LINKING SCIENCE TO MANNED SPACE FLIGHT

Scientific exploration of the moon required close cooperation between two quite different organizations within the space agency. Space science was an active field of research when NASA was created, with a well-organized constituency and established procedures for generating and developing experiments. The Office of Space Sciences, which managed these projects, relied heavily on scientists outside the agency for advice on policy and regarded itself as an operational arm of the nation’s scientific community, providing opportunities for that community to conduct the research it deemed important. The Office of Manned Space Flight, on the other hand, had no interested constituency outside of the space agency. Having been handed their primary assignment by the President in 1961, engineers of the manned space flight organization reported to the NASA Administrator and to Congress on the progress of their projects.

To get these two offices working together on exploration of the moon was not simple. Starting in 1962, Homer Newell, director of the Office of Space Sciences, began to lay the organizational foundations on which eventual collaboration would be built. The Office of Manned Space Flight, feeling the pressure of the Apollo deadline, was at first reluctant to spend much time preparing for science. By the end of 1963, however, much of the preliminary work had been done and the broad outlines of a lunar science program were taking shape.

The Moon and the Space Science Program

NASA’s initial space science programs were largely defined by the projects transferred from other agencies and were mainly concerned with the study of phenomena in near-earth space. But shortly after taking over direction of space sciences, Homer Newell established a Theoretical Division to support programs in planetology and lunar science.¹ Unlike space physicists and astronomers, those interested in the moon and planets had little hard data to work with. Lunar and planetary science in 1960 was a field for theoreticians, and few scientists devoted their entire attention to it. So when Robert Jastrow, whom Newell appointed to head the new division, set out to learn all he could about current theories and research in that area, he had a very short list of sources to consult. High on the list was the name of Harold C. Urey, professor at large at the University of California at San Diego.

Urey, a chemist whose scientific career spanned four decades, had won the Nobel Prize in chemistry in 1934. During the second World War he had directed one of the major projects for concentrating uranium-235, the fissionable material of the first atomic bomb. A scientist of catholic interests, Urey became fascinated by the distribution of the chemical elements within the earth and in the solar system. Noting that there had been an extensive separation of iron from the rocky materials of the earth and meteorites, he began to consider possible mechanisms for the accretion of the planets out of the primordial matter of the solar system. In 1952 he published a book on the origin of the planets, in which he asserted his belief that the moon might provide the key to understanding the formation of the solar system. On retiring from the University of Chicago in 1958 at age 65, he continued to teach and conduct research in California, devoting considerable time to cosmology.²

Urey brought a chemist’s approach to a subject that had previously been the province of astronomers and astrophysicists. Like almost any chemist of his era, he would have preferred to have samples that he could study in the laboratory. Lacking lunar samples, he used information from meteorites, plus such physical data as were available concerning the moon, to construct working hypotheses. When Apollo was created, Urey supported it for the contributions it could make to his own research interests, but he was conscious of its nonscientific value as well. In 1961 he thought that the lunar landing was too expensive for its potential scientific return, but on reflection he decided that if the money were not spent on Apollo it might well go to less productive projects and changed his mind.³ Urey never failed to criticize NASA’s practices when he felt criticism was justified, but on the whole he was a dependable supporter of the lunar landing program.⁴

Impressed by Urey’s exposition of his theories and the potential they held for space investigation, Jastrow brought him to Headquarters to confer with Newell about possible NASA programs for lunar exploration. Their enthusiasm convinced Newell that space science should make room for a program in lunar and planetary sciences, and in January 1959 he appointed an ad hoc Working Group on Lunar Exploration to coordinate the efforts of NASA and academic scientists and to evaluate proposals for lunar experiments.⁵

Such interest as there was in lunar missions in early 1959 was at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL).^* Even there, however, many scientists favored missions to Venus and Mars rather than to the moon, partly because the best opportunities for launch to the near planets occurred less frequently.⁶ The moon - in earth’s back yard, so to speak - offered an optimum launch opportunity once every lunar month, and if one were missed because of problems with a launch vehicle the delay was only four weeks, whereas a mission to Mars would have to wait two years if an optimum launch date were missed. While JPL was developing a plan for 12 deep-space missions, including 5 moon probes, Jastrow was urging Newell to accelerate NASA’s lunar exploration programs.

* JPL’s director William Pickering had proposed an unmanned lunar probe as a response to Sputnik but had found no support for it.

