Word: raborn
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...When I walked out, I knew I was ready to die for someone, but I didn't know-or remember-whether it was the admiral, the President, my mother, the head of the Boy Scouts, or who. But, brother, I was ready to die." Men & Money. At first Raborn tried to make some use of the Army's liquid-fueled Jupiter missile. He was soon convinced that dangerous, liquid fuels sloshing around on shipboard would never prove practical. And when breakthroughs in the arcane art of missilery satisfied him that a seaborne solid-fueled bird could be built...
Despite all objections, the Navy and the Defense Department decided on the expensive gamble. Red Raborn found himself in command of a program that demanded more of U.S. science and technology than any military program had ever demanded before. His submarine was yet to be built; its navigation system was still in the planning stage. His missile had neither its guidance system, its rockets nor the solution to its launching problems. "But I had all the tools I needed,'' he recalls. "I had authority, and I had money...
Increased Pressure. Early in the game Raborn concluded that the management techniques of U.S. industry were not good enough for him; businessmen, he told his civilian assistant Gordon Pehrson, know figures, but they do not know what goes on in their plants. Raborn's management experts soon set up a system called PERT (Program Evaluation Research Task) that provided the boss with graphically charted records and computer-calculated time estimates for every milestone on his schedule...
Threading his way through a maze of PERT charts, Raborn could spot trouble in advance-at Sunnyvale, Calif., where Lockheed Aircraft Corp., prime contractors for the missile kept 9,000 men on the job, at the new plant near Sacramento where Aerojet-General Corp. was working on solid-fuel rocket engines, at the Groton, Conn, sub pens of the Electric Boat Division of General Dynamics Corp. From weekly progress reports he could tell where to pour on extra effort to break a prospective bottleneck. Contractors had a hard time keeping up with Raborn's knowledge of what was going...
Wartime Urgency. The Navy's Special Projects group was asked what it could accomplish with a supplemental $350 million. Can-Do Man Raborn took just a week of consultation with ship design and missile experts to produce an answer. If the Defense Department would settle for a 1,200-mile missile instead of the 1,500 mile that was in the works, he could give the fleet an operational system by 1960, a full five years earlier than planned...