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Politics, Apollo, Ed David and Richard Nixon

The webcast and transcript of our visit with Ed David, science advisor to Richard Nixon from 1970-1973, are now available online. Dr. David related a story that I had never heard before about how the scheduling of the Apollo missions were affected because of political considerations related to the 1972 presidential election. In short, President Nixon was worried that an accident might hurt his reelection prospects. Here is how Dr. David described the events:

"Another interesting situation I found myself involved with was the Apollo program. When I arrived on the White House scene, two Apollo missions had already been canceled. They were Apollo 18 and 19. There were originally plans, as I remember, for 20 and 21, but 21 never really got off the drawing board. The possible cancellation of Apollo 16 and 17 was in the wind, it was talked around, even though those two missions were slated to provide important scientific information about the moon, and they were basically the payoff of all of the efforts that went into the Apollo program. Most of the man-hours on the moon came during those two missions. In fact, most of the scientific measuring equipment the astronauts placed on the moon at that time are still there and many of them are still operational. So there's an awful lot of data coming in. Now, after examining this issue closely with the help of the President's Science Advisory Committee, which was called PSAC in those days, and specifically the help of Professor Tommy Gold of Cornell, who some of you may know, I wrote a memo to the president saying, in effect, that the nation had bought everything for these trips except the fuel, and that we ought to go ahead in light of the potential knowledge to be gained. That memo had some effect, and Apollo 16 and 17 proceeded, and Apollo 17 put the first scientist on the moon. And he's a good friend of mine now.

The interesting aspect of all this was the reason for considering canceling 16 and 17 in the first place. That reason was essentially political. It focused on the timing of those two launches vis-a-vis the 1972 presidential election. Apollo 17 was slated to launch about a month before the election day, early in November, 1972. The big worry by the political forces in the White House was that if there was an accident of Apollo 17, it would bear heavily on the election outcome negatively. I suggested that Apollo be postponed, however, until December after the election, a month after it, and that Apollo 16 was too early to have much influence on the outcome, we did win that day for the final two moon missions. This shows you how science hangs by a string in such situations. It illustrates that political thinking is very different from scientific thinking. Anyone coming to the science advisory post without considerable experience in politics is in for some rude shocks."

In our informal discussions, Dr. David described how NASA at first resisted the schedule change, claiming that they would have difficulty keeping their staff in peak form during the delay. Dr. David gave them a choice that they could not refuse. Launch in December ... or not at all. NASA quickly saw the merits of his perspective.

There is a great deal of interesting material from Ed David's visit on science and politics in the transcript here. Have a look.