planning." That approach gave top priority to making the space shuttle operational and then utilizing it frequently while getting approval for a major new development project, the space station. [III-37]

Like the Carter administration before it, the Reagan White House carried out an early, comprehensive review of national space policy. The results of that review were incorporated in a classified national security decision directive issued July 4, 1982. [III-38] The directive provided "the broad framework and the basis for the commitments necessary for the conduct of U.S. space programs." It gave particular emphasis to the role of the space shuttle, which was to be "a major factor in the future evolution of United States space programs. The directive also transferred White House responsibility for reviewing space policy from the Office of Science and Technology Policy, where it had been vested during the Carter administration, to the National Security Council, and created a Senior Interagency Group (SIG) for Space, chaired by the president's assistant for national security, to oversee the Reagan-era space policy process.

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During the following six years, SIG (Space) was the focal point for a series of debates, policy statements, and directives on various aspects of U.S. space efforts. Issues that stimulated these debates included a desire to foster the commercial uses of space, the decision to begin a space station program, controversy over the pricing policy for the space shuttle, and actions required to recover from the January 1986 Challenger accident. In 1988, President Reagan approved a revised statement of national space policy that incorporated the results of these individual decisions and directives. [III-42] Reflecting a theme that had been present in U.S. space policy since the beginning, the directive noted that "a fundamental objective guiding United States space activities has been, and continues to be, space leadership.

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The Space Station Decision"

At his Senate confirmation hearing in June 1981, James Beggs was asked his view on what should be the next major U.S. undertaking in space. He replied that "it seems to me that the next step is a space station."*7 Between the second half of 1981 and the end of 1983, NASA carried out an intense, and ultimately successful, campaign to gain presidential approval to develop a large, permanently occupied space station as the "next logical step" in space development. Like the space shuttle before it, developing and operating a space station promised to influence the U.S. space program for years to come.

NASA spent most of 1982 laying the foundation for station approval by conducting internal and contractor studies, with a particular focus on identifying the missions that a station might perform. Beggs and Mark pursued a two-pronged strategy for gaining station approval. One path was to work with other government agencies and external constituencies to build a broad coalition in support of the station; the other was to convince President Ronald Reagan that it was in the U.S. interest to go ahead with the program.*

48

The forum for developing an interagency consensus on the station was the National Security Council's SIG (Space). At a March 30, 1983, meeting, SIG (Space) approved terms of reference for a study that would provide the basis for a presidential decision on whether to proceed with the program. To give added weight to the study, a national security

43. Mark, Space Station, p. 128.

44. National Security Decision Directive Number 42, "National Space Policy," July 4, 1982 (partially declassified June 14, 1990).

45. Office of the Press Secretary, "Fact Sheet: Presidential Directive on National Space Policy," February 11, 1988, NASA Historical Reference Collection.

46. For more details on the space station decision, see Howard E. McCurdy, The Space Station Decision: Incremental Politics and Technological Choice (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990); Mark, Space Station.

47. McCurdy, The Space Station Decision, p. 40.

48. See Mark, Space Station, chapter XIV, for a discussion of this strategy.

decision directive signed by the president and incorporating these terms of reference was drafted. After being briefed on the station program, Reagan approved the directive on April 11. [III-39] The directive identified five policy issues to be studied:

How will a manned Space Station contribute to the maintenance of U.S. space leadership and to the other goals contained in our National Space Policy?... How will a manned Space Station best fulfill national and international requirements versus other means of satisfying them?... What are the national security implications of a manned Space Station?... What are the foreign policy implications of a manned Space Station?...What is the overall economic and social impact of a manned Space Station?

These questions were to be answered with respect to four possible future scenarios:

- Space Shuttle and Unmanned Satellites

- Space Shuttle and Unmanned Platforms

- Space Shuttle and an Evolutionary/Incrementally Developed Space Station

- Space Shuttle and a Fully Functional Space Station

The directive called for study results to be available "not later than September 1983."*9 In the course of the next several months, NASA discovered that getting a positive recommendation on the station from SIG (Space) was not going to be possible. First of all, the effort got bogged down as the NASA-led team considered the multiple options of the study directive. The process of developing a shorter policy paper containing recommendations to which all SIG (Space) members could agree became stalemated in August; there was significant opposition from the national security members of the group to going ahead with the station. In particular, Secretary of Defense Caspar Weinberger argued against the station project. [III-41] Without SIG (Space) agreement, it seemed, there would be no recommendation to Ronald Reagan to approve the space station.

