Nixon was only following a trend set by LBJ (who’d already cancelled Apollo Applications in 1967), to be honest Kennedy himself might’ve even cancelled Apollo outright had he not been assassinated (he was already considering handing Apollo off to be a “joint mission” study with the USSR)

von Braun saw the writing on the wall when Apollo Applications was cancelled in 1967 by LBJ and advised Paine that funding wouldn’t go up but still went on to spearhead mission planning for the IPP mars trip

he had a shady past but without him mankind never would’ve touched the surface of the moon

Nixon later agreed to an ambiguous plan of landing a man on Mars by 2000 (which was so far away that it was meaningless) and announced in 1972 that the space shuttle would be part of the future nasa budget

however funding for the other projects was scrapped entirely

Paine was stubborn and refused to back down from Nixon and demanded that all 3 parts of the IPP be implemented after getting support from the STG committee (he wanted a space station, moon base, AND mars mission) and Nixon’s refusal led to his resignation in 1970 on the anniversary of the STG report

Administrator Paine had expected NASA to be “rewarded” for winning the race to the moon but grossly underestimated the political capital NASA had and all of this would be eventually cut from the budget (except the prototype Skylab station and the shuttle)

he was very cynical from working on ESA projects like hermes that got canned for political reasons and thought that we’d never reach mars within the century and i was a naive young optimist who thought the SLS/Constellation was a good idea and that he was a defeatist

running a vc-backed company is basically being a modern day hunter-gatherer it’s amazing

if by mac miller you mean emperor marcus milleritius, one of the esstern roman emperors who paved a critical path in its transition from a latin to greek identity then yes 😇

they also wanted to put a space station in orbit with cameras so astronauts could literally just stuff going on below and send back canisters (was called the manned orbiting laboratory)

my counsel advises me to not answer this question (try it)

i petition to pre-emptively ban all .gov handles inshallah this is a safe space from the feds