One More NASA Center?

In his November 20, 1961, status report on NASA’s Apollo buildup, Jerome Wiesner had noted that “it is hoped that there will be no further field sta­tions beyond these already announced.” This turned out to be a false hope. As the NASA leadership assessed the various capabilities it would need to manage Apollo effectively, it concluded that NASA was sorely lacking in high-quality electronics competence. This presented a problem with respect to NASA’s ability to manage its contracts with industry and academia, since NASA calculated that 40 percent of the cost of launch vehicles was related to their electronic components; for spacecraft, the cost was 50 to 70 percent. In addition, experience with early robotic spacecraft suggested that there were significant differences in the reliability requirements for electronic compo­nents in space as compared to on Earth. Most NASA employees at the time were more interested in the structural and propulsion aspects of spacecraft and launch vehicle design and development than their electronic aspects.38

In January 1962 associate administrator Robert Seamans asked the NASA staff to investigate what could be done to address this situation. Albert Kelly, director of electronics and control in NASA’s Office of Advanced Research and Technology, spent the next ten months preparing a detailed report on the issue; the November 1962 report concluded that the best approach to gaining the needed competence was to create a new NASA laboratory, or “field center,” dedicated to managing NASA’s electronics research. The NASA leadership had in fact several months earlier reached the same conclu­sion; the issue then became where to locate the new center. Webb, Dryden, and Seamans gave greatest weight to two criteria in making this decision: (1) a location near one or more universities involved in advanced electronics research, and (2) a location where the industrial community was also work­ing on electronics and was research-oriented.

Another consideration, according to James Webb, was President Kennedy’s questioning “why some of the best brains in the East were not working more actively in our program.” Webb told Kennedy that “a new Electronics Research Center in the eastern part of the country” would not only satisfy a specific NASA need, but would also “kill several birds with the same stone by making this Center a focal point of contact between some of our ablest people and some of the ablest ones working in advanced fields in universi­ties.” Kennedy told Webb that “while he felt that this was certainly an impor­tant objective, he was going to leave the decision to me but would like to be kept informed.” By October 1962, Webb told Kennedy that he, Dryden, and Seamans had decided to locate the Center in Boston, “making it clear that the geographic proximity to Harvard, MIT and the brilliant researchers and scholars in the electronics and associated fields in the city was one of the major bases for our judgment.” In fact, said Webb, NASA wanted “to put it [the new Center] within walking distance of both Harvard and MIT.”39

There were two political problems with that decision. President Kennedy was of course from Massachusetts, and thus such a decision could appear as if it had been influenced by his desire to bring some of the benefits of the space buildup to his home state. Even more problematic was the fact that the President’s youngest brother, Edward “Ted” Kennedy, was in 1962 running to fill the remaining two years of President Kennedy’s Senate term, and his campaign argued that he “could do more for Massachusetts.” If NASA had announced, without any prior notice or competition, a decision to locate a major new facility in Massachusetts, the political reaction likely would have involved NASA in a tightly contested election, a situation both President Kennedy and James Webb wanted to avoid.

When Webb on October 16, 1962, told Kennedy of NASA’s plans for locating the new center in the Boston area, he also said that it was extremely important from NASA’s “image of careful professional work and decisions made on a technical basis that this should not become a matter under dis­cussion in the then ongoing campaign in Massachusetts where his brother was running for the Senate.” Kennedy’s response was that “he approved the concept of the Electronics Research Center.” Kennedy also “stated that he was prepared to accept it in his budget” and “agreed that it should not be introduced into public discussion until the budget was to go to Congress” in early 1963, after the Senate election. To avoid the appearance of Kennedy’s political influence on the decision, Webb buried the initial funding for the new center in the NASA budget request submitted to the BOB in September 1962; this was not difficult to do, since the initial request of $5 million was very small compared to the overall $6.2 billion NASA budget request. Even the BOB was not informed of NASA’s intentions. As a former director of the BOB, Webb was well versed in ways to manipulate the normal process of BOB review. In Fall 1962, according to Webb, “the only persons who knew we were planning this Center outside of NASA” were President Kennedy and his top political operative, Kenneth O’Donnell.”40

