Project Apollo in Management and Schedule Trouble

Congressional budget cuts and widespread criticism were not the only threats to Apollo’s success during 1963. The relationship between James Webb and “Apollo czar” Brainerd Holmes never recovered from their differences in the final months of 1962 with respect to requesting additional funding to try to move forward the date of the initial lunar landing attempt. It became increasingly clear in the following months that Webb and Holmes could not work together effectively. As the accomplishments of Project Mercury were being celebrated by various ceremonies and receptions in Washington on May 21, 1963, Holmes became incensed that he was not mentioned at any point during the day; he called Robert Seamans, complaining that “there is absolutely no excuse for the lack of recognition” and that Webb “hates me.” Seamans later commented that “to say he was upset is to put it very mildly,” and that Holmes’s reaction that day “was really the start of the sequence of events that led to his leaving.” During a reception that evening at Webb’s home, Holmes and Webb got into a public argument. In a series of meetings a few days later, first with Seamans, then with Seamans and Dryden, and finally with Seamans, Dryden, and Webb, Holmes was asked to resign. On June 12 he announced that he would be leaving NASA within the next few months to return to industry.29

NASA sought the president’s assistance in quickly finding a replacement for Holmes. On June 11, Webb sought JFK’s help in recruiting to the NASA position Ruben Mettler, president of Space Technology Laboratories, an organization providing systems engineering support for the Air Force ICBM and space programs. Webb told the president that Mettler had “exactly the qualifications and the experience necessary. . . and has the complete confi­dence of men like Secretary McNamara and Dr. Wiesner.” Webb suggested that the president could assist the recruitment effort by joining McNamara and Webb in signing a letter to the chairman of the Board of the Thompson – Ramo-Wooldridge Company, the parent company of Space Technology Laboratories, requesting Mettler’s services and indicating that “we all will be working together in this program and that we all want and need him and are presenting the request in the form of a national draft.”30 It is not clear whether such a letter was ever sent.

At any rate, NASA was not able to convince Mettler to leave his West Coast position, and so turned to one of his senior associates at the Space Technologies Laboratories, George Mueller, as Holmes’s successor. As he formally joined NASA on September 1, 1963, Mueller was greeted by a front-page article in The New York Times headlined “Manned Test Flight Lags 9 Months in Moon Project” and saying that such a delay “has led some space officials to question whether it will be possible to achieve the Administration’s objective of landing men on the moon by the end of the decade.” Newsweek in its September 23 issue reported that “the Apollo man – on-the-moon program is almost a year behind its original timetable—and almost certainly will not meet the target set by Mr. Kennedy.” The magazine suggested that “the crux of the delay is threefold—money, machines, and men,” and suggested that there was “lagging morale and confusion inside NASA.”31

Soon after assuming his position at NASA, George Mueller asked two senior NASA engineers to conduct a quick and discreet inquiry into the state of the Apollo program. On September 28, the two reported to Mueller that “if funding constraints. . . prevail,” the “lunar landing cannot be attained within the decade at acceptable risk,” and that the “first attempt to land men on the moon is likely about late 1971.” Mueller showed this report to Robert Seamans, who directed that it not be distributed, much less publi­cized; there are reports that he told Mueller to destroy the report since it was so at variance with what NASA was saying publicly, but at least some copies were retained. On the basis of this report and his own experience, by the end of October Mueller mandated a dramatic change in the Apollo schedule, known as “all up” testing; this required that all parts of the Saturn V launch vehicle be tested together, rather than separate tests for each launcher stage. This critical management decision made feasible getting to the Moon by the end of the decade.32

Whether NASA’s problems with the Apollo schedule were known to the White House is not clear from the written record. Given John Kennedy’s avid reading of the general media, it is probable that he noticed the Times and Newsweek stories. The program’s troubles in maintaining its schedule are likely to have played a role in a major White House review of the nation’s civilian and national security space programs that was just beginning in early October 1963.

Conclusion

Certainly if the Soviet Union had responded positively to Kennedy’s September 20, 1963, offer to cooperate in sending people to the Moon, there could have been profound changes in the character of the Apollo program. But even if such cooperation were not to have materialized, there is strongly suggestive evidence that Kennedy’s advisers, if not the president himself, were thinking about significant changes in the national space program in the October-November 1963 period. Those changes might well have included relaxing the schedule aimed at an initial lunar landing by late 1967, or even abandoning the Moon goal altogether. The New York Times noted as NASA celebrated its fifth birthday in early October that “technically, politically, financially, the space agency was in trouble. . . After five years of seemingly unlimited growth, the agency had suddenly and unexpectedly found its future ambitions and growth questioned by segments of the scientific com­munity it had tried so hard to patronize and by a Congress that had always seemed so open-handed and enthusiastic.”33 That questioning extended to John Kennedy’s inner circle, and it was very uncertain in the fall of 1963 whether the White House would maintain the lunar landing program on its planned course.