How President Nixon Saved/Wrecked the American Space Program

MarkWhittington writes John Callahan posted an accountof a talk given by space historian John Logsdon on the Planetary Society blog in which he described how President Richard Nixon changed space policy. The talk covered the subject of an upcoming book, After Apollo: Richard Nixon and the American Space Program. Logsdon argued that Nixon had a far more lasting effect on NASA and the American space program than did President Kennedy, most famous for starting the Apollo project that landed men on the moon.

Nixon came to office just in time to preside over the Apollo 11 lunar mission. At that time, the space program was a national priority due to the Kennedy goal of landing a man on the moon by the end of the 1960s. However by the time Neil Armstrong made that first footstep, public support for large-scale space projects had diminished. Nixon, therefore, made a number of policy decisions that redound to this very day.

Comments

Re:He did some decent things as president.

[PopeRatzo]

Nixon was a "complicated" man, with a "complicated" presidency. I personally think the guy did a lot of rotten shit, although through the course of time, I have come to view him more with pity rather than contempt. He was a deeply unhappy and insecure man with (it seems to me) few, if any, real friends.

You know what's funny is that the two guys who immediately followed him, Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter, were probably the only two presidents going back to Eisenhower who were actually pretty decent human beings. Moral, honest and pretty authentic. It's no wonder they got eaten alive. Every president and vice president after Carter have been more or less sociopaths, weak in the face of an elite that has an agenda hostile to most everyone but themselves.