The Apollo Chronicles

by Brandon R. Brown

  The responsibility bestowed and respect given to each employee was woven into the organization’s DNA before it was NASA. The twin cultures of the Langley research laboratories and von Braun’s missile team in Huntsville each worked in this way: loose leashes and high expectations.

  Max Faget’s best buddy drove with him to Langley when both were just scruffy young war veterans. “It was the greatest place to work in the world,” Guy Thibodaux later said. “It was what you’d call a bottoms-up outfit. All the ideas started at the bottom and came up to the top, and the managers had enough sense to kind of steer you or guide you, but never interfere with your work. . . . Just 180 degrees from the way things are right now [in 1999].”4

  The engineers routinely mention the trust. If your part, or your system, or your simulation was supposed to work, everyone around you assumed it would work by the required deadline.ii It had to be perfect, because for many years the project didn’t impose (or offer) extra levels of double-checking.

  “It started at the top,” says Gerry Griffin. “Nobody at NASA was micro-managed by their boss. From the beginning . . . the lowest rank could speak up. The leadership wanted everyone to be heard. They let us do our thing. They . . . empowered us and held us accountable.” He cites the lightning-struck Apollo mission as an example. His bosses trusted him to assess all the spacecraft data from his engineers and make the decision: onward to the Moon or come home? His supervisors allowed the flight director to do his job. Similarly, in the wounded Apollo 13 mission, he recalls telling NASA leaders that they would go behind the Moon and sling their way home instead of turning the broken ship around. The brass listened and then asked simply, “What do you need? What can we do to help you succeed?”5 In the 1960s, this sort of reasoning dominated Gilruth’s outfit in Houston and von Braun’s in Huntsville.

  A striking example of trust—of responsibility overcoming rank—sits tucked away in a devilishly tricky task: How would NASA scoop those conical capsules from the ocean, without them turning over and sinking, without them pulling a helicopter into the ocean, and without them smacking against the side of a navy destroyer? Engineer Peter Armitage recalled an early test that was not going well—a dummy capsule was about to sink. As the engineer in charge of the test, he stood with his boss watching a capsule listing—they knew they had to intervene quickly. “Do you want me to swim a line out?” his boss asked. Armitage laughed at the memory of this. “I said, ‘Sure.’ I mean, he’s asking me, because I’m the test engineer and he recognizes who he’s put in charge.” His boss stripped down to his underwear, swam to the capsule and attached a rope.6

  Another example comes from engineer Elmer Barton, who worked at the Cape for most of his career. He recalled an early rocket launch problem. The engineers set up a number of cameras to monitor and film each launch, to learn everything they could from these expensive, brief, and violent events. With just minutes remaining before launch, he saw a truck run over his cables. All the cameras went out, and he heard Mission Control’s confused chatter. Barton knew the mission would be aborted any second now if they didn’t recover the cameras. A damaged cable sprawled there in front of him but otherwise unseen. “Without saying anything to anybody,” he said. “I go down on my knees with my pocketknife and peeled the cable back.” He and a colleague started splicing the cable back together, by hand. One by one the cameras started coming back online, to the mystified delight of flight controllers, and the mission moved ahead. Barton said he never had a second thought about it. “Get the thing done,” he said.7

  Responsibility often arrived with little warning. Typically, a young, fresh-faced employee could find herself or himself called to a big meeting, hoping to just listen and learn instead of speaking. Then, when a thorny, unsolved problem arose, a boss invariably stood up, pointed to the shrinking youngster, and introduced them as the project manager for the previously unconsidered issue. In some cases, a manager would say, “The floor is yours,” and then excuse himself, saying he was late for another meeting. These engineers, thrown into the deep end, had to tread water before they mastered new subjects, but it usually worked in the end. In most meetings, the group rallied to help outline the way forward.8

  Henry Pohl and others share similar Huntsville stories. Youngsters would find themselves in the smoke-filled von Braun conference room. Perhaps a boss would be conveying some new finding, and von Braun would suddenly interrupt. “Let him tell me about it himself,” he’d say, pointing at a youngster. And in this pre-PowerPoint era, with no notes or posters on hand, the blushing engineer would get up and hold forth. By the end of the meeting, he might own a new project—a project that had owned neither name nor acronym just an hour earlier.

