Moon Lander: How We Developed the Apollo Lunar Module (Smithsonian History of Aviation and Spaceflight)

by Kelly, Thomas J.

  The next evening I was finishing dinner with Joan and the kids when a call came in from Saul. He had safely delivered our proposal two hours before the deadline. Hallelujah! At last it was over. I looked forward to taking the next two weeks off, using some long-deferred vacation time. After a few days at home, Joan and I would get away by ourselves for a week in Williamsburg, Virginia, and the Blue Ridge Mountains while her parents stayed in our house with the children. Sleeping late and seeing the outside world again after being sealed in the time tunnel. I could hardly wait.

  4

  The Fat Lady Sings

  Three weeks after the LM proposal was submitted I flew to Houston on the luxurious Grumman Gulfstream with the LM program team and some of the company’s senior executives to brief NASA on the “salient features” of our proposal and to answer their questions. The briefing, “orals” before an invisible audience in a darkened auditorium, were an ordeal, but thanks to thorough rehearsals we acquitted ourselves well.

  On the trip down and back I found that Clint Towl and Bill Schwendler were almost as excited about going to the Moon as I was. In an expansive moment on the return flight, Schwendler promised to fly us down for dinner at Antoine’s, the renowned New Orleans restaurant, if we won the contract. Towl was aghast and assured us that this was so counter to Schwendler’s conservative nature that he would never follow through, even if we did win. Towl knew his friend and colleague well—no more was ever said about Bill Schwendler’s promise.

  About two weeks after the orals our administrative planning was abruptly halted by a phone call from Bob Mullaney summoning me and other project leaders to drop everything for a “fire drill,” our expression for a sudden emergency task that must take priority over all others. (Now more smoothly referred to by management consultants as “crisis management.”)

  The fire drill was a list of questions from the NASA Source Evaluation Board that had to be answered within one day. It was not just an exercise but an attempt by NASA to gain additional information they needed in evaluating our proposal. They were serious questions, probing our plans and capability for doing the work and our interpretation of certain technical requirements. Ferdman got the deadline extended, and at his urging, Gavin decided to assemble a small group and deliver the answers in person. In less than forty-eight hours we wrote a thirty-page miniproposal and handed it to an astonished Bob Piland, head of the NASA evaluation team in Houston. We had the opportunity to discuss some of our answers with Piland and restate the main themes of our proposal. On the flight back to New York we were giddy at the thought that an incredible adventure appeared almost within our reach, and we fantasized about its possibilities. Mullaney, Ferdman, and I fairly vibrated in our seats with suppressed excitement.

  After the orals and the fire drill, it was difficult to get back into the routine work of planning how we would perform the job if we won. Rumors swirled daily, alternately tantalizing us and dashing our hopes. We tried to ignore them, telling one another, “It’s not over until the fat lady sings.” But it was no use; I for one could not concentrate without drifting into fantasy, imagining how wonderful it would be to win this prize sought by all the giants of aerospace, and to design and build a manned spaceship to land on the Moon. What would it look like, and how could we ever design and build it in time? My colleagues and I were suspended in a time warp of anticipation, drifting from rumor to rumor in a fuzzy haze, believing that things would turn out well for us.

  The rumors of the prior week focused on election day, Tuesday, 6 November 1962. Some said the LM contract would be awarded before the election to gain favor with voters in the selected state and region; others maintained it would be delayed until after the election to avoid disappointing the losers. Election day arrived with still no word, so half the rumor was proven false.

  At eight o’clock the next morning I was back in my Preliminary Design cubicle looking over the material I needed for the day’s planning effort. I had enough information on staffing and space requirements for the first six months after go-ahead to meet with LM program administrator Art Gross and firm up floor plans and building space commitments. Because our staffing buildup assumed a 1 December 1962 go-ahead, we were initially confined to space on the main Engineering floor in Plant 5. When the new Plant 25 Space Engineering Center opened in February 1963 we would have plenty of room for the first two years’ worth of growth, but the transition from our start-up in Plant 5 to permanent quarters in Plant 25 required careful planning to avoid breaking the momentum of program activity and growth.1

  I was waiting for Art Gross to arrive for our meeting when Erick Stern, grinning from ear to ear, entered my office, stuck out his hand, and said, “Congratulations!”

