The PayPal Honey browser extension is, in theory, a handy way to find better deals on products while you’re shopping online. But in a video published this weekend, YouTuber MegaLag claims the extension is a “scam” and that Honey has been “stealing money from influencers, including the very ones they paid to promote their product.”
Honey works by popping up an offer to find coupon codes for you while you’re checking out in an online shop. But as MegaLag notes, it frequently fails to find a code, or offers a Honey-branded one, even if a simple internet search will cover something better. The Honey website’s pitch is that it will “find every working promo code on the internet.” But according to MegaLag’s video, ignoring better deals is a feature of Honey’s partnerships with its retail clients.
MegaLag also says Honey will hijack affiliate revenue from influencers. According to MegaLag, if you click on an affiliate link from an influencer, Honey will then swap in its own tracking link when you interact with its deal pop-up at check-out. That’s regardless of whether Honey found you a coupon or not, and it results in Honey getting the credit for the sale, rather than the YouTuber or website whose link led you there.
Paypal VP of corporate communications Josh Criscoe said in an email to The Verge that “Honey follows industry rules and practices, including last-click attribution.”
MegaLag isn’t the first to make such claims. A 2021 Twitter post advises using Honey’s discount codes in a different browser to avoid it taking the affiliate credit. A Linus Media Group employee also explained in a 2022 forum reply that Linus Tech Tips dropped Honey as a sponsor over its affiliate link practices.
Honey’s convenience has resulted in the extension being recommended widely, including in almost 5,000 Honey-sponsored videos across about 1,000 YouTube channels, according to MegaLag. We’ve even recommended it here at The Verge; now we do not.
Here is Criscoe’s full statement:
Honey is free to use and provides millions of shoppers with additional savings on their purchases whenever possible. Honey helps merchants reduce cart abandonment and comparison shopping while increasing sales conversion.
The company behind those cameras is a start-up called Hayden AI, which offered to demonstrate how they work in real life on the streets near its offices in this New Jersey suburb.
"What you're seeing on the screen right now is the system identifying different objects as we're driving down the road," said Charley Territo, the chief growth officer for Hayden AI, as we rode in the back of a specially equipped van.
The cameras are mounted inside the front windshield, where they can take in everything that's happening in front of the bus. The system analyzes those images to decide if it's looking at a vehicle, Territo says — and whether that vehicle is stopped somewhere it shouldn't be.
In just three years, Hayden AI has launched services with transit agencies in New York, Washington, D.C., Oakland, Calif., and Los Angeles. The company is deploying pilot programs in Seattle and Denver, and it's talking with other cities, including Philadelphia and Chicago.
The camera systems are using AI to help transit agencies catch and fine drivers who illegally block bus lanes and bus stops. But Territo says that's not the ultimate goal.
"When you look at the reason for enforcement, it's really not to write tickets. It's to change driver behavior," Territo said in an interview. "And what we're seeing is a reduction in the number of repeat offenders."
There's some evidence that these camera systems are helping buses move faster, though their rollout has hit a few speed bumps.
"It's working brilliantly," said Richard Davey, the former president of New York's Metropolitan Transportation Authority, in an interview last year. "It's changing behavior, which is what we want. And it's speeding up our buses."
The MTA operates the subways and buses in New York City, where its buses carry more than two million each day. And Davey says the riders complain about how slowly the buses move.
"We ask our customers, what is preventing them from using our services more? What's sort of irritating them?" Davey said.
"Our bus customers have told us that bus reliability, wait times, traffic, those are their three biggest issues," he said. "So I'm sure some motorist somewhere will be unhappy that we're doing this. But I can assure you that there are 2 million bus customers who will be happy."
Transit advocates say slow service is a big reason why fewer people ride the bus in the U.S. than in other countries. The MTA says its buses are 5% faster on the routes where it's been using the cameras, and they have been involved in 20% fewer collisions. So the agency moved to expand the program this year to 20 new bus routes and 1,000 more buses earlier this year.
But that expansion did not go quite as planned, as hundreds of drivers received erroneous tickets.
"It wasn't anything too worrisome at first, because you realize that you're parked in a legal spot," said George Han, who lives on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.
Han says he's careful about only parking in legal spots, so he was surprised when the tickets started arriving in the mail — including three in a single day — and kept coming.