  Dirty Hands

  In theory, any manager could empower their troops. But in the NASA of the 1960s, they all had another key quality. Dating from his days with the V-2 rocket, von Braun told his colleagues in Huntsville he wanted his group and laboratory leaders to “keep their knowledge up to date and judgment sharp by keeping their hands dirty at the work bench.” And when Robert Gilruth was planning the new space center south of Houston, he told his inner circle they had to build more than office buildings. “I do not want to have our people, our engineers, sit in their offices and only look at paper,” he said. “I want them to get their hands dirty, understand the hardware, bring it here and test it.” Both Gilruth and von Braun wanted all of their managers to maintain technical chops.9

  When thinking back on the space program, Henry Pohl starts with the leaders. “Every one of those people grew up in a laboratory doing things themselves,” he says. “So when it came time to manage [hundreds of thousands of] people all over the United States and contractors of every persuasion, they could do it from the standpoint of having been there, of knowing what it took to do the job.”10

  A number of engineers tell stories of under-estimating von Braun’s own engineering skills. After his magazine and television appearances, some engineers assumed he was mainly a silver-tongued space salesman. But starting from the earliest NASA days, when Henry Pohl asked von Braun about balancing a spinning space station, von Braun could easily dive into tiny technical details, and he expected the same of his managers. “I always thought of von Braun as being a figurehead,” Marlowe Cassetti said. But one day late in the Apollo program, Cassetti had to brief key leadership on his study of the lander’s weight problem. Von Braun peppered him with penetrating equipment questions. They got down into the ounces of obscure parts in the lander’s engine. “I shouldn’t have been surprised [that] he knew the technical details.”11

  Engineer Aldo Bordano started at the Houston center straight out of college. “Our bosses were really something we wanted to emulate,” he says. “I wanted to be able to ask intelligent questions.” He pauses a bit. Thinking back over his entire career, he says it was successful exactly because he spent the entire time trying to embody his NASA elders.12

  The Teamwork

  This might go without saying, but the retired engineers mention goodwill and sacrifice in NASA’s early years. “It was just instilled in people,” Marlowe Cassetti recalled. “You would see people who would try to build empires,” obstructing others, accumulating power, and hoarding resources, as in most any organization. But at NASA “they would be just absolutely steamrolled by this team. I saw it time and time again where there was this intense feeling of teamwork.” You didn’t have to be nice—people were routinely brutal and competitive with one another on technical issues. As Cassetti says, “It wasn’t always smooth,” but you had to be selfless. Many of the engineers have stories about a person hoarding information or looking out for his own career finding himself pushed effortlessly aside (and often out of the agency). The enormous group spirit, like a rushing flood, removed clutter without expending extra energy.

  “You know, I never did worry about who got credit for anything,” Henry Pohl says, “as long as the right thing was done.” He cites the “common cause” of beating the Russ
ians as the primary welding power at work, convincing the engineers, as individuals, not to worry about the next promotion or their slice of acknowledgment. Some still yearn for those early days, when, as one says, “everybody needed everybody.” People worked their insane hours and owned their jobs, but they recognized that other jobs were just as critical, and more often than not, one engineer would drop everything to go help someone else, to lend advice or give brutal feedback on an attempted fix.

