Apollo: The Race to the Moon (24 page)

When they came to the Apollo Program, the systems engineers accepted that they had one parameter—the safety of the crew—that was sacrosanct. But the mentality they brought to the program led them to approach the problem of safety in different ways than the Germans and the N.A.C.A. hands did. Cast out all taboos, they said, and take a fresh, cold-eyed, analytic look at the problem, following the implications wherever the data lead. The results led them to fly in the face of everything that the Germans and the N.A.C.A. hands believed about flight testing.

The idea came out of experience on the Titan II and Minuteman programs. Shea had already broached it to Holmes, but Holmes had said no—they could never sell it to Huntsville and Houston, he thought. George Mueller, who like Shea had come out of the Air Force ballistic missile program, didn’t worry about whether he could sell it or not. Huntsville and Houston would learn to like it or else. For this is what his analysis had led him to:

Point number one: They were never going to be able to fly enough Saturn V’s to be confident of the vehicle because of the number of times it had worked. So what if they tested the Saturn V six times instead of four? Or eight times instead of six? Statistically, the extra successes (assuming they were successes) would be meaningless. All they would have done is to use up two pieces of hardware that could have been used for real missions. The only way they were going to man-rate a Saturn V was by having confidence in the engineering and the ground testing that had gone into it. There was no other choice.

Point number two: This business of testing one stage of the rocket at a time, as Marshall always did, didn’t accomplish what people thought it accomplished. You didn’t really build brick by brick any more; all that did was to waste time. Whenever you added a new stage, the ground support equipment was different, the checkout procedures were different, the countdown was different, and the hardware was different. You had to relearn everything anyhow.

Point number three: The step-by-step approach locked you into an assumption that you’re going to fail. For example, Marshall had scheduled four test flights of the first stage of the Saturn I. The first stage had worked perfectly on the first flight, and as Rocco Petrone remembered, even they had asked themselves, “What the hell are we going to do with the next three?” Mueller wanted a testing program that put NASA in a position to “take advantage of success.”

Therefore, what Mueller proposed to do was to scrap the plans for incremental testing of the stages and to condense drastically the testing schedule for the spacecraft. This was called all-up testing—“up” meaning that a stage is a flight-ready piece of hardware, “all-up” meaning that everything on the Saturn V would be a real, functioning stage the very first time they launched it.

George Mueller, the man who proposed this and then saw it through, is one of the most elusive figures in the Apollo story. For the most part, Apollo was led by men of great ability, often colorful and occasionally eccentric, but always they were men who plainly bled when they were pricked. With Mueller, it was harder to be sure.

In background and intellect, Mueller was like Shea—or the other way around, since Mueller was Shea’s senior. Mueller was a newcomer to the manned space program, as Shea had been. Like Shea, he had worked in the I.C.B.M. world. Like Shea, he was a systems engineer. Brilliant like Shea. Intellectually arrogant like Shea. They had even worked together before, first at Bell Labs and then at T.R.W., where Mueller had been Shea’s boss. But whereas Shea had an open complement of human vulnerabilities, Mueller kept his well hidden. Some of his colleagues weren’t certain he had any.

No one disputed Mueller’s technical capabilities. John Disher, who remained in O.M.S.F. with Mueller for many years, put him a notch above even Silverstein, Disher’s other hero, as the “only bona-fide genius I’ve ever worked with.” Sam Phillips, who ran the Apollo Program Office under Mueller, could never understand why the histories of Apollo paid so little attention to Mueller—he hadn’t ever “gotten the credit that he really deserves for the success of Apollo.” It wasn’t just the big things, like the all-up decision, Phillips emphasized. Mueller could work the Hill one day, then go off and supervise a highly technical task force to deal with problems in the flight operations software. People like George Low and Chris Kraft, who would clash repeatedly with Mueller, readily conceded his strengths. “I’ve never dealt with a more capable man, in terms of his technical ability,” said Chris Kraft, who dealt with everybody. Nor was Mueller an office tyrant. On the contrary, he was considerate with his own staff—getting along with him was “a piece of cake” for John Disher, who found Mueller to be always pleasant, a pleasure to work for. But when Mueller was dealing with senior people from the centers, it was a different story.