"I think we're up to about a dozen or so. There were definitely over 10," Han said, costing hundreds of dollars in total.
Han knew these tickets were issued in error. At first, he tried to fight them in court. But that wasn't working very well. So Han went public, and local TV station WNBC picked up the story. After that, Han finally received a flurry of letters apologizing for the tickets.
The MTA says about 800 tickets were mistakenly issued because of a "programming error" by Hayden AI. In addition, the MTA says about 3,000 tickets were accidentally issued during what should have been a 60-day warning period for the bus lane enforcement zones.
"Normally the 60-day warning period serves as a shakeout phase during which such glitches are identified and fixed," MTA spokesman Eugene Resnick said in a statement. "All violations issued in error during what was intended to be a warning period have been or are being voided. Any payments made on improperly issued tickets are being refunded."
Hayden AI says those programming errors have been fixed.
"Anytime there's a large program, there are going to be bumps along the road," said Hayden's Charley Territo. The problems in New York "had nothing to do with the AI or the technology. It was really a configuration issue."
There's supposed to be an additional level of human review, where someone from the NYC Department of Transportation looks at each video of an alleged violation before deciding whether to issue a ticket.
The DOT declined to comment on why those human reviewers did not catch hundreds of erroneous tickets for cars that were legally parked.
George Han says he supports the program's goal of keeping bus lanes clear. Still, he says the incident raises bigger questions about AI. Han, a dermatologist, says there's a lot of conversation in medicine about how and when to use AI — and a healthy dose of skepticism.
"In medicine, we're trained to be a little pessimistic about new technologies before we really think they're ready because we don't want to harm our patients," Han said. "Maybe you could argue, yes, the stakes are lower. These are some parking tickets. It all worked out in the end. But, you know, our city is spending all this money. There should be some level of accountability for these programs."
Federal authorities have arrested and indicted a 20-year-old U.S. Army soldier on suspicion of being Kiberphant0m, a cybercriminal who has been selling and leaking sensitive customer call records stolen earlier this year from AT&T and Verizon. As first reported by KrebsOnSecurity last month, the accused is a communications specialist who was recently stationed in South Korea.
One of several selfies on the Facebook page of Cameron Wagenius.
Cameron John Wagenius, 20, was arrested near the Army base in Fort Hood, Texas on Dec. 20, after being indicted on two criminal counts of unlawful transfer of confidential phone records.
The sparse, two-page indictment (PDF) doesn’t reference specific victims or hacking activity, nor does it include any personal details about the accused. But a conversation with Wagenius’ mother — Minnesota native Alicia Roen — filled in the gaps.
Roen said that prior to her son’s arrest he’d acknowledged being associated with Connor Riley Moucka, a.k.a. “Judische,” a prolific cybercriminal from Canada who was arrested in late October for stealing data from and extorting dozens of companies that stored data at the cloud service Snowflake.
In an interview with KrebsOnSecurity, Judische said he had no interest in selling the data he’d stolen from Snowflake customers and telecom providers, and that he preferred to outsource that to Kiberphant0m and others. Meanwhile, Kiberphant0m claimed in posts on Telegram that he was responsible for hacking into at least 15 telecommunications firms, including AT&T and Verizon.
On November 26, KrebsOnSecurity published a story that followed a trail of clues left behind by Kiberphantom indicating he was a U.S. Army soldier stationed in South Korea.
An 18-year-old Cameron Wagenius, joining the U.S. Army.
Ms. Roen said Cameron worked on radio signals and network communications at an Army base in South Korea for the past two years, returning to the United States periodically. She said Cameron was always good with computers, but that she had no idea he might have been involved in criminal hacking.
“I never was aware he was into hacking,” Roen said. “It was definitely a shock to me when we found this stuff out.”
Ms. Roen said Cameron joined the Army as soon as he was of age, following in his older brother’s footsteps.
“He and his brother when they were like 6 and 7 years old would ask for MREs from other countries,” she recalled, referring to military-issued “meals ready to eat” food rations. “They both always wanted to be in the Army. I’m not sure where things went wrong.”
Immediately after news broke of Moucka’s arrest, Kiberphant0m posted on the hacker community BreachForums what they claimed were the AT&T call logs for President-electDonald J. Trump and for Vice President Kamala Harris.
