Apollo: The Race to the Moon (25 page)

When it had become obvious that Frick wasn’t going to be around much longer, Jim Elms had come up with an idea for Bob Gilruth to consider. Elms, Gilruth’s deputy at Houston, had known Shea since his Titan days, had worked with him at headquarters, and had been impressed with the way that Shea had taken hold of the mode decision. Elms suggested to Gilruth: Why not bring Joe Shea down to Houston to run ASPO? It sounded good to Gilruth. He broached the idea to Brainerd Holmes, who quickly squelched it. It turned out that Shea himself had already come to Holmes, asking for the ASPO job, and had been refused. Didn’t Shea realize that it would be a demotion? That in the ASPO job he’d be two or three layers farther down in the organization than he was in his present position as associate director of O.M.S.F.? Holmes wouldn’t hear of it.

By fall, Holmes was gone. Bob Piland, still serving as acting manager of ASPO, had already told Gilruth that he didn’t want to continue in the job. When Mueller was making his first tour of the centers, Gilruth asked Mueller about sending Shea to Houston. Displeased with what he was hearing about the progress of the spacecraft, Mueller phoned Shea from Houston and asked whether he wanted it. Sure, Shea said. There were, however, certain things that Shea wanted changed. In a memorandum dated September 17, 1963, he wrote to Mueller, “I think you know that I would be enthusiastic about the assignment” if certain conditions could be met. And he proceeded to lay out a mighty set of ifs.

There was the problem with Walt Williams, deputy director for Operations at Houston, who, according to a senior person close to the situation, “wanted so badly to be the head of [the Manned Spacecraft Center] that it overcame his better judgment.” There were reasons for Williams to think he deserved the job. To many of the people who saw Project Mercury in its early days, Walt Williams was the man who saved it from disaster. But Williams was not an easy man to get along with. He made enemies in a way that the easygoing, more diplomatic Gilruth did not, and key people at headquarters couldn’t see Williams in the center director’s chair. To Joe Shea, the point of all this was that he wasn’t going to go to Houston with Williams there. “Joe didn’t want to be in the middle of it,” George Low said. Thus Shea wrote to Mueller in the confidential memorandum that he would accept the ASPO job in Houston only if Williams were shifted “to a position in Washington in which he can be effective but not dominant.” Shea added that Elms’s authority should be augmented so that Elms could pull together “all elements of Houston to support the program.”

There were other conditions as well, aimed at centralizing the authority of ASPO at the factories, at Houston, at the Cape—all in all, a pretty cocky set of conditions. It didn’t faze Mueller, however. His mind and Shea’s were working in synchrony—the things Shea wanted done were things that Mueller wanted done anyway. And he also was aware, as Shea would admit later, that Shea’s memo wasn’t really much of an ultimatum. Shea would have taken the job no matter what, even if Mueller had done none of the things Shea had asked. He wanted it that much.

On October 8, NASA announced that Joseph F. Shea was being reassigned from the Office of Manned Space Flight to the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, where he would manage the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office. Two weeks later, George Mueller had another personnel announcement to make: Walter C. Williams was being reassigned to Washington and promoted to the position of deputy associate administrator for Manned Space Flight in O.M.S.F.

Two more important changes followed in close order. On the last day of 1963, Sam Phillips, a brigadier general in the Air Force, became director of the Apollo Program Office within O.M.S.F., working under Mueller. Six weeks later, George Low left O.M.S.F. for Houston, where he took over the deputy director’s position vacated by Elms, who wanted to return to private industry.

These changes marked an end to the two years of personnel ins and outs and revised organization charts that had beset Washington and Houston. The dramatis personae for the Apollo Program from then through the spring of 1967 was now set: in Washington, Mueller, running all of Manned Space Flight with a disciplined hand; also Phillips, running a centralized Apollo Program Office under Mueller. In Houston, Low, deputy to Gilruth, and Shea, ramrod for the spacecraft.

