Apollo: The Race to the Moon (20 page)

The twist to this story is that Houston was by all accounts a fine place to put the Manned Spacecraft Center. “Moving it to Houston was magnificent,” said the same person who refused the subscription to the Houston newspaper. “We got away from the old fogies. We got down there and created a whole new thing with a bunch of twenty-and thirty-year-olds. Holy smokes, that move to Houston is what made the program.”

Some of the selection criteria had been absurd (especially the one about “water access,” which was unnecessary and eliminated otherwise attractive landlocked sites), but one feature of Houston that wasn’t on the list turned out to be crucial: Houston was about halfway between the coasts, only three hours from North American in Los Angeles or M.I.T. in Cambridge, Massachusetts. And if the climate was scorching hot, Hobby Airport in Houston didn’t get snowbound or clouded over in the way that, say, Stapleton Airport in Denver did—not a trivial point for people who were to live on airplanes for the next several years.

As to the most obvious question of all—why not just put the Manned Spacecraft Center at the Cape?—the answer is that NASA didn’t want the facilities of the M.S.C. at the Cape. The launch facilities had little to do with the work of the Manned Spacecraft Center. The flight controllers spent their time preparing for and running flights. The people in the engineering and design division and the program offices spent their time working at drafting tables or in laboratories or traveling to visit contractors—many of whom were on the West Coast, a continent away from Canaveral. When the astronauts trained, they used simulators, and the people they needed to talk to before, during, and after the flight weren’t the launch teams, but the flight-control people.

It must be added that Houston helped its own case considerably when the newcomers arrived. One longtime Virginian vividly remembered his first startled impression of Houston, that everything out there—the houses, the stores, the cars, the streets—glistened. And Houston piled on hospitality in Texas-sized portions. The old N.A.C.A. people kept comparing it with the indifference of the Hamptonians toward Langley. “They didn’t think we were worth schmatz back in Hampton, Virginia,” mused one of them. “In Houston, there were big billboards welcoming us. This little jerkwater town hadn’t cared for us at all and the sixth-biggest city in the U.S.A. was welcoming us.” Houston really was, after all, a pretty good place to put the Manned Spacecraft Center.

Shea’s mandate from Brainerd Holmes was twofold. He was supposed to wring a mode decision out of the centers. And he was supposed to do it in a way that helped unify NASA. As things stood, the tensions among the centers—and the erstwhile Space Task Group was now a full-fledged center—were terrible. They were united only in their mutual distrust of Washington and the new breed of systems engineers who seemed to be taking over.

Joe Shea knew that he was a symbol of this new order, so he set off in early February to visit the centers to try to build alliances and allay fears. If the folks down in Huntsville and Houston were worried that Shea was going to build a Washington empire, he would defuse this anxiety by peopling his own staff with personnel from the centers—a few from Houston, a few from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, a few from Marshall, a few from Lewis. They wouldn’t have to come to Washington. They would report to Shea, they would be his technical resource, but they would remain at the centers, under the eyes of the centers. It sounded to him like a great idea.

He went first to Marshall to meet Wernher von Braun. It was Shea’s first personal contact with him. Von Braun was gracious and courteous to the newcomer from Washington, Shea recalled. Both von Braun and his chief of staff, Eberhard Rees, briefed Shea on what Marshall was doing, took him on a tour of the Center, listened to what he wanted to do in Washington. And when Shea asked for some technical support from Marshall, they said fine, and came through with Arthur Rudolph, one of von Braun’s most senior people. “Overall it was a nice day and the opening up of what turned out to be a good relationship, Shea said. He left Marshall impressed by von Braun’s grasp of the program and a little surprised to find that von Braun wasn’t just a pretty face after all. Shea flew on to Houston to meet Gilruth.

Gilruth and von Braun played the same generic role at their respective centers but interpreted it in different ways. Each was the paterfamilias, presiding over a family. Each of them was indulgent to a degree. But whereas von Braun was the German father who expected everyone to be at the dinner table every night to give an account of his day, Gilruth was more like the American dad who was satisfied if they called home now and then. When Shea proposed his plan, it was not Gilruth’s style to call in Max Faget and tell him that he thought it was a good idea and Max should take care of it. The technical resources that Shea wanted were under Faget, and therefore Shea should go talk to him. Shea did.