  Max Faget long partnered with an intuitive and untrained Virginian who’d made his engineering start at Langley. Caldwell Johnson in many ways completed Faget’s brilliance. As Faget would dream, Johnson would find a way to get the dream on paper and start making something possible out of it. He, like so many others, just saw what needed to happen and was all too happy to fill that gap. He eventually saw the concept of “concinnity” in his life’s work. “It’s hard to pronounce,” he said. “It means a kind of artful assembly of things. That’s probably what I did, was artfully assemble things that other people had done into a combination that was pleasant. I didn’t invent. . . . It was just a matter of taking the ideas that other people had and putting them together in a way that everybody could look at and say, ‘Yes, that’s what we want.’ ”13

  An artful assembly of people and effort may well have benefited from the striking youth involved. Flexible, open minds abounded—“Why not try it this way?” they said in ever-shifting teams. John Mayer, the man who hired my father and scores of other planning engineers for NASA, once said, “I was encouraged by the management to try to hire ‘experienced’ personnel. But in my mind, I wanted people who didn’t know that going to the Moon was an impossible task (as the MIT science advisor to President Eisenhower believed). So, I hired the best of the new college graduates. At one time, I was the oldest one in the division at thirty-six!” Peter Armitage started at a relatively old thirty, and he recalled an army major visiting his office. “He had this puzzled look on his face. He’d been there a day and he’d talked to a lot of our people. . . . And he said, ‘Tell me, are there no older people here?’ ” The military man was used to authority and roles of leadership having a natural link to age.14

  Waves of people in their twenties could not only sink long hours into an engineering adventure; they were less likely to demand recognition for their ideas, seethe over blunt criticism, or wonder about the next pay raise. Many recall their NASA job offer as the most meager of several salary options. But they wanted to join the space race. As authors Murray and Cox write, parts of NASA had a sort of “male bonding . . . on a grand scale, and a kind of closeness that many of them would never know again.” At times, it seemed that the engineers “lacked only decoder rings and a treehouse.” If nothing else, most of the engineers will credit their youth for giving them the requisite energy and the sort of fearlessness they needed for the many hurdles they faced.15

  And fifty years later, the field of neuroscience has made its own giant leaps since Apollo. The brain, we now know, busily sculpts its garden of neural connections well into our twenties. Our thinking is literally more plastic, more flexible, and less fixed in comfortable ruts during our early years. It may well be that when minds needed to change in the face of dead ends and new realities, those in the Apollo program could do so. Brains more stuck in traditional tracks may have spent more time writing up “minority reports” and taking their concerns up the ladder. (And that did happen now and again, to be sure.)

  My father came to NASA at age thirty-one, joining with waves of younger engineers. Meanwhile, in the leadership, Faget and company were war veterans in their forties and up. Did my father feel caught in-between, age-wise? Did he fit in? “It never occurred to me,” he said, giving the question a reaction usually reserved for odd smells. “I don’t think it occurred to anybody.” And then he says something they all say, and it has the sound of a deep truth: “We were all just about the work.”

  Bur-eau-cra-what?

  Whether springing from the agency’s own relative youth or just the immense pressure of their goal, most of the engineers also express nostalgia for the blissful lack of red tape, especially in the early Apollo years.

  “The bureaucracy just didn’t exist,” said Hal Beck, who saw the project from soup to nuts, starting in 1958. “Because we didn’t have time and it wasn’t tolerated.”16 To be sure, some of this sprang from the roots of Langley’s freewheeling research-based culture, but there was even less overhead, by all appearances, in von Braun’s Huntsville outfit. They had a “Why wait?” approach to most of their work. For instance, young Henry Pohl once struggled to diagnose a problem within a burning rocket engine. He needed to somehow see it close up, while it was burning. “Henry, this is the army,” his German boss Guenther Haukohl said in one of those pre-NASA Huntsville days. “The army has lots of tanks. . . . Go down and get you a tank.” So, Pohl rolled a tank up to the rocket stand and watched the engine through its thick glass window.

