Apollo: The Race to the Moon (18 page)

Finally, in November, Houbolt wrote another letter to Seamans, once again leapfrogging bureaucratic channels. “Somewhat as a voice in the wilderness…” he began this nine-page plea from the heart. It was written in haste and ignored the staid conventions of NASA internal memoranda. “It is conceivable that after reading this you may feel you are dealing with a crank,” Houbolt conceded in the opening paragraphs. “Do not be afraid of this. The thoughts expressed here may not be stated in as diplomatic a fashion as they might be, or as I would normally try to do, but this is by choice and at the moment is not important. The important thing is that you hear the ideas directly, not after they have filtered through a score or more of other people, with the attendant risk that they may not even reach you.” Houbolt proceeded to make an impassioned plea for NASA to rethink the mode issue, and attached to it a copy of the two-volume report they had prepared down at Langley.

Seamans had been keeping track of L.O.R. ever since he had first heard Houbolt’s spiel on a visit to Langley a year earlier. Seamans had never forgotten Houbolt’s conclusion that fifty percent of the launch weight of the spacecraft could be saved by using L.O.R. Before joining NASA, Seamans himself had done rendezvous work at both M.I.T. and R.C.A., and he was convinced that the rendezvous techniques for L.O.R. were within the state of the art.

He passed the letter on to Brainerd Holmes, who had just taken over from Abe Silverstein as head of Space Flight Programs, now renamed the Office of Manned Space Flight (O.M.S.F.). Holmes didn’t like the letter at all, and he told George Low so when he passed it to Low for his opinion. He didn’t like the style and he didn’t like Houbolt jumping over channels like that. In a memorandum of his own, Low wrote back diplomatically that he of course agreed that Dr. Houbolt hadn’t followed procedures. “Nevertheless, I feel that Houbolt’s message is a relatively sound one and I am forced to agree with many of the points he makes,” Low told Holmes. Among other things, “I agree that the ‘bug’ approach may yet be the best way of getting to the moon and back.” Low concluded by recommending that Holmes invite Houbolt to come to Washington to present the L.O.R. scheme in detail—and that “you might also consider asking him to join your staff.”

It was December 1961 when Holmes pondered this politely mutinous response. The hardware contract for the Apollo spacecraft had been let. The facilities at the Cape were being laid out on the drafting tables. And the Office of Manned Space Flight still didn’t know how they were going to go to the moon. A decision had to be made.

About this time, Holmes hired a new deputy director of O.M.S.F. Since Holmes had come on board in October, he and Seamans had been looking for a specific kind of expertise in systems engineering, someone who could offer what Seamans called a “systems competence”—a person with the technical expertise to keep up with the Fagets, the pertinacity and ego to deal with the von Brauns, and the capacity to make the many pieces of Apollo interlock both at the grand managerial level and down in the trenches. Put more roughly, Holmes needed a technical foreman for the sprawling lunar program and, when required, an enforcer.

For the next two months, O.M.S.F. cast about for such a person. Finally one of Holmes’s advisers remembered someone he had known a few years ago at Bell Labs who fit the requirement perfectly. He was young, he had the right kind of experience and the right temperament. And when people talked about him, they all said the same thing—“a brilliant engineer,” they said, as if “Brilliant Engineer” were his title. He was hired shortly after Christmas 1961. For his first assignment, Holmes and Seamans decided, why not let him sort out the mode decision?

And so Joe Shea came to Apollo.

At the end of 1961, Joseph Francis Shea was thirty-five years old, within months of the same age as George Low, the man whose career in Apollo would be so intertwined with his. Shea had grown up in a working-class Irish neighborhood in the Bronx, the oldest son of a mechanic with the subway system. He had gone to a local Catholic high school and graduated at sixteen, exceedingly bright but with no aspirations beyond getting a secure job. He was a good runner, and mostly he dreamed of being a track star.

It was 1943 when he graduated, wartime, and Shea heard about a special Navy program that would send him to college. He applied, was accepted, and the Navy sent him off to Dartmouth College in the mountains of New Hampshire. The young man from the Bronx discovered hills and forests and deep, pristine snow that squeaked when you walked on it. He also discovered engineering, and that he liked it. Then the Navy sent him to M.I.T., and after that to the University of Michigan. Gradually he began to realize that the engineering courses his friends found so difficult were, for him, easy.

