It became obvious that we were not going to finish by the Thanksgiving deadline. There were simply too many areas of the proposal to be redefined and reestimated. We told our team members to prepare for a longer haul; with luck and hard work we would be home before Christmas. As gently as possible we broke the news to our loved ones back home.
I was getting to know some of the NASA leaders with whom I would be working closely for the next few years. As NASA’s LM Engineering manager, Owen Maynard was my direct counterpart. He was a young engineer from Canada, about my age, with a friendly, outgoing personality and an understated, dry sense of humor that made him a pleasure to deal with. Maynard was of medium height and build, with brown hair and narrow squinting eyes that often showed a mischievous twinkle. After becoming accustomed to the soft southern accents or southwestern drawls of most of the NASA people, Maynard’s clipped Canadian speech sounded very different. His sentences were frequently punctuated with “Eh?” (rising inflection), which was not a question but a pause or acknowledgment, roughly equivalent to a New Yorker’s “uh huh” or “y’know.” The words “oot” (out) and “aboot” (about) also signaled his Canadian background. Of course, Maynard thought that the Grumman “Noo Yawkers” spoke with strange accents, too, which he dryly let us know when we were rude enough to comment on his speech patterns.
Not only his pleasant personality but also his experience and technical background made working with Maynard rewarding. He had worked on aircraft design at A. V. Roe in Canada before coming to the United States and joining NASA at Langley, Virginia. He was one of the early members of Bob Gilruth’s Space Task Group, working with Caldwell Johnson under the brilliant and innovative Max Faget. Maynard and Johnson had performed most of STG’s in-house studies of alternate lunar landing mission concepts and were early disciples of John Houbolt’s LOR approach. They developed STG’s own preliminary LM design, which the LM Source Evaluation Board used as a standard against which to evaluate the contractors’ design proposals. During the negotiations Maynard refused to show us the group’s LM design because he thought we might be unduly influenced by it and our own inventiveness would be suppressed. I thought that differences between NASA’s in-house LM design and the Grumman proposal provided the basis for many of the technical questions and concerns that NASA raised in our discussions.
Dave Lang, MSC contracts director, was also pleasant to deal with. He was a tall man with a craggy face, jet black hair slicked back, bushy black eyebrows, and the wise and wary look of a professional poker player. He favored cowboy boots, bolo ties, and a white Stetson hat, which, combined with his Texas-Oklahoma drawl, made him seem to me the quintessential south-westerner. Although he exuded an air of shrewdness, he was so friendly and helpful that it was impossible not to like him. When called in to mediate a disagreement between Grumman and NASA negotiators, he sought a commonsense compromise that left both parties at least partly satisfied. Increasingly our management team requested that Lang attend significant NASA-Grumman meetings because of the positive contributions he made to their outcome. Jim Neal, NASA’s LM contracts manager, reported to Lang and followed his boss’s constructive approach to negotiation and problem resolution.
Early in Thanksgiving week the NASA people invited their Grumman counterparts to share Thanksgiving dinner with them in their homes. Bill Rathke and I were invited to Jim Neal’s, where we enjoyed a warm, sunny Texas afternoon in their ranch-style house with Jim, his wife, and their two young girls. We wistfully described our families back home and feasted on turkey with all the fixings. Afterward, we watched football and played on the lawn with the Neal children. This warm gesture by NASA helped create a feeling among us “Grummies” that we were a welcome, valued part of the Apollo program.
As the scope of the job grew, the planning that we had forced ourselves to do became invaluable. Our staffing, office space, and equipment requirements were continually revised upward, and many Grumman meetings were devoted to updating these estimates with Carbee, Whitaker, Stern, and the LM section managers. We also discussed our approach to systems engineering for the LM to comply with program requirements.
Systems engineering was a logical methodology for quantitatively analyzing mission requirements and breaking them into subsets for assignment to systems and subsystems within the spacecraft or supporting ground complex. The systems were designed in response to this array of mission and systems requirements, and its performance was calculated and later verified by tests. A standardized method was used to diagram the physical and functional performance of systems and their interactions and dependencies. Systems performance was documented against requirements and updated with test results. Detailed control of the spacecraft’s physical configuration was an essential part of the systems engineering process. The “as designed,” “as built,” “as tested,” and “as flown” configurations were documented down to the smallest part and rigorously controlled throughout the life cycle of a spacecraft.
Stern built on his experience at Arma to make himself an expert in systems engineering, one of a few at Grumman. This alone made him invaluable to me on LM, because NASA had invoked the air force’s systems engineering approach wholesale for the Apollo program. Stern brought far more than expertise, however; he had engineering insight that allowed him to quickly deconstruct a complex problem into its essential components and then suggest ways of analyzing possible solutions.
No area of our proposal was more severely criticized by NASA than ground-support equipment. Dick Spinner, our GSE project engineer, took a personal drubbing from NASA for what they considered a poorly conceived, grossly underestimated GSE program. I worked closely with him to reconstruct a more complete version. He needed much reassurance to regain his confidence after NASA’s harsh comments. I told him he had done the best any of us could have done, using his experience with support equipment for naval aircraft in the absence of direct knowledge of spacecraft support requirements. He looked at me dubiously, his round face etched with self-doubt, and reluctantly returned to his outspread worksheet.