“In the event you do not reach out to us @ATNT all presidential government call logs will be leaked,” Kiberphant0m threatened, signing their post with multiple “#FREEWAIFU” tags. “You don’t think we don’t have plans in the event of an arrest? Think again.”
Kiberphant0m posting what he claimed was a “data schema” stolen from the NSA via AT&T.
On that same day, Kiberphant0m posted what they claimed was the “data schema” from the U.S. National Security Agency.
On Nov. 5, Kiberphant0m offered call logs stolen from Verizon’s push-to-talk (PTT) customers — mainly U.S. government agencies and emergency first responders. On Nov. 9, Kiberphant0m posted a sales thread on BreachForums offering a “SIM-swapping” service targeting Verizon PTT customers. In a SIM-swap, fraudsters use credentials that are phished or stolen from mobile phone company employees to divert a target’s phone calls and text messages to a device they control.
The profile photo on Wagenius’ Facebook page was deleted within hours of my Nov. 26 story identifying Kiberphant0m as a likely U.S. Army soldier. Still, many of his original profile photos remain, including several that show Wagenius in uniform while holding various Army-issued weapons.
Several profile photos visible on the Facebook page of Cameron Wagenius.
November’s story on Kiberphant0m cited his own Telegram messages saying he maintained a large botnet that was used for distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks to knock websites, users and networks offline. In 2023, Kiberphant0m sold remote access credentials for a major U.S. defense contractor.
Allison Nixon is chief research officer at the New York-based cybersecurity firm Unit 221B who helped track down Kiberphant0m’s real life identity. Nixon was among several security researchers who faced harassment and specific threats of violence from Judische and his associates.
“Anonymously extorting the President and VP as a member of the military is a bad idea, but it’s an even worse idea to harass people who specialize in de-anonymizing cybercriminals,” Nixon told KrebsOnSecurity. She said the investigation into Kiberphant0m shows that law enforcement is getting better and faster at going after cybercriminals — especially those who are actually living in the United States.
“Between when we, and an anonymous colleague, found his opsec mistake on November 10th to his last Telegram activity on December 6, law enforcement set the speed record for the fastest turnaround time for an American federal cyber case that I have witnessed in my career,” she said.
Nixon asked to share a message for all the other Kiberphant0ms out there who think they can’t be found and arrested.
“I know that young people involved in cybercrime will read these articles,” Nixon said. “You need to stop doing stupid shit and get a lawyer. Law enforcement wants to put all of you in prison for a long time.”
The indictment against Wagenius was filed in Texas, but the case has been transferred to the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in Seattle.
Scholars from Edinburgh College of Art and KU Leuven in Belgium have been investigating the origins of the musical score – which contains only 55 notes – to cast new light on music from pre-Reformation Scotland in the early sixteenth-century.
Tantalising find
Researchers say the tantalising discovery is a rare example of music from Scottish religious institutions 500 years ago, and is the only piece which survives from the northeast of Scotland from this period.
The scholars made the discovery in a copy of The Aberdeen Breviary of 1510, a collection of prayers, hymns, psalms and readings used for daily worship in Scotland, including detailed writings on the lives of Scottish saints. Known as the ‘Glamis copy’ as it was formerly held in Glamis Castle in Angus, it is now in the National Library of Scotland in Edinburgh.
Musical score
Despite the musical score having no text, title or attribution, researchers have identified it as a unique musical harmonisation of Cultor Dei, a night-time hymn sung during the season of Lent.
The Aberdeen Breviary came from an initiative by King James IV who issued a Royal Patent to print books containing orders of service in accordance with Scottish religious practices, rather than needing to rely on importing texts from England or Europe.
Handwritten annotations
The researchers say the composition is from the Aberdeenshire region, with probable links to St Mary’s Chapel, Rattray – in Scotland’s far northeastern corner – and to Aberdeen Cathedral.
The discovery was made as researchers examined numerous handwritten annotations in the margins of the Glamis copy.
Of primary interest to the scholars was a fragment of music – spread over two lines, the second of which is approximately half the length of the first – on a blank page in a section of the book dedicated to Matins, an early morning service.