For the next several years Shea moved back and forth between Michigan, where he eventually obtained his engineering doctorate, and Bell Labs. It was an educational odyssey that took him from engineering mechanics to electrical engineering to theoretical mathematics to physics to inertial guidance. “The nouns change but the verbs remain the same” became one of Shea’s sayings as he went from one specialty to another.

Then in 1956 Shea found out how it all fit together. At the age of twenty-nine, Shea was named systems engineer for a radio guidance project connected with the Titan I. “I didn’t know what ‘systems engineer’ meant,” Shea said, but he learned quickly, traveling around to the subcontractors on the Titan I, becoming a member of the small fraternity of engineers who were coming of age in this new field. At night after work they would gather at a bar near the plant where they had been working that day. They didn’t even drink that much, Shea recalled, they were so busy talking—about testing, grounding, vibrational spectrums, weights, stability, electrical interfaces, guidance equations, all the myriad elements of the system that some lucky guy, like a systems engineer, got to orchestrate.

By 1959 Shea had acquired enough of a reputation within the ballistic missile fraternity for General Motors to hire him to run the advanced development operation for its A.C. Sparkplug Division, which was trying to wedge its way into the missile business. Shea was in charge of preparing a proposal for the inertial guidance contract for the Titan II. After the proposal won, Shea went back to administering the advanced development office. But a year later, in September 1960, the contract he had won was six months behind and Shea was called away to rescue it.

Shea began to discover that he had a knack for leading. His was not a gentle style, but if he was tough on people who fell short, he was generous and loyal to those who didn’t. And for engineers tired of working for bosses who had forgotten their engineering, working with Shea was refreshing. It didn’t make any difference what your specialty was. Shea’s maxim was that if you understood it, you could make him understand it—and once he did, you never had to explain it again. The only problem was keeping up.

It was about this time that Shea discovered the uses of what he would come to call his “controlled eccentricity.” When he was still at Bell, his wife had bought him a pair of red socks as a joke. One day in a meeting he absentmindedly put his feet up on the table, getting some laughs and loosening up the meeting. So Shea started wearing red socks, not all the time, but to important meetings. Eventually the socks were accepted as a good-luck charm to wear to presentations. Even senior management at General Motors, where putting one’s feet on a desk was discouraged and wearing red socks was unthinkable, got used to the idea.

Shea had other eccentricities as well. Puns, for example. Shea loved plays on words, and puns would come spilling out every few minutes, or sometimes seconds. Good puns and bad puns, subtle and obvious, double entendres, triple entendres—Shea’s punning subroutine (his phrase for it) was not discriminating, it just kept producing them, and it became another way to keep things loose.

Armed with his red socks and his puns and an emerging sense of how good he was getting to be at this sort of engineering, Shea set out to rescue the lagging Titan contract. He moved into the plant, and for five days a week, all three shifts, he was there, catching catnaps on a cot set up in his office. It was a pattern he would repeat later, during Apollo. The reasons were partly motivational—people work harder when they see the boss working all three shifts. “But it also lets you find out everything that’s going on,” Shea said. “Things I’d find out at night, I’d get corrected during the daytime.” Shea began handing out red socks as an award for good performance. His enthusiasm and energy were infectious.

Shea pulled it off, making up the six months, bringing in the contract on budget and on time. In the world of military contracts, that kind of performance got attention, and soon afterward, in August, T.R.W. lured Shea away from G.M. and out to the West Coast.

With the move to California, Shea had promised his wife and five daughters that they’d stay put for a while. But when he got a call from NASA in early December, asking him to interview for the job as Holmes’s deputy, he couldn’t resist. “I could see they needed good people in the space program,” he recalled, “and I was kind of cocky in those days.” He flew to Washington ready to listen. There was some patriotism in it, but also a lot of Joe Shea. The experience with the Titan II had created in him an appetite for high-pressure jobs where great things had to be accomplished and the schedule was falling behind and Joe Shea was told to rescue the whole unwieldy, out-of-control mess. The Apollo Program sounded as if it had that kind of job available, and Shea wanted the action.

Chapter 9. “What sonofabitch thinks it isn’t the right thing to do?”

