Reaching for the Moon

by Roger D. Launius

  Percentage Change

  FY 60

  $0.500

  FY 61

  $0.964

  93%

  FY 62

  $1.825

  89%

  FY 63

  $3.674

  101%

  FY 64

  $5.100

  39%

  FY 65

  $5.250

  2.9%

  FY 66

  $5.175

  –1.4%

  FY 67

  $4.966

  –4.0%

  FY 68

  $4.587

  –7.6%

  FY 69

  $3.991

  –13%

  FY 70

  $3.746

  –6.1%

  FY 71

  $3.311

  –12%

  Sources: NASA, Aeronautics and Space Report of the President, 1974 Activities (Washington, D.C.: NASA, 1975), appendix E-1 and E-2, 140–141.

  For seven years after Kennedy’s Apollo decision, through October 1968, James Webb politicked, coaxed, cajoled, and maneuvered for NASA in Washington. A longtime Washington insider—the former director of the Bureau of the Budget and undersecretary of state during the Truman administration—he was a master at bureaucratic politics, understanding that it was essentially a system of give and take. For instance, whether the native North Carolinian genuinely believed in the Johnson administration’s civil rights bill that went before Congress in 1964, as a personal favor to the president he lobbied for its passage on Capitol Hill. This secured for him Johnson’s gratitude, which he then used to secure the administration’s backing of NASA’s initiatives. In addition, Webb wielded the money appropriated for Apollo to build up a constituency for NASA that was both powerful and vocal. This type of gritty pragmatism also characterized Webb’s dealings with other government officials and members of Congress throughout his tenure as administrator. When give and take did not work, as was the case on occasion with some members of Congress, Webb used the presidential directive as a hammer to get his way. Usually this proved successful. After Kennedy’s assassination in 1963, moreover, he sometimes appealed for continued political support for Apollo because it represented a fitting tribute to the fallen leader. In the end, through a variety of methods Administrator Webb built a seamless network of political liaisons that brought continued support for and resources to accomplish the Apollo Moon landing on the schedule Kennedy had announced.

  Funding was not the only critical component for Project Apollo. To realize the goal of Apollo under the strict time constraints mandated by the president, personnel had to be mobilized. This took two forms. First, by 1966 the agency’s civil service rolls had grown to 36,000 people from the barely 8,000 employed at NASA in 1958. Additionally, NASA’s leaders made an early decision that they would have to rely upon outside researchers and technicians to complete Apollo, and contractor employees working on the program increased by a factor of 10, from 36,500 in 1960 to 376,700 in 1965 (Table 6). Private industry, research institutions, and universities provided most of the personnel working on the space effort.

  To incorporate the great amount of work undertaken for the project into the formal bureaucracy never seemed a particularly savvy idea, and as a result during the 1960s somewhere between 80 and 90 percent of NASA’s overall budget went for contracts to purchase goods and services from business firms and universities. This reliance on the private sector and universities for the bulk of the effort predated Apollo, originating early in NASA’s history under T. Keith Glennan, in part because of the Eisenhower administration’s mistrust of large government establishments. Although neither Glennan’s successor nor Kennedy shared that mistrust, they found that it was both good politics and the best way of getting Apollo done on the president’s schedule. It was also very nearly the only way to harness talent and institutional resources already in existence in the emerging aerospace industry and the country’s leading research universities.