Puzzling discovery
The presence of the music was a puzzle for the team. It was not part of the original printed book, yet it was written on a page bound into structure of the book, not slipped in at a later date, which suggests that the writer wanted to keep the music and the book together.
In the absence of any textual annotations on the page it was not clear whether the music was sacred, secular or even for voices at all, the researchers say.
Independent melody
After investigation they deduced it was polyphonic – when two or more lines of independent melody are sung or played at the same time. Sources from the time say this technique was common in Scottish religious institutions, however very few examples have survived to the present day.
Looking closer, one of the team members realised that the music was a perfect fit with a Gregorian chant melody, specifically that it was the tenor part from a faburden, a three- or four-voice musical harmonization, on the hymn Cultor Dei.
We’d been chatting for the better part of two hours when Chris Kraft’s eyes suddenly brightened. “Hey,” he said, “Here’s a story I’ll bet you never heard.” Kraft, the man who had written flight rules for NASA at the dawn of US spaceflight and supervised the Apollo program, had invited me to his home south of Houston for one of our periodic talks about space policy and space history. As we sat in recliners upstairs, in a den overlooking the Bay Oaks Country Club, Kraft told me about a time the space shuttle almost got canceled.
It was the late 1970s, when Kraft directed the Johnson Space Center, the home of the space shuttle program. At the time, the winged vehicle had progressed deep into a development phase that started in 1971. Because the program had not received enough money to cover development costs, some aspects of the vehicle (such as its thermal protective tiles) were delayed into future budget cycles. In another budget trick, NASA committed $158 million in fiscal year 1979 funds for work done during the previous fiscal year.
This could not go on, and according to Kraft the situation boiled over during a 1978 meeting in a large conference floor on the 9th floor of Building 1, the Houston center’s headquarters. All the program managers and other center directors gathered there along with NASA’s top leadership. That meeting included Administrator Robert Frosch, a physicist President Carter had appointed a year earlier.
Kraft recalls laying bare the budget jeopardy faced by the shuttle. “We were totally incapable of meeting any sort of flight schedule,” he said. Further postponing the vehicle would only add to the problem because the vehicle’s high payroll costs would just be carried forward.
There were two possible solutions proposed, Kraft said. One was a large funding supplement to get development programs back on track. Absent that, senior leaders felt they would have to declare the shuttle a research vehicle, like the rocket-powered X-15, which had made 13 flights to an altitude as high as 50 miles in the 1960s. “We were going to have to turn it, really, into a nothing vehicle,” Kraft said. “We were going to have to give up on the shuttle being a delivery vehicle into orbit.”
On the eve of the 40th anniversary of the first human landing on the Moon, Apollo 11 crew members, Buzz Aldrin, left, Michael Collins, and Neil Armstrong and NASA Mission Control creator Chris Kraft, right, during their visit to the National Air and Space Museum on July 19, 2009.
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NASA/Getty Images
Armed with these bleak options, Frosch returned to Washington. Some time later he would meet with Carter, not expecting a positive response, as the president had never been a great friend to the space program. But Carter, according to Kraft, had just returned from Strategic Arms Limitation Talks (SALT) in Vienna, and he had spoken with the Soviet leader, Leonid Brezhnev, about how the United States was going to be able to fly the shuttle over Moscow continuously to ensure they were compliant with the agreements.
So when Frosch went to the White House to meet with the president and said NASA didn’t have the money to finish the space shuttle, the administrator got a response he did not expect: “How much do you need?”
In doing so, Jimmy Carter saved the space shuttle, Kraft believes. Without supplementals for fiscal year 1979 and 1980, the shuttle would never have flown, at least not as the iconic vehicle that would eventually fly 135 missions and 355 individual fliers into space. It took some flights as high as 400 miles above the planet before retiring five years ago this week. “That was the first supplemental NASA had ever asked for,” Kraft said. “And we got that money from Jimmy Carter.”
As I walked out of Kraft’s house that afternoon in late spring, I recall wondering whether this could really be true. Could Jimmy Carter, of all people, be the savior of the shuttle? All because he had been bragging about the shuttle’s capabilities to the Soviets and, therefore, didn’t want to show weakness? This Cold War mystery was now nearly 40 years in the past, but most of the protagonists still lived. So I began to ask questions.