  “For what?” I replied.

  “We won! I just heard.”

  About that time my phone rang; it was Joe Gavin. “I’ve just been informed that Clint Towl will be receiving a call from our local congressman in a few minutes,” he said. “It’s not quite official yet, but it sounds like we’ve won! Congratulations! I’ll call back when it’s official.”

  I had no sooner relayed Joe’s message to Erick and others who had gathered around my desk with excited, smiling faces when Joe Gavin called again. It was official: we won! Representative John Wydler (R-N.Y.), Sixth District, called Clint Towl and read him the official announcement press release, which was being sent to Grumman immediately. Joe thanked me for everything I had done to make victory possible and asked me to extend his appreciation to the entire LM Engineering team. Even before I finished my conversation with Joe, my broad smile and “thumbs up” told the story to the growing crowd around my desk, and a rousing cheer shook the dusty corners of the PD mezzanine. I circled through the area shaking hands and slapping backs, hardly daring to believe the news.

  The next few days were a blur of activity and excitement. There was an “all hands” meeting with our corporate leaders in which Clint Towl, Bill Schwendler, George Titterton, and Joe Gavin thanked the LM project team for their successful efforts on the proposal and promised help and support for the challenging times ahead. They hosted a celebratory lunch at the Grumman executive table at the nearby Beau Sejour2 restaurant for the LM project, where toasts were drunk in ginger ale (no alcohol, in the Grumman tradition that work and drink did not mix), and the corporate leaders expressed their intense pride and pleasure that Grumman would be part of the ongoing national adventure. Bill Schwendler came close to making a speech, offering his congratulations and promising support as needed.

  There was a frantic after-hours party for the LM proposal team at the nearby Holiday Manor catering hall, where plenty of alcohol fueled a wild victory celebration. During the day there were dozens of congratulatory phone calls from the NASA people we knew, our RCA teammates, and other subcontractors who had supported our proposal. Norm Ryker called me from North American, the prime contractor for the Apollo command-and-service module spacecraft, welcoming Grumman to the Apollo team. We had arrived into the elite Apollo fraternity.

  NASA asked us to come to Houston in mid-November to begin contract negotiations. We needed to bring all our proposal backup data and our experts in every area of the program. The negotiations were expected to take several weeks. We put Art Gross in charge of the negotiation team logistics, and he took over in his authoritative fashion. Within a few days we identified a Grumman negotiation team of about eighty people, and Gross supplied them with airline tickets, rental cars (car-pooled four to one), cash advances, and hotel reservations. Someone thought to ask the hotels if the fact that two of our people were black posed any problem, and in the Houston of 1962, it did. One of the hotels, not wanting to lose our business, said that our black members could reserve a room provided they avoided the lobby and the dining areas. The hotel said that, if necessary, it could “fix them something to eat out in the kitchen” (!). Gross phoned several hotels and motels, progressively more distant from our NASA destination, until he found one that was color blind: the Sherat
on Lincoln Hotel in downtown Houston, into which he booked our whole team.

  NASA had its own logistics problems with the LM negotiations. The campus of the Manned Spacecraft Center at Clear Lake was still under construction and would not be ready for several more months, and the barrackslike World War II buildings at Ellington Field were filled with the burgeoning NASA Apollo program staff. All available speculative office space in southeast Houston had already been leased by NASA, so they had to be ingenious to find more.