Once again, however, the Soviets' eagerness to achieve space “firsts” exerted its pernicious influence on American space programs. Even before the Working Group for Lunar Exploration could finish drawing up a list of recommendations for lunar missions, the Russian Luna I swung by the moon and into solar orbit, measuring magnetic fields and particles in space. A month after JPL submitted its plan to Headquarters on April 30, 1959, orders went out to Pasadena to reorient the program to concentrate on lunar orbiting and soft-landing missions. (Apparently Headquarters felt that the more frequent opportunities for lunar missions offered the best chance to beat the Russians to their apparent target.) As the year progressed, the Soviets sent two more Luna spacecraft to the moon; one crashlanded, the other photographed the hidden side of the moon for the first time. In December Headquarters killed JPL’s planetary exploration plan, in part because of problems with the proposed Atlas-Vega launch vehicle, and substituted a program of seven lunar missions using the Atlas-Agena B. Emphasis was on obtaining high-resolution photographs of the moon’s surface, but some space science instruments would be carried as well. JPL would also investigate the feasibility of sending a hard-landing instrument package to transmit data about the moon. This project, called “Ranger,” was explicitly recognized as a high-risk project geared to very short schedules and intended to capture the initiative in lunar exploration from the Soviet Union.⁷

Since lunar and planetary exploration seemed to have a promising future, Homer Newell established a Lunar and Planetary Program Office at Headquarters in January 1960 to manage it.⁸ Initially, Ranger was the the new office’s only lunar project. In July 1960 a second, Surveyor, was approved. More ambitious than Ranger, Surveyor had the objective of soft-landing a large (2,500 pounds, 1,100 kilograms) instrumented spacecraft on the moon’s surface to gather physical and chemical information about the lunar soil and return it to earth by telemetry.⁹

Both Ranger and Surveyor were technically ambitious projects, requiring improvements in spacecraft stabilization, navigation and guidance, and telemetry. Both encountered technical and management problems that pushed back their completion dates to the point where rapidly changing events made their original objectives obsolete. In 1960, neither Ranger nor Surveyor was primarily intended to support the manned lunar landing, which at that time was still only an idea in the minds of NASA’s planners, although both, if successful, would yield information useful to that project. But the pressures generated by the needs of Apollo between 1961 and 1963 forced Ranger and Surveyor into supporting roles for the manned space flight program, to the intense chagrin of the space scientists.

Manned Space Flight and Science

When the engineers of Robert R. Gilruth’s Space Task Group began work on Project Mercury in 1958, they could not - as the space scientists could - draw on 10 years of experience in designing their spacecraft and conducting their missions. Aviation experience was helpful in some aspects of manned space flight, but in many others they faced new problems. Apollo posed many more. The engineers did not lack confidence that the President’s goal could be met, but they knew only too well how much they had to learn to achieve it. A sense of urgency pervaded the manned space flight program from the beginning right up to the return of Apollo 11 - an urgency that determined priorities for engineers at the centers. Every ounce of effort went into rocket and spacecraft development and operations planning. Science was considerably farther down the list, and for the first five years they gave it little thought.

Manned space flight projects were ruled by constraints that were less important to science projects. One was safety. Space flight was a risky business, obviously, but the risks had to be minimized. No matter that the astronauts themselves (all experienced test pilots in the beginning, accustomed to taking risks) understood and accepted the risks. From the administrator down to the rank-and-file engineer, everyone knew that the loss of an astronaut’s life could mean indefinite postponement of man’s venture into space. Moreover, NASA was in a race, competing against a competent adversary and working in the public eye, where its failures as well as its successes were immediately and widely publicized.

Reliability was one key to safety, and spacecraft engineers strove for reliability by design and by testing. With few exceptions, critical systems - those that could endanger mission success or crew safety if they failed - were duplicated. If redundancy was not feasible, systems were built with the best available parts under strict quality control, and tested under simulated mission conditions to assure reliability.¹⁰ The measures taken to ensure reliability and safety contributed to the fact that manned spacecraft invariably tended to grow heavier as they matured, making weight control a continuing worry.

Those constraints were not so vital in the unmanned programs. Instruments needed no life-support systems and required no protection from reentry heat; scientific satellites were usually expendable. Being smaller than manned spacecraft, they required smaller and less expensive launch vehicles. Furthermore, those vehicles could be less reliable. More science could be produced for the money if experimenters would accept less than 100-percent success in launches, and space scientists were content with this.¹¹ The loss of a scientific payload, though serious to the investigators whose instruments were aboard, did not cost a life.

