In our world, Challenger was the name — not of a Mars lander — but of the shuttle orbiter which was destroyed in January 1986, killing its crew of seven. It was a disaster which brought the U.S. space program, in 1986, to a nadir, rather than the new zenith of a Mars landing.

But it might have been very different.

After the liftoff of Apollo 11 in July 1969, an exuberant Vice President Spiro Agnew proclaimed that the U.S. “should articulate a simple, ambitious, optimistic goal of a manned flight to Mars by the end of the century.” And NASA had strong, feasible plans to achieve that goal.

America has never again been so close to assembling the commitment to go to Mars.

What went wrong in 1969? Why did President Nixon decide against the Mars option?

And how would things have worked out, in an alternate universe in which Natalie York walked on Mars?

In February 1969, a few months before the first Apollo Moon landing, the incoming Nixon administration appointed a Space Task Group (STG), chaired by Vice President Agnew, to develop goals for the post-Apollo period. The STG was to report to the President in September. (President Nixon’s initiating memo was similar to that reproduced in the novel — but without the handwritten addendum…)

Post-Apollo planning for space entered its most crucial months. And gradually, over this period, NASA lost the case for Mars.

To space proponents in 1969, technical logic appeared to indicate a building from the achievements of Apollo to a progressive colonization of the Solar System, including missions to Mars. But the political logic differed.

The Apollo era — when the efforts of half a million Americans had been devoted to spaceflight — had been born out of an extraordinary set of circumstances, which were not repeated in 1969. Just a week after Yuri Gagarin’s pioneering first spaceflight in April 1961, President Kennedy sent a memo to Vice President Johnson asking for options: “Do we have a chance of beating the Soviets by putting a laboratory in space, or by a trip around the Moon, or by a rocket to land on the Moon, or by a rocket to go to the Moon and back with a man. Is there any other space program which promises dramatic results in which we could win?…”

Although NASA by this time already had a schedule for a lunar program, there was no overriding logic favoring the Moon goal. In fact, in private, Kennedy berated his technical advisors for not producing recommendations for more tangible, down-to-earth scientific spectaculars, such as desalinating seawater.

So when Kennedy made his famous 1961 commitment to put a man on the Moon within a decade, the new program was not intended as a first step in an orderly expansion into space. Rather, Kennedy was reacting, to the early Soviet lead in spaceflight, and his administration’s Bay of Pigs disaster.

Thus, in 1969, there was no internal logic which proceeded from Apollo to Mars. This key point was evidently misunderstood by many within NASA in this period. Technically, Apollo was an end in itself, a system designed to place two men on the Moon for three days, and it achieved precisely that; its political goals were similarly well defined — to beat the Soviets in space — and had been achieved. With the completion of Apollo, there was no inertia to be carried forward to future goals — and, in 1969, no perceived threat to drive the necessary political reaction behind a new program.

Still, NASA had explored the technical feasibility of a Mars mission in as many as sixty study contracts between 1961 and 1968. But the visionaries were dealt a severe blow when the pictures of Mars returned by the early Mariners showed a bleak lunarlike cratered landscape. There were still compelling scientific reasons to go to Mars, but the opportunity for human expansion was clearly limited. NASA suffered deferments and cancellations as a result.

Meanwhile, throughout the Apollo period, NASA’s overall long-range planning was weak, leaving it ill prepared for 1969.

This was in fact a deliberate policy of James Webb, NASA Administrator from 1961 to 1968. Webb believed that Apollo’s success would give U.S. citizens great pride and encouragement, and that any evidence of commitment to an expensive, long-term Mars program would lose NASA the margin of strength needed to finish Apollo.

As early as 1966, NASA budgets began to slide.

On September 16, 1968, after arguing with Johnson about the latest cuts, Webb resigned. When the STG began its work NASA’s only firm funding commitments for manned spaceflight were for the Apollo lunar landings and a follow-up Apollo Applications Program.

President Nixon himself was not an instinctive opponent of spaceflight. But — as new NASA Administrator Thomas O. Paine learned as he flew with Nixon to Apollo 11’s splashdown — the incoming administration could not direct large amounts of money into space while the Vietnam War continued.

Given such strong signals, NASA’s political tactics during this key period, under Paine, showed deep naпvetй.

Although in its STG submission NASA formally called for such worthy goals as “commonality,” “reusability,” and “economy” — the program it actually envisaged was outward-looking and very expensive, including a space station, a manned Mars mission, a new generation of automated spacecraft, and new programs in advanced research and technology. These tactics were counterproductive. Even supporters of more modest programs, given a Hobson’s choice of a huge Mars “boondoggle” or nothing, backed away.

NASA also tried to talk up the benefits of state-managed R D, but this, too, was a mistake. There was no doubt that NASA was an astonishing success as a giant technocratic exercise in management science and project control. And only a fifth of Kennedy’s 1961 speech had been devoted to spaceflight: Kennedy had been promoting the space program as part of a greater technocratic solution to perceived threats and problems — eliminating poverty, resisting communist expansion, promoting development abroad.

But by 1969 it was clear that technocracy had failed in its greater objectives. Instead there was only the maturation of the power complex of the technocratic state. Nixon seemed to understand the antitechnocratic mood of his day, and also how technocracy was in opposition to America’s older Jeffersonian tradition of local politics and democratic responsiveness.

Meanwhile, during 1969, funding cuts were made in the NERVA nuclear rocket research program, which had been proceeding in Nevada since 1957. Although the Nevada test station would not be shut down until 1972, the 1969 cuts ended any hopes of flight testing nuclear rockets. Without NERVA, a component NASA believed was vital to a Mars expedition, the case for Mars was essentially already lost. (In the novel, NASA manages to fend off these cuts.)

Against this background — and without a strong and articulate champion, the role served by Jack Kennedy in the novel — the Agency was soon forced to back off from its more aggressive proposals. The language in NASA’s draft report to the STG, prepared in April 1969, read: “We recommend that the U.S. begin preparing for a manned expedition to Mars at an early date.” By the published version the sentence had been watered down to: “Manned expeditions to Mars could begin as early as 1981” (my emphasis).

Agnew himself was, however, a champion within the White House of aiming for Mars — even though he was booed when he spoke of the project in public. White House counsel John Ehrlichman later described how he was unable to dissuade Agnew from including a 1981 landing in the STG’s list of recommendations, even though it was already clear that the Mars mission did not fit with the Nixon administration’s overall budget priorities. Agnew insisted on taking the argument in to Nixon. We do not know what Nixon said to Agnew, but fifteen minutes later, Agnew called Ehrlichman to explain that the Mars mission was being moved from the list of “recommendations” to another category headed “technically feasible.”