At the time of the space shuttle decision, von Braun was advocating the use of pressure fed parachute recoverable boosters for the shuttle. If Nixon had endorsed these, then they could have been used separately as extremely low cost launchers; and the US launch industry's position would have been unassailable due to that low cost. coul.

But since the early 1960's, solid rocket manufacturers had been lobbying hard for the use of solids rockets in the manned space programs. von Braun had been opposed and had never pursued this course, simply because solid rockets "lacked abort modes" - could not be turned off. However, industry found support from the military, a supporter at OMB, and finally a supporter in the Oval Office who "liked" Utah.

The shuttle was pretty much dead until the design using solids was advocated. While its not in Heppenheimer's work, (which as I mentioned before is so politically correct as to be gutless) I interviewed Fletcher on this decision myself and was told by him that it came down to Nixon giving him the choice of using solid boosters on the shuttle or NASA being forced to use the Titan, which also had solid boosters.

But all of this simply bypasses the important point: following on the Mariner 4 images of Mars, which showed it not to be Earth-like, there was simply very very little public demand for manned flight to Mars. That's why the Mars ships were cancelled, that's why the Saturn 1 and Saturn 5 were cancelled, and that's why NERVA was cancelled -

While the public today still does not want teh government to spend their money on a manned flight to Mars, the story has a slightly different ending. The large majority of the public does want NASA to find the asteroid or comet before it hits, and they expect NASA to make their best effort to do so. And that best effort is known to require manned facilities on the Moon.

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