Over the next few months, however, NASA was able to find an alternative path to get the issue of whether or not to go ahead with the station before the president. It had been James Beggs' position all along that President Reagan would approve the station program, given the opportunity; this had been the second prong of the NASA strategy. NASA's allies in the White House succeeded in getting the station question on the agenda of a December 1, 1983, meeting of the Cabinet Council on Commerce and Trade, one of the organizations that the Reagan administration had created for policy development; the national security community did not have a controlling position among the council's membership.

The NASA presentation to the meeting, which was attended by the president, asked for a decision to proceed with the space station program. [III-40] Primary emphasis in the presentation was given to the station's contribution to U.S. leadership around the world, a theme that Beggs knew was close to Ronald Reagan's heart. The presentation also emphasized the commercial potential of station-based activities, and underlined the fact that the Soviet Union already had a small space station and was expected to develop a larger facility. In concluding the presentation, James Beggs told the president and others in the Cabinet Room that "the time to start a space station is now."50

President Reagan approved the station program in an Oval Office meeting a few days later. On January 25, 1984, in his annual State of the Union message, Reagan told Congress and the nations that

America has always been greatest when we dared to be great. We can reach for greatness again. We can follow our dreams to distant stars, living and working in space for peaceful, economic, and scientific

49. National Security Decision Directive 5-83, "Space Station," April 11, 1983, National Security Archive, Washington, DC.

50. "Revised Talking Points for the Space Station Presentation to the President and the Cabinet Council," November 30, 1983, with attached: "Presentation on Space Station," December 1, 1983, NASA Historical Reference Collection.

gain. Tonight I am directing NASA to develop a permanently manned space station and to do it within a decade.

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Looking Toward the Future

The space station was frequently justified by James Beggs and others in NASA as "the next logical step." When asked "step toward what" NASA most often pointed out the many missions that had been proposed for a permanently occupied orbiting laboratory. During the 1982-1983 debate over station approval, the agency resisted pressure from Presidential Science Adviser George A. Keyworth II to identify the station with the ambitious goal of preparing for human journeys to Mars. The memory of the negative response to the 1969 Space Task Group recommendation for Mars exploration was still strongly in the minds of many at NASA, and Beggs judged that the time was not propitious for linking station approval to such a visionary objective.

Pressure also came from Congress for NASA to articulate its long-term vision of the future in space. In 1984, Congress passed a bill requiring the president to name a National Commission on Space to develop a future space agenda for the United States. The White House in March 1985 chose Thomas Paine as chairman of the commission, who, since leaving NASA fifteen years earlier, had been a tireless spokesman for an expansive view of what should be done in space. The fourteen other commissioners were a diverse group, ranging from Apollo 11 astronaut Neil Armstrong and test pilot Chuck Yeager to the U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations, Jeanne Kirkpatrick.

The commission took most of a year to prepare its report; in addition to its own deliberations, the group solicited public input in hearings throughout the United States. The commission report, Pioneering the Space Frontier, was published in a lavishly illustrated, glossy format in May 1986; a summary videotape was also prepared.

The National Commission on Space recommended “a pioneering mission for 21stcentury America”—“to lead the exploration and development of the space frontier, advancing science, technology, and enterprise, and building institutions and systems that make accessible vast new resources and support human settlements beyond Earth orbit, from the highlands of the Moon to the plains of Mars."

The report also contained a “Declaration for Space" that included a rationale for exploring and settling the solar system and outlined a long-range space program for the United States. 52

The United States in 1986 was not in a particularly receptive mood for such bold proposals; the tragic Challenger accident in January 1986 had focused attention on the problems with the U.S. space program, not its prospects. But as the year ended, NASA once again began to focus on its long-range objectives. James Fletcher, who had returned for a second tour of duty as NASA administrator in the wake of the shuttle tragedy, asked former astronaut Sally K. Ride to chair a task force to develop options for NASA's future. The group's report, Leadership and America's Future in Space, was presented to Fletcher in August 1987.

The Ride report identified four "leadership initiatives" that NASA might choose to pursue, individually or in combination:

1. Mission to Planet Earth: a program that would use the perspective afforded from space to study and characterize our home planet on a global scale.

