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Let's go to Mars

Nixon says no to Mars

Von Braun had twelve astronauts leaving Earth orbit on 12 November 1981 aboard two nuclear ships. Seven months later Nixon put Mars behind a rigorous system of national priorities.

A 1969 painted NASA chart on black: two slim silver spacecraft docked end to end in one long diagonal, a strut-braced engine skirt at each outer end with an open bell nozzle on the near one, cutaway panels along the upper-left half showing stacked compartments and two cone-shaped modules back to back at the joint, and a red curved arrow turning about a dashed red line ruled across the hull, under the heading 'En route spacecraft configuration - artificial gravity mode'.
Marshall's 1969 drawing of the two nuclear-powered ships that were to leave Earth orbit in November 1981. · Image: NASA Marshall Space Flight Center

Eleven days after Apollo 11 splashed down, Wernher von Braun read a thirty-minute schedule to Vice President Spiro Agnew's Space Task Group. Two ships, each three NERVA nuclear stages side by side under a four-deck mission module, 800 tons apiece at departure, three-quarters of it hydrogen. Twelve astronauts in two crews of six. Leave Earth orbit 12 November 1981, enter Mars orbit 9 August 1982, three men down in a 47.5-tonne excursion module for thirty to sixty days, a Venus swingby home, Earth-orbit quarantine 14 August 1983. Paine put the cost at roughly $9 billion a year.

Nixon had set the group up by memorandum on 13 February 1969: Agnew in the chair, Paine as acting NASA administrator, budget director Robert Mayo an observer. Agnew, courted by Paine all summer, used the Apollo 11 launch to call for Americans on Mars before 2000.

On 29 July, before the pitch, Senator Clinton Anderson, NASA's most dependable ally, said this was no time to commit to a crewed Mars flight. Gallup that summer had Americans against a Mars mission 53 to 39. Mariners 6 and 7 flew past on 31 July and 5 August, sending back two hundred more pictures of craters.

The report went to Nixon on 15 September. Paine's body text made Mars the destination of every option: a maximum-rate landing in 1981, 1983 or 1986, Agnew's preference, and a fourth identical to the last but undated. White House staff bolted a conclusions section on the front: NASA could reach Mars inside fifteen years, but the recommendation was sometime before 2000.

On 13 November 1969 Mayo's office cut NASA's FY 1971 budget to $3.5 billion, a billion short of the request; Congress got $3.38 billion on 2 February 1970. The Saturn V line shut permanently and Apollo 20 was cancelled. Nixon's statement of 7 March never said no: the United States would eventually send people to Mars, but space had to take its place "within a rigorous system of national priorities".

He approved the Shuttle on 5 January 1972 and NERVA was terminated a year later. Von Braun's departure date arrived in November 1981 and nothing left Earth orbit; what flew that year was Columbia.