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By Root 1452 0

still was a way to continue my activities at NASA, and work on concepts that would contribute to the future of manned space exploration. So I dived into the project. We were looking at the features of a fully reusable spacecraft system in which both the shuttle and the booster rockets that had separated after liftoff would fly back to Earth for a runway landing. These rocket boosters used liquid propellant, as we had on the Saturn V, in keeping with Wernher von Braun’s premise that we should never launch human beings on boosters with solid propellant because of the associated hazards. But squabbles arose between NASA’s flight centers as to whether the rocket boosters should be manned or unmanned. I probably surprised a lot of people by supporting the unmanned booster, and a number of the committee members agreed. After all our discussions, however, our plans were tabled. Ultimately, due to funding restrictions, NASA would opt for the cheap fix over the costly runway-landing reusable liquid boosters, and use solid propellant boosters for the shuttle that are then dropped in the ocean to be recovered and refurbished for further flights.

Ordinarily such debate wouldn’t have affected me greatly; since my days at MIT, I was accustomed to the give-and-take of rocket science. But for some reason the futility of these discussions sent me back into a negative mindset again. Even today it is one of the few regrets I have from my time at NASA, since our space program would be much different if we had stuck to liquid rocket boosters, rather than adopting the solid rockets that have caused so many problems with the shuttle, including the first shuttle mishap, the Challenger explosion in 1986.

Fortunately for me, in October 1970, NASA gave me an assignment that I thought I might enjoy. Two Russian cosmonauts, Andrian Nikolayev and Vitaly Sevastyanov, were coming to the United States, and NASA wanted me to join them on their tour of American space centers. This was years before the Cold War had ended or the Berlin Wall had been torn down, so to have two cosmonauts poking around in U.S. space centers was not like taking them on a trip to Disneyland. Nevertheless, America has always operated its space program out in the open, with success or failure readily seen by the world. Thanks to our tremendous technological expertise, and a little luck, we have had far more successes than failures. The Soviets conducted their space program as clandestinely as possible, which always gave rise to questions about their intentions, whether they viewed space exploration as something to help mankind or merely as another weapons-delivery system in their already dangerous arsenal. Unquestionably, part of what motivated President Kennedy and succeeding presidents to pursue the “space race” was to make sure that the Soviet Union did not gain a military or technological advantage over us.

Yet, despite our suspicions, the American astronauts and the Soviet cosmonauts shared an explorer’s mentality. We wanted to know what the other side knew. I felt great appreciation for what the Russians had accomplished, and we actually got along quite well, although we had to communicate through an interpreter. We invited the Soviets to view our entire operation, including our launch facilities at Cape Kennedy, but the Soviets refused, knowing that if they accepted a tour of our launch facilities, it would be almost obligatory to invite Americans to tour their launch center in Tyuratam, and the Soviets were not open to doing that.

We did tour the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, as well as the Space Center in Houston, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and many American tourist sites. We consumed a great deal of vodka, and the trip was considered a huge step forward in space cooperation on both sides. Although when the Soviet cosmonauts were asked in a press conference before their departure why they hadn’t visited the Kennedy Space Center, they replied with a straight face through an interpreter that they hadn’t been invited to visit the Cape. So much