Michaels was criticized for a lack of vision. NASA under his stewardship was a throwback to the Apollo-era organization under James Webb (1906 — ), in which all activities, however worthy, were valued solely in terms of their contribution to a single goal — in Michaels’s case, the eventual Mars landing. NASA appeared to suffer from a lack of direction during much of the 1970s, and when a clear mission did emerge, in the aftermath of the Apollo-NERVA disaster, NASA was left with no vision of its future beyond the Ares project, and with its facilities and systems dangerously weighted to serve Ares alone. Michaels’s successors will face a formidable challenge in keeping the large organization and workforce in place once the primary goal has been achieved.

However, history will probably look more kindly on Michaels’s achievements than do many of his contemporaries. In a time of dwindling budgets and growing hostility to the U.S. civilian space program, he followed in the footsteps of Webb by building and maintaining a political coalition behind the manned space program, which he saw as the primary goal of his Agency.

Without Michaels’s shrewd handling it is possible — as former President John Kennedy remarked this week on hearing of Michaels’s death — that the post-Apollo space program would have crumbled. It is worth remembering that Mr. Kennedy himself lobbied for Michaels’s appointment in 1971.

Whatever one’s view of this year’s man-to-Mars space spectacular, it is surely ironic that its principal architect has not lived to see it.

Mr. Michaels is survived by his wife, Elly; three daughters, Kathleen Lau of Wilmette, Ill., Ann Irving of Pal Desert, Calif, and Jane Devlin of Rockville, Md.; and eight grandchildren.

March 1985

COCOA BEACH, FLORIDA

There was one final press conference in Houston, just before they were brought out to the Cape. By then the members of the crew were in quarantine, and they had to come onto the stage wearing hospital masks, which they kept on until they were installed behind a plastic screen.

To York, exhausted, it was bizarre, unearthly, the questions and answers rendered meaningless by their endless repetition.

The Life issue of March 28 had a cover story called “Ready for Mars.” Inside there was the usual domestic stuff: Stone playing catch with his sons, Gershon at the wheel of his car, York — well, York in her den, wading through her correspondence, redirecting her mail, arranging for her goods to be taken into storage, smiling uncertainly at the camera. She’d generated her own clichй industry by now. The dedicated scientist. The single woman, coping alone. The bright visionary, focused on the goal.

She’d lost her critical faculties about the press coverage, actually. The whole thing was just a blizzard, whiting out around her. The Life piece could have been a lot worse. In fact the reporter had made the best he could, she supposed, of unpromising material.