Chapter 12. “Hey, it isn’t that complicated”

“I went to Houston in November ’63,” Shea recalled, “and we’d made the decision to go to the moon L.O.R. in November ’62. And there was still no design for a command and service module compatible with lunar-orbit rendezvous. No design. I found it hard to understand.” And so Shea began to see firsthand what came to be the closest thing to an out-and-out scandal in the Apollo Program: the origins and first years of North American’s contract to build the spacecraft.

When awarding large contracts, the federal government uses a standard procedure. First it publishes a Request for Proposals (R.F.P.) in which it describes the work to be done and names a time and date by which proposals for this work must be received. Companies that wish to bid submit proposals by that date. The government evaluates the proposals. The contract is awarded to the proposal scoring highest on a prearranged formula that weighs the technical approach, the personnel the bidder will use, and the bidder’s corporate expertise.

At the time the R.F.P. for the Apollo command and service module (C.S.M.) was distributed, in late July 1961, North American Aviation was one of the leading aerospace companies in the United States. It boasted an especially strong record on military and experimental aircraft. North American had designed and produced both the F-100 and F-86, and more recently had built the experimental X-15, which in its initial flights was proving to be a surpassingly fine aircraft.

The man who had managed the X-15 and who ran North American’s other space-related projects was Harrison Storms, known universally as Stormy—a nickname his friends thought to be descriptive of the man. Storms was not enthusiastic about bidding for the C.S.M. North American had a grab bag of subcontracts on the Mercury and Gemini programs and was frontrunner to win the contract for the second stage of the Saturn—a contract which was in fact awarded to North American in early September. It is an understood thing in the government-contracting world that the goodies are spread around, and it seemed to Storms that the task of winning the C.S.M. contract as well was “pretty much impossible.” But he figured that “since we were training these people to be a Space Division, and since we needed the exercise and we could always go subcontractor, then it was a very worthwhile exercise for us to go through the motions of bidding,” Storms said later. “So we went ahead and bid.”

Five companies submitted proposals: Convair, General Dynamics, Martin, McDonnell, and North American. On October 9, NASA’s Source Evaluation Board, heavily loaded with Space Task Group people, met at the Chamberlain Hotel at Old Point Comfort, near Langley.

Tom Markley was secretary for the subcommittee evaluating administrative capacity. His subcommittee rated Convair first, Martin second, and North American last. A few days after his subcommittee had finished its work, he got a call from Bob Piland. “The scores on your Management Subcommittee look a little skewed,” Piland told him. “We’d like to have you evaluate some other criteria, in addition to what you guys evaluated already.”

This seemed a little odd to Markley. Why hadn’t they thought of these other criteria beforehand? Well, he was told, the Source Evaluation Board thought it ought to give a little more weight to the bidder’s experience in producing experimental aircraft. The other subcommittees got similar instructions: Rescore the proposals, giving more weight to experience with experimental aircraft. And so everybody did.

The result of the rescoring helped North American considerably, since the leading example of an experimental aircraft was the X-15. North American was still ranked fifth on the business criteria. It was ranked fifth on technical approach. But in technical qualification it had risen to first by a thin margin over Martin. Overall, the summary score put Martin first, with Convair and North American tied for second. The Source Evaluation Board was unequivocal when it turned in its recommendation: “The Martin Company is considered the outstanding source for the Apollo prime contractor,” it wrote in its report to Webb.

The rescoring wasn’t the only funny thing that had been happening with the C.S.M. contract. One Space Task Group engineer was assigned to a review panel along with astronaut Al Shepard. During the panel meetings, Shepard was openly contemptuous of the rigmarole they were being asked to go through. “This is all a waste of time,” he kept saying. “It doesn’t make any difference what the score is. North American is going to win.” Another man who had been with the Space Task Group for about two weeks remembered walking to lunch during the oral presentations, before North American had even given its pitch, and hearing another astronaut, Gus Grissom, say to his companions, “By God, I’m going to do everything I can do to make sure North American gets this contract.” The man was shocked. What kind of outfit am I in, anyway? he asked himself.

