Josephson was mildly shocked at how quickly the scientific and exploratory aspects of spaceflight were discarded as factors in shaping the new program. Nobody with any clout cared about going to Mars, or anywhere else, for the science. And nobody argued — he was more surprised to observe — on the basis of the benefits of space spin-offs. After all, if you wanted the spin-offs, why go into space at all? Why not turn the R D money and NASA’s fabled management skills directly to other, more worthy, programs?

Those were hard questions to answer. So Michaels, bluntly, avoided them.

In public, Michaels played up space as an adventure — something a nation like the U.S. ought to be able to afford, damn it. Astronauts from the heroic days, including Joe Muldoon, were wheeled out to serve as living reminders of good moments gone by. After Michaels’s skillful PR hoopla, Mars came to seem a little more acceptable. There was a snowball effect, and some support for the option started to appear on the Hill.

And, slowly, the opinion polls showed public opposition to a Mars option dropping.

But NASA’s budget was still far too high. In July, members of Congress had moved twice to delete manned spaceflight altogether from the FY1972 budget.

It was a dangerous moment in history, and the hard bargaining continued.

What can we drop?

At one point Josephson had believed Nixon was coming close to approving the Space Shuttle system — just that one item, out of all the options his own task group had presented. At least the goal of the Shuttle was to do with reducing costs, and the Shuttle would actually have been the favored option of the aerospace lobby because of all the new development it would have entailed.

But the Shuttle program had quickly become a mess. It was obvious, Josephson thought, that the final, low-cost Shuttle design was a bastardized compromise, put together by committee to satisfy conflicting interests. And Michaels wasn’t above drafting his predecessor, Paine — a great lover of the Mars option whom Michaels had replaced in September — to point out the Shuttle’s strong military flavor. It was no accident that the low, hundred-mile orbits which were all the Space Shuttle was capable of, and its wide-ranging flyback capabilities, were ideally suited to Air Force missions.

The Space Shuttle would be cute technology, with nowhere to go except low-Earth-orbit reconnaissance missions. In an era in which detente was becoming the fashion, the military taint of the Shuttle was unpalatable. And besides, Kennedy and others never ceased to remind the public, there was nothing heroic about it.

So Josephson had watched, not unhappily, as the Shuttle quietly faded from Nixon’s thinking. The next generation of launch vehicles for manned flight, instead, would probably be a series of upgraded Saturns.