"We are at the peril point," declared NASA Administrator Thomas Paine. With that gloomy but accurate assessment of the space agency earlier this year, he announced one more in a series of cuts in staff and work schedules. Last week the 48-year-old former General Electric executive made an even more telling comment: he quit himself. Though Paine insists that his resignation was not an act of protest against continuing reductions in the space agency's budget, he obviously sees a better future back with G.E.
Only a year after its triumphant conquest of the moon, NASA can barely coax enough money out of Congress to continue existing programs. Its budget has been slashed to $3.3 billion for fiscal 1971 compared with peak spending of $5.2 billion in 1965. Total employment by NASA and its private contractors has dwindled from 420,000 in the heyday of the Apollo program to fewer than 145,000 today. Nor has NASA gotten significant support from the White House. "With the entire future and the entire universe before us," said President Nixon, outlining the Administration's cautious new approach to space, "we should not try to do everything at once."
Planetary Probes. That is not likely to happen. NASA has already scrubbed one of the seven remaining moon missions, and it may well cancel three more. Some of the Apollo's big Saturn 5 boosters will be used to establish small earth-orbiting space stations such as the three-man Sky lab scheduled for launching in 1972. But even these schemes—not to mention more ambitious space stations—could be set back by a balky Congress. Certainly, a decision to send Americans to Mars will not be made for years to come. The only phase of the space program that has escaped the budget cutters relatively unscathed has been the planetary probes, although these, too, will be delayed. Even William Pickering, director of Caltech's Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Pasadena, and one of the men in charge of these unmanned trips, admits: "If I were in the manned program, I know I would be worried."
Falling morale at NASA's major installations is readily apparent. In Florida's once booming Brevard County, site of Cape Kennedy, houses and stores are boarded up, new offices stand empty, and the most lucrative profession in the area seems to be that of resume writer for the thousands of space workers who have been looking for new jobs. At Houston's Manned Spacecraft Center, the five giant computers are working at a sharply reduced rate (operating cost: about $10,000 per hour), one of the two mission-control centers has been put in mothballs, and astronauts have been asked to cut back their pilot training flights in T-38 jets. Apollo 14 Commander Alan Shepard has publicly worried whether his ship will be properly prepared for next January's tentatively scheduled moon shot.
NASA insists that the economies will not bring new dangers. Kennedy Space Center Director Kurt Debus says that only one case of sloppy workmanship attributable to morale has come to his attention: having accidentally snapped a screw on a key spacecraft section, a workman glued the other half into place. He feared that he might be laid off if his company—a private contractor —had to go to the time and expense of drilling out the screw.