  TABLE 6

  NASA PERSONNEL MOBILIZATION

  In addition to these other resources, NASA moved quickly during the early 1960s to expand its physical capacity so that it could accomplish Apollo. In 1960 the space agency consisted of a small headquarters in Washington, its three inherited NACA research centers, and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the Goddard Space Flight Center, and the Marshall Space Flight Center. With the advent of Apollo, these installations grew rapidly. In addition, NASA added three facilities specifically to meet the demands of the lunar-landing program. In 1962 it created the Manned Spacecraft Center (renamed the Lyndon B. Johnson Space Center in 1973) near Houston to design the Apollo spacecraft and the launch platform for the lunar lander. This center also became the home of NASA’s astronauts and the site of mission control. NASA then greatly expanded the Launch Operations Center at Cape Canaveral on Florida’s eastern seacoast. Renamed the John F. Kennedy Space Center on November 29, 1963, this installation’s massive and expensive Launch Complex 39 was the site of all Saturn V firings. The spaceport’s Vertical Assembly Building was a huge and expensive forty-six-story structure where the Saturn/Apollo rockets were assembled. Finally, to support the development of the Saturn launch vehicle, in October 1961 NASA created on a Deep South bayou the Mississippi Test Facility, renamed the John C. Stennis Space Center in 1988. The cost of this expansion was great, more than $2.2 billion over the decade, with 90 percent of it expended before 1966.

  The Program Management Concept

  The mobilization of resources was not the only challenge facing those charged with meeting President Kennedy’s goal. NASA had to meld disparate institutional cultures and approaches into an inclusive organization moving along a single unified path. Each NASA installation, university, contractor, and research facility had its own perspective on how to go about the task of accomplishing Apollo. To bring a semblance of order to the program, NASA expanded the “program management” concept borrowed by Glennan in the late 1950s from the military-industrial complex, bringing in military managers to oversee Apollo. The central figure in this process was U.S. Air Force Major General Samuel C. Phillips, the architect of the Minuteman ICBM program before coming to NASA in 1962. Answering directly to the Office of Manned Space Flight at NASA headquarters, which in turn reported to the NASA administrator, Phillips created an omnipotent program office with centralized authority over design, engineering, procurement, testing, construction, manufacturing, spare parts, logistics, training, and operations.

  One of the fundamental tenets of the program management concept was that three critical factors—cost, schedule, and reliability—were interrelated and had to be managed as a group. Many also recognized the consistent interrelation of these factors: if program managers held cost to a specific level, then one of the other two factors, or both of them to a lesser degree, would be adversely affected. The Apollo schedule, dictated by the president, was firm. Since humans were involved in the flights, and since the president had directed that the lunar landing be conducted safely, the program managers placed a heavy emphasis on reliability. Accordingly, Apollo used redundant systems extensively so that failures would be both predictable and minor in consequences. The significance of both of these factors forced the third factor, cost, much higher than might have been the case with a more leisurely lunar program such as had been conceptualized in the latter 1950s. As it was, this was the price paid for success under the Kennedy mandate, and program managers made conscious decisions based on these factors.

  The program management concept was recognized as a critical component of Project Apollo’s success in November 1968, when Science magazine, the publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, observed:

  In terms of numbers of dollars or of men, NASA has not been our largest national undertaking, but in terms of complexity, rate of growth, and technological sophistication it has been unique. . . . It may turn out that [the space program’s] most valuable spin-off of all will be human rathe
r than technological: better knowledge of how to plan, coordinate, and monitor the multitudinous and varied activities of the organizations required to accomplish great social undertakings.

  Understanding the management of complex structures for the successful completion of a multifarious task was an important outgrowth of the Apollo effort.

  This management concept under Phillips orchestrated more than 500 contractors working on both large and small aspects of Apollo. For example, recipients of the prime contracts awarded to industry for the principal components of just the Saturn V included the Boeing Company for the S-IC, first stage; North American Aviation for the S-II, second stage; the Douglas Aircraft Corporation for the S-IVB, third stage; the Rocketdyne Division of North American Aviation for J-2 and F-1 engines; and International Business Machines (IBM) for the Saturn instruments. These prime contractors, with more than 250 subcontractors, provided millions of parts and components for use in the Saturn launch vehicle, all meeting exacting specifications for performance and reliability. The total cost expended on development of the Saturn launch vehicle was $9.3 billion. So huge was the overall Apollo endeavor that NASA’s individual contracts for all things purchased great and small rose from roughly 44,000 in 1960 to almost 300,000 by 1965.

