Apollo: The Race to the Moon (21 page)

Charlie Frick was surprised at the reception they got. He came expecting some hostility, but found himself admiring the way that the Marshall people confronted a technical problem once they had decided to do so. They had occasional questions, but for the most part the Marshall engineers, a mix of Germans and Americans, listened attentively as the briefing continued throughout the day.

In the late afternoon, the last of the Houston presenters put away his transparencies and the lights went up. The packed conference room was quiet. To Caldwell Johnson, it was the kind of uneasy silence that falls after a long argument is over and no one knows how to say the obvious. To him, the meeting had made it clear that “we had to go lunar-orbit rendezvous; it just wasn’t gonna work any other way, no matter what the politics were.” But no one knew how to say it, how to end the meeting.

John Paup, North American’s program manager for the Apollo spacecraft, found himself in an awkward situation. North American, holding the main contract for the command and service module, had a corporate interest in earth-orbit rendezvous. If earth-orbit rendezvous were chosen, presumably North American would build the expanded spacecraft. If, on the other hand, lunar-orbit rendezvous was chosen, there was a good chance that a separate contract for the lunar lander would be written and that some company other than North American would get it. Paup and Harrison Storms, general manager of North American’s Space Division, had been stubbornly arguing for earth-orbit rendezvous and resisting every suggestion that the command and service module might have to be adapted for an L.O.R. mission. But now Paup had to wonder whether it made sense to keep on fighting it. Abruptly, he spoke into the silence: “I’ve heard all these good things about lunar-orbit rendezvous,” he said. “I’d like to hear what sonofabitch thinks it isn’t the right thing to do.”

There was another long pause. Owen Maynard remembered seeing one of the Marshall people at the back of the room stand up and von Braun quietly gesture for him to sit down. Charlie Frick remembered Storms saying, “No, everything looks great. That’s the way to go,” and von Braun making “a very gracious speech thanking us and saying he understood the advantages of the system.” Faget came away with a vivid memory of von Braun “very generously throwing in the towel,” without any rancor at all. Caldwell Johnson remembered just the long pause, and then Paup wrapping it up with, “I guess that’s the way we’re going to go, lunar-orbit rendezvous.” To Johnson, everybody seemed happy and relieved that it was over with.

The Houston people were a little optimistic in their reading, for Wernher von Braun had not yet decided finally in favor of L.O.R. The data presented at Marshall that day represented many of the facts von Braun had been waiting for, however, and he meditated on them. He himself dated his commitment to lunar-orbit rendezvous from a trip to Houston a few weeks later when his Marshall team presented its most recent thinking on earth-orbit rendezvous. “I think that was the occasion when some people felt that I had walked away from our proposal,” he recalled later. “On that flight back from Houston there were a couple of disappointed guys on the plane, that I remember.” But if that was actually when von Braun changed his mind, it was a closely held secret. A month later, in a long afternoon’s meeting with Joe Shea, von Braun gave no hint that he had decided in favor of lunar-orbit rendezvous.

Like Gilruth, von Braun would always deny that he had changed his mind about anything. “I wasn’t committed to earth-orbit rendezvous very strongly,” he later said. “I’d always taken the position that we in Marshall would investigate E.O.R. and Houston would investigate L.O.R. I just wasn’t ready to vote at all until I had the facts.” Of a published report that von Braun changed his mind about the mode, von Braun said shortly, “That’s a lot of crap.”

The final act in the drama of NASA’s decision on the mode occurred on June 7, 1962. The place was once again the conference room at the Von Braun Hilton, this time at a review arranged by Shea’s office. For Shea, who had had a long discussion with von Braun about the mode decision just a week earlier, it was a singular experience, one that taught him a lot about how von Braun ran Marshall. For six hours, members of the Marshall staff stood up and gave presentations that were markedly pro-E.O.R. “And finally, at the end of the day,” Shea recalled, “von Braun stood up and said, ‘Gentlemen, it’s been a very interesting day and I think the work we’ve done has been extremely good, but now I would like to tell you the position of the Center.’” And then he announced, to Shea’s surprise and to the apparent stupefaction of most of the men from Marshall, that while all of the leading mode alternatives were feasible, lunar-orbit rendezvous “offers the highest confidence factor of successful accomplishment within this decade.” Engineering elegance had won out: “A drastic separation of these two functions [lunar landing and entry into the earth’s atmosphere] is bound to greatly simplify the development of the spacecraft system [and] result in a very substantial saving of time.”

