In July 1968, NASA's Apollo Applications Program (AAP) was suffering another of its annual deep budget cuts. Despite this broad hint that ambitious post-Apollo space projects would not receive support, NASA continued planning a post-AAP Saturn V-launched Space Station that would serve many different experiment disciplines. Against this backdrop, some proposed lower-cost alternative station concepts. Bellcomm engineers, for example, proposed a series of four temporary "specialist" stations in place of NASA's single multidisciplinary one. Their program would draw heavily from the successful Gemini Program.