Carter's apathy toward space
At the root of my skepticism was this simple fact—Jimmy Carter was no great friend to the space program or, at least initially, the shuttle. Less than five months after he became president, on the date of June 9, 1977, Carter wrote the following in his White House Diary: “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.”
On NASA’s own 50th anniversary website, space historian John Logsdon described the Carter presidency in less than flattering terms. “Jimmy Carter was perhaps the least supportive of US human space efforts of any president in the last half-century,” Logsdon wrote.
In 1978 President Jimmy Carter visited Kennedy Space Center to check on the space shuttle's progress and participate in an awards ceremony. Here he is greeted by Kennedy Space Center Director Lee Scherer.
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NASA
Carter, with wife Rosalynn and daughter Amy, listens to Center Director Lee Scherer explain a model of the crawler transporter during their tour of the Kennedy Space Center.
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NASA
Astronaut Neil Armstrong receives the first Congressional Space Medal of Honor from President Jimmy Carter, assisted by Captain Robert Peterson, in 1978.
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NASA
President Jimmy Carter presents the Congressional Space Medal of Honor to Neil Armstrong, Frank Borman, Charles Conrad, John Glenn, Betty Grissom, and Alan Shepard in 1978.
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NASA
Former President Jimmy Carter, in 1980, presents the National Space Club's Goddard Memorial Trophy to NASA Administrator Dr Robert A Frosch on behalf of the team that planned and executed the Voyager mission to Jupiter and beyond.
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NASA
Carter returned to Kennedy Space Center in 2002. Here Center Director Roy D Bridges Jr welcomes him. Behind Carter, at right, is Rosalynn Carter, Jimmy Carter's wife.
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NASA
Rosalyn and Jimmy Carter talk with Bridges and the director of external affairs and business development, JoAnn H Morgan, in 2002
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NASA
In the Space Station Processing Facility, the Carters listen to an explanation of the station's different modules.
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NASA
In the Space Station Processing Facility, former President Carter pauses for a photo with astronauts Scott Kelly (left) and Joseph Tanner (right). Kelly would go on to become one of NASA's most recognizable astronauts after his one-year mission in 2015.
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NASA
Carter is shown packages of food that are used on the International Space Station. Astronaut Scott Kelly (far left) relates how the food is prepared and how it tastes.
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NASA
Carter, Ted Turner, and Virgin Galactic's Sir Richard Branson participate in an event during the Captain Planet Foundation's benefit gala at Georgia Aquarium on December 7, 2012.
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Ben Rose/Getty Images
Then there was Carter’s vice president, Walter Mondale, who in 1972 had called the space shuttle a “senseless extravaganza.” A senator from Minnesota at the time, Mondale had vigorously opposed early funding measures to begin development of the shuttle. His views exemplified those who believed the United States had more pressing needs for its money than chasing the stars.
“I believe it would be unconscionable to embark on a project of such staggering cost when many of our citizens are malnourished, when our rivers and lakes are polluted, and when our cities and rural areas are dying,” Mondale argued during one debate over shuttle funding. “What are our values? What do we think is more important?”
Now these two men were responsible for establishing priorities for the government’s budget and supporting a shuttle that was already years behind schedule as it faced cost overruns of hundreds of millions of dollars. They were going to keep the program afloat?
The shuttle, canceled?
If Kraft is to be believed, cost overruns began really catching up to the shuttle program in 1978, necessitating the big meeting at Johnson Space Center. By then the Enterprise had already made its first free flight in the atmosphere, and the test vehicle was a public relations success. However, the programs to develop the space shuttle’s main engines and its thermal protective tiles remained far behind schedule. It does not seem beyond the realm of possibility that the program might be canceled altogether and that program managers might have worried about this.
John Logsdon, the eminent space historian who has written books about Nixon’s space policy and is working on one about Reagan, told Ars that as costs mounted, the White House Office of Management and Budget suggested to Carter that he might want to cancel the program in 1978 and 1979. This set off a series of White House meetings that culminated in an influential memo to Carter from Brigadier General Robert Rosenberg, of the National Security Council. Titled “Why Shuttle Is Needed,” the Rosenberg memo offered an effective counterpoint to the OMB concerns about cost, according to Logsdon. Written in November 1979, it helped lead Carter to a decision to fund the vehicle.