On the whole the engineers were content to go their way while the scientists went theirs. But the scientists were not [see Chapter 1], and their protests seemed to require a response. Manned space flight enthusiasts spoke of the superiority of humans as scientific investigators and of the benefits to science that would result from putting trained crews in space or on the moon to make scientific observations. No existing instrument, they said, could approach a human’s innate ability to react to unexpected observations and change a preplanned experimental program; if such an instrument could be built, it would be far more expensive than putting people into space.¹²

This argument did not move the space scientists, most of whom worked in disciplines where human senses were useless in gathering the primary scientific data. The role of a person in space science was not to make the observations but to conceive the experiment, design the instruments to carry it out, and interpret the results.¹³ Cleverness in these aspects of investigation was the mark of eminence in scientific research. The early manned programs offered space scientists no opportunities that could not be provided more cheaply by the unmanned programs. The relationship between the manned and unmanned programs - essentially one of independence - took quite a different turn with the Apollo decision. Within two weeks of President Kennedy’s proposal to Congress, NASA Deputy Administrator Hugh L. Dryden told the Senate space committee that Apollo planners would have to draw heavily on the unmanned lunar programs for information about the lunar surface. Knowledge of lunar topography and the physical characteristics of the surface layer was vital to the design of a lunar landing craft. Ranger was the only active project that could obtain this information, and to provide it, NASA asked Congress for funds to support four additional Ranger missions. The day after Dryden testified, NASA Headquarters directed the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to examine how to reorient Ranger to satisfy Apollo’s needs.¹⁴

This directive was received with mixed feelings by the participants in Ranger. JPL’s project managers favored a narrower focus, because the scientific experiments were giving them technical headaches that threatened project schedules. They proposed to equip the four new Rangers with high-resolution television cameras and to leave off the science experiments, using the payload space to add systems that would improve the reliability of the spacecraft. Scientists who had experiments on the Ranger spacecraft, however, were upset by the proposed change. When they complained to Newell, he and his Lunar and Planetary Programs director reasserted the primacy of science in Ranger and did everything they could to keep the experiments on all the flights. But the difficulties with the Ranger hardware and the pressure of schedules proved too much. In the end, the problem-plagued Ranger carried no space science experiments on its successful flights, but did return photographs showing lunar craters and surface debris less than a meter^** across.¹⁵

** Ranger’s results came too late (1964-1966) to affect the design of the Apollo lunar module; they did confirm that the designers' assumptions about the lunar surface were satisfactory and that the lunar module needed no modification.

Apollo could command enough influence to affect the unmanned lunar programs, but science had no such leverage on manned flights. For that matter, scientists had little interest in Mercury; its cramped spacecraft and severe weight limits, plus the short duration of its flights, made it unattractive to most experimenters. Still, the Mercury astronauts conducted a few scientific exercises, mostly visual and photographic observations of astronomical phenomena.¹⁶ Comparatively unimportant in themselves, these experiments pointed up the need for close coordination between the scientists (and the Office of Space Sciences) and the manned space flight engineers. After John Glenn’s first three-orbit flight on February 28, 1962, the Office of Space Sciences and the Office of Manned Space Flight began to look toward the moon and what humans should and could do there.¹⁷

Apollo managers had spent the second half of 1961 making the critical decisions about launch vehicle and spacecraft design; in the spring of 1962 they were wrestling with the question of mission mode. Should they plan to go directly from earth to the moon, landing the whole crew along with the return vehicle and all its fuel on the lunar surface? Or would it be better to assemble the lunar vehicle in earth orbit - which would require smaller launch vehicles but would entail closely spaced multiple launches, rendezvous of spacecraft and lunar rocket, and the unexplored problems of transferring fuel in zero gravity from earth-orbiting tankers to the lunar booster? Or was the third possible method, lunar-orbit rendezvous, preferable: building a separate landing craft to descend from lunar orbit to the moon, leaving the earth-return vehicle circling the moon to await their return?¹⁸ Apart from its essential impact on the booster rocket and spacecraft, the mission mode would determine how much scientific equipment could be landed on the moon, how many men would land to deploy and operate it, and how long they would be able to stay. Until the decision was made it was pointless to try to design equipment, but by early 1962 the mission planners needed to know in general terms what the scientists hoped to do on the moon and some important questions of responsibility and authority had to be settled.