  NASA located a real estate developer who was building a large garden apartment complex off the Gulf Freeway in southeast Houston, next to the just completed Gulfgate Shopping Mall. They leased two apartment buildings that were completed structurally but not finished on the interior and had the developer make them into temporary offices. They had water, electricity, air conditioning and heating, telephones, bathrooms, and basic interior white paint but lacked carpets and flooring, kitchens, and many of the doors, fixtures, and decorations. These finishing touches to make the buildings into attractive apartments would be added later, after their use as a makeshift office complex had ended. Openings were cut into some of the walls between apartments to permit interior access and circulation throughout the building, and the parking area adjacent to the buildings was temporarily paved with crushed oyster shells from the Gulf of Mexico. A permanent asphalt surface would come later, after the traffic of heavy construction equipment subsided.

  We were greeted at Gulfgate Gardens by Charles Frick, Apollo spacecraft program manager, and many other members of the NASA LM Negotiation Team. Gulfgate Gardens was a large, not unattractive complex of two-story red-brick residential apartments, with white architectural trim and white shutters on the windows. The buildings contained ten or twelve duplex units, each with a separate front door, and were widely spaced, surrounded by lawns and young, sticklike trees and shrubbery, all newly planted.

  NASA had two adjacent buildings on a quiet street in the interior of the complex. When we arrived, furniture trucks were parked outside the NASA buildings and workers were busily unloading the desks, chairs, and file cabinets NASA had rented. Inside was mostly antiseptic white, but there were clumps of construction debris in the corners here and there. Wires dangling from ceiling electrical boxes and covers missing from wall switches and plugs emphasized the unfinished nature of the place. The rooms had been assigned to some thirty specialty teams that would fact-find and negotiate each area of the proposal. The NASA and Grumman team members paired off and got acquainted in their new quarters.

  I joined Gavin, Mullaney, and Rathke in a meeting with the NASA leadership. NASA said they wanted to review our backup data showing the detailed basis for our proposal, including technical approach; program, manufacturing, test, logistics, and staffing plans; subcontract plans; and manpower, cost, and schedule estimates. After this joint fact finding we would discuss changes to the proposal, which would become the negotiated basis of the LM contract. NASA thought this process should take about two weeks and targeted completion the day before Thanksgiving. They asked, however, that we plan to remain in Houston over Thanksgiving and into December in case the negotiations took longer than expected. We agreed to a weekday schedule with counterpart meetings beginning at 10:00 A.M. and continuing nominally until 5:00 P.M.; this allowed each side to hold summary status meetings beginning at 7:00 or 8:00 A.M. and use the evenings when necessary for continued counterpart discussions and for separate problem resolution and status accounting on each side. Saturdays would be used as necessary; Sundays would be days off. Before launching into this demanding regimen, NASA invited the combined negotiating teams to a “kick-off” luncheon at a nearby Gulfgate restaurant.

  The NASA LM Negotiation Team was led by Bill Rector, LM program manager for the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office (ASPO), with Dave Lang, MSC contracts director, as the team deputy Rector had only been with NASA a few months, having been recruited by Charles Frick, his former boss at General Dynamics, shortly after Frick joined NASA in January 1962. Rector had been a key member of General Dynamic’s Apollo spacecraft proposal team in 1961, and wanting to be part of the program even though his company had lost, he decided to join Apollo with NASA. I had met him at Apollo bidder’s conferences and technical society meetings during the prior two years. He was a friendly, direct fellow with an aerospace engineer’s understanding of technical and program details and the intricacies of doing business with the federal government. I felt a basic rapport with him as one who empathized with the contractor’s problems and concerns. Rector was a tall man with wavy brown hair, a boyish-looking freckled face, a snub nose, and wide, round eyes, which he hid behind owlish horn-rimmed glasses. I thought he looked younger than me, but we were probably about the same age. Because he had only been with NASA a short time, Rector relied heavily on Lang and other NASA veterans for advice, but he was quite capable of making his own decisions. Major agreements and the overall negotiated contract would have to be approved by Bob Gilruth, MSC director, and Frick, as well as by George Mueller, Apollo program director at NASA Headquarters, and his staff.