It wasn’t that he would try to humiliate people, as another senior manager in NASA had been known to do. Rather, Mueller appeared to be almost inhumanly rational, unmoved by any argument that was not scrupulously logical and grounded in data, indifferent to the human content that was so much a part of even the most technically abstruse struggles during Apollo. “If you saw a meeting and were not tuned into the content,” said one man who knew him well, “he would seem to be reasonably charming and affable. But there’s a coldness there.” Disher made the same point: Mueller was “always the epitome of politeness, but you know down deep he’s just as hard as steel.”

You had to remain on your toes, no matter where you were in the NASA hinterlands. “He never hesitates to pick up a phone and call Joe Schmo and challenge him in the greatest technical detail on a technical problem, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred he’ll wrestle the guy to the ground in his specialty,” remarked one of his colleagues. “Once in a while one of the supervisors who has been bypassed gets real disturbed. He might bring it up to George and George will say, ‘I’m so sorry.’ He smiles and says, ‘So sorry about that.’ But completely unperturbed, you know.”

Mueller’s way of putting people down wasn’t obvious, another engineer observed. He didn’t shout at people, didn’t call them names, but he was a master of the intellectual put-down. It’s like the joke about the knife fight, the engineer said, where the guy says “Hah! You missed!” and then discovers he can’t shake his head because it’s been severed at the neck. Mueller cut you like that.

Let there be provisos and caveats to that description, for Mueller was a complex man. When he was once asked what the highlight of the Apollo Program had been for him, his answer had nothing to do with honors or awards or the moment of his own most personal triumph, the successful flight of the first Saturn V. The most memorable moment of all his years on Apollo, George Mueller said, had been the surprise birthday party that his staff gave him after Apollo 11. Or there would be the night after the Apollo fire, when the supposedly implacable Mueller would twice put aside technical arguments in order to help a troubled Joe Shea. The people who saw Mueller at closest hand seem to have admired him the most, which is one of the ultimate compliments. But at least this much may be said without qualification: He was the undisputed boss of manned space flight from the day he walked into the office in 1963 until the day he left six years later.

Mueller didn’t so much sell the all-up idea as dictate it. He had arrived at NASA at the beginning of September. At the end of September, he got the Disher-Tischler briefing. Two weeks later, he canceled four manned flights of the Saturn I. On October 29, at a Manned Space Flight Management Council meeting, he told a dumbfounded audience from Houston and Huntsville about the all-up concept. Lest there be any doubt, he followed that up two days later with a priority teletype message spelling out the new flight schedules. He asked for responses by November 11, and announced his intention to post “an official schedule reflecting the philosophy outlined here by November 25, 1963.” It was a way of putting things that didn’t leave a lot of room for argument.

The people at Marshall were incredulous when they first got wind of the all-up decision. John Disher was the first to tell Willy Mrazek, the head of von Braun’s Structures and Propulsion Laboratory. Instead of testing each of the stages, they were going to fly the first stage, using the F-l engine (which was still experiencing combustion instability), the second stage (which used hydrogen as a fuel, involving new and tricky technology), and the third stage, the S-IVB, all together, on their first flight. Mrazek snorted. It was impossible. He asked sarcastically, “And how many launches are you going to have before you put the man on?” Disher said, “One successful.” Mrazek said, “You’re out of your mind.”

On November 16, 1963, President Kennedy flew on Air Force One to the Launch Operations Center at Cape Canaveral, where he inspected the construction sites for the V.A.B. and Pad 39, saw mockups of the hardware to come, and was briefed by senior NASA officials on their progress toward the goal he had set two and a half years earlier. On the following Wednesday, the Senate cut $612 million from his budget request for NASA, another sign of public disaffection with the space program which, the New York Times observed, “raises a serious question of whether the Administration can count on the budgetary support necessary to achieve a lunar landing by the 1969 deadline.” Kennedy responded the next day, warmly commending the space program in a speech at San Antonio, Texas, where he had begun a three-day political fence-mending trip. That same day, he flew to Houston and attended a testimonial dinner for Albert Thomas, the man who did most to bring M.S.C. to Houston. Kennedy spent the night in Fort Worth. The next morning, Friday, November 22, he flew to Dallas. Six days later, less than two weeks after Kurt Debus had taken President Kennedy on a helicopter tour of the Launch Operations Center, it was renamed the John F. Kennedy Space Center in his memory. Work on the Apollo Program continued without a perceptible break.

