Proceedings of an Oral History Workshop 

Conducted July 21, 1989 

Moderator: 
 

John M. Logsdon
 

Participants:
 

Howard W. Tindall
 

George E. Mueller
 

Owen W. Morris
 

Maxime A. Faget
 

Robert A. Gilruth
 

Christopher C. Kraft
 

MONOGRAPHS IN AEROSPACE HISTORY
 

Number 14
 

July 1999
 

National Aeronautics and Space Administration 

NASA History Division 

Office of Policy and Plans 

Washington, DC 20546 

Foreword
 

In a spring 1999 poll of opinion leaders sponsored by leading news organizations in 

the United States, the 100 most significant events of the 20th century were ranked. 

The Moon landing was a very close second to the splitting of the atom and its use 

during World War II. “It was agonizing,” CNN anchor and senior correspondent Judy 

Woodruff said of the selection process. Probably, historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, 

Jr., best summarized the position of a large number of individuals polled. “The one 

thing for which this century will be remembered 500 years from now was: This was 

the century when we began the exploration of space.” He noted that Project Apollo 

gave many a sense of infinite potential. “People always say: If we could land on the 

Moon, we can do anything,” said Maria Elena Salinas, co-anchor at Miami-based 

Spanish-language cable network Univision, who also made it her first choice. 

With his 81-year-old eyes, historian Schlesinger 

looked forward toward a positive future and 

that prompted him to rank the lunar landing 

first. “I put DNA and penicillin and the computer and the microchip in the first 10 because 

they’ve transformed civilization. Wars vanish,” 

Schlesinger said, and many people today cannot even recall when the Civil War took place. 

“Pearl Harbor will be as remote as the War of 

the Roses,” he said, referring to the English 

civil war of the 15th century. And there’s no 

need to get hung up on the ranking, he added. 

“The order is essentially very artificial and fictitious,” he said. “It’s very hard to decide the 

atomic bomb is more important than getting on 

the Moon.” 

There have been many detailed historical studies of the process of deciding on and executing 

the Apollo lunar landing during the 1960s and 

early 1970s. From the announcement of 

President John F. Kennedy on May 25, 1961, of 

Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 3 
his decision to land an American on the Moon 

by the end of the decade, through the first lunar 

landing on July 20, 1969, on to the last of six 

successful Moon landings with Apollo 17 in 

December 1972, NASA carried out Project 

Apollo with enthusiasm and aplomb. 

Of all the difficulties facing NASA in its bid to 

send humans to the Moon in the Apollo program, 

management was perhaps the greatest challenge. 

James Webb, NASA administrator from 1961 to 

1968, often stated that while the technological 

aspects of reaching the Moon were daunting, 

these challenges were all within grasp. More difficult was ensuring that those technical skills 

were properly utilized and managed. Thus, the 

success or failure of Apollo in large part depended on the quality of its management. “We can lick 

gravity, but sometimes the paperwork is overwhelming,” Wernher von Braun once said. 

To a very real extent, Project Apollo was a triumph of management in meeting enormously 

difficult systems engineering and technological 

integration requirements. NASA leaders had to 

acquire and organize unprecedented resources 

to accomplish the task at hand. From both a 

political and technological perspective, management was critical. The technological accomplishments of Apollo were indeed spectacular. 

However, it may be that the most lasting legacy 

of Apollo was human: an improved understanding of how to plan, coordinate, and monitor the 

myriad technical activities that were the building blocks of Apollo. 

More to the point, NASA personnel employed a 

“program management” concept that centralized authority over design, engineering, procurement, testing, construction, manufacturing, spare parts, logistics, training, and operations. The management of the program was 

recognized as critical to Apollo’s success in 

November 1968, when Science magazine, the 

publication of the American Association for the 

Advancement of Science, observed: 

In terms of numbers of dollars or of 

men, NASA has not been our largest 

national undertaking, but in terms of 

complexity, rate of growth, and technological sophistication it has been 

unique....It may turn out that [the space 

program’s] most valuable spin-off of all 

will be human rather than technological: better knowledge of how to plan, 

coordinate, and monitor the multitudinous and varied activities of the organizations required to accomplish great 

social undertakings. 

The editor of Science probably did not fully 

understand the complex project management 

procedures used on Project Apollo. 

While there have been many studies recounting 

the history of Apollo, at the time of the 30th 

anniversary of the first lunar landing by Apollo 

11, it seems appropriate to revisit the process of 

large-scale technological management as it related to the lunar mission. Consequently, the NASA 

History Office has chosen to publish this monograph containing the recollections of key participants in the management process. The collective 

oral history presented here was recorded in 1989 

at the Johnson Space Center’s Gilruth Recreation 

Center in Houston, Texas. It includes the recollections of key participants in Apollo’s administration, addressing issues such as communication between field centers, the prioritization of 

technological goals, and the delegation of 

responsibility. The following people participated: 

Howard W. (Bill) Tindall Jr. was responsible for planning all 10 

Gemini missions. He 

was an expert in orbital 

mechanics and a key 

figure in the development of rendezvous 

techniques for Gemini 

and lunar trajectory techniques for Apollo. He 

4 Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 
was also the inventor of “Tindallgrams,” memos 

that captured the details of Apollo operations 

planning. He retired from NASA in 1979. 

George E. Mueller was 

NASA’s associate administrator for manned space 

flight from 1963 to 1969. 

As such, he was responsible for overseeing the 

completion of Project 

Apollo and beginning 

the development of the 

Space Shuttle. He left NASA in 1969. 

Owen W. Morris worked 

at the Langley Research 

Center from 1948 until 

the Space Task Group 

moved to Houston, Texas, 

in 1962. He worked for 

NASA during Apollo’s 

entirety. Morris was chief 

engineer of the lunar 

module, manager of the lunar module, and later 

the manager of the Apollo program office. 

Maxime A. Faget joined 

the Space Task Group in 

NASA in 1958. He became NASA Manned 

Spacecraft Center’s (designated the Johnson 

Space Center in 1973) 

assistant director for 

engineering and development in 1962 and later its director. Faget contributed many of the original design concepts 

for Project Mercury’s spacecraft and played a 

major role in designing virtually every U.S. 

crewed spacecraft since then, including the 

Space Shuttle. 

Robert R. Gilruth served as assistant director at 

Langley from 1952 to 1959 and as assistant director (manned satellites) and head of Project 

Mercury from 1959 to 

1961. In early 1961 an independent Space Task 

Group was established 

under Gilruth at Langley to 

supervise the Mercury program. This group moved to 

the Manned Spacecraft 

Center, Houston, Texas, in 

1962. Gilruth was then director of the Houston 

operation from 1962 to 1972. 

Christopher C. Kraft Jr. 

was a long-standing official with NASA throughout the Apollo program. In 1958, while at 

the Langley Research 

Center, he became a 

member of the Space 

Task Group developing 

Project Mercury, and he later moved with the 

Group to Houston in 1962. He was flight director for all of the Mercury and many of the 

Gemini missions and directed the design of 

Mission Control at the Manned Spacecraft 

Center (MSC), later designated Johnson Space 

Center. He was named the MSC deputy director 

in 1970 and director two years later, a position 

he held until his retirement in 1982. 

The valuable perspectives of these individuals 

deepen and expand our understanding of this 

important historical event. 

This gathering was organized through the efforts 

of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Space Center in 

Houston, Texas, at the time of the 20th anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing. In particular, 

Joseph P. Loftus, Jr., played a central role in 

bringing these key Apollo managers together. 

This is the 14th in a series of special studies prepared by the NASA History Office. The 

Monographs in Aerospace History series is 

designed to provide a wide variety of investigaManaging the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 5 
tions relative to the history of aeronautics and 

space. These publications are intended to be 

tightly focused in terms of subject, relatively 

short in length, and reproduced in an inexpensive format to allow timely and broad dissemination to researchers in aerospace history. 

Suggestions for additional publications in the 

Monographs in Aerospace History series are 

welcome. 

Roger D. Launius 

Chief Historian 

National Aeronautics and 

Space Administration 

April 18, 1999 

6 Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 
Table of 
 

Contents
 

Foreword 3
 

Preface and Acknowledgments 9
 

Roundtable Discussion 11
 

About the Moderator 47
 

Monographs in Aerospace History 49
 

Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 7 

Preface and 

Acknowledgments 

The idea for getting on the record the recollections of those who had been intimately involved in the management of Project Apollo came from Joseph P. Loftus, Jr., of 

the Johnson Space Center. Mr. Loftus, who had himself been involved in the Apollo 

project, has long been an advocate of the value of recording the history of space 

exploration. He, with other Johnson personnel, organized this set of recollections 

with key personnel from the Apollo management team. The purpose was to exact 

lessons learned in management practices. I was honored to be asked by Mr. Loftus 

to moderate this fascinating discussion. 

These reminiscences took the form of a work- Space Policy Institute to undertake worthwhile 

shop that was recorded on videotape at the projects such as this is a result of the generosity 

Gilruth Recreation Center at the Johnson of the several corporate contributors to the 

Space Center, on July 21, 1989. This document Institute’s work. 

and the videotape of the workshop itself were 

made available to various archives and Of course, all of us involved in organizing this 

research centers concerned with space and workshop owe great thanks to the participants, 

with the major events at that time. both for sharing their experiences with us and 

for the contributions they have made to their 

The workshop would not have been possible country, both during Project Apollo and 

without the financial support of the Lyndon throughout their careers. 

Baines Johnson Space Center. The ability of the 

John M. Logsdon 

Director 

Space Policy Institute 

George Washington University 

Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 9 

Roundtable 
 

Discussion
 

DR. LOGSDON: 

My name is John Logsdon. I am the director of 

the Space Policy Institute at George 

Washington University in Washington, D.C. and 

I have a unique opportunity this afternoon to 

moderate a discussion among the people that 

made the Apollo program happen. 

Our goal this afternoon is to get down on video 

tape for both the current and future generations involved in the space program some sense 

of the working of the Apollo program: how it 

was managed, how the presidential goal of 

landing man safely on the Moon and returning 

him to Earth before the decade is out was 

turned into an operating program–engineering, 

development, and operations. 

At my left are six of the people most totally 

involved in the Apollo program. And to get 

started, I am going to ask each one of them to 

identify themselves, how they came to the program, and the roles they played in it. 

