Why did Jimmy Carter save the space shuttle

[LongTomH]

There are a lot of backstories to the development of America's only spaceplane (to date); one of the most interesting is: Why did Jimmy Carter, who was no great fan of man in space save the space shuttle program? The excellent Ars Technica blog has an article on this: 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.

The article goes into the various funding problems faced by the space shuttle program by the late 70s, during the Carter administration; the upshot is that Carter finally supported the program.

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.”

These few paragraphs vastly oversimplify the story; but, it does seem that without the need for the shuttle's use in verifying the Strategic Arms Limitation Treaty, it might very well have been canceled.

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.

If Walter Mondale had won the presidency in 1984, the shuttle program would likely have been canceled after the Challenger disaster and NASA's budget gutted.

There's much more to the story, I recommend the article: http://arstechnica.com/science/2016/07/a-cold-war-mystery-why-did-jimmy-carter-save-the-space-shuttle/

[Warpy]

1. NASA's budget wouldn't have been totally gutted

because the military depended upon all the infrastructure for many of its own programs.

However, Mondale would likely have canceled the shuttle. Maybe by now we'd have an improvement going up and returning, possibly building on U2 technology rather than requiring huge rocket boosters at low altitude. There were a lot of design problems with the old shuttle and it was in service for far too long with no real improvements simply because it worked most of the time.

What is in doubt is whether a lot of the pure research that has been so exciting lately would ever have been done without the shuttle. Hubble's eyesight problem would never have been corrected, for instance, and it would have been more difficult to get the ISS started.