A few weeks later, John Houbolt was at NASA headquarters on other business and saw a number of Houston people gathered in the hallway. “What’s going on?” he asked. They were surprised he didn’t know. They were having a rehearsal briefing for Seamans before presenting the L.O.R. case to Webb. Houbolt, stunned that he had been so completely ignored, asked if he could watch, and Charlie Frick said of course he could.

Shea was the presenter. It seemed to Houbolt that Shea and the Houston group were managing to discuss all the advantages of L.O.R. without any reference to the people who had been voices in the wilderness. But at least at the end, there was Bob Seamans turning to him and saying, “Well, John, how does that answer your letter?”

Shea and his staff prepared the technical, budgetary, and scheduling analyses that once and for all laid out the alternatives side by side in complete detail. Their conclusion, like von Braun’s, was that all of the alternatives were feasible but L.O.R. was the best choice. Holmes was convinced, Seamans was convinced, and Jim Webb accepted the judgment of his technical people. By early July, NASA had made up its mind, and called a press conference for July 11. Four men would be on the platform representing NASA: Webb, the administrator; Seamans, the associate administrator; Holmes, the director of the Office of Manned Space Flight; and Joe Shea.

NASA had made up its mind, but NASA had not reckoned with Jerome Wiesner and the President’s Science Advisory Committee. They had been watching from the sidelines, and were perplexed and disturbed by NASA’s decision.

PSAC’s reaction was the one that everyone initially had toward lunar-orbit rendezvous: It must be more complicated and more dangerous than earth-orbit rendezvous. Wiesner assigned one of his own people to conduct a study of the mode problem. He chose Nicholas Golovin, a mathematician and former NASA employee who had preceded Shea as Holmes’s deputy a year earlier.

Two problems complicated the situation. One was personal: Golovin had been openly encouraged to resign, and had left NASA with what one of his colleagues called “bitter gall” in his throat. It worried Seamans when he heard that Wiesner was going to hire Golovin. When Wiesner asked him for a recommendation, Seamans cautioned that Nick “wasn’t always wrong, but his thinking could be colored by some of the relationships over here in NASA.” The other problem was professional: Golovin and Shea were diametrically opposed in their stances toward that recurring issue in the Apollo Program—what is the meaning of “safety” or “reliability” when going to the moon? Golovin believed in a statistical method (test the components until you have a statistical basis for assessing reliability), while Shea assigned reliability estimates to components on the basis of design considerations (given the mechanism, the materials, and the environment in which they are operating, what’s a reasonable estimate of the component’s vulnerability to failure?) and then compared the results across different modes.

Joe Shea first heard that something had gone awry in the approval of the L.O.R. decision on July 3, a week before the press conference. He had a meeting with Golovin scheduled for two days later and had already sent over a preliminary typescript of the final, detailed mode comparison. He was sitting with a few others in his office at the end of the day when, at about 6:15, the phone rang. It was Jim Webb. “Now look,” he said to Shea, “Jerry Wiesner just called me and he’s in a highly emotional state; he thinks L.O.R. is the worst mistake in the world, and we’re risking these guys like mad—get over and see him.”

Shea walked the few blocks to the Executive Office Building and found Wiesner in his office with Golovin. As Shea recalled it, Wiesner was furious. Lunar-orbit rendezvous was a “technological travesty.” Even NASA’s own analyses showed that it was. “Look at that,” he said to Shea, pointing to a page in the draft report, “even your own numbers say that it’s wrong!’” Instead of the probability of mission success of .4 that Houston had calculated, Golovin, in checking Shea’s work, had come out with a probability of .3.*

[* Both numbers were unacceptably low as true estimates of mission success, but this points to a distinction that needs to be made: In comparing two modes, the question was not whether the absolute reliabilities were correct, but whether the figures to compare reliabilities were consistent. To simplify for purposes of illustration, it didn’t make any difference whether the real probability of a successful Saturn V launch was .9 or .95, as long as the same probability was used for the analysis of both modes. Shea and the others using these numbers felt all of the estimates of mission success were unrealistically low in an absolute sense. The position of Wiesner and Golovin was that even the comparative reliabilities were untrustworthy because each mode had some events that were unique to that mode, and the numbers representing the probability of success of those unique events were essentially made up.]