MR. TINDALL: 

My name is Bill Tindall. I started with NACA 

way back in 1948. I got involved at Langley 

Research Center with Project Echo, and then 

Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo. I worked for 

Chris Kraft, who you will meet when we finally get around to the other end. I was a deputy 

division chief in his Flight Operations 

Directorate, but the division chief didn’t really 

need a deputy, so most of the time Chris just 

loaned me out to other places. I worked for 

Joe Shea for a while on the Apollo on-board 

software, for the spacecraft software, and 

then for George Low doing mission techniques, which is basically trying to figure out 

how we were going to fly the mission. 

DR. MUELLER: 

I am George Mueller. I am president of the 

International Academy of Astronautics. I was 

associate administrator for Manned Spaceflight 

during the Apollo and the Gemini programs. 

And my role was, I guess, trying to make everything happen at once and only a little faster 

than people thought was possible. And over 

time, we managed to do what people thought 

was impossible. And that was a very worthwhile thing to accomplish. 

MR. MORRIS: 

I am Owen Morris. Like Bill, I joined the 

Langley Research Center in 1948, was in supersonic aerodynamic research until the time the 

Space Task Group moved to Houston. I worked 

in the Apollo program office all the way 

through Apollo. I was primarily chief engineer 

of the lunar module, manager of the lunar module, and then later in the program, manager of 

the Apollo program office. 

DR. FAGET: 

I am Max Faget. I also started at the Langley 

Research Center in 1946 working for Bob 

Gilruth. The Mercury program was started 

there under the Space Task Group, again under 

Dr. Gilruth. And I came over here to Houston 

with the Space Task Group to do the lunar mission and I was the head of engineering here at 

Johnson Space Center. 

DR. GILRUTH: 

My name is Bob Gilruth. I have worked for the 

U.S. Government ever since I graduated from

college as an aeronautical engineer. I started 

out with airplanes, went through the developments of World War II, and then when space 

came along, I was in the right place to work on 

Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 11 
[The president] was very impressed with the reaction 
 

of the public to the flights that we had made. 
 

And he wanted to do something even much greater than that.
 “ flying men in space. We started with orbiting 

people, and then finally we got to going to the 

Moon. We flew six missions to the Moon. We 

brought everybody back, and then shortly after 

that I did other work and I was no longer in 

charge. But many of these people here kept it 

going. 

DR. KRAFT: 

”

My name is Chris Kraft. I started at age 20 at the 

NACA. I came there from college, I suppose, in 

1945. I worked for Bob Gilruth in Flight 

Operations testing airplanes, learning what flying qualities were that Bob Gilruth had invented. From that point on, I did a lot of things that 

I had a lot of fun with until the space program 

started. Bob Gilruth asked me to join the Space 

Task Group in September of 1958. From that 

time on, I was involved with Flight Operations 

in all of the manned space flight programs. For 

Apollo, I was the director of Flight Operations 

and fortunate enough to be intimately involved 

in the planning of that great and fantastic voyage. And then from ’72 to ’82, I was the director 

of the Johnson Space Center. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Clearly a distinguished panel. Gentlemen, what 

I am going to do is direct a question at one or 

the other of you as we go along, but I think all 

of you should feel free to chime in. And since 

we have so much to cover in a couple of hours, 

let’s try to keep our answers not to the normal 

garrulous length of telling stories, but really 

down to the point. 

I am going to start with Dr. Gilruth. When John 

Kennedy went before Congress on May 25, 

1961, and said we were going to the Moon, our 

total flight experience was one 15-minute suborbital flight. You have been widely quoted as 

being aghast at the notion that the United States 

was committing itself to send people to the 

Moon, at least on a specific schedule. Talk a little bit about the kind of challenges that you all 

of a sudden had responsibility for carrying out. 

DR. GILRUTH: 

Well, let me tell you this first. The president 

talked to me before he made his statement. I 

told him that I thought that maybe we could go 

to the Moon, but I wasn’t sure that we could. 

And there were a lot of unknowns that we 

would have to uncover before we were sure. 

And he said well, let’s go ahead and say we can 

do it in a decade. And we will do the best we 

can, and if all things work, why we will do what 

we want to do. 

He was very impressed with the reaction of the 

public to the flights that we had made. And he 

wanted to do something even much greater 

than that. Of course, he was a young man. He 

was much younger than I was at that time. But 

he was very bright, and he was an easy, good 

man to work for because he really wanted us to 

be successful. So that’s really how it all got 

started. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Max, I know you had been working with groups 

in Headquarters and involved in some committees, even before the Kennedy announcement, 

thinking about the lunar landing as the appropriate post-Mercury goal. What was the kind of 

engineering outlook at that point? Did we know 

how to do the job? 

DR. FAGET: 

We knew what had to be done. How to do it in 

10 years was never addressed before the 

announcement was made. But quite simply, we 

considered a program of a number of phases. 

The first phase was simply to fly out to the 

Moon, make a circumlunar flight, as we put it, 

never going into orbit but passing nearby and 

then whipping on back to the Earth, which was 

pretty easy on the total propulsion requirements, and was fairly safe from the standpoint 

of guidance. If you missed the Moon by a large 

enough margin, you were fairly certain to come 

back in at an acceptable entry angle. 

12 Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 
After doing that, we finally learned a little bit 

more about what deep space flight might be 

like. We thought the next phase would be to 

orbit the Moon, and we would do that with the 

sense of a follow-on program, that they evolved 

from the first one and that finally we would 

evolve to when we would accomplish the landing from a lunar-orbiting, know-how base. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

But all of that got very compressed very quickly. 

DR. FAGET: 

It all got compressed into one big program. But 

actually, in concept, we continued to maintain 

the idea that we would orbit the Moon before 

we landed, and we would want to do some 

reconnaissance from orbit before we landed. 

Fortunately, there was enough money to buy a 

lunar orbiter, which was an unmanned spacecraft which provided some excellent photographs of the Moon from which a lot of missions could be planned. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

All of a sudden, instead of being a group of 

people that all knew one another located in 

Hampton, Virginia, you were sitting on top of a 

national priority, with not exactly a blank 

check, but with certainly a lot of resources 

available to you, a set of dates to meet, and 

instead of doing the work yourself, managing a 

lot of contracts. I think Bill or Owen may be 

the right persons to start on this, but I think it 

goes to all of you. How did you change the 

character of the work you were doing in order 

to take on a task of this size? What were the 

early steps? Owen? 

MR. MORRIS: 

Well, it was a big change, I think, for just about 

everybody involved in the program at that time. 

First, we had to work with Max and his people 

to understand in a little bit more detail what the 

systems would be. And we spent almost two 

years, as a matter of fact, before the final mode 

to reach the Moon was selected. And the spacecraft components could then be defined in 

some detail. In the meantime, we knew enough 

to start the Command and Service Module 

since it ultimately, essentially, had to go to the 

Moon, take care of the people on the way there 

and the way back, and reenter the Earth’s 

atmosphere. We were not intimately involved 

with the rest of the operation. 

Once we had defined the mission and worked 

with Chris and Bill and their people to understand a little bit more about the operations, we 

were able to organize the system a little bit better. I think the biggest challenges that we had, 

or at least that I, from where I saw the program, 

was one of communication and coordination. I 

certainly had been used to working on the 

smaller jobs, smaller programs, where you intimately knew almost all of the people involved 

and were able to, by personal relations, do 

most of the management things you needed to 

do. All of a sudden, we were thrust into a great 

big program with tens of thousands of people 

involved. And trying to get communication and 

organization set up so that everybody understood how the program worked was probably 

the biggest challenge. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Bill, do you have anything to add to that? 

MR. TINDALL: 

Well, yes. I think the other thing that you have 

to remember is that when we really started the 

space program, it was before Apollo. And we 

were working on Mercury, and I worked on 

Echo. It was at that time where people like 

me, mechanical engineers who didn’t know 

anything about that sort of thing, suddenly 

found out what orbital mechanics were, how 

computers worked, how to program them, and 

things like that. So that it wasn’t just a jump 

right into Apollo, but we really had some pretty nice stepping stones to kind of learn our 

way along. 

Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 13 
DR. KRAFT: 

I think that is a good point. I think that you have 

to recognize that those of us who came from 

NACA weren’t totally blind to the industry. All 

of us that worked in NACA were used to working with the aircraft manufacturers, particularly we in Flight Operations, Max in missiles, and 

Bill in instrumentation, and so forth. So it was 

not a dumb thing to us. And as Bill points out, I 

think that in the beginning of the Mercury program, where we had guys like Zimmerman to 

help us with formulating contracts and getting 

those contracts set up, etc., we weren’t totally 

ignorant to how to do that job. 

I think the other aspect of Apollo was that it 

gave all of us young guys, like Max and myself, 

under the tutelage of Bob Gilruth, the new 

opportunity to go out and become managers of 

this sort. It was a great challenge to us, and we 

looked at it that way. And it became a heck of a 

great game for us. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

So it really started with Mercury. 

DR. KRAFT: 

Absolutely. 

MR. TINDALL: 

Even before that. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Where you had a set of experiences that you 

could apply to a much more sizable problem. 

DR. KRAFT: 

Yes. And I think we learned a great deal about 

how to approach the spacecraft operations and 

manufacturing job from Mercury. The industry 

grew just as we did. So we both grew up together. 

DR. GILRUTH: 

You must remember that we started Mercury 

before there was any thought of going to the 

Moon. And we flew Mercury before that. And it 

was Gemini, the second spacecraft, well in 

hand when we realized that we were going to 

have to go to the Moon. We used Gemini as a 

way of finding out whether we could do rendezvous and all those other things. So we were 

kind of lucky that we got started the way we 

did. 

DR. KRAFT: 

Very fortunate. I think that the question is did 

we have to manage a new set of ideas and 

where were we going in the industry. I don’t 

think these are fair questions because we had 

just as much a leg up on how to manage the 

industry as the industry did on how to respond 

to us. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Indeed. Well, George, you got to Headquarters 

in 1963 and you found this group of strongwilled people by now in Houston, probably 

pretty well convinced they knew what they 

were doing. 

DR. MUELLER: 

They were just starting in Houston. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

And your job was to make them part of an integrated whole, together with Marshall and all of 

the other centers, including Kennedy, that were 

involved with the program. Do you want to 

reflect on what you found when you got there? 

DR. MUELLER: 

Well, let me start earlier, because we were all 

talking about how we got to where we were. 

And I actually started in the space business 

with William Wooldridge, back when ballistic 

missiles were just starting to come into being. 

And so my own involvement with the space 

activities was to be in charge of building the 

first of the lunar probes, Pioneer I, which 

unfortunately never made it to the Moon, but 

at least it taught us a good deal about what one 

14 Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 
had to do in order to accomplish something 

like that. 

