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◼ REMARKS Bloomberg Businessweek July 22, 2019on Mars in 2011, advises engineers—and others—to “hold
onto the doubt.” In The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of
Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation, Steltzner
writes, “Listen to all that the problem has to say, do not make
assumptions or commit to a plan of action based on them
until the deepest truth presents itself.”Delegate but decide. NASA realized early on that it needed
help. About 90% of Apollo’s budget was spent on contractors.
Boeing built the first stage of the Saturn V. North American
Aviation built the massive F-1 engines for the first stage, as
well as the second stage and the command and service mod-
ules. Douglas Aircraft Co. made the third stage. Grumman
Corp. built the buglike lunar module. International Business
Machines Corp. made the computers. And so on. NASA itself
was more of a confederation than a single agency. Units
included the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville,
Ala.; JPL, administered by California Institute of Technology;
Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley; and Langley Research
Center near Washington.
With so many players involved, turf wars were unavoidable.
NASA Administrator James Webb was a blustery North Carolina
Democrat who’d come of political age during the New Deal.
He coined the phrase Space Age Management to describe how
he tried to manage conflicts and ensure final decisions were
made by headquarters. “Personal relationships and a sensitiv-
ity to the total environment are essential parts of leadership
responsibilities if the system is to work at all,” he wrote in the
foreword to a 1982 book published by the agency, Managing
NASA in the Apollo Era.
One of Webb’s masterstrokes was to advocate for the
Manned Spacecraft Center to be located in Houston. The
choice pleased Al Thomas, the Texas congressman who con-
trolled NASA’s appropriations and whom Kennedy needed for
votes on other issues. And it created a new power center to bal-
ance Marshall in Huntsville, where the formidable von Braun
held sway, writes Piers Bizony in The Man Who Ran the Moon:
James E. Webb, NASA, and the Secret History of Project Apollo.
Unfortunately, Webb’s mastery of the complex network was
not as thorough as he believed. The death of three astronauts
during a routine test on a Cape Canaveral launch pad in 1967
was traced by congressional investigators to deficiencies at
North American Aviation of which Webb had been unaware.
The deaths cast a pall over NASA and led to Webb’s resignation.
Failure, in this case, was as instructive as success.Effectiveness over elegance. Aesthetically, the Apollo mis-
sion was a poor substitute for the Buck Rogers vision of space
travel that began to intrigue Americans in the 1930s. The mod-
ule that touched down on the moon looked like an oversize
version of a kid’s cardboard-and-foil science project, all right
angles and spindly legs.
Apollo’s return to Earth was equally unglamorous. The
spaceship that left the launch pad was awesome, but it shrank
as it went. Three stages of rocket were cast off as their fuel wasused up. The base of the lunar module was left behind on the
moon. Then the service module was ejected as the astronauts
began to descend to Earth. That left nothing but a stubby cone,
the command module, weighing just 0.2% of the majestic orig-
inal. By plan, the astronauts had to be rescued from it by frog-
men after splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.
But what looks clunky and awkward to an outsider may
appear elegant—i.e., efficient, effective—to an engineer. The
lunar module was angular because there is no atmosphere on
the moon, so streamlining was superfluous. Form followed
function. Likewise, the tininess of Apollo 11’s payload in com-
parison to the hugeness of the rocket engines was dictated by
the difficulty of escaping from Earth’s gravity. It was once cal-
culated that giving the astronauts one more 8-ounce shaver
would require adding 150 pounds of fuel. There was no sense
even trying to build a rocket that would come down looking
the same as it went up.
Engineering inelegance, by contrast, is redesigning a
machine without fully anticipating the consequences. That
seems to describe Boeing’s botched efforts on the 737 Max,
which to save fuel carries wider-diameter engines than its low-
slung design from the 1960s called for. Boeing had to move the
engines forward and make other changes to keep them from
scraping the tarmac. But those alterations caused the plane to
pitch upward at times. The software patch inserted to counter
that tendency is the leading suspect in the two recent crashes
that killed 346 people.Improvise.Makingstuffupontheflyisnotinanyone’s
manual, but sometimes it’s essential. The need for grace under
pressure is why military pilots were often chosen as astronauts.
As the Eagle was coming in for a landing, its onboard guidance
computer started flashing warnings. The underpowered com-
puter was getting overloaded by spurious data. Buzz Aldrin and
Mission Control quickly nailed the solution: Reduce the strain
on the itsy-bitsy machine by asking for navigation data from
Houston instead. And then ignore the alarms. Seconds later,
Neil Armstrong realized the Eagle was headed for a crater and
boulder field. He took over the controls and coolly steered past
them to a smoother spot.
Improvisation averted another crisis after one of the astro-
nauts bumped and broke off the plastic switch for rearming the
engine that would lift them off the moon. Aldrin saved the day
with a felt-tip pen. “I inserted the pen into the small opening
where the circuit breaker switch should have been, and pushed
it in; sure enough, the circuit breaker held,” he recalled in his
2009 memoir, Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home
From the Moon. “We were going to get off the moon, after all.”Mostofthepeoplealivetodayhadnotyetarrivedonthe
planetwhenArmstrong,Aldrin,andCommandModulepilot
MichaelCollinsreturnedtoit aftertheirhistoricvoyage.
Nevermindthat,though.Themoonlandingwasa victoryfor
allofthehumanrace,past,present,andfuture.Thelessons
it taught are enduring. <BW>