Word: apollos
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That the butterfly now exists is, above all, a tribute to superb management techniques. This was the biggest and most imaginative Government-industry-university team ever put together for a single project. At its peak in 1966, Apollo involved 400,000 men and women at 120 universities and laboratories and 20,000 industrial firms; its budget for that year alone was $5.9 billion...
...John C. Houbolt, 50, former chief of theoretical mechanics at NASA's Langley Research Laboratories in Hampton, Va. Houbolt, a civil engineer, is responsible for the lunar-orbit rendezvous that is the key maneuver in Apollo's entire flight plan. In what he remembers as "an intuitive flash," Houbolt realized that tremendous weight savings would be gained by this rendezvous method, permitting the use of a smaller launch vehicle. Often scorned by colleagues, Houbolt fought a two-year battle, finally put his job on the line by appealing directly to NASA headquarters. His arguments prevailed in the fall...
...Charles Stark Draper, 67, director of the Instrumentation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. To solve the problems of navigation, NASA went straight to the nation's leading authority on inertial guidance. The system devised by Draper for Apollo includes telescopes, a sextant, and a computerized inertial reference "platform" that tells astronauts where they are in space, where they are headed and how fast. But how could they be sure that it would work?, the NASA brass wanted to know. "I told them I'd go along and run it myself," recalls Draper. The on-board navigation...
Other men were almost as indispensable. Maxime A. Faget, director of engineering and development at Houston's Manned Spaceflight Center, designed Apollo's command and service module. Dr. George E. Mueller, NASA's top official for manned spaceflight, introduced a time-saving technique known as "all-up testing," in which all three rocket stages are tested together. Christopher Columbus Kraft, director of flight operations since 1961, and George Low, manager of the Apollo program, brought a sense of cool discipline to the nerve-racking operations in Houston...
Then, too, there is Donald K. ("Deke") Slayton, the man who selects and trains the astronauts. The professionalism of the Apollo crews is a reflection of Slayton's success-but leaves him less than totally fulfilled. Though he was chosen as one of the original seven U.S. astronauts in 1959, a mild heart murmur prevented him from ever venturing into space. When he was asked recently what he would best like to be remembered for, Slayton replied: "As the pilot of Apollo 11." There was no smile on his craggy face...