So when I came to NASA, I had a fair background on the commercial side of the field, as it 

were, trying to sell NASA some of these marvelous new devices that they really needed in 

order to carry out the lunar mission. And perhaps my major contact at that time was not 

with the Manned Spacecraft Center, but with 

Marshall Space Flight Center and working with 

Wernher von Braun and trying to convince 

them that they needed to have something that 

we called systems engineering, or an understanding of the total system and the interfaces 

between the launch vehicle and the spacecraft 

and the launch complex, and what needed to be 

done in order to make sure that those interfaces, when they came together, met the needs 

of the overall mission. And that, of course, was 

a key in the long run to the success of Apollo 

because we did set up a very deep and strict 

interface control system that made sure that 

when you delivered things to the Cape, almost 

always they fit together. And that, I think, was 

the most important thing. 

So I brought to the program a background in 

quite a different arena, that was the Air Force 

management arena. And that combination of 

the NACA strengths, the old Marshall strengths, 

and the Air Force experience, I think, really led 

to the ability to complete the mission within the 

time scale that we had. And I don’t think there 

was any doubt that we could have carried out 

the mission, given enough time. But to do it 

within the decade was more of a challenge. In 

the long run, it also permitted us to build a team 

that I don’t think has been equaled in the world 

before or since. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

But I think it is fair to say that when people 

here and in Marshall were first confronted with 

your approach to things, like all-up testing and 

management of the systems level, there was an 

initial skepticism that that was the right way to 

do business. 

Dr. Robert R. Gilruth, 

director, NASA Manned 

Spacecraft Center, second 

from left, in Antarctica at 

“Project Deep Freeze,” with 

(left to right) Dr. Faget, Dr. 

von Braun, two Deep 

Freeze scientists, and Dr. 

Ernst Stuhlinger. 

(NASA Photo 77-12818.) 

Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 15 
DR. MUELLER: 

It was a little more than skepticism, I would 

say, but downright disbelief. And, of course, 

there were various ways of managing the program. One of the things that I remember very 

distinctly is the idea of inserting a program 

management structure in parallel with the functional structure of the centers. And the amount 

of time it took to convince people that that was, 

in fact, a good thing to do, and, in my view at 

least, was necessary in order to provide the 

kinds of communications that were required in 

that complex a program in order to be sure that 

all those interfaces worked. 

And in fact, in order to ensure that communications structure, for one thing, and for another to be sure that people were responsible for 

the important functions that were within a program, I created this idea of five boxes, the fivebox management structure, which I don’t think 

was ever widely appreciated, but the idea was 

to focus, early on in the program, on the fact 

that you were going to test things, and you 

ought to design so you can test them. And you 

are going to have to have reliability, so you have 

to design for reliability. 

And you had to have a system, so you had to set 

up the interfaces within that system clearly and 

fix them so that everyone understood what 

those interfaces were. And you had to have program control, so somebody was keeping track 

of scheduling dollars and what the implications 

were. And finally, you had to have someone 

who was worried about when you had all of 

this put together, if it will fly and how you will 

fly it, so we had to have an operations box. And 

we duplicated this down through the structure 

in such a way that there were communications 

between like disciplines so that you could be 

sure that there was the right set of information 

flowing up and down the chain in order to be 

able to make decisions and to follow the program and be sure that everybody was in sync. I 

think it worked very well. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Dr. Gilruth, in setting up the organization to do 

the Manned Spacecraft Center part of the job, 

what did you have to do? How were your priorities set? How did you discipline this team to 

focus on the job? 

DR. GILRUTH: 

Well, first we had very good people. And I think 

our task was pretty straightforward. We didn’t 

have to do the big rockets. That was done by 

another center. We would have a meeting every 

month where we would tell each other what we 

were doing and what our problems were, and 

made sure that we were going to have good 

interfaces. 

It wasn’t just by luck. We did all of these important things, and we were lucky enough that if 

we left one out, or so, we found it before it was 

too late. And I think we had a very good system. 

And the big rockets, we couldn’t have had a better bunch of people to build those big rockets 

than we had there. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

But the relationships between Houston and 

Huntsville were not always amicable. 

DR. GILRUTH: 

Yes, they were. They were quite amicable for 

big organizations like that. We had good friends 

at the top, and the people got together once a 

month and we, each, told what our problems 

were and what we were worrying about in our 

own things and what we thought we were worrying about in their own business. So we got 

this thing all worked out pretty well every 

month. And I generally sat in on those myself. 

So I think we had a good set of works and a 

good feeling, I don’t think we had any of that 

where you sometimes see where you have two 

big groups working together, supposedly. We 

were good friends with the people there and 

they were good friends with us. 

16 Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 
DR. LOGSDON: 

The five of you, other than George Mueller, 

came from a NACA background. But clearly, 

those weren’t enough people to do the job. You 

had to do a personnel buildup real quick. 

Where did the people come from? What were 

you looking for in your various units? What 

kinds of skills were there? Was there a kind of 

personnel base sitting, ready for this kind of 

task? 

DR. GILRUTH: 

Well, I remember they shut down a lot of things 

in England and we were able to get a good number of aeronautical engineers with English 

backgrounds but were very bright. 

DR. MUELLER: 

From Canada, I think. Yes. 

DR. GILRUTH: 

Very bright. And they didn’t have to unlearn a 

lot of things that they might otherwise have had 

to do. And we got enough people. It was such 

an exciting program that a lot of people wanted 

to work on it. Our problem was to make sure 

that we took the best people and I think our 

people did a good job at that. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Anybody else want to comment on that? 

DR. KRAFT: 

Yes, I would like to comment on that. I think 

that in terms of manufacturing and designing 

and developing, we tried to hire engineers that 

had 5 to 10 years of experience. And we hired a 

lot of people. Max hired a great number of people. We had the foresight to get people around 

him to do our kind of work. And along with the 

people that we had from Canada, I think that 

was a good nucleus, the organization. 

However, in Operations I looked for people 

right out of college. That is where I wanted 

them from. We, frankly, didn’t know quite what 

we were going to have to do and what we were 

going to have to learn to do that job. And I want 

you to know that the average age of my organization in 1969 was 26. So, we couldn’t have gotten very many guys with a lot of experience. 

We had a lot of guys that had some good experience at the top. I, at that time, was about 37 or 

38 years old, and Bill Tindall, and Sig Sjoberg 

about the same. So we were all within the 

nucleus of the NACA, and the rest of the guys 

we got out of college. 

MR. TINDALL: 

True. The exact answer was we got them from 

Oklahoma and Texas. Everyone wanted to 

come down here. That’s the truth. And they 

might have had one year of experience at China 

Lake or something like that. And they all 

poured in. But none of us knew anything about 

how to really do the job. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

You all learned together. 

MR. TINDALL: 

Yes. And there weren’t any courses on that in 

college on this stuff. There were chemists— 

DR. KRAFT: 

The other thing I want to stress is we weren’t 

ignorant to organization in NACA. The aircraft 

industry was run by a matrix organization. We 

interfaced with those organizations. We knew 

how they operated. They had functional organizations, they had operations organizations, and 

they had flight test organizations. We were very 

familiar with that. And Bob had grown up with 

that sort of thing in his experience. So we had 

good knowledge of how to organize, in a functional sense, to get the job done both in research 

and design and development and in operations. 

So we had, as an example, Bill Tindall, particularly, and myself, in a management sense had to 

build a world network. And there was a lot of 

money for a big system to send things around the 

Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 17 
world, and contracts around the world to build 

something that we didn’t set out to know about, 

in the beginning. But we designed that with 

Western Electric in the Bell labs. So that was a 

good management experience also. 

MR. TINDALL: 

Can I say one thing? 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Sure. 

MR. TINDALL: 

Another thing that I think was extraordinary, 

and this was throughout the whole mannedspace flight program, was how things were delegated down. I mean, NASA responsibilities 

were delegated to the people and they, who 

didn’t know how to do these things, were 

expected to go find out how to do it and do it. 

And that is what they did. It was just so much 

fun to watch these young people take on these 

terribly challenging jobs and do them. 

DR. KRAFT: 

And that stemmed from the top. Bob Gilruth 

was that kind of a manager and he taught Chris 

Kraft and Max Faget how to manage in the 

same sense. We ended up giving a guy a job and 

giving him the responsibility to go do it. 

DR. FAGET: 

Right. 

DR. KRAFT: 

And I think that everybody had that feeling. 

And the other thing you have to realize is there 

was a tremendous feeling of openness among 

our organizations. We grew up telling each 

other we were making mistakes when we made 

them. And that is how we learned. It was 

extremely important for us to say the mistakes 

we made as we made them because that helped 

us to grow. And that feeling was very much a 

part of our organization. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

How did that look from Headquarters, George? 

Did you feel that you had a group that was 

learning as it was growing and building confidence in being able to do the job? 

DR. MUELLER: 

Oh, I think we had a group that was not only 

learning, but was very, very capable. And truthfully, that was the secret of success in NASA, 

the capability of the individuals involved in all 

of the centers because we had some tremendous people down at the Cape as well as in 

Huntsville. I think that one other thing that was 

instrumental was the fact that we were able to 

work quite openly with our contractors, a situation which is not true today. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Very much so. 

DR. MUELLER: 

It was so important to be able to actually work 

with them and to share their problems and be 

sure that we knew it well enough so that not 

only did they share their problems, but they felt 

confident about sharing their problems. 

Without that confidence you have got a very 

real problem in terms of getting a program 

done in a reasonably orderly fashion. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

I want to talk to the program people about that, 

but let me push you one more step on that. How 

did you create a political climate in Washington 

that allowed that relationship to work? 

DR. MUELLER: 

You know, it was interesting. We had in 

Congress some very strong support, and we 

had set up some guiding committees that provided an oversight. And of course, today you 

couldn’t set up an Apollo execs group and 

probably couldn’t even set up the science and 

technology advisory group under Charlie 

Townes because, after all, there would be 

18 Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 
...the Apollo execs were very powerful, not so much 

that they did everything themselves, but they got 

their organizations geared around to supporting the activity. “ ” conflicts of interest you wouldn’t believe in 

doing that. 

And yet, the Apollo execs were very powerful, 

not so much that they did everything themselves, but they got their organizations geared 

around to supporting the activity. And the key 

to that was a real understanding on the part of 

Congress of what it was we were doing. Every 

month I met with Tiger Teague and his committee to tell them where we stood, what our problems were the last month, how we were working around them, and whom we were working 

with. So he was well aware of the Apollo execs 

group and all of those other things. 

