Review: Going Beyondby Jeff Foust
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| Logsdon puts the blame on the deteriorating relationship between the space council and NASA on both organizations. NASA failed to grasp that the White House wanted alternative approaches to SEI, but the administration also failed with maneuvers that “poisoned” the relationship with Truly. |
John Logsdon, the elder statesman of space policy history, believes there is room for another. At the beginning of Going Beyond, a new NASA history Office monograph, he acknowledges those previous works but believes he can add to those accounts. That is in part because of access to documents from the Bush presidential library (from a fortuitously timed visit there in March 2020, just before the pandemic) about the White House’s deliberations about SEI. He also received a chapter of Truly’s unpublished autobiography about his time as NASA administrator that offered his perspective as a counterweight to Albrecht’s book.
As the subtitle of the book indicates, Logsdon’s focus is less on the how of SEI—the programs and systems proposed to return humans to the Moon and go on to Mars—than the clashes between the White House and NASA on how to run such a program and changes needed at NASA to do so.
SEI, at a high level, should have been a gift for NASA: for the first time since Apollo, a president was showing interest in human spaceflight beyond Earth orbit and was willing to commit political capital for it: “I am determined that we have a broad-visioned approach to space,” he stated in a hand-written note to a visitor a few months into his term, Logsdon noted. The problem was that the White House believed that approach required changes to a NASA that people like Albrecht and vice president Dan Quayle, chair of the National Space Council, had concluded had lost its way. Truly and others at NASA, on the other hand, thought that the agency did not need any major changes and interpreted the administration’s interest in space exploration as a green light for a traditional approach where money was no object.
Those misunderstandings and miscommunications would ultimately breed resentment, destroying the trust required if SEI was to have any chance of success. The White House, dissatisfied with NASA’s Apollo-like approach to SEI with its infamous 90-Day Study (“the biggest ‘F’ flunk you could ever get in government,” as Albrecht put it) had brought in Lowell Wood of Lawrence Livermore to brief the space council on his radical alternative. That took place at the same meeting where Truly discussed the 90-Day Study; Truly had not been informed in advance of Wood’s presentation. Truly, in his autobiography, said he was “livid” as the meeting wore on: “In more than 30 years in my Navy career, half of which was spent on duty at NASA, I had never been set up or blindsided like this.”
Logsdon puts the blame on the deteriorating relationship between the space council and NASA on both organizations. NASA failed to grasp that the White House wanted alternative approaches to SEI, but the administration also failed with maneuvers like the Wood presentation that, as Logsdon put it, “poisoned” the relationship with Truly. The White House had not helped itself by selecting Truly, a NASA traditionalist, as administrator in the first place, with Quayle not involved until relatively late in the process.
A smoother relationship between NASA and the White House might not have saved SEI, though. There was strong Congressional opposition at a time of concern about budget deficits. Also, as a blue-ribbon panel convened by the space council noted, “we need to develop a strong rationale for the program we are pursuing. That rationale does not yet exist.” (Logsdon served on that panel but, as he stated in a footnote, “he did not take a very active role in this discussion.” He added, though, that one highlight of the panel’s deliberations “was Vice President Quayle shutting off, within a few minutes of each other, what promised to be extended remarks by voluble group members Carl Sagan and Edward Teller.”)
SEI failed, but the organizational change that the White House sought for NASA did come from Truly’s successor, Dan Goldin, who led the agency for nearly a decade. Yet NASA is still struggling with efforts to return humans to the Moon and go on to Mars: the Vision for Space Exploration came and went, but left behind some programs like Orion and SLS that have become part of Artemis, although its timelines for returning to the Moon continue to slip. As a second Trump administration prepares to take office, there are questions about whether it will seek a radical shift towards Mars, moving away from plans backed in the first Trump administration.) If so, will we see at NASA the same organizational antibodies to change emerge as was the case 35 years ago, particularly if NASA and the White House are not coordinated?
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