2. Exploration of the Solar System: a program to retain U.S. leadership in exploration of the outer solar system, and regain U.S. leadership in the exploration of comets, asteroids, and Mars.

51. Quoted in McCurdy, Space Station Decision, p. 190.

52. The Report of the National Commission on Space, Pioneering the Space Frontier (New York: Bantam Books, 1986), excerpts.

3. Outpost on the Moon: a program that would build on and extend the legacy of the Apollo program, returning Americans to the Moon to continue exploration, to establish a permanent scientific outpost, and to begin prospecting the Moon's resources.

4. Humans to Mars: a program to send astronauts on a series of round trips to land on the surface of Mars, leading to eventual establishment of a permanent base.

In its conclusion, the report referred to the central vision statement of the National Commission on Space, quoted above, and recommended that "the United States needs to define a course of action to make this vision a reality.'

Conclusion

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Many influences shaped U.S. space policy and the U.S. space program in the three decades between 1958 and 1988. Throughout, leadership in space has been a consistent policy objective, and human exploration of space a constant theme. As a response to the needs of the time, the United States sent twelve people to the surface of the Moon between 1969 and 1972, but this first instance of human exploration of another celestial body did not lead to a sustained program of human exploration. That still lay in the future in 1988; the final Reagan administration statement of space policy set as a long-range goal "to expand human presence and activity beyond Earth orbit into the solar system. "54 While much happened in the early years of the space program, much remains.

53. Dr. Sally K. Ride, Leadership and America's Future in Space: A Report to the Administrator (Washington, DC: National Aeronautics and Space Administration, August 1987), pp. 21, 58.

54. Office of the Press Secretary, "Fact Sheet: Presidential Directive on National Space Policy," February 11, 1988, NASA Historical Reference Collection.

Document III-1

Document title: Special Committee on Space Technology, “Recommendations to the NASA Regarding A National Civil Space Program," October 28, 1958.

Source: NASA Historical Reference Collection, History Office, NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C.

By the end of 1957 the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) was heavily involved in space-related research, which constituted forty to fifty percent of its total effort. Sensing that NACA might be the obvious choice for taking the lead in the American space effort after Sputnik, on January 12, 1958, General James Doolittle, chairman of NACA, created a Special Committee on Space Technology. While NACA Director Hugh Dryden addressed the institutional issues involved in transforming NACA into NASA, the Committee on Space Technology was charged with addressing specific areas of space technology deserving early attention. NASA was formally established on October 1, 1958, and the committee issued its final report at the end of that month. The following document reprints the recommendations to NASA on “A National Civil Space Program" offered by the Special Committee on Space Technology on October 28, 1958.

The major objectives of a civil space research program are scientific research in the physical and life sciences, advancement of space flight technology, development of manned space flight capability, and exploitation of space flight for human benefit. Inherent in the achievement of these objectives is the development and unification of new scientific concepts of unforeseeably broad import.

Space Research - Instruments mounted in space vehicles can observe and measure "geophysical" and environmental phenomena in the solar system, the results of cosmic processes in outer space, and atmospheric phenomena, as well as the influence of space environment on materials and living organisms. A vigorous, coordinated attack upon the problems of maintaining the performance capabilities of man in the space environment is prerequisite to sophisticated space exploration.

Development - Flight vehicles and simulators should be used for space research and also for developmental testing and evaluation aimed at improved space flight and observational capabilities. Major developmental recommendations include sustained support of a comprehensive instrumentation development program, establishment of versatile dynamic flight simulators, and provision of a coordinated series of vehicles for testing components and sub-systems.

Ground Facilities - Properly diversified space flight operations are impossible without adequate ground facilities. To this end serious study aimed toward providing an equatorial launching capability is recommended. A complete ground instrumentation system consisting of computing centers, communication network, and facilities for tracking and control of and communication (including telemetry) with space vehicles is required. At least part of the system must be capable of real time computation and communication. A competent satellite communications relay system would be most valuable in this regard, and it is recommended that NASA take the lead in determining the specifications of such a system. A coordinated national attack upon the problems of recovery is recommended. Flight Program - The first recovery vehicles will probably be ballistic, but the control and safety advantages of lifting re-entry vehicles warrant their development. [2] A million-pound-plus booster can be achieved about three years sooner by clustering engines than by developing a new single-barrel engine, but the cluster would not have the growth potential of the larger engine. Further growth potential requires the development of the single-barrel engine. Both developments are needed.