http://seattletimes.com/html/pacificnw/2019783643_pacificpanders09.html?cmpid=2628I was unaware that Major General Anders has been living on Orcas Island in the San Juans for the past 20 years. He has some interesting things to say about the space program. I found especially interesting this description of how NASA went with the large Space Shuttle approach:
In 1969, he accepted President Nixon's appointment to serve as executive secretary of the National Aeronautics and Space Council, charged with determining America's post-Apollo role.
Anders went along with the consensus that the space program should be "brought back down to Earth" to focus on weather, communications and military satellites. The question was whether to go whole hog on a large shuttle or build a smaller craft to test the waters and judge NASA's claim that a shuttle would slash the cost of space delivery tenfold.
Anders, still mulling both approaches, vividly recalls a call from H.R. "Bob" Haldeman, Nixon's chief of staff, bluntly asking which option would provide more aerospace jobs in California. When he gave the obvious answer — the big shuttle — that was it. Click, decision made.
The shuttle program was launched, the jobs were secured and NASA embarked on what Anders calls a four-decade-long detour. The shuttle was a spectacular vehicle, with an equally spectacular price tag: It wound up increasing the cost of spaceflight tenfold. "That is a 100-fold error," Anders says, with clear disgust.I have read over the years about how the surest means to get Congressional budgetary support for big projects is to make sure that the project creates jobs in all 50 states, or at least the states with big Congressional delegations. There is a reason why so much aerospace, space and defense projects have a heavy presence in California and Texas.