Coordinating Science and Apollo

The question of science on Apollo was far down the list of priorities in the Office of Manned Space Flight during 1961, behind such overriding questions as the choice of mission mode and the configuration of the launch vehicle. Elsewhere, however, stirrings of scientists' interest in the lunar mission began to appear. The director of MIT’s Instrumentation Laboratory, which was designing the navigation system for Apollo, proposed that at least one Apollo crewman should be a scientist, since the major interest in the moon would be scientific. Furthermore, he said, it would be easier to train a scientist to pilot the spacecraft than to make a scientist out of a test-pilot astronaut.¹⁹ A similar suggestion was made by a group of scientists working with the Lunar Exploration Committee of OSS, who asserted that the scientist should be a geologist, or at least a scientist well versed in geology and geophysics. They further proposed that NASA begin to recruit astronaut trainees from the ranks of professional scientists.²⁰

That the Office of Manned Space Flight and the Office of Space Sciences would have to coordinate their efforts became evident early in 1962. When Homer Newell appeared before the Space Sciences Subcommittee of the House Committee on Science and Astronautics to defend NASA’s authorization request, he was pointedly questioned about the support his office was providing for Apollo.²¹ This line of questioning evidently perturbed Newell, for he subsequently wrote a personal letter to the subcommittee chairman explaining that the specific information needed by Apollo would become available through the normal course of lunar scientific investigations. Newell acknowledged the importance of the lunar landing, but could not agree that concentrating on the immediate needs of Apollo’s engineers would best serve the overall space program. Newell’s attitude gave rise to a feeling, even within OSS, that “space sciences was rather unbending in not getting scientific data which would assist the manned program,” in the words of a Langley official. Langley had proposed that future Ranger missions should carry an experiment to measure the load-bearing capacity of lunar soil intended to assist in the design of the Apollo lunar landing craft, but the proposal had been rejected in favor of a purely scientific exercise in lunar seismometry.²²

Newell, far from being indifferent to the needs of Apollo or unconscious of its importance, was simply trying to conduct his programs in the best interests of space science. Mindful of space scientists' increasing discontent over Apollo and its effect on NASA’s budgets, he was trying to avoid alienating his major constituency. As nearly as Newell could make it, the Office of Space Sciences was run along lines that suited the scientific community. Advice on policy - the general fines that OSS programs should follow - was provided by the Space Science Board of the National Academy of Sciences and reflected the best consensus the space science community could reach. The content of space science projects was determined (within rather broad limits) by the interests of individual investigators, evaluated and endorsed by the Space Sciences Steering Committee and conducted under the direction of the investigator who proposed it. No one in OSS would have dreamed of telling scientists what experiments they should conduct with the expectation of having their instructions followed or their advice appreciated. Indeed, had anyone in OSS attempted to direct the course of a scientist’s experiment, he would have brought down the wrath of the entire scientific community on the space science program. The prerogative of individual scientists to explore problems of their choice, with the endorsement of their scientific peers, is one of the hallmarks of basic research, and probably the most jealously guarded.²³ While Newell might have been able to find a way to supply the data Apollo needed, he risked losing the confidence of the scientists in doing it. At a meeting of OSS field directors in June 1962, Newell’s director of Lunar and Planetary Projects reiterated that “pure science experiments will provide the engineering answers for Apollo.” ²⁴

The issue was focused more sharply in mid-June, when Brainerd Holmes issued a document specifying the information Apollo required: the radiation environment in cislunar space, the physical properties of lunar soil, and the topography of the moon, including photos and maps to permit selection of a landing site. All groups conducting lunar investigations were asked to give top priority to obtaining the specified data.²⁵ The curt wording of the document and its assumption of overriding importance for the lunar landing project were not calculated to win friends in the space science programs, where managers had been struggling with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory over the same issue on Ranger and Surveyor. As events developed, it was JPL’s director, William C. Pickering, who forced the issue later in the summer by urging Associate Administrator Robert C. Seamans, Jr., to seek an agreement between the Office of Space Sciences and the Office of Manned Space Flight that would allow JPL to define Ranger’s objectives more clearly. Pickering’s inclination was to support Holmes, because the science experiments were among Ranger’s prime sources of difficulty.²⁶