“I said I didn’t think the numbers were wrong,” Shea recalled, and looked at the draft for himself. Then he discovered what had upset Wiesner. In the typescript, which had yet to be proofread, there was an error in the calculations: The one that was wrong was the safety number summarizing the L.O.R. alternative.

Wiesner and Golovin did not remember it that way. “We pointed this out to them,” Wiesner recalled later, “and in a week they came back with a new set of numbers which [still] showed that L.O.R. was better…. My recollection is not that they made a mistake. It was just that they added another nine to the cycle of things they multiplied to get [their reliability estimate], to get the number up where they wanted.”

That evening in Wiesner’s office, Shea went over the reasoning that had led NASA to the L.O.R. decision. Yes, it was true that a rendezvous in lunar orbit carried a risk, but so did everything else. Shea remembered that Wiesner kept saying, “No, it’s got to be more dangerous than earth-orbit rendezvous,” and that he, Shea, finally said, “Look, your background is electronics. You ought to understand it better than most guys in the program because they’re not in electronics.” But after an hour and a half, they were at an impasse. Shea could not understand why he could not convince Wiesner. Wiesner was convinced that NASA had done a shoddy analysis of the modes.

Many factors made up the muddle—Golovin’s history at NASA, Shea’s cocky confidence in his own numbers, Wiesner’s conviction that lunar-orbit rendezvous was intrinsically more dangerous no matter what the numbers said. But the core of the controversy continued to be the disagreement on how to estimate reliability, and on this point the divisions were deep and irreconcilable. Is reliability to be based on the statistical analysis of repeated trials? Or is it to be based on judgments about the hardware’s design and the adequacy of the ground testing?

Because of PSAC’s objections to L.O.R., NASA hedged at the press conference on July 11. The choice of lunar-orbit rendezvous was tentative, Webb said. More studies would be conducted.

Throughout the summer and into the fall, PSAC mounted a persistent campaign to have the decision reversed. The issue came to a head in September, at Huntsville, when John Kennedy was on a tour of NASA’s facilities. Von Braun, Wiesner, and the President were looking at a mockup of the first stage of the Saturn V at Marshall. “I understand you and Jerry disagree about the right way to go to the moon,” the President said. Von Braun acknowledged that this was the case. “We were having an intelligent discussion,” Wiesner recalled. “I was starting to tell Kennedy why I thought they were wrong when Jim Webb came up, saw us talking, thought we were arguing, and began hammering away at me for being on the wrong side of the issue. And then I began to argue with Webb.”

The dispute about the mode, which the press had hitherto seen as a low-key technical issue, was suddenly in the open. There, in the middle of a Marshall hangar, with the press corps bunched behind the ropes a dozen yards away trying to make out the words, Wiesner and Webb were each saying heatedly that the other fellow was flat wrong.

On the way to his next destination, Kennedy predicted the eventual outcome. British prime minister Macmillan’s science adviser, who had listened to the confrontation, was with Kennedy and Wiesner on Air Force One and asked how it was going to come out in the end.

“Jerry’s going to lose, it’s obvious,” said Jack Kennedy.

“Why?” the Englishman asked.

“Webb’s got all the money, and Jerry’s only got me.”

Nonetheless, Wiesner was not ready to give up. He continued to complain about the L.O.R. decision until, on October 24, Webb wrote him a tart letter, saying in effect that the L.O.R. decision was as sound now as it had been in July and they were going to go ahead with it. If Wiesner wanted to stop it, he was going to have to get the President to stop Webb. Wiesner couldn’t very well do that right away, because on October 24, 1962, John Kennedy was in the midst of the Cuban missile crisis. But he did what he could. Wiesner asked to examine all the contractors’ materials relating to the mode decision. He was refused, on grounds that much of the material was proprietary. Golovin and his staff prepared a brief for a two-man lunar mission using earth-orbit rendezvous. Shea and his staff blasted it for going back to techniques that had been found unacceptable months before, after exhaustive analysis. Finally, conceding that L.O.R. was a feasible mode for going to the moon—albeit an inferior one—Wiesner decided to let the issue die. But he never changed his mind. Fifteen years later, when Robert Seamans became M.I.T.’s Dean of Engineering, M.I.T. President Wiesner greeted him with, “I still think you made the wrong decision.”