“I came into the agency the first week in January of ’62,” Joe Shea reminisced. “I still didn’t know how disjointed the program was. Hell, I was still learning the names of the Saturn stages. One day Brainerd came into my office. Somehow we wound up with Seamans, who’d gotten the famous letter from John Houbolt, and Seamans said to me, ‘Anything to this?’ I said, ‘Well, I don’t know.’ He said, ‘You know, I don’t think we really yet know how we’re going to go to the moon.’ I said I was beginning to get that same suspicion.” And so Shea decided to go talk to the people down at Langley to find out what was going on.

When Shea walked into the Langley conference room in Building 58, he had a casual preference for earth-orbit rendezvous. He hadn’t worked it out in detail, but the Nova looked unnecessarily big. You didn’t need that much booster to get to the moon, Shea thought. And if you didn’t go direct, then earth-orbit rendezvous was the obvious alternative. But Shea didn’t have a commitment to E.O.R. or an aversion to any of the other modes. Shea prided himself on going wherever the data took him and, as he listened to the briefing, it seemed to him that the data for L.O.R. weren’t so bad.

John Houbolt watched Shea closely as he went through his pitch yet one more time, and he began to hope—“Shea grasped the thought and seemed to be receptive.” Houbolt recalled Shea saying to the Space Task Group, “Look, what’s going on here? Why haven’t you been thinking about this thing longer? Looks pretty good to me.”

The reaction Shea got was not quite what he had expected. Gilruth and Faget did not rise up to denounce L.O.R. Instead, as the day wore on, it became increasingly apparent to Shea that their message, still tentative, was that, actually, they had been doing some more thinking about lunar-orbit rendezvous and, as a matter of fact, they were beginning to think it was a good idea.

In later years, Gilruth minimized Houbolt’s role in promoting L.O.R. “John Houbolt just assumed that he had to go to the very top,” he once said. “He never talked to me, you know… . Actually, we at the Space Task Group had not decided on any mode to go, and I was very much interested in the lunar-orbit rendezvous, and we were the guys that really sold it. It wasn’t Houbolt’s letter to Seamans.”

This attitude mystified and hurt Houbolt. “I talked to Gilruth many times,” he recalled. “If just once he had said, ‘Look, John, I’m on your side. You can stop fighting, we’ll take it from here,’ then I would have been satisfied. But he never said anything like that.” Nor did Seamans have any indication throughout 1961 that Gilruth was interested in L.O.R. In his mind, the notion that the Space Task Group really sold L.O.R. was “baloney.” In any case, it seems clear that throughout 1961, the Space Task Group’s public position remained firmly hostile to any sort of rendezvous. In September, for example, Gilruth wrote a letter to headquarters arguing that all rendezvous schemes were suspect. Rendezvous of any kind would “degrade mission reliability and flight safety,” he wrote, and he warned that “rendezvous schemes may be used as a crutch to achieve early planned dates for launch vehicle availability, and to avoid the difficulty of developing a reliable Nova-class launch vehicle.”*

[* Inter-center rivalries played a role in these calculations about the mode. As part of a management struggle at headquarters, Abe Silverstein left his job as director of Space Flight Programs in the fall of 1961 and went back to be center director at Lewis at just about the same time that the lunar crasher looked as if it would be the winner. The word around NASA was that Lewis would be given the “crasher” stage of the lunar crasher as part of an effort to placate Silverstein. But neither Gilruth nor Faget liked the idea of splitting management responsibility for the command and service module with a second center. Also, Silverstein had made no secret of his opinion that Gilruth was not the right man to become Director of the new Manned Spacecraft Center to be built at Houston. Gilruth was not inclined to do Silverstein any favors if he could help it.]

And yet, hidden from public view, minds at Langley were changing. Insofar as it can be pieced together from memories consulted a quarter of a century later, the reality seems to have been that in 1961 the Space Task Group was increasingly divided on the mode controversy, but kept quiet about it. The Space Task Group’s official position throughout the year was to favor direct ascent. In the meantime, the Lundin and Heaton Committees up in Washington were coming out in favor of earth-orbit rendezvous. Through all this, the people closest to the design of the spacecraft were doing pretty much as they pleased.