  To be sure, there were management mistakes, and some strategies ended in cul-de-sacs; NASA sometimes backfired and suffered near implosions of organization. During the more intense waves of hiring, some new people said they felt lost and underused. And the earliest days of the Houston center may actually have suffered from the Langley-based, free-flowing structure. Pohl, on transferring to Houston, encountered some frustration. He thought a lot of their meetings and paperwork seemed fairly useless. “I[’ll] tell you what,” he says now. “Max [Faget] never did think too much of an organization. He was a kind of dreamer. He had the philosophy that if it was the will of the people, any organization would work.” And how about Bob Gilruth, the father of manned spaceflight? “Had the same problem,” Pohl says.17 But both Gilruth and Faget eventually recognized the importance of management and hired excellent deputies to apply structure. The efforts in Houston also benefited from new leadership sweeping into power in 1963, when NASA floundered in bad press and constant doubt. Moving from industry, George Mueller, NASA’s new administrator for manned spaceflight, erected a scaffolding of logical professionalism—a new “systems engineering” approach.

  A number of engineers highlight what they accomplished after the tragic launch pad fire in early 1967. “It couldn’t be done today,” engineer Thomas Moser said. “You could not do that kind of redesign without having so many checks and balances in the system. It would take years to do it. I think we did it, what, in eight months? . . . from complete redesign to flying again. That was, I think, indicative of the can-do, will-do, and allowed-to-do environment.”18

  Marlowe Cassetti, enjoying front row seats to the space age from the beginning, acknowledged the bureaucracy growing even during the late 1960s. He said it got harder and harder to simply get things done at NASA after the early days of Mercury (phase I) and Gemini (phase II). “On Apollo, much more was being done in committees,” he says. “It was more headaches.” Maybe we can add bureaucracy to the inevitability club with death and taxes. Bureaucracy caught up with NASA in a hurry, and most voices point to 1970 as the year it became obvious to all. “The manned space program started with one hundred and fifty people,” said astronaut Gordon Cooper, noting how it had grown to tens of thousands of agency employees in just ten years. “Typical bureaucracy set in, in a big way.” He attributed all the success to this early lean structure. “The way we caught the Russians was by not really having a bureaucracy to start with. Then, you could . . . make a total change in fifteen minutes, because it was all first-name acquaintance. You scribbled out a little piece of paper, handed it around, and the change was made.” Just a few years later, “that same change would take you a month!”19

  Again, we see the arc: NASA launched its incredible journey from 1958, leaving everyday, grounded concerns behind with billowing exhaust. When the agency came back to Earth after Apollo, it saw not just a completely changed America, but when it looked in the mirror it saw an aged and bloated version of itself: successful and rightly proud, but hardly ready to take on a new ma
rathon.

  Some of those from Apollo leadership speak angrily of the lost momentum. “If I’d had a clue that it would be forty or fifty more years before we sent men back there,” Chris Kraft wrote, “I would have fought like hell to get Apollos 18 through 20 back into the schedule.” Kraft disciple and flight director Gerry Griffin feels the same way. He now often gives talks to schools about what it will take next time we get the chance to explore. “I tell them, ‘you’ve got to be ready, because these factors will line up again.’ ”20

  Despite their pride in Apollo, some voices from the trenches might not re-enlist. “If I knew then what I know now,” Caldwell Johnson, Max Faget’s right-hand man, said in 1999, “I think I’d have gone to Australia or somewhere and got the hell out of there.”

  And the biggest surprise comes from Henry Pohl: “I would not in any way, shape, size, or form want to go through the Apollo Program [again],” he said. “But that’s all I did for seven years. That’s all I thought about, day and night. That’s all I dreamed about, day and night. We had so many problems, and you never had enough time.” He said a lot of it was fun, but it took too much of a toll. “I guess I remember in ’65 making fifty-one trips out of Houston, and the reason I remember that is there’s fifty-two weeks in a year.” With his Houston desk disappearing in piles of worries, Pohl had tracked insolvent problems, arguments, and mysteries from Huntsville and the Cape to dozens of contractors. He could not afford to ignore a single loose thread.