A major aspect of the negotiations was redefinition of the LM program plan, including schedules and deliverables. NASA declared that our proposal did not contain enough test articles, which were nonflyable mockups or partially functional LMs used for specialized tests of individual or combined systems. Our proposal contained a full-sized mockup, two propulsion test articles (ascent and descent systems), a guidance and navigation simulator, and an antenna test mockup, in addition to the ten flight LMs required by NASA’s request for proposals. With NASA’s guidance we expanded the propulsion test articles to include both heavyweight “boiler-plate” and flight-weight models, added a full-sized metal electrical/electronic systems test article for functional and electromagnetic interference (EMI) testing in a copper screen room, and a full-sized thermal test article to be man-rated and tested inside the large space thermal vacuum chamber at NASA Houston. Also added to the deliverables list were boiler-plate mass simulations of the LM to be flown as ballast on Saturn booster development tests. A number series was established for LM test articles (LTAs) and test models (TMs) to distinguish them from flight-worthy LMs and mockups (Ms). These additions were costed and scheduled as the month of December 1962 flew by.
NASA also wanted changes to our subcontracting plans. RCA had mounted a major effort in support of Grumman’s LM proposal and was rewarded by being proposed for a major share of the work. We offered them to NASA as a “subprime,” responsible for complete subsystems that would contain many assemblies and components, some of which RCA would buy rather than make. NASA felt this was unnecessarily complicated and would add cost and retard decision making. They also were concerned that it might dilute Grumman’s accountability for the end product.
NASA wanted RCA out of the GSE area, insisting that Grumman take full responsibility. The acceptance checkout equipment would be supplied by GE under direct contract with NASA, and for other systems NASA wanted commonality with command-and
-service-module GSE wherever possible. They further demanded that Grumman take back the avionics systems integration role we had proposed delegating to RCA. In NASA’s view, systems integration was the technical heart of the project and must be performed by the prime contractor.
None of this went down well with RCA’s LM manager, Frank Gardiner. Gardiner was an MIT graduate and had served in the U.S. Navy in the Pacific Fleet and at the Bureau of Aeronautics. He was tall, with wavy salt-and-pepper hair and a tanned, angular face. He had the unusual habit of pushing his handkerchief up his shirtsleeve or coat sleeve, where it remained partly visible. It made me think he was a conjurer and would someday pull a rabbit or something else amazing out of his sleeve. I would not have wanted to play poker with him. Despite his riverboat gambler image, I found that Gardiner was straightforward and a man of his word. During our studies and proposal he was effective in unifying RCA’s efforts in support of Grumman across several divisions at different locations, and he was helpful on technical issues, especially in radar and electronics.
NASA also disagreed with our choice of subcontractors for the environmental control system and the fuel cells. Our competitive selections had been very close, but in both cases we had selected another company over the existing supplier for the command and service modules. (We chose Pratt and Whitney for ECS and Hamilton Standard for fuel cells, the reverse of the CSM lineup.) NASA asked us to update the competition for the two top-ranking companies, adding a requirement to maximize commonality with CSM equipment. In a two-week frenzy of activity we obtained revised bids from the subcontractors involved and changed our selections to the CSM suppliers of these systems.
The summary management meetings with the NASA negotiators grew longer as we focused on reaching agreement on the revised program plan, technical approach, and cost and schedule estimates. On 23 December 1962, Dave Lang offered Grumman a definitive LM contract through October 1968 valued at $385 million. Grumman’s proposed contract price was $345 million; the negotiations had increased the estimated program cost to NASA by more than 11 percent. Gavin was not ready to agree to NASA’s proposed cost number until we had more time to compare the increased work scope that had resulted from the negotiations with the added cost allowances.
Joe Gavin recalled that he was the last to leave Gulfgate Gardens to go home for Christmas. Lang was still pressing him to agree to NASA’s offer, saying it was the best Grumman would ever get, but he demurred to consider it further.3
We booked what flights were available on Christmas Eve and headed for home. What a wonderful relief to be back with my family again, enjoying the happy holiday season with Joan and our four little boys! Joan had our house beautifully decorated with colorful wreaths, garlands, lights, and ornaments. Her loving welcome and the boys’ smiles, hugs, and excitement made me wonder why I had stayed so long in Texas.
On my first day back at work in Bethpage internal battles ensued over the proposed separate LM program “clock number.” In the LM proposal Grumman committed to a management innovation: the LM program staff was to be “projectized” by assigning all LM employees to a separate personnel clock number. Joe Gavin was vice president-LM program, a corporate officer dedicated to LM with direct control of the people and resources needed. The proposal described Grumman’s LM program organization as a “single-product company” within the corporation. This approach assured NASA that their program would receive equal attention within a historically navy-oriented company. It was modeled after projectized organizations that evolved in the Atlas, Polaris, and other ballistic missile programs at West Coast aircraft companies to satisfy customers’ demands for “separate but equal” control over personnel and resources.