  Getting all the personnel elements, including civil service, industry, and university personnel, to work together challenged the program managers. Various communities within NASA differed over priorities and competed for resources. The two most identifiable groups were the engineers and the scientists. As ideal types, engineers usually worked in teams to build hardware that could by the end of the decade carry out the missions necessary to a successful Moon landing. Their primary goal involved building vehicles that would function reliably within the fiscal resources allocated to Apollo. Again as ideal types, space scientists engaged in pure research and were more concerned with designing experiments that would expand scientific knowledge about the Moon. They also tended to be individualists, unaccustomed to regimentation and unwilling to concede gladly the direction of projects to outside entities. The two groups contended with each other over a great variety of issues associated with Apollo. For instance, the scientists disliked having to configure payloads so that they could meet time, money, or launch vehicle constraints. The engineers, likewise, resented changes to scientific packages added after project definition because these threw their hardware efforts out of kilter. Both had valid concerns, but they had to maintain an uneasy cooperation to accomplish Project Apollo.

  Furthermore, neither the scientific nor the engineering community within NASA was monolithic, and differences within each thrived. Add to these groups representatives from industry, universities, and research facilities, and competition on all levels to further individual scientific and technical areas was inevitable. The NASA leadership generally viewed this pluralism as a positive force within the space program, for it ensured that all sides aired their views and honed their positions to a fine edge. Competition, most people concluded, made for a more precise and viable space-exploration effort. There were winners and losers in this strife, however, and sometimes ill will festered for years. Moreover, if the debates between scientists and engineers, even between scientists or between engineers with differing priorities, became too great and spilled into areas where they were misunderstood, it could be devastating to the conduct of the lunar program. Most important, disagreements between those inside NASA could never be fought out in public settings such as congressional hearings without raising concerns among the rank-and-file public that the presumed experts at NASA might not really know what they were doing. Disagreements, NASA leaders emphasized, needed to be aired and resolved inside the agency and not on the nightly news or in the newspapers. The head of the Apollo program worked hard to keep these factors balanced and to promote order so that NASA could accomplish the presidential directive.

  Another important management issue arose from the agency’s inherited culture of in-house research. Because of the magnitude of Project Apollo, and its compressed schedule, most of the nitty-gritty work had to be done outside NASA by means of contracts. As a result, with a few important exceptions, NASA scientists and engineers did not build flight hardware, or even operate missions. Rather, they planned the program, prepared guidelines for execution, evaluated competing contract bids, and oversaw work accomplished elsewhere. This grated on those NASA personnel oriented toward research, and prompted disagreements over how to carry out the lunar-landing goal. Nor were the complaints just that NASA personnel wanted to be “dirty-handed” engineers; NASA scientists and engineers needed to have enough in-house expertise to ensure program accomplishment. If in-house personnel lacked professional competence on a par with that of the individuals actually doing the work, how could NASA oversee contractors actually creating the hardware and performing the experiments necessary to meet the rigors of the mission?

  One anecdote illustrates this point. The Saturn second stage was built by North American Aviation at its plant at Seal Beach, California, shipped to NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, and there tested to ensure that it met contract specifications. Problems arose on this piece of the Saturn effort, and Wernher von Braun began intensive investigations. Essentially his engineers completely disassembled and examined every part of every stage delivered by North American to ensure that no defects remained. This was an enormously expensive and time-consuming process, grinding the stage’s production schedule almost to a standstill and jeopardizing the presidential timetable.

  When this happened, Webb told von Braun to desist, adding, “We’ve got to trust American industry.” The issue came to a showdown at a meeting where the Marshall rocket team was asked to explain its extreme measures. One of the engineers produced a rag and told Webb, “This is what we find in this stuff.” The contractors, the Marshall engineers believed, required extensive oversight to ensure that they produced the highest-quality work. A compromise emerged that was called the 10 percent rule: 10 percent of all funding for NASA was to be spent to ensure in-house expertise and in the process to check contractor reliability.

