The last few months had given Josephson, working as a close aide of Fred Michaels, a startling insight into the way major national decisions were made: at the highest level in the land, with at stake national prestige, tens of billions of dollars spread across many years, and hundreds of high-profile careers in politics, industry, the military. Someday he was going to write a book about all of it. Management in the Space Age, maybe.

The decision about America’s future in space had turned out to be extraordinarily painful.

It had been clear to Josephson from the beginning that Nixon wanted to spend as little as possible on space.

The fact was, Nixon — belying his image — had brought a pretty liberal domestic agenda to the White House; in the midst of a debilitating war, he wanted to free up money to pay for expanded social entitlement programs, and wage and price controls.

Space was one place that money could come from. But space was a tough lobby to fight.

So, soon after coming into office, Nixon had allowed Congress to reorganize the standing space committees out of existence, so that space was the purview of the Senate Commerce and House Science and Technology subcommittees. Losing its special interface to Congress, NASA was in danger of being emasculated, losing its heroic status, becoming just another spending department fighting for funds. To most people involved in the space program, even within NASA, such changes were all but invisible; but to an insider like Josephson — or Michaels — they were dramatic, a potent signifier of Nixon’s real determination to down-grade the profile of space.

But then the White House had come up against the aerospace industry.

Aerospace was ailing, as ever. In fact technological progress was making life even tougher. New systems were either not deployed at all or had short production runs: if it works, it’s obsolete Aerospace firms had to bet the farm every time they accepted a contract.

But obviously the government needed a healthy aerospace industry. So ways had to be found to feed the industry in slack times: to spread wealth, and to subsidize research. The civilian space program was perfect for that purpose. It always had been.

So, from the start of 1971, Fred Michaels had started to put it about that the aerospace industry might not be able to survive another year of diminished space work; he spoke particularly to congressmen from states like California, Texas, and Florida, where aerospace depression was an acute electoral issue. And he quietly encouraged the contractors contributing to the various program studies to talk up their estimates of the employment the various options would stimulate. It was all designed to keep the pressure on the White House. Nineteen seventy-two is an election year. We need a space program to keep the aerospace guys in work… But what’s that program going to he?