The LM clock number was a source of internal friction between the LM program and corporate engineering organizations even before the proposal was submitted. Now the Engineering establishment knew that it was for real, not just a possibility NASA had pressed us hard for assurances that they and the LM project would have real control over internal priorities and people versus Grumman’s entrenched U.S. Navy programs. They made us explain in detail how the projectized LM program organization would work, and how it would draw support from the rest of the company. We felt that we had little room for concessions in our internal negotiations with the Engineering Department.
In meetings with Engineering Department heads and project engineers we explained the reasons for the new organizational approach (our NASA customer demanded no less) and how we thought it could work to the benefit of all. The heads were divided in opinion: some were willing to give it a try, and even saw potential gain in providing special training and equipment for space engineering versus aircraft; others were unalterably opposed because they believed it undermined their authority. The issue was settled in mid-January when Vice President of Engineering Dick Hutton and Chief Technical Engineer Grant Hedrick assembled the Engineering Department management, with Rathke and me present, and directed them to cooperate with the LM project organization as we had defined it. This relieved a great burden from my mind, allowing me and Rathke to concentrate on designing and developing the LM.
Although the clock number issue created much discord within Grumman Engineering, we also felt respect growing for the LM program within the company. Eight aerospace companies had bid for the LM, and by winning this hotly contested prize Grumman had gained greatly in prestige, business base, and future competitiveness. Within Grumman we were no longer perceived as oddball “space cadets” but as a major part of the company’s future.
Thanks to a coincidence, word spread quickly at Grumman and on Long Island about the Apollo program. I served on the program committee of the Long Island section of the aerospace professional association, the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA). Before Grumman’s LM proposal preparation began I made arrangements with NASA for air force major Dick Henry, who was assigned to the Apollo program office in NASA Headquarters in Washington, D.C., to speak on the Apollo program at an AIAA dinner meeting to be held at Grumman-Bethpage in November 1962. When the long-planned day arrived, I was not able to attend because I was in Houston for the negotiations. Due to the timing—two weeks after the announcement of the LM award to Grumman—the response was overwhelming. An average Long Island AIAA dinner meeting drew fifty to sixty attendees; this one had more than five hundred reservation requests.
Grumman decided to accommodate all who wanted to come, seating about three hundred people in our largest speaker-equipped cafeteria, the overflow watching on closed-circuit TV in a second cafeteria. Many of the attendees were from local aerospace suppliers and machine shops, wondering how they could get some LM business from Grumman. For them the Grumman Procurement Department announced that a lunar module supplier day would be held at Grumman as soon as the LM program’s needs were better defined. Local press and TV also attended Major Henry’s briefing, and the widespread publicity attracted a flood of job seekers to Grumman’s employment office, helping us to hire skilled people to staff the LM program.
The LM program became the talk of not only Grumman but also all Long Island. Neighbors and acquaintances went out of their way to congratulate me and to wish Grumman luck on the new venture. I knew we had arrived, however, when one day in mid-January I went onto the Engineering floor to look at the area that was being set aside as interim space for LM. There in a large side corridor I could scarcely believe what I saw: tall stacks of brand-new IBM Selectrics in their cartons, reserved for the LM program! Recalling how I had scrounged to get three of those machines to write the proposal, I was astonished. I did not stop bragging within Grumman about that discovery for weeks.
On 14 January 1963 Gilruth visited Joe Gavin at Bethpage. They resolved the outstanding negotiation items and agreed upon a price and final contract wording. NASA then issued direction to Grumman to proceed with LM development. We were on our way! The contract was not formally signed until early March, at a revised cost figure of $387.9 million.4
A
fter the announcement of the LM contract award to Grumman by NASA, we received friendly overtures at all management levels from North American Aviation, which had been chosen a year earlier as the Apollo spacecraft contractor.5 North American Aviation was responsible for designing and developing the Apollo spacecraft, consisting of the command and service modules, and for integrating the lunar module into the complete Apollo spacecraft stack and ensuring compatibility of the spacecraft with the launch vehicle.6 North American Aviation designed and built the spacecraft/LM adapter, a truncated conical structural shell that housed the LM atop the Saturn booster at launch and upon which the CSM was mounted. They developed the launch escape system (LES), with its solid rocket and tower of tubular struts, the purpose of which was to snatch the CM with its astronauts safely away from the Saturn if it exploded before or shortly after launch. Together with NASA-Houston, they planned the Little Joe 2 solid-rocket program to flight-test the CM’s parachute recovery system and the LES.
North American Aviation was unquestionably the senior partner in the Apollo spacecraft development team, consisting of North American Aviation (CSM and spacecraft integration), Grumman (LM), MIT Instrumentation Laboratory (spacecraft guidance and navigation), and General Electric (Apollo reliability and quality assurance [R&QA] and ACE). NAA was the first aerospace contractor selected for the Apollo spacecraft and was a much larger company than Grumman, and we were very pleased by their welcoming attitude.
Moon Lander: How We Developed the Apollo Lunar Module (Smithsonian History of Aviation and Spaceflight) Page 7