At that time, you didn’t have the same kind of 

constraints in dealing with contractors that we 

do today. I don’t think there was a single 

instance of a contractor taking advantage of this 

relationship. In fact, if anything, we took advantage of that relationship to get things done that 

we otherwise could never have gotten done. 

DR. KRAFT: 

And I think that is one of the most broad points 

that we have made since we started talking. In 

our career as NACAers, and the then first years 

of the NASAers, we encouraged a transfer of people between the industry and NACA. And if you 

looked across the industry, say take 1960, you 

would find an awful lot of NACA people in top 

level management positions in the industry and, 

likewise, a lot of people from the industry that 

had come in to NASA to help us manage these 

programs. That was encouraged. It ought to be 

encouraged today because it was one of the fundamental strengths of NASA in those early days. 

DR. MUELLER: 

Exactly. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Owen, what about trying to run a contract to 

get a spacecraft built? What was it like in that 

environment? 

MR. MORRIS: 

Well, it was pretty hectic at the time. There 

were the same kinds of meetings that everybody is talking about, where you would get 

together on a frequent basis comparing notes 

about what the problems were, what anybody 

could do to help the situation. And there was a 

spirit of cooperation pretty much throughout 

the program. 

There was a little bit of rough edges initially 

when the contracts were first let, but those 

were rubbed off quite early. From then on, it 

was really a team operation. And I think the 

point I was making earlier about communications, I think, was one of the bigger issues 

throughout the whole program. Being able to 

build a team and get people to talk with each 

other, and get a response out of government, or 

industry, or the services, or whomever could 

give a hand, were some of the keys in being 

able to do it in the kind of time span that we 

had. 

There were a lot of program management techniques learned that were foreign to many of us 

who were primarily from engineering and 

research backgrounds. I think those techniques 

were developed in the early ’60s, and by ’63 or 

’64 they were pretty well-honed and in place. 

And the organization that Dr. Mueller talked 

about, the five boxes throughout the NASA 

structure and in most of the contractor structure, also gave a very good point of contact, 

kind of an input. Anywhere you wanted to go 

within the organization there was a counterpart 

whether you knew him or not. Whether you had 

ever met the man, you knew that if you called 

that box, he had that same kind of responsibility and you could talk to him and get communication going. 

DR. MUELLER: 

You know, one thing I would like to remark on 

is contract structure. One of the things we did 

was convert the contracts we had, some of 

Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 19 
them were cost plus and some were fixed price, 

into incentive contracts. Incentive contracts 

perhaps are not used today as we used them. 

We used them as a means of communication, 

hard communications. Because we set what we 

wanted to incentivize, that got the attention of 

our contractor structure. And it also got our 

attention because we had to think through 

exactly what it was we wanted. 

MR. MORRIS: 

Well said. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Max, how did your engineering organization 

here relate to the technical skills of the contractors? What was the balance of design and 

engineering choice? 

DR. FAGET: 

Well, in both the Mercury and of course the 

Gemini and Apollo programs, I think we were 

ahead of the contractors. As a matter of fact, 

before we even put the RFP out, we pretty 

much knew what we wanted and stated it. The 

Apollo Command Module was designed more 

or less by our people. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

No elaborate Phase A, Phase B kind of structure? 

DR. FAGET: 

Well, we had a contract with industry to look 

at the Apollo design and we ran an in-house 

design at the same time. We had three contractors doing what would now be called a 

Phase B contract. We ran our own in-house 

design. And, of course, we kind of took advantage of what our contractors were doing during this time and were continually taking the 

best parts of their designs and putting them in. 

So when the final design came out, it didn’t 

look like any of theirs, but was one we had 

confidence in. 

We made some very fundamental decisions 

during that period of time. One of biggest fundamental decisions that very few people appreciated is that we decided, firmly decided, that 

we would not use pumps to operate our rocket 

engines and that we would use hypergolic propellants, just simply because those had all of 

the characteristics to provide the greatest 

amount of reliability. 

We got criticized roundly by a number of contractors and others, particularly the engine people. They had designed all these wonderful 

pump-fed engines. Pratt & Whitney in particular 

had a beautiful engine that ran on hydrogen and 

oxygen. And the engine demonstrated reliability. 

I remember a number of times they came to fuss 

at me and asked why aren’t you using my engine. 

And I said the reason I’m not using your engine 

is that the engine is not the propulsion system. 

The propulsion system includes the hydrogen 

and the oxygen and all of that, and I don’t know 

how they keep all that stuff ready to be used 

throughout a mission that has got a number of 

firings. The engine will work, but I don’t know 

that the rest of the propulsion system will work. 

So we deliberately used less than the highest 

performance because it provided the simplest in 

a system where we could have the greatest reliability. We made a number of decisions. 

In other areas, NASA was well-funded then. Our 

development laboratories were well-funded. We 

had what we called back-up systems being 

developed in our laboratories, directly under 

contract from the engineering department. And 

quite often we ended up having the contractor 

go to another subcontractor. They had the backup system, instead of going with the original 

simply because the development wasn’t going 

along as well. So the engineering organization in 

many ways kind of stayed ahead of the technology, or at least even with the technology, and 

was ready to stand in there and plug up some of 

the deficiencies that occurred during the development program. 

20 Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 
DR. KRAFT: 

I think one of the biggest strengths of the 

Johnson Space Center was what Max was just 

referring to. I would like to have him speak a little more to the fact that what we were doing 

with the finances we had was building ourselves a team of guys that were just as good or 

better because we were hands-on people. I 

would like to have Max talk to that because it is 

an extremely important point. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

That was the point I was driving at. Whether 

you got pressure to change from the outside, or 

whether the contractors said hey, these folks 

are telling us how to do our business, that 

strong engineering core was essential to the 

ability to carry off the mission. 

DR. FAGET: 

Yes, we did get pressure to change it. And I am 

going to be very frank. I think most of the pressure came from Headquarters. Headquarters 

wanted to do studies, we wanted to do development. So we spent an awful lot of money on 

studies, and we studied things to death -­

DR. LOGSDON: 

With not much intent to do anything about it. 

DR. FAGET: 

With the Apollo program. I can show you studies of space stations, and everything else that 

was done back then. And it didn’t lead to anything because there wasn’t enough money to 

follow through. And when we did want to do 

something, quite often the most practical system to do it was nonexistent because the development work wasn’t done. The NACA did an 

awful lot of development work in that laboratory. Of course, I came from that background. I 

am not going to say that I am completely right, 

but I know one thing in my own mind. In my 

own mind, that is the best way to do it. And we 

didn’t do it that way after a while. 

DR. KRAFT: 

Max, let’s go a little further there. I think that 

what we recognize, from Mercury to Gemini to 

Apollo, was that we needed a certain percentage of the funds to do these kinds of things in 

Max’s laboratory which gave our people 

straight, hands-on knowledge, first-hand 

knowledge, and it allowed us to build systems 

that we built at the time of Mercury to use in 

Gemini and at the time of Gemini to use in 

Apollo. The perfect example of that is the fuel 

cell. The fuel cells that we used in Apollo were 

developed with Gemini money. 

And so it was extremely important. The fuel 

cells that we used in the shuttle were developed with Apollo money. And that was a concept we all preserved, all of us sitting right here 

said it was a great thing to do because it gives 

our guys the great knowledge of how to build 

these systems and work on designs. So they are 

just as good as the guys out there that are doing 

it at the same time. That was a tremendous 

thing. And we just weren’t able to continue and 

that really hurt NASA. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Why not? Is it basically a question of money or 

is there something that underpins the money? 

DR. FAGET: 

It is a question of money because he who has 

the money makes the decisions on how it is 

going to be spent. The money in the present 

NASA system is spread out among the organizations at Headquarters, they in turn have 

their channels of spending the money, and 

ultimately a lot of the say of how that money 

is spent is made by people up at Headquarters 

without much hands-on experience. They 

have a lot of theoretical experience. They are 

well-educated. I know that. But very few of 

them have ever really done anything and they 

are making all the decisions on how the 

money is being spent. 

Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 21 
Left to right–Eugene F.
 

Kranz, deputy director of
 

flight operations;
 

Christopher C. Kraft; and
 

Maxime A. Faget at
 

Mission Control in
 

Houston.
 

(NASA Photo 81-H-365; 
 

S-81-30139.)
 

DR. KRAFT: 

We can’t over-emphasize that point because 

that was the strength of Marshall, of KSC, and 

ourselves that they worked in that kind of a 

fashion. And it dried up post-Apollo. And it really hurt us, and it was because of money 

because we didn’t have enough to support the 

program itself. So when we started trying to 

siphon off some of that for future technology, 

we could not do it. It just went away. 

MR. TINDALL: 

We didn’t hire anyone during the entire ’70s, for 

crying out loud. 

MR. MORRIS: 

Might be made along these lines. One was that 

they were saying a lot of the hardware built for 

Gemini came from Mercury development, 

Apollo built on Gemini, the Shuttle built on 

Apollo. The financial support was much bigger 

in those days, and the guy managing the Gemini 

program could afford to invest in developing 

better systems which he might use or the next 

guy might use. 

As the budgets got tight in the late ’60s and on 

into the ’70s, the program manager was faced 

with the problem that he either had to put the 

money directly into his program or have his 

program suffer materially to foster development for the next program coming down the 

line, and it was very easy to see where he was 

going make his decision. I think that is one of 

the problems the agency has had. 

DR. KRAFT: 

You probably have a lot to say about that 

because I think you had a lot to do with making 

sure that took place. I mean, you understood 

that was a necessary element of what we were 

doing and you could see that as good expenditures of funds. 

DR. MUELLER: 

I have been surprised that there has been no 

recognition in NASA over the years that the 

important thing is the investment in technology, because that is where we, looking back now, 

I had the opportunity of going around and seeing what has been done in the last 20 years. And 

22 Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 
in the Apollo era, one of the things that we did 

insist on was sufficient funds, free funds from 

the centers, to make decisions about where to 

put development money. And so we had, essentially in every center, an ability to spend money 

on development of future things. Looking back, 

going back 20 years, what I find is that over that 

period of time, somehow or another, all of our 

engineers have become contract managers and 

almost none of them now go out in the lab and 

do some work. 

MR. MORRIS: 

Amen. Yes. 

DR. MUELLER: 

And even in our so-called research centers, 

they have become contract managers. 

MR. MORRIS: 

Amen. 

DR. MUELLER: 

And they keep going out and getting contracts 

instead of going out and doing technology. And 

that is a serious weakness. I mean, it affects the 

whole structure of NASA in a way that, I think, 

is very detrimental. 