Others recall the ways in which, in those years, North American seemed to act as if it had the government in its pocket. One senior NASA official remembered being present in Brainerd Holmes’s office when Holmes told a senior executive from North American that he would not be permitted to bid on the lunar module because of North American’s backlog of work. The executive is supposed to have said, explicitly, “If you don’t let me bid, I’ll have your job”—which seemed to the observer to be a strange thing for a corporation executive to think he could say to an official of the government.

Then there were curious coincidences involving Bobby Baker, still operating under the unofficial patronage of Lyndon Johnson and retained as North American’s Washington lobbyist, and the powerful senator Robert Kerr of Oklahoma. Baker had begun a company (Serv-U) with the help of a bank closely connected to Kerr. Serv-U then got a big contract to place vending machines in the North American plants. Shortly after being awarded the C.S.M. contract, North American moved a large part of the Apollo work to a plant in Tulsa. No one ever proved that anything shady had gone on, but the coincidences were noted and the rumors persisted.

After finishing his work with the subcommittee, Tom Markley was offered the job of resident manager at the C.S.M. contractor’s plant (he would be resident for ASPO, hence RASPO). Markley agreed and, since he knew that the board had recommended the Martin Company, Markley went to Baltimore, where Martin had its main plant, to start looking for a house.

In a few days, Markley got another call from Piland, who now asked Tom whether he would be willing to take the RASPO job if the place “turned out to be a warmer climate.” Markley was perplexed.

“There’s no place in Florida they’re going to build this,” he said.

“What about Southern California?” Piland asked. “Bob, General Dynamics doesn’t have a chance,” Markley said, “and there’s no one else in California who could win this thing.”

“Well, I just wanted to know your opinion,” said Piland. “What if it is California?”

Markley finally got the drift. He paused, and then he told Piland that in that case he didn’t think he wanted to go. He just wouldn’t be able to start off with the right attitude.

Webb had set aside the recommendation of the Source Evaluation Board and given the C.S.M. contract to North American. But he had done so not at the behest of North American’s powerful political allies; rather, he had followed the advice of Bob Gilruth, George Low, and Walt Williams. Piecing together various accounts, it seems to have happened more or less like this:

After the Evaluation Board had finished briefing Webb on its assessment, Webb took Seamans and Dryden into his office to talk. Probably Brainerd Holmes was called in too. Then after a while Webb called in Gilruth, Williams, and Low, and asked them whether there were any factors other than those presented by the Evaluation Board that he should take into account. Gilruth and Williams promptly said that they felt North American was more qualified than Martin, and Low indicated that he agreed.

Therein lies the complication that keeps this from being a simple story of favoritism and possible corruption. A lot of people within NASA wanted North American to win because they thought North American would do the best job. George Low said later that when they saw the Source Evaluation Board’s report recommending Martin, “we didn’t believe it.” He and the others told Webb and Seamans “to think of this spacecraft as an outgrowth of more conventional flying machines.”

They worried that Martin could not do what North American had already proved it could do with planes like the F-86, the F-100, the B-70, and the X-15. The X-15, the closest analogue to the command and service module in an aircraft, loomed especially large. “It flew like a bird; it was more or less within cost, within plan, on time,” Caldwell Johnson would say later. “They weren’t just talking about it, they had done it and there it was.” That sort of thing meant a lot to the old N.A.C.A. hands who, above all, were persuaded by evidence that someone could make a fine flying machine.

Webb listened carefully to all these arguments. By this time it was late Friday evening. He said he wanted to sleep on it over the weekend. Monday morning, he told them his decision. North American won the contract, and with it trials and tribulations that would not fully end until 1968.

The tensions between NASA and North American began the night of the award, when someone at North American made up some baseball caps with “NA$A” embroidered on the front. That infuriated a number of NASA engineers: The moon program was not supposed to be business as usual. There was also the problem of staffing: North American was already strained to the limit with its new contract for the Saturn S-II stage. Simultaneously, North American was involved in trying to develop the paraglider that, it was then thought, would be used for the Gemini capsule’s landing system. So during the early months of the award, North American’s Apollo spacecraft team was often understaffed and studded with inexperienced people.