Despite Marshall’s consternation, Mueller was immovable. Arthur Rudolph found that out when Bob Seamans and Mueller visited Marshall in early December. Rudolph showed Seamans a model of the Saturn V next to a model of the Minuteman missile, which the systems engineers had successfully tested all-up. Rudolph carefully walked Seamans through the enormous differences between a small solid-fuel rocket like the Minuteman and the complex, state-of-the-art Saturn V. Use all-up for the Saturn V? Rudolph looked at Seamans: “Now really, Bob!” he said, pleading for understanding. “I see what you mean, Arthur,” Seamans said. Rudolph, thinking that he was making progress, got Mueller over beside the models and went through the same pitch. The complexities of the Saturn. The size. The unknowns. He finished with a flourish and looked at Mueller hopefully. “So what?” said Mueller.

Marshall never really did “agree.” Von Braun and Rees granted Mueller’s central point: Without all-up, they couldn’t possibly get to the moon by the end of the decade. Marshall could not dispute, except emotionally, Mueller’s contention that the Saturn V would be as safe for manned flight (as far as anyone could tell) under all-up as under the more extended—but still inevitably limited—testing process. Left without a good objection, von Braun went on record supporting all-up testing, overriding the vocal objections of many of his senior staff. One of them, Dieter Grau, later wrote, “I’m not aware that a consensus was obtained on this subject in favor of the all-up concept.” What happened, he said, was that “just as Dr. Mueller could not guarantee that this concept would succeed, the opponents could not guarantee that it would fail.” Von Braun, in Grau’s view, decided that Marshall “should share the risk with him.”

In later years, von Braun wrote about how “George Mueller visited Marshall and casually introduced us to his philosophy of ‘all-up testing.’ … It sounded reckless,” von Braun said, but “Mueller’s reasoning was impeccable.” Moreover, the leader of the German rocket team continued, “In retrospect it is clear that without all-up testing the first manned lunar landing could not have taken place as early as 1969.”

Mueller also moved quickly to accomplish what had eluded Silverstein and Holmes before him: Webb finally gave in to a reorganization of NASA that would have the center directors reporting directly to Mueller on matters affecting manned space flight. And it was not to be merely a paper triumph. For better or worse, Mueller was the man from headquarters who finally pacified the independent duchies that had come together to make up NASA. Brainerd Holmes had made a few inroads, but when Mueller took over, the centers were just about as feisty and independent as they had ever been. Mueller brought them to heel, even Marshall, the proudest and most independent of them all. Under Mueller, manned space flight became much like other federal bureaucracies, run from the headquarters in Washington with strict management controls or, depending on your point of view, stifling interference.

Of more immediate importance in those early months of Mueller’s reign, however, were two key management moves. Walt Williams, deputy director at Houston and one of the chief reasons for the success of Mercury, was brought to Washington, where he was effectively removed from power. Joe Shea took over the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office (ASPO), the office at Houston responsible for producing the spacecraft. The two events were not unrelated.

The preceding spring, a few months before Brainerd Holmes lost his bureaucratic duel with Jim Webb, Charlie Frick, head of ASPO in Houston, departed. The spacecraft contract with North American was falling badly behind and was beset with other troubles that were only beginning to surface. On top of that, there was a big new contract with Grumman for the lunar module that had to be managed. The whole effort had acquired a slapdash quality that was worrisome to Gilruth and headquarters alike. In March, ASPO was reorganized in one more of the attempts to bring Apollo under control. Frick left in April, half of his own accord, half pushed, physically exhausted. In May, when ASPO was reorganized still again, Bob Piland, one of the early members of the Space Task Group, agreed to serve as acting manager.