  At lunch we relaxed with the NASA people with whom we would be intensely involved for years to come. We learned a little bit about them as individuals, and about how they reacted to Grumman’s LM proposal. In general they thought our proposal was ingenious and showed great knowledge of the mission and its technical problems but was naive and simplistic in a number of areas. It promised to be an interesting negotiation.

  Bob Carbee, Arnold Whitaker, Erick Stern, and I at first paired off with Owen Maynard and his chief assistants to review the overall technical approach. NASA explained to us that the LM’s requirements, mission plan, and space environment would continue to evolve as NASA and Grumman worked together closely for the next several months leading to the LM mockup review. NASA, therefore, was not buying the preliminary LM design that Grumman proposed but planned to develop the LM’s design together with Grumman. NASA would provide direction and leadership and share their knowledge of space engineering; Grumman was responsible for developing, implementing, and testing the complete detailed design. True responsibility for the LM’s success or failure would be shared between NASA and Grumman and would depend upon the cooperative efforts and capabilities of both. But for contractual purposes, Grumman’s tasks would be clearly defined by technical performance specifications, cost targets, and schedules. Our task in the negotiations was to envision how the LM was likely to evolve in the next year, to rough out a revised technical approach, a program plan and cost and schedule estimates based upon that vision, and to use this as the basis of the initial LM contract.

  My colleagues and I had not thought of these negotiations in such specific terms before, and initially we followed NASA’s lead. For example, Owen Maynard questioned our fixed, five-legged landing gear. NASA considered it inevitable that the LM’s weight would increase substantially, requiring a greater footprint width of the landing gear that would necessitate a folding, deployable gear. They suggested that our technical approach be changed and cost and schedule estimates increased to account for the design and development of the more complex deployable landing gear. My proposal “rule beater” was very short-lived.

  We entered into the spirit of things, and before long the Grumman people were questioning NASA about the validity of some of our own proposal assumptions. After a few days everything in the proposal was up for grabs as we jointly took on the challenge of guessing what the LM design and program plan would look like after a year or more of intensive development. It was an unusual negotiation for a government agency and a contractor—repeatedly the government pointed out where Grumman’s estimates were incomplete or oversimplified and the more likely approach would be more complex and expensive. Contrary to the usual practice, NASA was negotiating the price up, not down!

  At our morning summary meetings we learned that these upward negotiations were occurring throughout the program. In some areas, such as ground-support equipment and
logistics, NASA considered that we had grossly underestimated the scope of the job and ignored major areas of required GSE and logistic support. They also realized that we did not understand how NASA conducted factory and development testing on the Apollo program. We had little knowledge, for example, of the functioning and requirements of the automated checkout equipment (ACE), which was developed by General Electric and would be installed and operated by them at Grumman’s factory in Bethpage and in the LM checkout area at Kennedy Space Center. The rigor and discipline with which NASA documented every action on the factory floor during spacecraft assembly and checkout also was beyond our ken. We never imagined that NASA required written step-by-step procedures, witnessed by an inspector, whenever a spacecraft or any flight hardware was touched, as in this procedure for attaching a support clamp to tubing:

  Step 45. Place support clamp P/N AN269972 on water line P/N LDW 390–22173–3 at location shown in sketch.

  Step 46. Verify that rubber grommet on clamp is properly seated with no metal touching the tubing.

  Step 47. Align holes on clamp with hole in structure P/N LDW 270–13994–1….

  It was inevitable that requirements such as this, which we dimly perceived after NASA pointed them out, would have a major impact on cost and schedule estimates.

  As the negotiations proceeded the scope of the LM job was rapidly growing. Using their experience in manned spaceflight with Projects Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, NASA was very helpful in identifying areas of underestimation in our proposal, and in visualizing the form in which growth might occur. There were other areas, however, in which even NASA had limited insight: such as the nature of the lunar surface, the difficulty of cislunar navigation and lunar landing, the limits of astronaut performance on the Moon, and the requirements of the space and lunar environments. In such cases our discussions produced consensus speculation, inevitably more complicated and difficult for the LM.