon White House that brought Apollo to an early end and set NASA's human spaceflight program on its diminished course?

Logsdon presents the history of what he terms the "Nixon Space Doctrine" in two "acts." The first act examines the evolution of Nixon's attitude toward NASA and space exploration, paying close attention to the ongoing negotiations between his administration and NASA administrators over what the agency's future should be.

The second act examines the decision to focus NASA's manned space-flight program on routinizing space travel through the Space Transportation System (STS, or the Space Shuttle) and activities in Earth orbit. Seven presidential administrations have come and gone since Nixon's resignation from office. Nonetheless, the decisions made in the Nixon White House have continued to shape NASA for the past four decades.

According to Logsdon, three major decisions were made by Nixon and his associates that reshaped NASA. First, they decided to stop treating NASA as a special, high-priority agency and to begin treating it as a normal government agency, subject to budget constraints reflecting its place among other national priorities. Second, they decided not to set another challenging space goal that would require a crash program like Apollo. Finally, they decided to keep manned spaceflight alive through the STS, but without linking the shuttle to any long-term plans for its use.

These decisions led to a space doctrine with two main elements. First, the space program would be one among many normal government activities, and space would be not a place of great leaps and triumphs, but "a normal and regular part of our national life" (Nixon space statement, quoted in Logsdon, page 279). Second, NASA would have to compete for priority and budget with other government agencies.

Space was thus decoupled from larger geopolitical goals. In short order, NASA saw its share of the federal budget drastically reduced. The infrastructure that had cost billions of public dollars to develop (namely the Saturn V launch system and its production facilities) was scrapped. The possibility of an expansive future in space, and the symbol that the United States could "do in space whatever was in its national interest" (p. 123), was abandoned.

NASA was unhappy with this space doctrine. Under the leadership of its third administrator, Thomas O. Paine, the space agency wished to maintain its "identity as an engineering and systems development organization, not just as an operator of existing space capabilities" (p. 56). NASA wanted to continue breaking new ground, and to offer the nation ever-greater technological triumphs. The STS program would provide the agency with opportunities to do this, but with limited resources and no physical frontiers to explore. This left NASA in the position of trying to do more with less, as its ambitions in space never diminished to match its budget constraints. Logsdon suggests that in order to remain competitive with other government agencies, it dared not become less ambitious.

Although the STS failed to fulfill many of the claims that were used to sell it (for example, it only flew 4.3 missions per year rather than the promised 40–60, and the cost and effort to service the shuttles between missions were much greater than expected), Logsdon concludes that the three-decades-long program "served the nation well as a focus for US space leadership and the resultant prestige and pride" (p. 292). It also opened up space to scientists and other "specialist" astronauts, rather than keeping...