European Participation in the Post-Apollo Program, 1972: Disentangling the Alliance—The Victory of Clean Technological Interfaces

Abstract

On January 5, 1972, President Nixon announced that the United States should proceed at once to develop “an entirely new type of space transportation system designed to transform the space frontier of the 1970s’s into familiar territory,” readily accessible to humans in the decades to come. The space shuttle would “revolutionize transportation into outer space.” It would “take the astronomical costs out of astronautics.” It promised to become “the workhorse of our whole space effort, taking the place of all present launch vehicles except the very smallest and the very largest” (the Scout and the Titan-III rockets) soon after it became operational at the end of the 1970s. The economic benefits of reusability, which promised to “bring operating costs down as low as one-tenth of those for present launch vehicles,” would allow the shuttle to transport humans safely, routinely, and relatively cheaply. The shuttle would take America “out from our present beach-head in the sky to achieve a real working presence in space.” It would also secure the “pre-eminence of America and American industry in the aerospace field” by engaging the talents of thousands of highly skilled workers and hundreds of industrial contractors who would ensure that the United States maintained its leadership in “man’s epic voyage into space.”¹