Apollo: The Race to the Moon (35 page)

Low was nonplussed. Thinking back on it later, Mathews, who was one of Low’s closest friends, reflected that he was putting Low into an unusual position. George Low always preferred that things proceed according to an orderly process and that he, George Low, be in control of that orderly process. Usually, he was. Chuck Mathews was supposed to take the job, that’s the way Low had planned it. “He had never, I guess, experienced a situation like this one,” Mathews said, “where someone put the finger on him and he didn’t have control.” Finally Low said, “Chuck, I’ve got the worst headache I’ve ever had in my life.” Mathews suggested they go for a walk.

They strolled in the spring twilight along the quiet residential streets of Georgetown, talking intently. The new job would be a demotion, of course, from number-two man at Houston to manager of a program office. But Joe Shea had taken a theoretical demotion when he went to ASPO; so had Low, when he went from headquarters to the deputy director’s job in Houston. Apollo managers bounced around the hierarchy without paying much attention to that sort of thing. Low in particular had never been a man who “worried about the color of the carpet on the floor,” in Mathews’s words, and he knew that ASPO was the critical job right then no matter what the organization charts said. Still, Low had carefully decided what ought to happen—Mathews would manage ASPO—and it took a long time for him to reconcile himself to a different plan. They walked for hours, Mathews remembered, getting back to the Georgetown Inn late at night. But finally Low agreed to take the job.

There followed the next morning a charade that has erroneously gone into some history books. Mueller, Gilruth, and Mathews decided that it would be impolitic to present Webb with a fait accompli, so Mathews’s refusal was presented to Webb along with the suggestion that they ought to talk Low into taking the job. Webb thought it was a terrific idea, and nothing would do but that they call Page Terminal at National Airport and have them hold Gilruth’s and Low’s plane. Webb, Seamans, Phillips, and Mueller all piled into Webb’s official car, went out to the airport, and “persuaded” George Low. In recounting his selection as head of ASPO to NASA historians, Low never wavered from the official version.

By good luck as much as anything else, the Apollo Program seemed to get the right men at the right time. In 1963, they needed an impatient, charismatic man who would seize the spacecraft and pull it through North American. Because much of Houston was preoccupied with Gemini during this period, they also needed a man who liked to do everything himself. They got Joe Shea. In 1967, they needed a “knitter of people,” in Glynn Lunney’s graceful phrase, someone who could win the trust of the disparate elements in Houston and bring them together as a working whole. They got George Low.

Except in ability, Low and Shea were mirror images. They were both born in 1926, but instead of Bronx working-class Irish, Low was Viennese Austrian, the son of a well-to-do manufacturer, educated in private schools in Switzerland and England before his widowed mother brought Georg Wilhelm to the United States in 1938. Instead of a systems engineer working on nuclear missiles, Low was a Lewis man, with the N.A.C.A. from 1949 on, who wrote papers on esoteric problems in boundary layer theory and heat transfer. While Shea reveled in pressure and complexity and the clash of personalities, Low sought order and harmony.

In personal manner, Low was unassuming to the point of diffidence. Back in the late 1950s, Caldwell Johnson reminisced, when they were fabricating the first Mercury capsule in the Langley shops, they roped off the area immediately around the capsule so that visitors wouldn’t get in the way of the engineers and technicians. One day Johnson noticed that a fellow was right up next to the capsule, even running his hand over the metal shingles. Johnson went over and reprimanded him. “You know you’re supposed to stay behind the ropes, don’t you?” Johnson said belligerently. The man apologized and did as he was told.

Johnson returned to his work. Another engineer came over and whispered to him. “You know who you were talking to?” Johnson didn’t. “That’s George Low!” Johnson looked over again, and he was still there, peering intently at the spacecraft—a young man with a kindly face, thin, a little stooped. He was NASA’s program manager for Manned Space Flight, and he was standing quietly behind the ropes. He never lost that quietness. Later, in the days when he ran ASPO, subordinates would sometimes call the Low home late in the evening for advice on some new problem, and they would hear a soft voice answer the phone. “May I speak to your father?” they would ask George Low.