It was the first encounter between these two outsized talents and egos. They got together over in the old Farnsworth Building where Faget had set up his temporary headquarters. Caldwell Johnson and the director of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office, Charlie Frick, were also present. “I said, ‘Max, I need half a dozen, maybe eight or ten guys, who can pad out my operation,’” recalled Shea. “And Max, God bless him, said to me: ‘Look, we don’t need Washington, we don’t need any technical strength in Washington, we’re bigger than you are now, we’ll always be bigger than you.’ In effect, get lost.” Thinking back to the same meeting, Faget acknowledged that, yes, he explained to Joe “in great detail” that “Washington didn’t do anything very useful.”

At this point, memories of the meeting diverged. Caldwell Johnson recalled Shea making some rejoinder to the effect that “Just because you guys have done Mercury, you think you know everything.” Shea didn’t remember it quite like that, but he did remember remarking that his shop didn’t need to be bigger than Faget’s. Just smarter. And he added that being smarter than Faget and his bunch shouldn’t be too hard.

“And God, we got hotter than a hornet then,” said Johnson. “Max said something like, ‘Well, what the hell have you ever done?’ About that time, Charlie Frick jumps in and says, ‘Max, I’d like to talk to you a minute, it’s something private,’ and then he turns to me and he says, ‘Why don’t you go on back to the office?’ And so he broke the thing up. You might say it never did start right.” Or as Shea put it in an official interview with NASA historians, “We started off with an antagonistic interface.”

It was in this context that Shea set out to satisfy Brainerd Holmes’s mandate to midwife a mode decision and to bring the centers together. “And I scratched my head,” Shea recalled later, “and said, ‘Well, how do you do it? These guys are so parochial’—and they really were!” For while he had gotten along a lot better with Marshall than with Houston, they seemed equally stubborn on the issue of how NASA should proceed with Apollo. By this time, M.S.C. was openly behind lunar-orbit rendezvous while Marshall remained attached to earth-orbit rendezvous. After his visits Shea reported to Holmes: “Most of the M.S.C people seem enthusiastic about L.O.R. However, I don’t feel they have a good understanding of the rendezvous problem, and their weight estimates for the L.O.R operation seem quite optimistic… . M.S.F.C. [Marshall] has not paid any attention to L.O.R. and was not in a good position to comment on the mode. Their instinctive reaction, however, was negative.” Even the two centers’ plans for earth-orbit rendezvous were at odds: “In essence, each center has its equipment doing most of the work, and completely ignores the capability of the other’s hardware.”

Shea decided to hire a contractor to do an independent study of how heavy a lunar module would have to be—until then, the main source of contention between the mode adversaries. He also set Houston and Marshall to work on additional studies directed by his office. To guard against puffery, the analyses of L.O.R. were assigned to Marshall and the analyses of E.O.R. to Houston.

Shea worked fast. He had the Request for Proposals out on the street, proposals submitted, and a winner chosen within about a month—the winner being Chance-Vought, an offspring of the same organization that had done the earliest work on L.O.R. back in 1960. They came back within another month with their preliminary results, which showed a lunar module weighing about 29,000 pounds, significantly heavier than Houston’s most recent estimate of 20,000. There remained a substantial weight difference between the two modes, however, and it came down to this: If NASA went via earth-orbit rendezvous, they would need two launches of the Saturn V. If they went via lunar-orbit rendezvous, they could do it in one.

By this time, Shea was also pushing the centers to come to grips with the mode issue through a series of meetings that he sponsored. The principals from Houston and Marshall would come together in the same room, Shea presiding, and thrash out a set of technical issues related to one of the modes. Then they would be sent back to their respective centers to conduct more detailed studies, which Shea continued to assign according to the rule of hostile testimony: Marshall did the studies involving L.O.R.; Houston did the studies involving E.O.R. The meetings did not produce consensus, but they at least permitted people to confront their differences and, more important, raised everyone’s awareness that a decision about the mode had to be made soon.