DR. KRAFT: 

Very profound. Very profound. 

DR. MUELLER: 

Yes. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Let’s talk about risk management for a little 

while, risks both in developing the systems and 

then operating them. What kind of attitude permeated the organization as you approached 

this task? How did you make your trade-offs? I 

don’t even know who to ask to start that discussion. I am sure you were all involved. 

DR. FAGET: 

There was a great deal of risk. 

DR. GILRUTH: 

In what we were doing. No question about it. 

Something brand new in a place man had never 

seen, man had never been. And it was all new 

and it was tough. 

DR. MUELLER: 

And we had a lot of help, those who helped us 

to do reliability analysis and prove that everything was going to work perfectly. 

DR. GILRUTH: 

Yes. 

DR. MUELLER: 

Or else we wouldn’t fly. 

MR. TINDALL: 

But we also had backup systems for everything, 

or almost everything that we could. And I know 

when it came to our planning missions and procedures and all of the software in the mission 

control center and things like that, at least, it 

must have been 80 percent or maybe 90 percent 

was spent on nonnominal situations. Everyone 

was trying to figure out what are you going to 

do if this happens, what are you going to do if 

that happens, work through the system rules, if 

the system was working or not working, and 

how do you decide, and all of that. And not just 

one source of information, but usually we 

would triple or quad it. 

DR. KRAFT: 

You know, the thing that I want to say about 

this risk business is that I think this numbers 

game, as George is implying, was greatly overplayed, is greatly over-played. And the way I felt 

about it was the following, and I think Max 

would back me up. We said to ourselves that 

we have now done everything we know to do. 

We feel comfortable with all of the unknowns 

that we went into this program with. We know 

there may be some unknown unknowns, but 

we don’t know what else to do to make this 

thing risk-free, so it is time to go. 

Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 23 
DR. GILRUTH: 

That’s right. That’s right. 

DR. KRAFT: 

And I can’t say it any differently than that. I 

think if any of us, Bob Gilruth from the top, 

myself, or any of us, Max Faget felt, well we 

don’t know what we are doing here. We don’t 

know the answer to that and we should know 

the answer, there was no question in our minds 

we weren’t going to do it no matter what. We 

were going to wait. We’ll wait and we’ll wait 

and we’ll wait. But when we feel like we are 

ready to go, to hell with this risk analysis business. We have done everything we can. Let’s go 

do it. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Are there examples where you did wait? 

DR. KRAFT: 

Of course. 

DR. FAGET: 

Oh, sure. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Talk about a couple. 

DR. FAGET: 

Some of the unknown risks, of course, we dealt 

with by making unmanned flights to test out the 

systems, parachutes and things like that. We 

realized you make a parachute that’s 60 feet in 

diameter and you are going to deploy it at one 

time, that was something kind of new. And if 

you are going to hang-glide three people on that 

thing, you better damn well test it. And so we 

had a very sensible, thorough test program to 

make sure that those parachutes would work. 

When it came to risk management, I always had 

an awful lot of trouble with some people coming 

in and telling me about redundancy and everything else. I always took the attitude that gosh, I 

am supposed to be an engineer. And if I am an 

engineer, I better damn well understand what 

reliability and what failure means, otherwise I 

am not an engineer. And I expect the engineers 

that work for me to take the same attitude. 

And that goes back to the propulsion systems. 

We took exactly that attitude before we even 

had the specifications for RFP, we had decided 

on what kind of propulsion system we were 

going to use because we could go through that. 

And by picking the pressure-fed hypergolic 

propulsion system, we could see the least number of conflicts. And then we said okay, you 

can’t have redundant tanks. You simply can’t 

carry twice as much propellant, fire what you 

need and throw away half of it. It is pretty hard 

to have redundant thrust chambers. But everything else besides the tanks and the thrust 

chambers and some of the propellant lines 

were all redundant. We had redundant valves, 

quad-redundant valves, everything else. Check 

valves, you bet we had those things redundant. 

And from that standpoint, the same thing in the 

pressure feed system. And so I basically said 

the best way to deal with risk management is in 

the basic conceptual design, get the damn risk 

out of it. And I think that is what made the program a success. 

DR. MUELLER: 

I guess I had been point man on this reliability 

analysis since the Apollo days because I got 

involved with the president’s science adviser in 

his insisting that we do a complete reliability 

analysis. You have to look at it in two ways. One 

is that each of these flights is a unique event. 

So statistical analysis has a limited utility in trying to define what the probability of success of 

one single event is. And that is one thing. But 

another thing, that Max touched on, is that the 

place to use the reliability analysis is in the 

design process. You can’t measure reliability in, 

you have got to design it in. And once you have 

got it designed and it is built in, from then on, 

whatever else you do is just window dressing, 

24 Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 
as far as I am concerned. Now, I will temper 

that, though, by saying that one of the important things one needs to do is to recognize 

when you have a failure and be sure you really 

understand in depth what that failure is due to 

and make sure you have fixed it to make sure it 

doesn’t happen again. 

MR. MORRIS: 

Amen. 

DR. KRAFT: 

Part of the creed. 

DR. FAGET: 

I couldn’t agree with you more, George. And 

one of the things that you want to do is make 

sure that you have enough testing. You are 

bound to have blind spots. There isn’t any engineer that I know of, God or not, that is not 

going to make some human errors. So you have 

to have testing to pick up those blind spots. 

And if you don’t do those tests and if you don’t 

believe what you see in those tests, you are in 

trouble. And I will give you a good example of 

when we did that was on the solid rocket 

motor. That was a blind spot. We designed in 

failure, and I would not hold a design engineer 

to fault for that failure system, but I would hold 

those that came after the design. 

So you need a good design. You have to come in 

with a good, basic design. What you might call 

testing, and a reliability audit, if I might use 

those words, as opposed to really saying, you 

know, it is no good until I approve it is right, as 

a second man coming in. An audit is good 

because it gives a second party a chance to 

look at what you have done. But it ought to be 

done by good engineering heads as opposed to 

a bunch of mathematicians. 

DR. KRAFT: 

I know you don’t want us to tell war stories, but 

I have to tell a story in that regard. We arrived at 

a management council meeting in Washington 

around noon. And this guy right here has a bunch 

of papers sitting in front of each of our desks that 

said could you please give me the reliability 

number associated with risk, at each one of the 

phases of the mission, and they were launch, 

translunar injection, orbital coast, etc., etc. The 

only thing that you and I want to remember 

about those numbers is two things. Number one, 

George Low and Chris Kraft got the identical 

number in the total listing of what was going to 

come, and I am not going to tell you what that 

number was. And I also want to say that George 

Mueller tore all those goddamn pieces of paper 

up and never asked us that again. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

There was a difference in test philosophy. Dr. 

Mueller brought with him the idea of all-up testing, testing as many systems as possible at one 

time. What if you had earlier had a large failure 

in one of the all-up tests? What would that have 

done to the program? 

DR. MUELLER: 

We would have found out what failed, and we 

did, as a matter of fact, have a real failure. I will 

say we did. We found out what failed and we 

fixed it. 

DR. KRAFT: 

And we put a man on it the next time we flew 

it. 

DR. MUELLER: 

Exactly. 

DR. FAGET: 

Hindsight is a wonderful thing. I thought that 

was a good idea. Even at the time I thought it 

was a good idea. But I believe that anything that 

works is bound to be a good idea. But it is a matter of being bold. It was a bold idea. You know, 

you can do step by step testing, a kind of sure-fly 

way. There is a risk. If you do an all-up test and 

you have a major failure, you might not be able 

to find out what failed. And that is your risk. 

Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 25 
DR. MUELLER: 

Yes, that’s the real risk. 

DR. FAGET: 

The stand point of the ultimate risks to the 

crew in the all-up test provides just as much of 

a safety audit or a confidence as a bunch of separate tests. And in many ways it is better 

because it has the systems working against 

each other. But it doesn’t undergo this one risk, 

which thank God we didn’t run into, when we 

ended up with a big failure and we couldn’t figure out what gave it. 

DR. KRAFT: 

That was a significant thing. That was a characteristic of our organization at the time. Our 

ability to fly the Saturn V after we had had a 

major malfunction on the SII stage, which we 

did the previous time before we flew Apollo 8. 

And that took a lot of guts, a lot of nerve, but I 

think we knew what we were doing. And we 

looked at that and said the risk is worth the 

gain. That would be extremely difficult to do in 

the environment that exists today. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

That is what I would like to pull out a little bit. 

We are risk adverse now. What allowed you to 

be bold? 

DR. FAGET: 

What we are all saying is that there is a time to 

be conservative and a time to be bold. And 

judgment, good judgment, tells you when to do 

it. And of course, we had great judgment. 

DR. KRAFT: 

But you are right. I don’t think there was a soul 

in any level of management in our organizations that I know of that was opposed to flying 

Apollo 8. 

DR. FAGET: 

No. 

DR. KRAFT: 

I cannot think of a single soul that was opposed 

to flying Apollo— 

DR. MUELLER: 

The only ones were the media. 

DR. KRAFT: 

But I am talking of when we got there. I mean, 

there were a lot of questions about it until we 

got there. George Mueller says you guys have 

lost your minds when we first thought that up. 

But when we got there and we said we were 

going to go, there was not a single question as 

to whether we were going. 

DR. MUELLER: 

We wouldn’t have gone if there had been. 

MR. MORRIS: 

That’s right. If there were a question we would 

not have done it. 

DR. KRAFT: 

It only took one voice to say we weren’t going. 

DR. MUELLER: 

Exactly. But let me just say I don’t think that 

we were not risk aversive at the time of 

Apollo. In fact, we spent a great deal of time, 

energy, and effort being sure that we understood the risks. So it wasn’t that we were just 

boldly marching out where angels feared to 

tread. We really understood what our system 

was. 

So today, we may be not willing to take any 

risk, but in that case, you can’t fly because 

there is always going to be risk. And to think 

that the shuttle is risk-free would be a major 

mistake. Even the best of solid rocket technology eventually has a failure. And even the best 

of liquid rocket technology eventually has a 

failure. So you have got to expect that you are 

going to have failures in the future. 

26 Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 
Our ability to fly the Saturn V after we had had a major 

malfunction on the SII stage... took a lot of guts, a lot of nerve, “ ” DR. LOGSDON: 

Well, you had a traumatic failure. You lost a 

crew in the Apollo 1 fire. What did that change? 

DR. MUELLER: 

It changed our test procedure for one thing. 

MR. MORRIS: 

Well, we tightened up. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

But did it change the way you could do your 

business? 