Once the election was over and Ted Kennedy had won the Senate seat, NASA was ready to let the BOB in on its plans. Before meeting with budget director Bell on December 13 to finalize the NASA FY1964 budget request, Webb asked Kenneth O’Donnell to check with the president to make sure that Kennedy still agreed with NASA’s decision to develop the new center. Assured that this was indeed the case, NASA and the BOB inserted into the president’s budget message notice of the decision to create a new Electronics Research Center and to locate it “in the Greater Boston area.” Kennedy directed that “this matter should be handled with the most complete discre­tion.” There was no leak to the press of this decision until the budget became public with its submission to the Congress in mid-January 1963.

The Congress, and particularly NASA’s House of Representatives oversight committee, the Committee on Science and Astronautics, was not pleased to learn that NASA had made this decision without prior consultation with the committee. Over the next several years, the committee and NASA remained at loggerheads over whether NASA could proceed with its plans. There was also opposition from some Senate members who believed that the areas they represented should have been able to compete for the new NASA center. At one point, President Kennedy got personally involved, meeting on June 11, 1963, with Webb and Representative Joseph Karth (D-MN), who thought that the center was not really needed, but if NASA went ahead with its plans to create it, the new center could very well be located in his state. Kennedy was “very gracious,” but he was unable to change Karth’s mind regarding the issue.41

By the time Congress finished work on the NASA FY1964 budget in December 1963, there was tentative agreement to allow NASA to proceed with its plans, subject to Congressional review of several required studies. Even after those studies were completed, there was continued questioning of NASA’s plans for the center; “the fight for and against the Center raged on through 1965.” It was not until 1966 that the Congressional opposition died down, even though the Electronics Research Center had become opera­tional in 1965. This was too late for the center to have much of an impact on the Apollo program. The Electronics Research Center was to have a short lifetime; NASA announced in December 1969 that as part of its post-Apollo retrenchment, it had decided to close the facility.42

Conclusion

While Jerome Wiesner at the end of 1961 might have been concerned by what appeared to be too slow a pace in NASA’s implementation of the lunar landing decision, to those at NASA involved in the effort the rate of activ­ity during 1961 and 1962 seemed extremely rapid. In the weeks following Wiesner’s November 20, 1961, memorandum, NASA chose the contractors for the Apollo spacecraft and the first and third stages of the Saturn V vehi­cle. By the start of 1962, construction had begun at all the new facilities that would be required for Apollo. A major NASA reorganization to prepare the space agency for managing Apollo was announced on November 1, 1961; among the changes made was the creation of a separate Office of Manned Space Flight as one of the major program units at NASA headquarters. Chosen as its head, with the title associate administrator for manned space flight, was a dynamic young executive from RCA named Brainerd Holmes. Webb and Seamans had thought briefly about asking Wernher von Braun to become the human space flight manager, but that possibility disappeared when Hugh Dryden said that he would retire if it became reality. (Dryden was apparently one of those at NASA who resented von Braun’s involvement with the Nazi regime in Germany before and during World War II.) On April 11, 1962, President Kennedy assigned to Project Apollo the highest national priority, designated DX; this gave the undertaking first call (together with some defense and a few other space efforts) on whatever human and physical resources were needed for its accomplishment.43

It was thus clear by mid-1962 that the mobilization of the resources needed to accomplish a lunar landing was well underway. President Kennedy had warned the Congress and the American public on May 25, 1961, that achieving the lunar goal “would take many years and carry very heavy costs.” In the fifteen months following his May 25 speech, the realism of that warn­ing became increasingly evident; by September 1962, President Kennedy concluded that it was time for him to take a first-hand look at the unfolding effort.