A Cold War mystery: Why did Jimmy Carter save the space shuttle?

We’d been chatting for the better part of two hours when Chris Kraft’s eyes suddenly brightened. “Hey,” he said, “Here’s a story I’ll bet you never heard.” Kraft, the man who had written flight rules for NASA at the dawn of US spaceflight and supervised the Apollo program, had invited me to his home south of Houston for one of our periodic talks about space policy and space history. As we sat in recliners upstairs, in a den overlooking the Bay Oaks Country Club, Kraft told me about a time the space shuttle almost got canceled.

It was the late 1970s, when Kraft directed the Johnson Space Center, the home of the space shuttle program. At the time, the winged vehicle had progressed deep into a development phase that started in 1971. Because the program had not received enough money to cover development costs, some aspects of the vehicle (such as its thermal protective tiles) were delayed into future budget cycles. In another budget trick, NASA committed $158 million in fiscal year 1979 funds for work done during the previous fiscal year.

This could not go on, and according to Kraft the situation boiled over during a 1978 meeting in a large conference floor on the 9th floor of Building 1, the Houston center’s headquarters. All the program managers and other center directors gathered there along with NASA’s top leadership. That meeting included Administrator Robert Frosch, a physicist President Carter had appointed a year earlier.

Kraft recalls laying bare the budget jeopardy faced by the shuttle. “We were totally incapable of meeting any sort of flight schedule,” he said. Further postponing the vehicle would only add to the problem because the vehicle’s high payroll costs would just be carried forward.

There were two possible solutions proposed, Kraft said. One was a large funding supplement to get development programs back on track. Absent that, senior leaders felt they would have to declare the shuttle a research vehicle, like the rocket-powered X-15, which had made 13 flights to an altitude as high as 50 miles in the 1960s. “We were going to have to turn it, really, into a nothing vehicle,” Kraft said. “We were going to have to give up on the shuttle being a delivery vehicle into orbit.”

Armed with these bleak options, Frosch returned to Washington. Some time later he would meet with Carter, not expecting a positive response, as the president had never been a great friend to the space program. But Carter, according to Kraft, had just returned from Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) in Vienna, and he had spoken with the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, about how the United States was going to be able to fly the shuttle over Moscow continuously to ensure they were compliant with the agreements.

So when Frosch went to the White House to meet with the president and said NASA didn’t have the money to finish the space shuttle, the administrator got a response he did not expect: “How much do you need?”

In doing so, Jimmy Carter saved the space shuttle, Kraft believes. Without supplementals for fiscal year 1979 and 1980, the shuttle would never have flown, at least not as the iconic vehicle that would eventually fly 135 missions and 355 individual fliers into space. It took some flights as high as 400 miles above the planet before retiring five years ago this week. “That was the first supplemental NASA had ever asked for,” Kraft said. “And we got that money from Jimmy Carter.”

As I walked out of Kraft’s house that afternoon in late spring, I recall wondering whether this could really be true. Could Jimmy Carter, of all people, be the savior of the shuttle? All because he had been bragging about the shuttle’s capabilities to the Soviets and, therefore, didn’t want to show weakness? This Cold War mystery was now nearly 40 years in the past, but most of the protagonists still lived. So I began to ask questions.

Carter's apathy toward space

At the root of my skepticism was this simple fact—Jimmy Carter was no great friend to the space program or, at least initially, the shuttle. Less than five months after he became president, on the date of June 9, 1977, Carter wrote the following in his White House Diary: “We continued our budget meetings. It’s obvious that the space shuttle is just a contrivance to keep NASA alive, and that no real need for the space shuttle was determined before the massive construction program was initiated.”

On NASA’s own 50th anniversary website, space historian John Logsdon described the Carter presidency in less than flattering terms. “Jimmy Carter was perhaps the least supportive of US human space efforts of any president in the last half-century,” Logsdon wrote.

Then there was Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale, who in 1972 had called the space shuttle a “senseless extravaganza.” A senator from Minnesota at the time, Mondale had vigorously opposed early funding measures to begin development of the shuttle. His views exemplified those who believed the United States had more pressing needs for its money than chasing the stars.

“I believe it would be unconscionable to embark on a project of such staggering cost when many of our citizens are malnourished, when our rivers and lakes are polluted, and when our cities and rural areas are dying,” Mondale argued during one debate over shuttle funding. “What are our values? What do we think is more important?”

Now these two men were responsible for establishing priorities for the government’s budget and supporting a shuttle that was already years behind schedule as it faced cost overruns of hundreds of millions of dollars. They were going to keep the program afloat?

The shuttle, canceled?

If Kraft is to be believed, cost overruns began really catching up to the shuttle program in 1978, necessitating the big meeting at Johnson Space Center. By then the Enterprise had already made its first free flight in the atmosphere, and the test vehicle was a public relations success. However, the programs to develop the space shuttle’s main engines and its thermal protective tiles remained far behind schedule. It does not seem beyond the realm of possibility that the program might be canceled altogether and that program managers might have worried about this.

John Logsdon, the eminent space historian who has written books about Nixon’s space policy and is working on one about Reagan, told Ars that as costs mounted, the White House Office of Management and Budget suggested to Carter that he might want to cancel the program in 1978 and 1979. This set off a series of White House meetings that culminated in an influential memo to Carter from Brigadier General Robert Rosenberg, of the National Security Council. Titled “Why Shuttle Is Needed,” the Rosenberg memo offered an effective counterpoint to the OMB concerns about cost, according to Logsdon. Written in November 1979, it helped lead Carter to a decision to fund the vehicle.

“Strong national support and prestige is focused on Shuttle as a means for maintaining space dominance as evidenced by broad user interest and recent space policy statements,” Rosenberg wrote. “Significant delay or abandonment of the Shuttle and manned space capabilities at this time would be viewed as a loss of national pride and direction. The notion that we are forced for short term economic reasons to abandon a major area of endeavor in which we have achieved world leadership at great cost is simply not credible.”

A key player in the shuttle program at this time, Robert Thompson, pushed back on the idea that the shuttle was ever at any real risk of being canceled. Thompson and Kraft are contemporaries. They were classmates at Virginia Tech University in the early 1940s, and later both were original members of the Space Task Group that put together Project Mercury. When Kraft managed flight operations during the Apollo Program, Thompson was in charge of capsule recovery. Ultimately Thompson became the first shuttle program manager in 1970, a post he headed until 1981. Today, Thompson lives about a mile away from Kraft, and his home overlooks the same golf course.

“I never worried an instant about Carter cutting the funding off,” he said in an interview at his dining room table. “You’d have to be an idiot to get up in front of people and say, ‘I’m now going to trash $5 billion even though we’re that close to the finish line, and I’m going to quit human spaceflight.’ Carter was kind of an oddball guy to be president, but he wasn’t stupid.”