COUNTDOWN TO DISASTER : Challenger’s Last Flight : 3. ORIGINS : ‘Man’s Epic Voyage . . . the U.S. Shall Lead’

The first Wednesday of 1972 dawned uncommonly cold in Southern California. At San Clemente, a chill wind came up over the cliff from the Pacific, sweeping across Richard M. Nixon’s putting greens and stirring the shrubs and rose bushes around the Western White House. At mid-morning, three men from Washington, who had come outside without coats, hurried along the walkways threading through the cluster of one-story buildings to the President’s office.

One carried a white plastic model of America’s future in space. It looked neither like an ordinary flying machine nor a space vehicle. It was an awkward assembly, designed to shed two-thirds of its structure during launch and put something that looked approximately like a delta-winged airplane in orbit.

This chilly morning marked a new day for the American space program.

Already, as Nixon lieutenant John D. Ehrlichman escorted NASA Administrator James Fletcher and Deputy Administrator George Low into Nixon’s blue-carpeted office, the basic decision on the outlines of the nation’s new space venture already had been made. It was a compromise shaped by the confluence of scientific, political and economic forces.

But now the venture needed formal presidential blessing and the two officials of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration had come to receive it. The meeting lasted barely a half hour.

Copies of a presidential statement already were stacked in the lower-level ballroom of the nearby San Clemente Inn, waiting for Fletcher and Low to brief reporters.

The President would not personally announce the go-ahead for the shuttle program--he had another meeting with Henry A. Kissinger to review the situation in Vietnam: American troops were being steadily withdrawn from the south while U.S. bombers pounded targets in the north.

If Vietnam was a painful wound on the national conscience, the space program was the opposite, a source of pride, a shining example of the nation’s technological talent.

Thirty months earlier, America had kept John F. Kennedy’s promise and landed on the moon before the end of the ‘60s. Apollo spacecraft had been back again and again, but as 1972 dawned, only two more lunar missions were planned.

For Nixon, the decision of what to do next had presented something of a dilemma. The space program still bore a heavy Kennedy mark and Nixon wished to establish his own. Flushed with the success of the Apollo program, the space agency had proposed a commitment for a manned expedition to Mars.

But with the war, Nixon had too many budget problems to take on anything as ambitious as that, and besides it would seem an echo of Kennedy’s dramatic challenge to land men on the moon.

The space shuttle was a compromise, a utilitarian instrument that Congress would buy, even in hard times. It had the promise of making space operations more or less routine.

White House ghostwriters searched for the right words to announce it. They settled on a sentence from Oliver Wendell Holmes: “We must sail sometimes with the wind and sometimes against it, but we must sail, and not drift, nor lie at anchor.”

“So with man’s epic voyage into space,” the presidential statement said, “a voyage the United States of America has led and still shall lead.”

“I have decided,” Nixon’s statement said, “that the United States should proceed at once with the development of an entirely new type of space transportation system.

“A space vehicle that can shuttle repeatedly from Earth to orbit and back,” the statement added, “. . . will revolutionize transportation into near space by routinizing it. It will take the astronomical costs out of astronautics.”

And, the presidential statement said, it “will make the ride safer and less demanding for the passengers, so that men and women with work to do in space can ‘commute’ aloft. . . .”

In the ballroom at the San Clemente Inn, as the NASA officials expanded on the President’s remarks with a scattering of scientific and technical details, they pointed toward the plastic model they had shown Nixon a few hours earlier. But, as space historians later noted, the model displayed that day in San Clemente was of a soon-to-be discarded shuttle design. The mix-up was a little-noticed symbol of the flux the program faced at the beginning.

One former White House official recalled last week that the decision nearly 15 years ago “took into account several factors--scientific, economic and political. It was a compromise among them.”

A Duke University space historian, Alex Roland, described the “war of wills” that raged prior to the decision and said the result was “a shuttle that no one wanted--except perhaps the Air Force.” Writing in last November’s Discovery magazine, Roland added:

“Congress, OMB (Office of Management and Budget), the Air Force and NASA had all pulled in different directions: Congress toward cost recovery, OMB toward low development costs, the Air Force toward operational capabilities, and NASA toward a future of manned spaceflight.

“Instead of a horse, NASA got a camel--better than no transportation at all and indeed well suited for certain jobs, but hardly the steed it would have chosen.”

The shuttle decision was great news for the aerospace industry, mired at the time in one of the worst downturns in its history. The Apollo program had crested. Commercial aircraft orders were drying up. Defense orders were dwindling as the Vietnam War wound down. Aerospace industry employment had dropped from 1.5 million workers in 1968 to fewer than 1 million in 1972.

It also was the dawn of an election year, and incumbent politicians abhor economic recessions. Nixon’s reelection announcement, in fact, already had been drafted in the form of a letter to his New Hampshire supporters. It would go into the mail two days after Nixon noted that the space shuttle program would mean income for “thousands of highly skilled workers and hundreds of contractors.”

California, a state critical in presidential politics, stood to benefit more than any other from the space shuttle program. Indeed, even before NASA was sure what such a craft would look like, four big companies with major facilities in the state--Rockwell International and McDonnell Douglas in the Los Angeles area, General Dynamics in San Diego and Lockheed in Sunnyvale--were asked in 1969 to begin designing a space shuttle.

While space scientists and NASA officials talked of building on the success of the Apollo program with moon bases and interplanetary excursions, the four companies in the shuttle design competition faced basic questions: Should the craft have straight or delta-shaped wings? Should the booster rockets be recoverable or expendable? Should the payload bay be big enough to handle large objects like satellites destined for high orbit or be limited to smaller cargoes?

The nation’s space program, for all its successes, had not been without its problems and tragedies. Astronauts were known to grumble among themselves about malfunctioning equipment and procedural foul-ups. In December of 1966, a NASA official acknowledged that there had been “something like 20,000” failures of various kinds in tests of the Apollo cabins and engine sections. And in January of 1967, astronauts Virgil I. (Gus) Grissom, Edward H. White II and Roger B. Chaffee died when fire charred their capsule during a launch test.

Although the glitches and tragedies had been overcome and men had landed on the moon, it was clear that for the new shuttle venture, major advances were needed in the rocket engines, thermal protection systems, hypersonic aerodynamics and computerized flight controls.

It was nine years from that morning in 1972 when Nixon made the space shuttle the nation’s No. 1 space project until the vehicle made its first journey in space, more than the time that elapsed between Kennedy’s Apollo challenge and Neil A. Armstrong’s first footprints on the moon.

In the interim, astronauts spent weeks in a rudimentary space station and flew to an orbital rendezvous with a Soviet Soyuz spacecraft. But the American manned space program found itself in a long hiatus.

Then the space shuttle recaptured the public imagination as firmly as the first orbital adventures and the historic journeys to the moon.