MR. MORRIS: 

We tightened up. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Had you gotten a little loose? 

MR. MORRIS: 

Yes, yes. 

DR. KRAFT: 

I think it changed the way we did our business. 

MR. MORRIS: 

It sure did. I think the configuration management received a lot more attention after the 

fire. We had reasonably good configuration 

management before. In the interest of time, 

there were a lot of changes made and the 

paperwork caught up with it afterwards. There 

were a lot of small changes that were really not 

reviewed in great detail. As a result of the accident, the fire, the procedures were really tightened up. And I think it was all to the good of the 

program. I think it helped— 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Kind of a brutal reminder. 

MR. MORRIS: 

The program matured much more rapidly from 

that point on because the rigor was in there. 

but I think we knew what we were doing. 

DR. KRAFT: 

Well, I think the other point you have to make 

there is that, let’s admit to the fact that we were 

running our fannies off trying to do Apollo. And 

it was difficult for us to take the lessons 

learned in Mercury and Gemini and apply them 

back into Apollo as we designed it and as we 

built it because it was tough, just tough to do 

from a communications point of view, right? 

Now, when we had the fire, I think we took a 

step back in and said okay, what are these lessons that we have learned from Mercury and 

Gemini. What lessons have we learned from 

this horrible tragedy. And now let’s pump that 

back and be doubly sure that we are going to do 

it right the next time. And I think that that fact 

right there is what allowed us to get Apollo 

done in the ’60s. 

DR. MUELLER: 

Right. I think one thing you ought to recognize 

is it wasn’t just that we fixed the fire, we fixed 

everything else we could find that had any possibility of being fixed. 

MR. MORRIS: 

Right. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

And you found some other things that needed 

fixing. 

DR. MUELLER: 

A whole large number of things. 

DR. KRAFT: 

One hundred and twenty-five of them. 

DR. MUELLER: 

Yes, a large number. 

MR. TINDALL: 

You know, I am not sure what risk management 

is. If it is only dealing with the spacecraft systems, well that has been discussed. But I think 

Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 27 
we are leaving out something that is pretty darn 

important, and that is how you operate the 

vehicle and the people and all of the rest of it 

after that. 

I think one of the greatest contributors to minimizing risk was the extraordinary amount of 

training that was done, high-fidelity simulations 

that were extraordinary. And there is no question about it, they saved us. I mean really saved 

us many, many times because I don’t think 

there was a single mission that we didn’t have 

some significant failures. The fact was that 

people could figure them out because they had 

been trained and knew how to work with each 

other. The communications were there, the 

procedures were there to figure out what to do 

in real time and get the thing going. And most 

of the time when those things happened, the 

outside world didn’t even know about it. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Bill, when you came to plan how to actually fly 

these missions, and maybe Chris will want to 

comment on this also, were you happy with 

what the engineers had given you? Did you 

have systems that were ready to go? 

MR. TINDALL: 

Yes. There were practically no changes that I 

can recall that we went back and asked for in 

the spacecraft systems. I am not saying that 

there weren’t any. There were maybe one or 

two pretty minor ones, minor ones and easily 

fixed ones. As far as I could tell, the spacecraft 

were safe. 

DR. MUELLER: 

I have a different view of that, as a matter of 

fact, because all through the design of the 

spacecraft the astronauts and the flight operators were involved in it. So we had a lot of 

changes in the design process. 

MR. TINDALL: 

During the design process, yes. 

DR. KRAFT: 

It was an iterative process there. 

DR. MUELLER: 

Right. 

MR. MORRIS: 

It was not a question of the designers and the 

builders then turning it over to the operations 

guys and them saying “what is this stuff?” They 

had been in it from the conceptual design, from 

the specification writing. 

DR. MUELLER: 

Sure, right. 

MR. MORRIS: 

When we sat down to write the specifications, 

we wanted the operations people right in the 

middle of it. 

DR. KRAFT: 

We argued over the instrumentation we wanted. We had a lot of arguments back and forth. 

MR. MORRIS: 

Sure. 

DR. KRAFT: 

But by the time it got to Bill Tindall’s technique 

development, we accepted what we got and 

used that as a set of mission limitations just as 

you would in the envelope of an airplane or 

anything else. 

MR. MORRIS: 

Right, right. 

DR. KRAFT: 

But before we got to that point, it was very 

much an iterative process. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Max, you wanted to say something? 

28 Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 
agement team was the only 

DR. FAGET: 

Well, I just was going to say 

in a different way than 

everybody else that we did 

have an integrated team. 

We did have a continuous 

sequence of design reviews 

where the engineering people from my organization, 

the program management 

team, and the operation 

team would all participate. 

And it was really an open 

forum. The program manone who would make the decision, but everyone 

could speak as long as he was unsatisfied with 

what was going on. 

DR. MUELLER: 

It’s true. 

DR. FAGET: 

And stated his views. And then everyone would 

discuss those views, whether they were reasonable or unreasonable. And then the program 

managers would make a decision. 

MR. MORRIS: 

That’s right. 

DR. FAGET: 

And that brought a lot of operational consideration into everything that we did from the 

standpoint of how the systems were designed. 

MR. MORRIS: 

Certainly. 

DR. FAGET: 

They were designed to operate, to work, and, of 

course, to be reliable. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Were there any major differences in the command and service module contract and development and the lunar module development? 

They were different spacecraft for specialized 

functions with different contractors. You hear 

a lot about the relationship between Houston 

and North American at the time. You hear 

very little discussion about the relationship 

between Houston and Grumman and the lunar 

module. Is there anything worth talking about 

there? 

MR. MORRIS: 

I think probably the biggest reason for that was 

that the lunar module was started later. The 

command module had two years of that contract underway before the lunar module was 

placed under contract. So a lot of the rough 

edges had been worn off. The team here at 

Houston and the team at Rockwell was much 

better at that point in time. 

DR. KRAFT: 

I don’t doubt what you say is true, but what you 

say is a misconception. I don’t think that is 

right. I think there was just as intimate a feeling 

between the organizations all across the board 

at Grumman as there was a— 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Well, I am not suggesting a detach. It is just that 

nobody seems to talk about the positive character of that relationship. 

Dr. George E. Mueller, 

associate administrator for 

the Office of Manned Space 

Flight, with Lt. Gen. Samuel 

C. Philips, director of the

Apollo Program, in Firing 

Room 1 of the Launch 

Control Center at NASA’s 

Kennedy Space Center. 

(NASA Photo 69-H-1064; 

107-KSC-69P-574.) 

Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 29 
DR. KRAFT: 

Well, let me tell you what we did. We discussed 

this, because I was at the management council 

meeting, as a total thing, both command module, service module, software operations. We 

always did a data dump for George every time 

we had one of those meetings. 

But I wanted to describe another meeting, and 

that was that once a month, and sometimes more 

often, George Low had a round robin, and we got 

on an airplane. He had a Configuration Control 

Board meeting, and once a month it was held at 

Grumman and at Rockwell. And both Grumman 

and Rockwell people attended those meetings. 

We would fly from here to Grumman, have an allday meeting, get on an airplane, fly all night, have 

the same meeting in California with Rockwell 

and fly home. And that was done all the time. So 

everybody was familiar with what was going on 

in all of those contracts as far as we were concerned. A very important thing to happen. 

DR. MUELLER: 

And Grumman had a fair number of problems 

also. 

MR. MORRIS: 

Oh, sure. 

DR. MUELLER: 

It was just that we worked them a little harder 

and earlier. 

MR. MORRIS: 

And we knew how to go about them a little bit 

better. 

DR. MUELLER: 

Right. 

MR. MORRIS: 

We were a little bit more experienced, too. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

You were learning from what had gone on before. 

MR. MORRIS: 

Yes, from our previous experience, yes. Sure. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Let’s talk about flying the missions for a while. 

You mentioned earlier, a couple of you, the 

Apollo 8 decision, the decision to commit a 

crew to a circumlunar, a lunar orbit flight with 

the first manned mission of the Saturn V. What 

would have happened if there had been a major 

problem there. What would that have done to 

the program? 

DR. MUELLER: 

Define problem. 

DR. KRAFT: 

Well, if we had had a similar malfunction on 

Apollo 8 as we had on Apollo 13, we would 

have been in a hell of a mess. And God knows 

what that would have done to the program. 

Anybody could give his or her own guess to 

that. So that would have been terrible. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

How risky did you feel that choice was. You 

earlier said no one in the organization down 

here stood up and said no. 

DR. KRAFT: 

It had a certain amount of risk to it. However, 

remember that that also was a human failure. 

There was not a damn thing wrong with the 

hardware that caused Apollo 13 to fail, it was 

those idiots that treated the hardware improperly and caused that malfunction to take place. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

And there was not a thing you could do about 

that then. 

DR. KRAFT: 

That’s right. As Max just described a little while 

ago, those are human frailties. But the Apollo 8 

thing, I think, was one of the most fantastic examples of good management that I have ever seen. 

30 Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 
DR. MUELLER: 

I thought that was one of the turning points in 

the program and one of the best things that we 

did. 

MR. MORRIS: 

Sure was. 

DR. MUELLER: 

Although these guys would never believe it, I 

was enthusiastic about that mission from the 

time I first heard about it. But I used it as a 

lever to make sure that everybody did their 

homework and we were certain that it was all 

going to be all right. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Were you ready from a flight ops point of view 

to take on that mission? 

MR. TINDALL: 

Absolutely. 

DR. KRAFT: 

Well, we made ourselves ready, I think, is the 

right way to put it. I mean, when first asked, I 

probably, in Bob’s office, got red in the face. 

And three days later told him we are “go.” So 

that is the way it went. 

DR. FAGET: 

I didn’t have anything to do with planning that 

mission, but I can just remember one thing. 

When that bird went behind the Moon and it 

was supposed to make a burn in the dark and I 

had to sit there and wait until it came back into 

the clear, that was a very exciting, high heartrate time for me. 

MR. MORRIS: 

That was a long pass. 

DR. KRAFT: 

It was particularly for me, too, because the 

sequence of the thing was as follows. When we 

got to thinking about doing the thing and 

George Low asked us what we could do to go 

around the Moon, when the ops guys got 

together, we decided look, we are having a hell 

of a lot of trouble with this lunar orbit determination. We have been looking at the lunar 

obiter data, and we can’t figure out where the 

spacecraft is when it comes back around. We 

are several thousand feet off. And if we are 

going to be that way for the whole mission, we 

are going to be in trouble because we won’t 

know where to start the descent. 

