Plotting A New Course for NASA

On Nov 28, 7:37*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?

Dave

It was the Nixon Administration that killed the last three Apollos and
made the Skylab decision with the hardware existing at the time.