On Nov 28, 4:28*pm, "Jorge R. Frank" wrote:
On 11/28/2011 09:37 AM, David Spain wrote:





Matt Wiser wrote:
Sorry, Bobbert, but your "ideas" won't get anywhere in Congress. Like
I said, they'd laugh you out of the hearing room, hold the door open
for you, and give you a kick in the ass on the way out. If you want to
blame someone for killing Saturn, as you imply, then throw darts at a
pic of Tricky Dick Nixon. He gave the order.

I call myth on that one.

That's not my understanding. The funding of the build-out pipeline of
Saturn Vs was capped in the 60's *before* Nixon was elected. Enough
vehicles were built to go up to an Apollo 20 mission IIRC and that was
all that was ever funded (Jorge?). The Nixon admin had nothing to do
with that. It's not even clear the Nixon admin had any say in whether to
stop at Apollo 17 and use the surplus hardware to do Skylab or if that
was an internal decision of NASA's.

Now it is possible that there may have been a bill introduced in
Congress to extend funding to build more Saturn Vs that the Nixon
administration could have desired to be quashed for budgetary reasons
(we're in the era of wage & price controls at this point in history).

Who can clarify?

The Google Groups archive should have a complete set of my old posts on
this issue. But to recap:

1) The Saturn V production line was capped at 15 rockets (enough for
Apollo 4, 6, and 8-20) in June 1968 during the LBJ administration. NASA
moved to terminate production contracts for the F-1, J-2, and H-1 in
August 1968.

2) NASA internally made the switch from wet-lab to dry-lab for Skylab in
July 1969, though at the time there was still some hope Nixon might
reverse the previous administration's decision and restart Saturn V
production. When that fell through, SA-513 was re-purposed for Skylab,
effectively canceling Apollo 20 in January 1970.

3) A Congressional budget rescission for FY71 in September 1970 resulted
in cancellation of two more Apollo missions. NASA chose to cancel 15 and
19 and renumber the remaining J-missions (16-18) to 15-17.- Hide quoted text -

- Show quoted text -

Thanks for the update. Then it's LBJ we should blame for shutting down
Saturn. You may now print out a pic of LBJ at leisure and throw
however many darts at the man as you see fit.