While unintentionally stirring up resentment on one front, the Office of Manned Space Flight was more cooperatively seeking assistance on another. In March 1962 the Space Sciences Steering Committee, at OMSF’s request, established an ad hoc working group to recommend scientific tasks to be performed on the moon by the Apollo crews. Not less important, the group would recommend a course of scientific instruction for astronauts in training. Chaired by Charles P. Sonett of the Lunar and Planetary Programs Office, the working group initially included five members from the Office of Space Sciences and one from the Office of Manned Space Flight; membership was later expanded to thirteen and a roster of some dozen consultants was added.²⁷ The Sonett committee first met on March 27, 1962, to hear William A. Lee, assistant director for systems in OMSF, explain what his office wanted it to do. As the minutes of the meeting recorded it, Lee’s approach was far from peremptory and demanding; rather, he explained,

the Office of Manned Space Flight now wants very much to have on Apollo moon flights experiments which are of fundamental significance scientifically. They would like the Working Group to consider these experiments without constraints set in advance by OMSF. OMSF will attempt to tailor flights and flight equipment to meet these needs. As examples, it is expected that the duration of stay on the moon may be largely determined by space science requirements and that if necessary, one or more members of the crew could be professional scientists trained as test pilots…. They welcome suggestions from the Group as to astronaut selection procedure with respect to scientific background; OMSF will handle physiological and psychological factors in astronaut selection…. Unmanned and earth-based scientific experiments which tie in with or prepare for manned experiments will be undertaken by OMSF as part of Apollo; suggestions by the Group are desired.²⁸

At the committee’s third meeting on April 17, Lee presented the engineering guidelines to be considered by the group in proposing experiments. OMSF expected to fly the first mission “before 1970” and subsequent missions at intervals of about six months. The mission mode, not yet selected, was not to be considered by the committee, nor were engineering and operational details of the flights. Landing sites would be chosen by manned space flight officials, but the Sonett committee was encouraged to indicate the desirability of particular areas. OMSF considered it “possible that one of the flight crew might be a professional scientist trained to perform flight operations…. [But this] would significantly complicate our selection and training program, and should not be done unnecessarily.” Lee urged the committee to assume no additional constraints. Even if some experiments required difficult engineering development, OMSF wanted the committee to list them so that the requirements could be considered in designing the Apollo spacecraft.²⁹

The guidelines Lee provided stated that the Office of Manned Space Flight would consider the committee’s report “a major factor” in determining some characteristics of the proposed missions. For example, the planned number of missions (“more than one but less than ten”) and time to be spent on the lunar surface (“between 4 and 24 hours”) might be strongly influenced by scientific considerations. If enough worthwhile scientific work could be done, “stays up to 7 days are not impossible.” Similarly the planned payload (100 to 200 pounds, 45 to 90 kilograms) might be increased and the mobility of the astronauts on the surface might be extended, for example by providing a motorized vehicle and tailoring the space suit for increased ease of manipulation, if the increased scientific return justified the added expense. A soft-landing unmanned supply vehicle carrying up to 30,000 pounds (13,600 kilograms) of support equipment and supplies was under active consideration; this vehicle might carry additional heavy or bulky scientific equipment.³⁰

Lee’s presentation indicated that the Office of Manned Space Flight was willing to be as accommodating as possible in providing for scientific exploration of the lunar surface. But the qualifiers in Lee’s guidelines suggest that OMSF left itself many escape clauses that could have important effects on the scientific program.

With these guidelines in mind, the Sonett committee began to collect suggestions for lunar surface experiments. Their criteria, established early, were simple: experiments must be scientifically feasible and important, capable of being performed only on the moon, significantly improved by having a human aboard, and likely to lead to additional scientific and technological progress. Three basic types of experiments were suggested: measurements and qualitative observations to be made by the astronauts on the lunar surface; experiments to be performed on samples selected and brought back by the crews; and instruments to be emplaced by the astronauts and left on the moon to transmit data to earth.³¹

A point that seriously concerned the Sonett committee was the background and training of the lunar explorers. As a basic requirement, the group suggested sufficient scientific judgment and maturity to recognize and act appropriately upon unexpected phenomena. They noted that scientist-astronauts might be caught in a serious conflict between acquiring proficiency in spacecraft operation and maintaining their skills in research³² - a question that was to complicate relations between the science community and NASA’s operations experts for the next 10 years.

Sonett’s committee submitted a draft report in early July 1962; its recommendations, considered in the following weeks by the first of NASA’s Summer Studies and endorsed by the external scientific community, would form the basis for the initial planning of Apollo’s lunar exploration program. Meanwhile, the committee’s work, together with the controversy over the content of the Ranger missions, emphasized the desirability of continuous contact between the offices of Space Sciences and Manned Space Flight on scientific matters. The experience in developing the scientific exercises carried out by the Mercury astronauts showed that overlapping responsibilities requiring close supervision would develop when science went aboard manned spacecraft, and some kind of formal liaison needed to be established.