So we said look, if we are going to do this mission, let’s really get something out of it. So 

let’s go and orbit around the Moon. Now, 

there were a lot of white-faced astronauts 

when we said that. But nevertheless, we again 

said that we thought that risk was worth the 

gain. And it was. That was the flight that we 

learned an empirical method for doing an 

orbit determination around the Moon and 

really put us ahead of the game. Apollo 8 gave 

us all, I am talking about engineering, program management, top management, operations, it gave us all a tremendous feeling of 

confidence that we knew what we were doing 

after that situation. 

MR. TINDALL: 

We knew what we were doing, we had procedures laid out, we tried to imagine every single 

conceivable failure that could occur and what 

we were going to do about them. We did things 

like lunar orbit insertion in two stages instead 

of one big burn because an overburn that might 

go undetected would cause it to crash into the 

Moon. So we backed off and did a two-burn. 

I mean, things like that, that we could tolerate 

some pretty significant problems. I don’t 

know what would have happened if we had 

been hit by lightening like we were on Apollo 

12, but the fact of the matter was we could 

have gone ahead and flown. We might not 

have had the guts later in the program to do 

that, but Lord. 

Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 31 
Dr. Christopher C. Kraft, 

director, Johnson Space 

Center, July 1976, 

is assisted into a 

developmental Space 

Shuttle pressure garment. 

The JSC-developed 

space suit is a two-piece, 

adjustable to fit, modular 

design suit, sized small, 

medium, and large to fit 

crew members of either sex. 

(NASA Photo S-76-26409.) 

DR. MUELLER: 

Of course, we had a free return trajectory. 

MR. TINDALL: 

Free return until you fired the SPS. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Dr. Gilruth, by this time were you beginning to 

be convinced that this was going to work? I say 

that a little facetiously. 

DR. GILRUTH: 

I was always a great worrier. 

DR. MUELLER: 

We all were. 

DR. GILRUTH: 

I felt that it was much better to be a great worrier than a person that didn’t have a trouble. 

And of course, a person either worries or he 

doesn’t. Some people don’t worry about things. 

I happen to be one that worries very, very 

much, especially on things like flying men to 

the Moon. We had a lot of worriers in there and 

most of them hid it quite well. And I hid it pretty well, too, except when I would be all-alone 

with some close friends. 

MR. TINDALL: 

Kind of like what I was doing. 

They called me a professional 

pessimist. 

MR. MORRIS: 

Yes, right. 

DR. KRAFT: 

That’s another profound thing, 

in my opinion. I think that the 

thing we learned, and the 

thing that made us strong, was 

that we knew about failure. 

We recognized failure, we 

knew it was there, we always 

looked for it. 

MR. MORRIS: 

That’s right. 

DR. KRAFT: 

And everything we did was based on decisions 

on failure rather than success. And if you want 

my opinion, that is what happened to NASA in 

the Challenger accident, their decisions were 

based on success, and the people sitting right 

here made decisions based on failure. And that 

may sound crazy as hell, but I believe that is the 

way we did it. 

MR. MORRIS: 

That is what we spent our time on. 

DR. KRAFT: 

That’s right. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

And the attitude clearly is very different today. 

DR. KRAFT: 

Yes. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Why? What were the elements in the climate in 

which you worked that made it possible to 

32 Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 
operate worrying about failure but anticipating 

success, I guess, and being free to do that, not 

having to promise success? 

DR. KRAFT: 

It is what we have been saying. We all, there is 

not a soul here or was in our organizations that 

felt like they couldn’t say what they wanted to 

say any time they wanted to say it and felt totally comfortable about it. We grew, that was our 

heritage. It was the way we thought. We were 

never embarrassed about it. We were never 

embarrassed about being made a fool of when 

we made mistakes because we made them. I 

mean, we made hundreds of them. But we were 

used to being open about them. And that was 

fundamental to getting our job done. 

MR. TINDALL: 

And in fact, it is exactly the opposite. If someone were to have found hidden problems and 

not bring them out, that was the worst kind of 

person to have around. 

MR. MORRIS: 

Amen. 

MR. TINDALL: 

Absolutely the worst. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

And you felt, as a center here, you could take 

that attitude and Headquarters would let you? 

DR. GILRUTH: 

Well, we didn’t ask them. We did it. We couldn’t 

have operated any other way than that. 

DR. MUELLER: 

Well, Headquarters couldn’t have operated any 

other way either. 

MR. MORRIS: 

Well, I think that it rather than injured us, we 

were encouraged. 

DR. GILRUTH: 

We didn’t have any trouble from Headquarters. 

They thought we were doing right. 

DR. KRAFT: 

I don’t think that any of us felt the least bit 

inhibited in saying what we thought. A lot of 

people didn’t like it, but at least they respected 

us for it. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

During the program, was money ever a constraint? 

MR. MORRIS: 

Oh, sure. 

MR. TINDALL: 

No. 

MR. MORRIS: 

Not nearly to the same extent as it was on the 

shuttle and is today on the space station. But 

yes, money was a constraint, from 1964 on it 

became more and more of a constraint. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

What kind? I mean, Bill said no and you say yes. 

MR. MORRIS: 

Well, comparatively speaking, I would say no. 

And I would try to qualify that. The number of 

backup systems that you were able to fund, the 

amount of hardware that you were able to 

build, was somewhat constrained. It never got 

to the point that you violated some of the real 

premises of the program, and I think that one of 

the things that allowed us to transcend a number of lines in the reliability industry was the 

failure analysis that we did. Any time we had a 

failure, we spent whatever it took to truly 

understand that failure and truly understand 

that it was fixed before we let go of it. Those 

kinds of things we always had money for. 

Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 33 
In later programs, instead of testing the hardware, in many cases it was qualified by what 

was called similarity. It was like another part, 

an engineer made a judgment that it was close 

enough or it wasn’t close enough, and that was 

it. That was the end of the testing. There was 

none. And so they had, later on, those kinds of 

monetary constraints. And in Apollo, we never 

did that. But yes, there were monetary constraints that were put on and there was a 

regime in which you had to live. 

MR. TINDALL: 

Sure, but it came after the mission success was 

way at the very top. 

MR. MORRIS: 

Oh, yes. Yes. 

MR. TINDALL: 

And schedule was pretty high up there. 

MR. MORRIS: 

Yes, absolutely. 

DR. FAGET: 

But there was funding to take. 

MR. TINDALL: 

Well, we could, I suppose, have used more 

money. 

MR. MORRIS: 

Well, we did not do some things that we would 

like to have done. We were able to do everything that we felt was necessary. 

DR. MUELLER: 

I can’t think of many. 

MR. MORRIS: 

Well, we got done what was necessary. 

DR. KRAFT: 

I don’t know if I should get within an inch of 

that. We were the guys that were always bringing in the money problems. And we weren’t the 

least bit inhibited for bringing in the money 

problems, either. 

DR. FAGET: 

We always seemed to never have the money for 

travel and we never had enough billets for the 

people that we wanted. 

DR. MUELLER: 

Well, billets were really outside our control. 

The travel, I have never understood why we 

ever curtailed travel. But that also was outside 

of my control at the time. There was some dictum by President Johnson that people shouldn’t 

travel. 

MR. TINDALL: 

Yes, those damn GSA cars out there in 

Arlington. I mean, that was so bad. 

DR. FAGET: 

George, you never heard this, but I remember 

one time we were having trouble with travel 

and I was talking to one of your money controllers, I don’t know who it was, but I 

explained to him that we were really in a hard 

way. And he had some data. He said well, the 

people at JSC travel more per capita than any 

other center. And I said well, you have proven 

another point, we don’t have the people. 

DR. MUELLER: 

True enough, as a matter of fact. Although, the 

centers’ population seems to even out over 

time, I have noticed. But it is true that people 

regulating things in Washington often create a 

regulation that has zero relationship to the real 

needs of a program, for example. And travel 

was one of them. We worked our way around 

that in every way we possibly could. 

DR. GILRUTH: 

But that wasn’t in the way of a budget limitation. 

34 Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 
DR. MUELLER: 

Exactly. 

DR. GILRUTH: 

So was the head count. 

DR. MUELLER: 

But I must say that we always found money 

enough for some odd things, like that swimming pool that was built down at Huntsville. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

The neutral buoyancy simulator. 

DR. KRAFT: 

And we traded monies around in terms of travel, too. We traded monies back and forth among 

organizations. It was tight. 

DR. FAGET: 

But we got by. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Once you started flying, what were the problems? You had to make a decision, I guess, as to 

how many missions to fly and what the objectives of each one were. Let’s talk about that a 

little bit. 

DR. GILRUTH: 

The decision was made before we started flying. And I don’t think we had to change it much. 

DR. KRAFT: 

No, I think George Mueller, in his regimentation 

of us, set out a class of missions—A, B, C, D— 

that from the very beginning we all participated 

in with a great amount of discussion and work. 

We had certain goals and objectives we were 

going to get out of each class of missions and set 

those beforehand. Frankly, I don’t think any of us 

expected that each one of those would be done 

with one flight, but that’s the way it turned out. 

We were able to build on our experience and 

learned from each one of those things and we 

didn’t have to do that. I think we were very, 

very fortunate, though, that we didn’t. I don’t 

think any of us expected to land on Apollo 11 

as simply and as straightforwardly as we did. 

I think we all expected that we would have to 

do maybe one or two flights in A and maybe 

two flights in B and two flights in C. But as we 

pointed out, Apollo 8 really gave us the turning point in the program to make that differently. That sort of gave us a different mindset, 

I suppose. 

DR. MUELLER: 

The only glitch was Apollo 13. 

MR. MORRIS: 

Right. 

DR. MUELLER: 

And that was one of those things that should 

never happen anyhow. 

MR. MORRIS: 

That’s right. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

But did Apollo 13 hasten the end of the flights? 

DR. MUELLER: 

Let me just say that the real problem that we 

had was the support of the scientific community and their feeling that all of this money was 

being wasted on manned space flight and man 

landing on the Moon early on. That is before we 

started flying and landing. 

MR. TINDALL: 

Yes, very much so. That was a great problem 

for all of us. 

DR. MUELLER: 

And then, once we got to landing and were 

beginning to pick up some data, they became 

very strong supporters. It was around that time 

Carl Sagan flipped. 

Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 35 
MR. MORRIS: 

All of them flipped, I think. 

DR. MUELLER: 

Yes. But by that time, we had already committed to the end of the program and there wasn’t 

much we could do about it. The Bureau of the 

Budget had us where we couldn’t do anything 

at that point. 

DR. GILRUTH: 

We landed six times. That was enough. 

