Ein Rätsel des Kalten Krieges: Warum hat Jimmy Carter das Space Shuttle gerettet? | Ars löst das Rätsel, indem er sich direkt an eine Hauptquelle wendet – den Präsidenten selbst.

From the article: We’d been chatting for the better part of two hours when Chris Kraft’s eyes suddenly brightened. “Hey,” he said, “Here’s a story I’ll bet you never heard.” Kraft, the man who had written flight rules for NASA at the dawn of US spaceflight and supervised the Apollo program, had invited me to his home south of Houston for one of our periodic talks about space policy and space history. As we sat in recliners upstairs, in a den overlooking the Bay Oaks Country Club, Kraft told me about a time the space shuttle almost got canceled.

It was the late 1970s, when Kraft directed the Johnson Space Center, the home of the space shuttle program. At the time, the winged vehicle had progressed deep into a development phase that started in 1971. Because the program had not received enough money to cover development costs, some aspects of the vehicle (such as its thermal protective tiles) were delayed into future budget cycles. In another budget trick, NASA committed $158 million in fiscal year 1979 funds for work done during the previous fiscal year.

This could not go on, and according to Kraft the situation boiled over during a 1978 meeting in a large conference floor on the 9th floor of Building 1, the Houston center’s headquarters. All the program managers and other center directors gathered there along with NASA’s top leadership. That meeting included Administrator Robert Frosch, a physicist President Carter had appointed a year earlier.

Kraft recalls laying bare the budget jeopardy faced by the shuttle. “We were totally incapable of meeting any sort of flight schedule,” he said. Further postponing the vehicle would only add to the problem because the vehicle’s high payroll costs would just be carried forward.

There were two possible solutions proposed, Kraft said. One was a large funding supplement to get development programs back on track. Absent that, senior leaders felt they would have to declare the shuttle a research vehicle, like the rocket-powered X-15, which had made 13 flights to an altitude as high as 50 miles in the 1960s. “We were going to have to turn it, really, into a nothing vehicle,” Kraft said. “We were going to have to give up on the shuttle being a delivery vehicle into orbit.”

Armed with these bleak options, Frosch returned to Washington. Some time later he would meet with Carter, not expecting a positive response, as the president had never been a great friend to the space program. But Carter, according to Kraft, had just returned from Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) in Vienna, and he had spoken with the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, about how the United States was going to be able to fly the shuttle over Moscow continuously to ensure they were compliant with the agreements.

So when Frosch went to the White House to meet with the president and said NASA didn’t have the money to finish the space shuttle, the administrator got a response he did not expect: “How much do you need?”

In doing so, Jimmy Carter saved the space shuttle, Kraft believes. Without supplementals for fiscal year 1979 and 1980, the shuttle would never have flown, at least not as the iconic vehicle that would eventually fly 135 missions and 355 individual fliers into space. It took some flights as high as 400 miles above the planet before retiring five years ago this week. “That was the first supplemental NASA had ever asked for,” Kraft said. “And we got that money from Jimmy Carter.”

As I walked out of Kraft’s house that afternoon in late spring, I recall wondering whether this could really be true. Could Jimmy Carter, of all people, be the savior of the shuttle? All because he had been bragging about the shuttle’s capabilities to the Soviets and, therefore, didn’t want to show weakness? This Cold War mystery was now nearly 40 years in the past, but most of the protagonists still lived. So I began to ask questions.