There was an uncomfortable stirring in the audience, some nervous laughter.
Bert Seger got to his feet, quickly thanked Dana, and turned away from him.
Udet’s words were incredible to Dana. Such accusations should not be made, in such fora as these, or beyond. It is — uncivilized. Somehow, though, now that it had happened, there seemed a certain inevitability about it all. Of course, I have been rejected. But this isn’t about logic, or engineering, or science. It was because he’d gone outside the hierarchy, the formal channels. This really is about power. Infighting. It’s possible Udet is even sincere. Maybe he really does think I’ve cooked up these numbers, that I’m just infighting for Langley.
Dana gathered together his foils, clumsily, and got off the stage.
The lights went up, and the conference room was quiet. Bert Seger got to his feet and began stalking along the stage, eyeballing the delegates as if challenging them, his hands on his hips.
“I’ve heard a lot of good things today about the nuclear mode,” he said. “And I’ve heard nothing else today, frankly, that makes a hell of a lot of sense to me in comparison.” He glared at the audience. “Now, I have to say that I think we can do this. I think we do indeed have a ‘Kennedy option’ to present to the President. And I’d like to hear now what son of a bitch thinks nuclear isn’t the right thing to do.”
There was a little more to and fro. Wernher von Braun got to his feet to make a brief statement commending the nuclear option. Then one of the chemical option presenters from Houston got up, and graciously conceded defeat to the guys from Marshall.
Seger closed the meeting. “Gentlemen, I want to thank you here for all the work you’ve done. I think we’ve found a way we can work together and do this thing. I think we’ve worked out how we’re going to Mars.”
He started to clap, then; and the hall joined in, applauding themselves for their achievement.
All but Dana. At least he could resist that much.
The Germans had won again.
Seger might be right. Perhaps we’ve made a historic decision that will, indeed, take men to Mars within my lifetime. But it’s wrong. I know it’s wrong.
Anyhow, he thought, it’s still possible this huge mission will never be funded. Perhaps Nixon will choose to build the Shuttle. Or nothing at all.
Nothing at all.
The applause went on, until the delegates started to cheer themselves.
Future of NASA
Present tentative plans call for major reductions or changes in NASA by sharply reducing the balance of the manned space program and many remaining NASA programs.
I believe this would be a mistake.
1) The real reason for reductions in the NASA budget is that NASA is entirely in the 28 percent of the budget that is controllable. In short, we cut because it is cuttable, not because it is doing a bad job or an unnecessary one.
2) We are being driven, by the uncontrollable items, to spend more and more on programs that offer no real hope for the future: welfare, interest on national debt, Medicare, etc. Essentially they are programs not of our choice, designed to repair mistakes of the past.
3) There is real merit to the future of NASA and to its proposed programs. Skylab and NERVA particularly offer the opportunity, among other things, to secure substantial scientific fallout for the civilian economy at the same time that large numbers of valuable (and hard to employ elsewhere) scientists and technicians are kept at work on projects that increase our knowledge of space. It is very difficult to reassemble the NASA teams should it be decided later, after major stoppages, to restart some of the long-range programs.
4) In response to our pressure NASA has reduced its requested development budget for the next several fiscals by half.
5) Apollo 14 was very successful from all points of view. Most important is the fact that it gave the American people a much-needed lift in spirit (and the people of the world an equally needed look at American superiority). Announcement now that we were canceling or severely diminishing the US manned space program would have a very bad effect. It would be confirming in some respects a belief that I fear is gaining credence at home and abroad, that our best years are behind us, that we are turning inward, reducing our defense commitments, and voluntarily starting to give up our superpower status, and our desire to maintain world superiority.
America should be able to afford something besides increased welfare…
Handwritten addendum: I agree with Cap. RMN.
Source: Caspar W. Weinberger, Deputy Director of the Office of Management and Budget, Memorandum to the President, 27 August 1971. White House, Richard M. Nixon, President, 1968-1971 File, NASA Historical Reference Collection, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC.
Wednesday, December 1, 1971
Ben Priest swung through Glendale and then turned north on Linda Vista, heading past the Rose Bowl. His hired car was an antique Dodge, and its heating was malfunctioning; outside it was a cold December day, and York alternately baked and shivered.
“This seems a long way out of Pasadena,” she remarked.
He grinned. “Yeah. Well, they used to test rocket engines here. Everyone thought the place would be dangerous, so they built it way the hell out there, in the arroyo. And then they built a sprawling, expensive suburb all around it.”
York saw that office buildings filled the arroyo; some of them were drab boxes, but there was also an imposing tower of steel and glass.
There were cars parked for a quarter of a mile along the road leading to JPL, and the street outside the press center was nearly blocked by TV vans.
There was a guard at the JPL entrance; he waved them into a parking lot. It seemed to York that pretty much every space was taken.
They got inside quickly; the cold seemed to be deepening.
Priest guided her through corridors littered with computer cards and printouts. Close-up photographs of the Moon’s surface were casually framed and stuck on the walls. JPL seemed a strange hybrid; this might have been any office complex anywhere, York supposed, except that people were younger than the average — and not one of them wore a suit, or a tie — and there was a lot of hair about, bristling above yellow Smile buttons. Some of the women even wore hot pants. But at the same time the place didn’t have the ragged, laid-back feel of a college; there was too much urgency for that. There was a sense that things happened there.
She remarked on how full the parking lot had been.
Priest said, “You should have been here a week ago, when the first pictures began coming through from Mars. You couldn’t move for press guys, and VIPs, and politicos, and science-fiction writers — anybody and everybody who could scrounge a pass.” He laughed. “You should have seen their faces, when all we got back was a picture of the dust.”
It was odd to be with Priest again. A blast from the past. She hadn’t seen him for more than a year, and she’d been surprised when he’d come through on his old promise to take her there to see the results from Mars come in. He hadn’t changed, as far as she could see: slim, dedicated to his job, easygoing, intelligent.
Fun to be with. Comfortable. Married.
She felt vaguely restless.
She was basically drifting, doing some postdoc work here and there. She was looking for a focus, a topic, trying to figure out what she wanted to do with her life.
And she was still in her mess of a relationship with Mike Conlig, who was so immersed in his NERVA work he barely seemed aware she was there, when she got any time out of him at all. NERVA was the center of Mike’s life; a kind of monomaniacal obsessive seemed to be emerging from inside the gentler, more intellectual outer shell that had first attracted her.