And yet this same man took some of the boldest initiatives in the manned space program, succeeding in them because he was a leader, classically defined—men followed him, as they followed Shea before him, Kraft in Flight Operations, Debus at the Cape, and von Braun at Marshall. But he was specifically suited for a particular kind of leadership, the leadership of engineers.

He was, first of all, unwaveringly faithful to good engineering when he made decisions. (“To be friends with somebody is one thing, but when you’re in the technical arena, it’s technical. I don’t give a damn whether I play golf with you or whatever, that’s a different world. Low knew that.”) He added to that an infinite capacity for detail. (“George was the kind of guy that if you gave him a job emptying wastebaskets, he would stretch it into overtime, not because he was loafing, but because he’d find more to emptying wastebaskets than you ever imagined could be there.”) He had a memory that was by all accounts phenomenal. (“He’ll tell you, ‘You wrote me a memo a year and a half ago and you told me that the oxygen flow rate was going to be 7.6 pounds per hour, and why is it 7.3 now?’ What can you say to a guy like that?”) And he had a gift for organization and management that verged on genius.

Low had an effect on his fellow engineers in Apollo that might have been hard for an outsider to appreciate. About a year after Low took over ASPO, one of Webb’s deputies in Washington got a call from a friend who had just arrived in Houston. The man in Washington was sufficiently amused by the call to jot down the exchange verbatim immediately afterward. “I hope you don’t think I’m nuts, but I want to tell you something,” the caller said. “We had an Apollo briefing in the ninth-floor conference room and George Low spoke to us. God! It was the most exciting, lucid, thrilling, dynamic thing I’ve ever heard… . Honest to God, it was just fantastic. He didn’t even have a note. He held us all spellbound… . So help me, if he had said ‘Let’s go’ I’d have followed him right off a cliff!” An observer who wasn’t an engineer would have seen just a courteous man, speaking quietly.

Taking up the ASPO job in early April, Low began dictating a daily memorandum to Gilruth, usually two or three typewritten pages, summarizing the day’s activities.* A few weeks later, returning from a trip to the North American plant in Downey, he wrote: “My general impression after this week’s visit is that Dale Myers, Charlie Feltz, and George Jeffs are trying extremely hard to do the right things…. The next level below them, however, disturbs me.” Frank Borman, writing of that period in his autobiography, put it more bluntly: “North American was positively schizophrenic, populated by conscientious men who knew what they were doing and at least an equal number who didn’t know their butts from third base.” After four years of prodding and pushing from ASPO and headquarters, even after the embarrassment of the Phillips Report, North American remained a problem.

[* Following the fire, Gilruth made it known to others that Shea had not kept him informed about what was going on. The “Apollo Notes,” as Low called them, were part of Low’s way of avoiding that problem. In the process, he also provided historians with a unique day-by-day narrative. The Apollo Notes are now part of the George M. Low Papers at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute.]

Borman was in a position to know. Gilruth had appointed him as head of a tiger team (an Air Force term for a small group of troubleshooters) to go out to Downey and be in charge of redefining the Block II spacecraft with North American. Borman took Aaron Cohen as his design engineer and Simpkinson as his quality and reliability expert. For the next four months, they spent every day in the North American offices, with virtual carte blanche from Gilruth and Low to carry out the redefinition strategy that ASPO had decided upon.

Houston also kept trying, as it had for years, to get some changes in the way that Downey operated. After a few days there, Borman noticed that many of the technicians were going across the street and having a few beers at lunch. Outrageous, when you’re working on a spacecraft, Borman told North American; and everyone, management and unions and the technicians themselves, agreed. The practice stopped. Jack Kinzler, the craftsman from Langley who had been heading the shops for the manned space program since the earliest days of the Space Task Group, was dispatched to Downey to look around the shops. Kinzler identified thirty or forty things that offended him—sloppy handling of materials, confused demarcation of work spaces on the shop floor, lots of wasted time—and wrote them up. Gilruth sent a copy to the president of North American. The offensive practices got fixed.