The crew of Star Trek gathers around space shuttle Enterprise in 1977.
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NASA
“Strong national support and prestige is focused on Shuttle as a means for maintaining space dominance as evidenced by broad user interest and recent space policy statements,” Rosenberg wrote. “Significant delay or abandonment of the Shuttle and manned space capabilities at this time would be viewed as a loss of national pride and direction. The notion that we are forced for short term economic reasons to abandon a major area of endeavor in which we have achieved world leadership at great cost is simply not credible.”
A key player in the shuttle program at this time, Robert Thompson, pushed back on the idea that the shuttle was ever at any real risk of being canceled. Thompson and Kraft are contemporaries. They were classmates at Virginia Tech University in the early 1940s, and later both were original members of the Space Task Group that put together Project Mercury. When Kraft managed flight operations during the Apollo Program, Thompson was in charge of capsule recovery. Ultimately Thompson became the first shuttle program manager in 1970, a post he headed until 1981. Today, Thompson lives about a mile away from Kraft, and his home overlooks the same golf course.
“I never worried an instant about Carter cutting the funding off,” he said in an interview at his dining room table. “You’d have to be an idiot to get up in front of people and say, ‘I’m now going to trash $5 billion even though we’re that close to the finish line, and I’m going to quit human spaceflight.’ Carter was kind of an oddball guy to be president, but he wasn’t stupid.”
So why wasn’t it canceled?
Still, there seem to be valid reasons for concern about a program that would ultimately run three years behind schedule and, according to NASA’s comptroller, about 30 percent over its initial $5.15 billion estimated development cost. Why did Carter remain so steadfastly behind the shuttle? Was it really because Carter valued the shuttle in his arms control discussions with the Soviet Union? The answer appears to be yes.
“It is conceivable that one of his arguments to Brezhnev on why there should be SALT was our ability to use the shuttle to verify the agreements,” Logsdon said. Whereas the president unquestionably felt lukewarm toward spaceflight, he felt conversely strong about arms control. And to verify that the Soviet Union was complying with the treaty, the United States would need a constellation of spy satellites. Back in 1970, to win Department of Defense support at the program’s outset, NASA had redesigned the shuttle to launch national security payloads. Now, that decision paid off.
A book about Carter’s space policy, Back Down to Earth by Mark Damohn, draws this conclusion about a president who liked NASA’s robotic exploration and science but didn’t see the value of humans in space. “The ability of the shuttle to launch arms control verification satellites is what saved it during the Carter administration," Damohn writes. His book does not recount any meetings with Brezhnev. When asked whether Carter might have discussed the shuttle with the Soviet general secretary and whether that might have influenced his decisions, Damohn replied that Kraft’s story is essentially correct except for the part of Carter bragging to Brezhnev. Bragging is not in Carter’s personality, Damohn told Ars.
Another person who could verify or debunk Kraft’s anecdote is Frosch himself, who left NASA in 1981 and remains a senior research fellow at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. After I related Kraft’s story, Frosch said he didn’t recall a Brezhnev connection with Carter’s decision to support shuttle funding. “That does not mean it's not true,” he added. “I just don't remember any clear sequence like that. But it's certainly possible if the dates fit together correctly.”
The timeline
Do the dates fit together? For some of the story, yes, and for other parts, no. Kraft recounted fiscal problems plaguing the space shuttle program in 1977 and 1978 that delayed development of the space shuttle’s main engines, thermal protection system, and other flight critical elements. According to TA Heppenheimer’s excellent History of the Space Shuttle, by May of 1979 the shuttle’s costs had already run $830 million over the initial $5.2 billion projected cost.
Moreover, by the time of Kraft’s come-to-Jesus meeting with the shuttle program managers and Frosch at Johnson Space Center, the vehicle had already missed its original March 1978 flight date. Ultimately, the vehicle would not fly until April 12, 1981.
It is also true that the White House provided additional funding when NASA needed it most. The president approved a $185 million supplemental for fiscal year 1979 to address the technical and manufacturing delays, and NASA would receive another $300 million supplemental for the fiscal year 1980 budget. The message from Carter to his OMB officials at this time regarding these supplementals was clear—“find the money.”