Houston decided to take a bold step. The Manned Spacecraft Center would talk directly to von Braun and Marshall, and try to convince them to accept L.O.R.

“It’s hard to characterize how formal the relationship was,” said Tom Markley, speaking of the early relationship between the Manned Spacecraft Center and Marshall. The tensions between the two centers resonated with the defensiveness of little brothers to older brothers. People like Wernher von Braun and Eberhard Rees had devoted their lives to rockets. The exploration of space had been their dream long before anyone at Langley even gave it a thought. They had a glittering record of success. And yet the aeronautical engineers of Langley had been given the prize of designing and operating the spacecraft.

To Tom Markley, the message from the Marshall people came through loud and clear. When he was sent down from the Space Task Group (still at Langley then) to Huntsville in the fall of 1960 to act as a liaison with Marshall, the Germans were faultlessly courteous, but it was obvious that they “really wanted to run the whole mission.” “You could pick that up,” Markley said, “through all the courtesy and collegiality: ‘We’re more qualified, we’ve done all these flights, we can do this, we know how to make things work. Watch us.’”* The fact was, they had missed their chance to run the whole mission when they had stayed with the Army for the first year after NASA was founded. They could have come in, after NASA’s civilian supremacy was conceded, if they had been willing to desert the Army unceremoniously, but von Braun had not been willing to do that and he had reconciled himself to the consequences—von Braun never tried to take over the spacecraft operation. But the people at Marshall still thought they were the ones who should have been doing it.

[* Besides their two decades of experience with rockets, von Braun’s team had a more recent card to play: They were the ones who had put up the first American satellite. Bob Gilruth was quick to pick up on the politics of such events. Back in 1958, Markley ran into Gilruth in the airport at Boston. “We were flying back,” Markley recalled, “looking out at the moon, and Gilruth said, ‘You know, someday we’re going to be there.’ I said, ‘Oh.’ He said, ‘I’ll tell you a little-known thing. We just agreed today that von Braun and his team are going to put the Jupiter up. Don’t be surprised if it happens much sooner than anyone expects.’ I said, ‘What do you think that means?’ He said, ‘It means they’re going to be tough to live with.’”]

For their part, the Space Task Group people were sensitive to being the novices in the spaceflight business while the Marshall people were the old pros. They perceived von Braun’s group as arrogant, even as they recognized, as Markley said, “they had a right to that kind of arrogance—they’d earned it over a long period of time.” Thus, Houston, a little shaky at first in its new role as a center, tended to be defensive, standoffish, and quick to see slights and bureaucratic threats. In the spring of 1962, when Houston still had only three short manned flights to offer as proof of its own capacity, these feelings were at their height. For Houston to go to Marshall and say to von Braun “We’re going to persuade you that we have a technically superior idea about space flight” was complicated in ways that were as much psychological as bureaucratic.

But that’s what Charlie Frick, then head of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office—ASPO—decided to do. An earlier effort they had made to present the arguments for L.O.R., at one of Shea’s meetings up at headquarters, had been disappointing. Frick announced that the next time they would do it right—with “a bit of showmanship,” too. They would try to convince von Braun that lunar-orbit rendezvous was less costly than E.O.R. and better from an operational standpoint, which, they planned to emphasize, was something they did have a lot of experience in. “Charlie Frick’s Road Show,” they called it. On April 16, it came time to play its Huntsville date.

They held nothing back. Along with Maynard and Johnson and the others who would make the technical presentations came Max Faget, Walt Williams, Chuck Mathews, Bob Piland, and Bob Gilruth himself—the entire senior staff of Houston. Frick even brought along John Glenn, just returned from his successful orbital flight. All the senior staff from North American, the spacecraft contractor, attended as well.

Von Braun treated the presentation as a major event, assembling all of Marshall’s senior staff. They were on the tenth floor of Marshall’s headquarters building, known locally as the Von Braun Hilton, in the conference room that adjoined von Braun’s office. “There were maybe fifty people at this meeting,” Caldwell Johnson recalled, “Every person you could pack in that big conference room at Marshall.”