  How Do We Go to the Moon?

  One of the critical early management decisions made by NASA was the method of going to the Moon. No controversy in Project Apollo more significantly illustrated the tenor of competing constituencies in NASA than this one. There were three basic approaches that were advanced to accomplish the lunar mission:

  1. Direct ascent called for the construction of a huge booster that launched a spacecraft, sent it on a course directly to the Moon, landed a large vehicle, and sent some part of it back to Earth. The Nova booster project, which was to have been capable of generating up to 40 million pounds of thrust, would have been able to accomplish this feat. Even if other factors had not impaired the possibility of direct ascent, the huge cost and technological sophistication of the Nova rocket quickly ruled out the option and resulted in cancellation of the project early in the 1960s, despite the conceptual simplicity of the direct ascent method. The method had few advocates when serious planning for Apollo began.

  2. Earth-orbit rendezvous was the logical first alternative to the direct ascent approach. It called for the launching of various modules required for the Moon trip into an orbit above Earth, where they would rendezvous, be assembled into a single system, refueled, and sent to the Moon. This could be accomplished using the Saturn launch vehicle already under development by NASA and capable of generating 7.5 million pounds of thrust. A logical byproduct of this approach would be the establishment of a space station in Earth orbit to serve as the lunar mission’s rendezvous, assembly, and refueling point. In part because of this prospect, a space station emerged as part of the long-term planning of NASA as a jumping-off place for the exploration of space. This method of reaching the Moon, however, was also fraught with challenges, notably finding methods of maneuvering and rendezvousing in space, assembling components in a weightless environment, and safely refuelin
g spacecraft.

  3. Lunar-orbit rendezvous entailed sending the entire lunar spacecraft up in one launch. It would head to the Moon, enter into orbit, and dispatch a small lander to the lunar surface. It was the simplest of the three methods, in terms of both development and operational costs, but it was risky. Since rendezvous was taking place in lunar, instead of Earth, orbit, there was no room for error; any slipup, and the crew could not get home. Moreover, some of the trickiest course corrections and maneuvers had to be done after the spacecraft had been committed to a circumlunar flight. The Earth-orbit rendezvous approach kept all the options for the mission open longer than the lunar-orbit rendezvous mode.

  Inside NASA, advocates of the various approaches contended over the method of flying to the Moon while the all-important clock that Kennedy had started continued to tick. It was critical that a decision not be delayed, because the mode of flight in part dictated the spacecraft to be developed. While NASA engineers could proceed with building a launch vehicle, the Saturn, and define the basic components of the spacecraft—a habitable crew compartment and a jettisonable service module containing propulsion, electronics, and other expendable systems—they could not proceed much beyond rudimentary conceptions without a mode decision. The NASA Rendezvous Panel at Langley Research Center, headed by John C. Houbolt, pressed hard for the lunar-orbit rendezvous as the most expeditious means of accomplishing the mission. Using sophisticated technical and economic arguments, over a period of months in 1961 and 1962 Houbolt’s group advocated and persuaded the rest of NASA’s leadership that lunar-orbit rendezvous was not the risky proposition that it had earlier seemed.

  The last to give in was von Braun and his associates at the Marshall Center. This group favored the Earth-orbit rendezvous because the direct ascent approach was technologically unfeasible before the end of the 1960s, because it provided a logical rationale for a space station, and because it ensured an extension of the Marshall workload (something that was always important to center directors competing inside the agency for personnel and other resources). At an all-day meeting on June 7, 1962, at Marshall, NASA leaders met to hash out these differences, with the debate getting heated at times. After more than six hours of discussion, von Braun finally gave in to the lunar-orbit rendezvous mode, saying that its advocates had demonstrated adequately its feasibility and that any further contention would jeopardize the president’s timetable.