Homer Newell moved to provide coordination in September 1962 when he proposed to establish a Joint Working Group to replace the ad hoc arrangements that were proving cumbersome. The basic tasks of this group would be to recommend to manned space flight planners a detailed program of scientific exploration, and to suggest to the Office of Space Sciences a program of data acquisition to ensure that Apollo’s needs were met. It would also keep the field centers and outside scientists informed of the science programs planned for manned space flight. In carrying out its functions, the group would have the implicit responsibility of assuring that NASA’s interface with the scientific community remained where it belonged - within the Office of Space Sciences - and to assure that each program office’s projects were maximally responsive to the interests of the other. The group’s chairman was to be assigned to OSS for administrative purposes but functionally would be a member of both offices, reporting to the Lunar and Planetary Programs Office in OSS and the Office of Systems Studies in OMSF.³³ Newell would later remark that this official “had two bosses to try to satisfy, which is universally recognized as unsatisfactory” ³⁴; but no better alternative seemed available.

To chair this Working Group, Newell appointed Eugene M. Shoemaker, a geologist from the U.S. Geological Survey who had recently been assigned for a one-year stint to NASA from the Survey’s Astrogeology Branch. Shoemaker had received his doctorate from Princeton under Harry H. Hess, chairman of the Space Science Board from 1962 to 1968 and an enthusiastic promoter of space science.³⁵ Since October 1961 Shoemaker had been a co-investigator for the television experiment on Ranger.³⁶ Having been a space enthusiast since pre-Sputnik days, he had consciously fashioned his professional career with an eye to becoming a scientist-astronaut.³⁷ Although he never realized that ambition, for seven years starting in 1962 he would contribute to the design of Apollo’s lunar surface activities and help to train the men who would be his surrogates on the moon.

For the first several months Shoemaker’s new job took him into a tangle of uncharted responsibilities and unclear jurisdictions. At Headquarters, Newell’s Office of Space Sciences had asserted its responsibility for all of NASA’s science, manned or unmanned; in the opinion of many scientists in OSS, neither the Office of Manned Space Flight nor the Manned Spacecraft Center had a staff qualified to manage scientific experiments, but both were considering adding their own science people.³⁸ Newell and his staff expected to plan and develop the manned science program and to help select and train the astronauts. The Office of Manned Space Flight, foreseeing the many complex interactions that such divided responsibility would require, felt that it was simply not feasible to allow anything - even the science - to be managed by another office.³⁹ When scientists showed interest in the Mercury project, the Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC) had quickly moved to establish a Mercury Scientific Experiments Panel to screen proposed scientific observations and prevent any interference with the program’s primary purposes.⁴⁰

Shoemaker spent much of 1962 devising a structure for the working group and soliciting support from the centers.⁴¹ Toward the end of the year he recommended to Newell that the group should comprise an executive board and two panels: one on data requirements generated by OMSF, the other on scientific missions recommended by OSS for manned space flight. The executive board would recommend projects to the respective directors (Holmes and Newell).⁴² It would, however, neither initiate nor manage specific scientific projects.⁴³

In the first months of 1963 Homer Newell moved steadily to bring manned space science under his office’s direction. He also began a campaign to persuade the Manned Spacecraft Center that science was something more than a means of acquiring the data required to design their spacecraft.⁴⁴ Shoemaker, who had been urging MSC to start training astronauts in geology, had found a few receptive minds at the Houston center - among them Max Faget, director of engineering and development - who understood that “it wouldn't look very good if we went to the moon and didn't have something to do when we got there.” ⁴⁵ In late March, Faget drafted a letter for MSC Director Robert R. Gilruth’s signature, formally requesting the U.S. Geological Survey to assign six of its scientists to the Houston center. Newell had paved the way for this cooperation in informal discussions with the Survey’s director, who agreed to Gilruth’s request.⁴⁶ Newell saw no need to establish a geological competence in NASA, and both he and Shoemaker preferred to have the Geological Survey staff the Apollo science program rather than geologists hired by MSC.