What is not consistent with Kraft’s narrative is the notion that Carter bragged about the shuttle to Brezhnev and then felt compelled to follow through with the shuttle’s development for this reason. The 1979 supplemental was formally signed into law by Carter on June 4, 1979, and by then he had already greenlit another supplemental for 1980. These dates are important, because Carter did not meet with Brezhnev in Vienna to sign the SALT II Treaty until June 15.
United States President Jimmy Carter, left, and Leonid Brezhnev, First Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, welcomed journalists to the Soviet Embassy in Vienna, Austria, on June 17, 1979, on the eve of the signing of the SALT II treaty limiting strategic arms.
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AFP/Getty Images
This means Carter could not have “bragged” about the shuttle and then have funded it. However, this does not mean the talks with Brezhnev had zero influence on Carter’s feelings for the space shuttle during the last 18 months of his turbulent presidency.
By 1980, amid double-digit inflation, spiraling gas prices, and Ayatollah Khomeini’s revolution in Iran, the United States was slipping into another recession. As part of that year’s budget process, the president sought broad spending cuts. Administration officials told NASA to find budget cuts of $460 million to $860 million for the coming fiscal year.
But ultimately, NASA’s budget was spared. Heppenheimer’s book says this happened because “Carter exempted the Pentagon from these cutbacks, which meant that the Defense Department could stand fast in the wake of Moscow’s invasion of Afghanistan. This exemption gave Frosch an opening, as he argued that the shuttle should also be spared from cutbacks on national security grounds.” The president agreed.
Effectively, then, the shuttle program received extra funding in 1980 from a president that did not support human spaceflight and a vice president that adamantly opposed it. The funds came during a recession when the rest of the federal government was undergoing significant budget cuts. That is perhaps a greater marvel than the majestic orbiters themselves.
The ultimate source
For some perspective on all of this, Ars reached out to Carter through Steven Hochman, director of research at The Carter Center. He hadn’t heard the Brezhnev-space shuttle story, but he was happy to assist our reporting by bringing some questions to the 39th president of the United States.
Why did the president ultimately support funding the shuttle in its time of need? “I was not enthusiastic about sending humans on missions to Mars or outer space,” Carter told Ars. “But I thought the shuttle was a good way to continue the good work of NASA. I didn’t want to waste the money already invested.”
Carter also confirmed that he did, in fact, discuss the space shuttle and its capabilities with Brezhnev at the SALT II Treaty meetings in Vienna in June 1979. “I did explain to the Soviets that the space shuttle was peaceful, would not carry weapons, and would always land in the US,” Carter explained.
Finally, Hochman reviewed Carter’s schedule and found that the president had met with Frosch four times, including a brief discussion on July 11, 1979 at Camp David with the NASA administrator. This came shortly after the final treaty negotiations in Vienna. Hochman said it would not have been at all surprising if Carter discussed with Frosch that he mentioned the shuttle during the Brezhnev meeting.
From this we can draw a few conclusions—principally that despite some timeline inconsistencies, Kraft’s story appears to be mostly true. The shuttle program was in big trouble and could have been canceled or drastically modified had Carter not stepped in. Moreover, this was not a drawn out process. By all accounts Carter acted swiftly in the shuttle's time of need. One of Carter’s primary motivations in doing so was enforcing the SALT II Treaty and, critically, Carter discussed the shuttle with Brezhnev during the treaty meetings. Important presidential decisions about the shuttle were made before and after the treaty meetings.
Perhaps what stands out most of all is the lasting, yet almost completely forgotten impact Carter had on this country’s space legacy. Despite just a passing interest in human space exploration, Carter ultimately played a pivotal role in ensuring that the longest-flying US spacecraft in history got built. That decision was instrumental, too, in development of the International Space Station. After all, NASA’s primary purpose for the shuttle was to eventually build an orbital station.
As someone who championed peace during his post-presidency, Carter no doubt would welcome the station’s driving idea of building an international consensus to work together in space. And ironically, after the shuttle finally stopped flying in 2011, America would come to rely on Russia to get into space. Today, we work with the very Cold War enemies with whom Carter negotiated arms treaties, contended with in Afghanistan, and vowed to watch closely from the orbital vehicle he shepherded across the finish line.
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