Meanwhile, throughout the Apollo period, NASA’s overall long-range planning was weak, leaving it ill prepared for 1969.

This was in fact a deliberate policy of James Webb, NASA Administrator from 1961 to 1968. Webb believed that Apollo’s success would give U.S. citizens great pride and encouragement, and that any evidence of commitment to an expensive, long-term Mars program would lose NASA the margin of strength needed to finish Apollo.

As early as 1966, NASA budgets began to slide.

On September 16, 1968, after arguing with Johnson about the latest cuts, Webb resigned. When the STG began its work NASA’s only firm funding commitments for manned spaceflight were for the Apollo lunar landings and a follow-up Apollo Applications Program.

President Nixon himself was not an instinctive opponent of spaceflight. But — as new NASA Administrator Thomas O. Paine learned as he flew with Nixon to Apollo 11’s splashdown — the incoming administration could not direct large amounts of money into space while the Vietnam War continued.

Given such strong signals, NASA’s political tactics during this key period, under Paine, showed deep naпvetй.

Although in its STG submission NASA formally called for such worthy goals as “commonality,” “reusability,” and “economy” — the program it actually envisaged was outward-looking and very expensive, including a space station, a manned Mars mission, a new generation of automated spacecraft, and new programs in advanced research and technology. These tactics were counterproductive. Even supporters of more modest programs, given a Hobson’s choice of a huge Mars “boondoggle” or nothing, backed away.

NASA also tried to talk up the benefits of state-managed R D, but this, too, was a mistake. There was no doubt that NASA was an astonishing success as a giant technocratic exercise in management science and project control. And only a fifth of Kennedy’s 1961 speech had been devoted to spaceflight: Kennedy had been promoting the space program as part of a greater technocratic solution to perceived threats and problems — eliminating poverty, resisting communist expansion, promoting development abroad.

But by 1969 it was clear that technocracy had failed in its greater objectives. Instead there was only the maturation of the power complex of the technocratic state. Nixon seemed to understand the antitechnocratic mood of his day, and also how technocracy was in opposition to America’s older Jeffersonian tradition of local politics and democratic responsiveness.

Meanwhile, during 1969, funding cuts were made in the NERVA nuclear rocket research program, which had been proceeding in Nevada since 1957. Although the Nevada test station would not be shut down until 1972, the 1969 cuts ended any hopes of flight testing nuclear rockets. Without NERVA, a component NASA believed was vital to a Mars expedition, the case for Mars was essentially already lost. (In the novel, NASA manages to fend off these cuts.)