Meanwhile Newell and Holmes, anticipating a need for increased cooperation as Project Gemini progressed, were negotiating a formal division of responsibility for manned science projects between their offices. Newell insisted that the Office of Space Sciences had the responsibility to solicit, select, and approve all of NASA’s scientific experiments; Holmes similarly asserted the Office of Manned Space Flight’s responsibility to approve any hardware that went into a manned spacecraft and any procedure that affected the flight plan. Between the selection of an experiment and its execution on a flight was a large area where responsibility for funding and management of design, fabrication, and integration into the spacecraft of the scientific instruments had to be worked out.

After considerable negotiation, deputies for Newell and Holmes signed a memorandum of agreement on July 25, 1963, spelling out the responsibilities of their two offices. Planning and development of all manned space science projects was assigned to the Office of Space Sciences, as well as any research and development necessary to support them. This meant that OSS would select the experiments and principal investigators and undertake preliminary development of the necessary instruments, in consultation with the Office of Manned Space Flight and the appropriate field center. OMSF agreed to develop and integrate flight hardware and work the scientific objectives into mission plans, usually acting through the Manned Spacecraft Center. OSS took on the job of formulating a science training program for the astronauts, which OMSF would conduct. Newell’s office would also establish the scientific qualifications for scientist-astronauts (though none had yet been selected) and would participate in selection of scientists for astronaut training. Each office would budget the funds for its part of experiment development. Fabrication, testing, and installation of the flight instruments would be supervised by the same team that monitored its design and early development.⁴⁷ This agreement proved to be about as workable an arrangement as possible, given the division of responsibility inherent in the Headquarters organization. With minor changes, it governed OSS-OMSF relations in manned space science throughout the Apollo program.

While the new agreement was being worked out, Newell reorganized Shoemaker’s working group as the Manned Space Science Division on July 30, 1963. The new division reported to both program offices as before, but at a higher level, and it would be the focus of OSS’s management of manned science experiments. Shoemaker, however, did not stay to direct the lunar science program from this position. When his tour of duty with NASA ended in November 1963 he returned to the Geological Survey to continue his work with Ranger and Surveyor. He was succeeded by Willis B. Foster, who had served in the Pentagon as Deputy Assistant Director for Research in the Directorate of Defense Research and Engineering.⁴⁸

Reorganizing Around Apollo

The establishment of the Manned Space Sciences Division coincided with a major reorganization of Headquarters. From 1961 to November 1963 the field centers reported to the Associate Administrator but might be conducting projects under the authority of any or all of the Headquarters program offices. Under the new organization each center reported to one of three program offices, the heads of which were now designated Associate Administrators for Manned Space Flight, for Space Science and Applications,^*** and for Advanced Research and Technology. This change greatly simplified the lines of authority between the program offices and the centers, as well as freeing NASA’s three top managers to attend to matters of broader concern. The greater autonomy of the program offices, however, tended to make them more self-sufficient and parochial and to make interoffice cooperation more cumbersome.⁴⁹

*** Newell’s responsibilities were extended to encompass the space applications program (communications, weather, and navigation projects), which since 1961 had been managed by the Office of Applications (abolished in the reorganisation).

In September 1963 Brainerd Holmes, who had steered the lunar landing program through some of its most critical decisions, left NASA to return to private industry. His replacement was George E. Mueller. Headquarters scientists did not know what to expect from the new chief of manned space flight, but they could hardly anticipate less consideration than Holmes had given their projects. One historian has characterized Holmes as “masterful, abrasive, and determined to get what he needed to carry out his assignment, even at the expense of other programs.” ⁵⁰ Considering the state of the manned space flight organization when Holmes took charge and the development problems that had to be solved to put men on the moon by 1970, it is hardly surprising that he gave science such a low priority; but the science community was not inclined to accept that as an excuse for his indifference to their suggestions.

Mueller, like Holmes, was an electrical engineer. He had managed Air Force missile and space development projects for Space Technology Laboratories, Inc., for five years before joining NASA. But he also held a Ph.D. in physics, and his experience included several years of teaching and research at Ohio State University⁵¹; it was at least conceivable that his attitude toward science might be different from Holmes’s. No less committed than Holmes to the success of Apollo and no less determined to have his own way,⁵² Mueller came to Washington about the time the public debates concerning Apollo and the space science program had subsided [see Chapter 1], so he was in a position to see that it would be politically advantageous to accommodate the scientists if he could.

