What spaceflight owes to Jimmy Carter: The president's little-known NASA legacy

Carter is hardly remembered as a champion of NASA. But he saved the space shuttle program, and his words that have been journeying aboard the Voyager probes for decades.

The year was 1977 and then-President Jimmy Carter had a problem with NASA.

In a diary entry from that June, Carter, who died Sunday at age 100, made clear his displeasure with the agency, which was in the midst of building the space shuttle but had fallen years behind schedule.

“We continued our budget meetings. It’s obvious that the space shuttle is just a contrivance to keep NASA alive, and that no real need for the space shuttle was determined before the massive construction program was initiated,” Carter wrote, according to excerpts published in his 2010 book “White House Diary.”

Carter is hardly remembered as a champion of NASA. Unlike Presidents John F. Kennedy and Lyndon B. Johnson, he has no NASA center bearing his name, and his time in office wasn’t characterized by grand visions for astronomy or human spaceflight.

Yet, it was Carter who ultimately saved NASA’s space shuttle program — giving the country perhaps its most iconic space vehicle. And it is Carter’s words that have been journeying aboard the Voyager probes for more than 45 years, carrying a message of peace and hope deep into the cosmos.

https://www.nbcnews.com/science/space/jimmy-carter-nasa-space-shuttle-voyager-rcna72474

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