Facing further cuts, Paine scrambled to reprioritize. One Skylab and the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project (ASTP) were the sole survivors of the Apollo Applications Program. Apollo 20 was canceled to free up a Saturn V for Skylab. The remaining Apollo missions, 13 through 19, would be stretched out to place two missions after Skylab. There was no prospect of a post-Apollo lunar program. Viking was postponed to 1975.

In January 1970, Nixon somberly told Paine of a Harris poll reporting that 56 percent of Americans believed the costs of Apollo were too great. Nixon said he regretted cuts but could not make an expansive space program a priority. Paine, however, kept up pressure on the President for a greater commitment to NASA’s activities, and this led to hard feelings between them. White House officials concluded that: “We need a new Administrator who will turn down NASA’s empire-building fervor… someone who will work with us rather than against us, and… will shape the program to reflect credit on the President rather than embarrassment.”

In March 1970 Nixon formally endorsed the STG’s third and least expensive option. His language was cautious. “With the entire future and the entire universe before us… we should not try to do everything at once. Our approach to space must continue to be bold — but it must also be balanced.”

Nixon set out six specific objectives: the remaining Apollo missions, Skylab, greater international cooperation in space (essentially ASTP), reducing the cost of space operations (Space Shuttle studies), hastening space technology’s practical application, and unmanned planetary exploration. Nixon made mention of one “major but long range goal we should keep in mind… to eventually send men to explore the planet Mars” (my emphasis). Nixon distanced NASA organizationally from its Apollo past: “We must think of space activities as part of a continuing process… and not as a series of separate leaps, each one requiring a massive concentration of energy and will and accomplished on a crash timetable.”

Essentially, NASA had lost the argument for Mars, and Nixon had (provisionally) chosen the Space Shuttle. In this short but crucial statement, Nixon summarized virtually all of U.S. space policy through the 1970s.

In the Voyage time line, Nixon withdraws this statement before publication; after this crux point, history diverges decisively.

Even after Nixon’s response to the STG, the future of U.S. manned spaceflight was far from assured. To save funds for future programs, on September 2, 1970, Paine cut two more Apollo missions. Paine was out of place in the Nixon administration, and he resigned on September 15.