Jimmy Carter, the president at the time, had an issue with NASA in 1977.
Carter, who passed away Sunday at the age of 100, expressed his dissatisfaction with the agency in a June diary entry. The agency was in the process of creating the space shuttle, but it had fallen years behind schedule.
Our budget meetings went on. Carter stated in passages from his 2010 book White House Diary that “it’s obvious that the space shuttle is just a contrivance to keep NASA alive” and that “no real need for the space shuttle was determined before the massive construction program was initiated.”
Few people recall Carter as a supporter of NASA. He had no NASA center named after him, unlike Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, and his administration was not marked by ambitious plans for human spaceflight or astronomy.
But in the end, Carter preserved NASA’s space shuttle program, providing the nation with what is arguably its most famous spacecraft. And for almost 45 years, Carter’s remarks have been traveling through space on board the Voyager probes, sending a message of hope and peace.
Valerie Neal, an emerita space history curator at the National Air and Space Museum, described him as an unsung hero for the space program, even though it isn’t mentioned in any of the retrospectives of his term’s significant accomplishments.
Prior to Carter’s election, NASA was planning its next major project. According to Neal, agency officials were considering other locations by the late 1960s while the Apollo moon missions were still in progress.
There was agreement to try to put a space station in Earth’s orbit where scientists could study the effects of microgravity on the human body and where astronauts could stay for longer.
However, Neal stated that in order to construct a space station, a new vehicle capable of transporting all the equipment into low-Earth orbit is required.
The space shuttle comes in.
NASA has a wide range of uses in mind for the shuttle. Agency officials said it could launch satellites and other commercial payloads and act as its own temporary laboratory in space, in addition to transporting cargo and space station modules into orbit.
However, political interest in the shuttle program had waned by the time Carter assumed office in January 1977. Neal claims that Carter himself didn’t think there was much use in putting humans into space.
She stated that although he supported NASA’s efforts in planetary exploration and aeronautics, he simply did not see a compelling case for the space shuttle.
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