But other problems of scheduling and efficiency that had persisted for years at first seemed as impervious to solution as they ever had. In another “Apollo Note” to Gilruth, with “No other copies to anyone except RRG” scrawled in big letters across the top, Low listed the kinds of things he was finding when he went to North American. Item: Up to five people could work productively in a command module at any one time, but out at the Downey plant, Low and his managers rarely saw more than two or three; often only one. Item: The industry average for a wire termination was six minutes. At North American, they were taking up to an hour and a half. Item: Low’s people had seen it take as long as four hours to install one washer. Item: The wire harness for spacecraft 101 was not even started until five weeks after it was supposed to be completed. Someone at North American had to start doing something about this.

The man most obviously on the spot at North American was Stormy Storms, head of North American’s Space Division. He was a proud man with a proud history, the engineer who had guided the development and production of the X-15, but the fire had happened on his watch and the pressure was relentless. While Gilruth continued to think highly of Storms, Low, Phillips, and Mueller were agreed that Storms had to go. Storms himself thought he was being “unjustifiably crucified,” in the words of one of his close associates. “There’s not a goddamn thing wrong with those spacecraft,” he remembered Storms saying shortly after the fire. “If they want to fly one this December, just fly what we’ve got.”

Few others agreed, and the fact that Storms could think nothing needed fixing was persuasive evidence to them that he wasn’t the man to rescue the contract. Webb called in Lee Atwood, now North American’s chairman, and told him that Storms had to go or NASA would turn to another contractor. However unrealistic the threat—if carried out, it would have hurt NASA as badly as North American—the word around Downey was that Webb had already held preliminary meetings with Boeing for just that purpose. Storms was retired from his position as president of the Space Division.

The man whom Lee Atwood chose to rescue the situation was Bill Bergen. For thirty years, Bergen had been one of the star engineers at the Martin Company—the company that had originally been recommended for the spacecraft contract back in 1961. When the Apollo fire occurred, he had just become corporate vice president at North American for the Space and Propulsion Group, meaning that Stormy Storms’s Space Division came under him.

Bergen was at an air show in Phoenix when he got the call from Lee Atwood. Bergen volunteered to give up the Space and Propulsion Group and take over the Space Division—to demote himself, just as Low and Shea had demoted themselves before him. “God bless you,” said Atwood. Bergen took over his new job on April Fool’s Day.

“People think I came in here and turned this place around like crazy,” said Bergen later. But he claimed that he hadn’t. “I think if you look back at it, soberly, there were very few changes made, but some very key ones.” One of the first of them was to send Bastian Hello, known as Buzz, to take over North American’s Cape operation.

Buzz Hello arrived at the Cape on May 7, 1967, to find a place where, in his words, “morale had sagged like a clothesline with ice on it.” The North American people at the Cape were the people who had somehow burned up three astronauts. “They had no way of knowing where they had failed, what they had done wrong,” Hello recalled. “They had lost very close friends of theirs in the spacecraft… . The whole world had turned against them.” There was no one particular thing that had to be fixed. “You just sort of wade into it,” Hello said. “It’s like a gigantic piece of cheese—you’ve got to start biting somewhere.”

Hello saw that somehow there had to be a welding together of his people. It could take the form of small psychological things, like a campaign to keep all the workplaces immaculate. Or of organizational things, like designating a separate room for tracking the status of each spacecraft, a place where that spacecraft’s schedule, test preparation sheets, engineering orders, and test results could be posted and tracked—“so it’s perfectly clear who’s doing what to who and who’s holding the bucket of water.” Or of training things, like “Crew Qualification,” in which each person who worked on the spacecraft had to undergo a “stand board,” appearing before a panel of three or four of his peers to be cross-examined on the workings of his system. But the most important thing that Buzz Hello did to turn the situation at the Cape around was to hire Tom O’Malley.

By 1967, Thomas J. O’Malley had been working at the Cape for ten years. First he had run Convair’s Cape office for the Atlas program. In Mercury days, the man with his finger on the launch button for the Atlas launches was Tom O’Malley. During Gemini, O’Malley had been with General Dynamics on the Atlas-Agena, then was promoted away from the Cape to the foggy precincts of New London, Connecticut, to be a senior manager in the General Dynamics Electric Boat Division. Now, Hello wanted him for North American and O’Malley wanted to come home to the space program.