Mueller moved quickly to reorganize his office and strengthen its lines of communication with the centers. He also brought in several high-ranking Air Force officers familiar with his management style to fill key positions in OMSF. One of Mueller’s first priorities was to evaluate the general health of the Apollo project. He detailed two experienced Headquarters officials to study the progress of its components and estimate its chances for success by 1970. After surveying current plans in light of recent progress and anticipated funding, they reported that in their judgment the project had about one chance in ten of meeting its stated goal. Mueller then imposed some drastic changes on the Saturn program: he canceled the scheduled earth orbital test flights of the Apollo spacecraft on the Saturn I and ordered that the Saturn V be tested “all up” - with all stages and systems complete and functioning from the first test flight - rather than proving each stage’s readiness separately.⁵³ Then, while the centers adjusted to their new boss’s ways, he turned his attention to the science program.

Mueller believed that his office had to have ultimate control over every part of every manned space program, including the science experiments; and by the end of the year he had decided to set up a Manned Space Flight Experiments Board (MSFEB) to review all experiments proposed for manned missions. The board’s charter established four categories of experiments (scientific, technological, medical, and Department of Defense^**** and the channels through which they were to be submitted. Assessment of the scientific merit of a proposed experiment was left to the sponsoring agency. The board would assess the operational feasibility of each proposal by referring the experiment plans to the appropriate field center (usually MSC) for review. In case the board could not agree on whether to fly any particular experiment, Mueller, as chairman, could make the final decision. Experiments accepted by the MSFEB and assigned a priority comprised a fist from which those to be flown on a particular mission were to be taken. Mueller assigned responsibility for developing the flight hardware for each experiment to the field center involved (again, normally MSC), which appointed a technical monitor to work with the experiment’s principal investigator in developing the flight-qualified instruments.⁵⁴

**** For the involvement of DoD in the early manned space flight programs, see Barton C. Hacker and James M. Grimwood, On the Shoulders of Titans: A History of Project Gemini, NASA SP-4203 (Washington, 1977), pp. 117-22, and W. Fred Boone, “NASA Office of Defense Affairs: The First Five Years,” NASA Historical Report HHR-32 (Washington, 1970).

Not everyone was happy with the new experiments board; some space science officials protested that Mueller was usurping their prerogatives to select and evaluate experiments.⁵⁵ Experimenters complained that Mueller’s system took too much time and paperwork and unduly increased the cost of manned space science. Nonetheless, Mueller had to ensure that a proposed experiment was compatible with the spacecraft in all respects and that it could be carried out without interfering with mission operations. As long as OMSF was still learning how to get people to the moon and back, science took second place when it came aboard at all.

1963: Progress and Prospects

As 1963 ended, manned space flight officials could look back at two and a half years of intense activity and considerable progress. Project Mercury had flown four earth-orbital missions, the last one remaining aloft for 34 hours. A new project, Gemini, was under way; its objectives were to explore some of the problems posed by the lunar landing mission, especially rendezvous.⁵⁶ Apollo managers had made several critical decisions, including the choice of lunar-orbit rendezvous, the basic design of the two lunar spacecraft, and the configuration of the three-stage Saturn V lunar launch vehicle. Nine of the 12 men who would ultimately walk on the moon were in training for their part in the program. A new NASA Administrator, James E. Webb, had taken control, and the agency had been restructured for better support of Apollo. The new president, Lyndon Baines Johnson, had more experience with the space program than any other politician in Washington and would remain committed to it despite severe criticism and unforeseen tragedy.

The dominant position Apollo occupied in the space program was indicated by the changes imposed on Ranger and Surveyor in 1962 and 1963. Space science officials tried hard to preserve the priority of science in both projects, but with limited success. After thorough examination of the lunar exploration projects, the Space Science and Space Vehicle Panels of the President’s Science Advisory Committee came down on the side of the Office of Manned Space Flight. In a mid-October report they concluded that Ranger and Surveyor must be planned so that the first few successful missions would provide the information engineers needed to design the lunar landing craft, and that those projects' technical management and funding should be integrated with Apollo’s. Notwithstanding that concession, the panels insisted that after the first couple of landings science should determine the content of lunar missions and that the lunar surface activities must be planned with the full participation of the scientific community.⁵⁷

Lunar science planning had begun, in the broadest sense, by the end of 1963, but how much science could actually be done during Apollo was still a question. Planners were contemplating as many as 10 lunar missions; what could be done on each one would have to await events. If the first lunar landing attempt did not succeed, and several attempts had to be made, science might have to wait. As 1964 began, Headquarters was preparing to deal with the details of the lunar missions: choosing landing sites, deciding what specific experiments would be done on the moon, and selecting the experimenters.