DR. KRAFT: 

I think that is a point that has been discussed a 

little bit recently. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

I would like to push on that point a little bit, 

that six was enough in his judgment. That perhaps the risk-benefit calculation changed 

somewhere in there, that the risk of each additional mission might have been greater than the 

benefits. 

DR. GILRUTH: 

Well, one of the things we had to find out was 

whether the Moon was different in different 

places. And no matter how well you did in one 

landing, you didn’t know what it was like in 

another place. And we went to three or four different places, and they really were somewhat 

different, but basic things were not. 

We felt that we had gotten about as much as we 

could get, unless we found something later on. 

But I think the scientists were pretty well satisfied, too, that we had made a good going of the 

various places around the Moon and doing the 

kinds of things as best they could think of what 

we should do. 

DR. KRAFT: 

I think that has been discussed in recent weeks 

relative to our process with the scientists, 

which I thought George made a great point of. 

And that is, on the first mission, we used a lot 

of profanity if you want to know the facts of it. 

We want to get the damn job done. Let us fly 

one time. Let us get familiar with the operation. 

Let us prove to ourselves that we know what 

we are doing, how we can get there, and that 

we have got a familiarity with that. After that, 

we will do anything you ask us to do within the 

performance of this vehicle. 

And if you look at the record, that is exactly 

what we did. After Apollo 11, we did not make 

a single move without the scientists saying that 

was what they wanted to do. All we did was 

give them the performance limits, tell them 

what we thought we could do, and in that envelope. And from then on, they were in control, 

totally in control. 

MR. MORRIS: 

As a matter of fact, after the first mission, 

almost all of our activity was to enhance the 

scientific capability of the vehicle. 

DR. KRAFT: 

Absolutely. 

MR. MORRIS: 

We brought the lunar rover on Apollo 15. We 

had the extended lunar module. We were able 

to stay another day. We had more cargo capability. 

DR. KRAFT: 

We put an automobile on the spacecraft, and 

they could go 20 miles away from the landing. 

MR. MORRIS: 

So almost all of our activity after Apollo 11, 

even before that, was to extend— 

DR. KRAFT: 

I think that is an extremely important point. We 

didn’t do anything, operationally from then on, 

or we did a lot of E&D, engineering and development work, because we had to expand the 

36 Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 
envelope of the machine to make it heavier, to 

do more things and carry more weight and 

bring more back and everything you can name 

about it. But it was all done because of wanting 

to do more science. 

MR. MORRIS: 

That’s right. 

DR. MUELLER: 

One point to make, and that is the Apollo, as it 

was conceived and designed, had some limitations on what it could do. Perhaps one of the 

chief things that we failed to find in our various 

explorations of the Moon was where water was 

because that is, of course, the key to future use 

of the Moon. And that is when we simply didn’t 

have the envelope to simply explore where the 

most likely places were for the water to be, 

which is by the poles. But then we were faced 

with the fact that we had an envelope that we 

could carry on scientific research. And beyond 

a certain point, we weren’t able to do enough 

more things to make it worthwhile to argue at 

least that you should continue. 

Now, in retrospect, the scientists said well, we 

should have had another 20 missions because 

we now know what we could do with that fairly limited capability. But by that time, it was 

past the point of no return. We also had started 

on, we thought, a rather ambitious program to 

build a space shuttle, a completely reusable 

vehicle, and we were going to build a transportation system that was going to be low cost 

to a space station that was going to serve as a 

way-point to lunar operations, a real lunar 

operation. So we had a program in place that 

Dr. Robert R. Gilruth, 

director, NASA 

Manned Spacecraft 

Center, with the Snoopy 

poster, May 11, 1969. 

(Houston Chronicle Photo, 

May 11, 1969.) 

Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 37 
One point to make, and that is the Apollo, 

as it was conceived and designed, 

had some limitations on what it could do. “ we thought was going to transform interplanetary space into the kind of thing where people 

were going to live. 

MR. TINDALL: 

We 

DR. MUELLER: 

had Skylab coming up, too. ” 

We had Skylab. 

MR. TINDALL: 

We had a lot of science on that. 

DR. MUELLER: 

Right. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

It may be too early in our time to ask this question, but it is the clear follow-up to Dr. 

Mueller’s observation. Why didn’t Apollo provide a convincing demonstration to continue 

that kind of program, that kind of development, to build on it, to continue to use the 

Saturn V systems to build a large space station, a 33-foot station, to get on with the 

Shuttle, with lunar bases? Somehow, there 

was a sense that the country didn’t become 

convinced by what Apollo accomplished that 

it was in its interest to continue. Was there 

something in the program itself that led to that 

outcome? 

DR. MUELLER: 

I would offer the observation, that it was 

rather the perception of the President at the 

time and his set of values that led to a decision 

both to abandon the Saturn V, because we had 

never really planned on abandoning the 

Saturn V at the time we did since we wanted 

the capability of continuing. For example, we 

had two Skylabs built and planned to fly both 

of them. But, the priority shifted. We had to 

solve the problems of New York City and 

Vietnam simultaneously, and his priority said 

that that was a better way to spend the 

nation’s resources. 

DR. KRAFT: 

Well, I want to give you a humorous answer to 

that. If George Mueller knew the answer to 

that, and not let us know how he could have 

solved the problem, and he didn’t know it at the 

time, I would have been pretty ticked off about 

it. I don’t think there is any answer to that question. I mean, of all people, George Mueller 

would have given us an answer to it. We just 

didn’t have one. That is all there is to it. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

But I want you to reflect on the program itself. 

Why did it become politically acceptable for 

Richard Nixon to make that decision not to 

push on with an ambitious program or the program that had been laid out. Was there something about Apollo that did not convince the 

country to go forward? 

DR. GILRUTH: 

Well, it was bilateral. The last landing we made 

on the Moon, the networks wouldn’t pay for 

putting it on television. We had to pay for that 

ourselves. Did you know that? We had been so 

successful that people thought they knew all 

about it and they did not think that they wanted to watch it. 

DR. KRAFT: 

Well, after Apollo 11, we had two men on the 

Moon and one circling, and we had real time 

pictures of it. And I would turn on the three 

major networks at mission control, and they, all 

three, had soap operas on. What can we do 

about that? I don’t know. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Well, is there something that says that doing 

space programs as TV spectaculars is not the 

right way to go about it? I mean, is that the right 

criteria? 

DR. KRAFT: 

No, look. Let me tell you. If landing men on the 

Moon and bringing them back safely, and all of 

38 Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 
the exciting things that we did on the lunar surface doesn’t excite the country and doesn’t 

want to get them moving, I don’t know what the 

hell will. And I don’t know where it is today. 

That is just the way this country is, I suppose. 

We all have to recognize that. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

So how do you do a program that lasts for a 

long time? 

DR. MUELLER: 

Well, let me offer an observation. The Russians 

have done that. As long as we had that commitment on Apollo, we were doing very well 

indeed. It was when we decided that we had 

finished that task, the President had decided 

we had finished it, that we began to lose support of the Congress and of the President and 

so that withered away. What you need is a commitment, a national commitment to a continuing program that doesn’t depend upon a spectacular success, but depends upon some results 

in the economy. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

But let me take that one step further and ask 

the people that ran Apollo. Could you capture 

the spirit, the elan, the excitement of that 1961 

to 1972 period, of that program, with a continuing multidecade program of humans in space? 

Was there something unique about the goal, the 

timetable, the ability to put a flight operations 

team together of young Turks that really went 

to the job, that can’t be reproduced in a more 

normal environment? Was Apollo special in 

ways that can’t be reproduced? 

DR. GILRUTH: 

Well, we landed six times on the Moon and we 

found some differences in the different places. 

But it was really no point in making more landings to find out more about the Moon. And with 

that much risk, we had more spacecraft that we 

could have flown. I didn’t want to fly them. I 

didn’t want to send any more people to the 

Moon because I thought we had learned the 

things we were going to, and it was not worth 

the risk. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

How about your flight teams? Were they as 

good on Apollo 17? Were they better? Were they 

sharper? 

DR. KRAFT: 

Every one got better. 

MR. MORRIS: 

Oh, yes. 

DR. KRAFT: 

They all got better. Let me try and answer your 

question a little more directly. How you can 

excite an organization or a nation like we did in 

Apollo again is, in my mind, extremely difficult 

to do. Here is a Moon that has been sitting there 

as long as man has been able to look at it. We 

have been writing stories about it for hundreds 

of years. Not tens of years, but hundreds of 

years. And then we suddenly do it. 

Now, to try to come up with an event which is 

going to recapture the imagination of the 

United States and the world as comparable to 

that I don’t think is possible. Now, maybe it is. 

But I don’t think it would be for as long. I mean, 

even if we said we were going to go to Mars, I 

don’t think you could keep that kind of momentum going again. 

So, I think George is absolutely right. We have 

got to take a different tactic which says look, 

space is extremely important to the economic 

structure of our country. It is just as important 

as defense. It is just as important as education. 

It is an integral part of what we have got to do 

in this country to remain preeminent, competitive, technologically ahead. And that doesn’t 

say only the space program, but it is one of the 

important elements. And the words I have used 

is, it isn’t some esoteric fantasy that we bunch 

Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 39 
Dr. Christopher C. Kraft 

director, Johnson Space 

Center, after the unveiling 

of the L.B. Johnson bust, 

reads the citation to 

Mrs. L.B. Johnson during 

the 1973 dedication 

services for naming the 

Spacecraft Center after the 

former president. 

(NASA Photo 73-H-853.) 

of space cadets want to do. It is something that 

is fundamental to the economic structure of 

our country. 

MR. TINDALL: 

Do we want to accept the assumption that the 

people of the United States don’t support this? 

I don’t think that is even true. I don’t think they 

have supported it a lot. The business of 

whether they want to watch it on TV all the 

time, you start talking about a program that 

lasts 10 years. I think that if you had a troublefree program that was flying along marvelously 

for 10 years, they would get terribly bored with 

it, particularly compared to the soap operas 

because, you know, really exciting stuff everyday. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Let me turn the discussion inwards. In terms of 

the excellence of performance of an organization, like NASA overall, like the Johnson Space 

Center, how do you keep the quality of performance that made Apollo possible, sustained 

over a period of decades without that kind of 

challenging goal, that short-term excitement? 

DR. MUELLER: 

I would argue that that really is quite possible 

within an organization. And I will use an example. Bell Laboratories had no over-reaching 

goal, but it has had some very dedicated people 

working in an environment, which was very 

conducive to forward-looking work. The NACA 

didn’t have an over-reaching goal, but it had 

some very dedicated people who worked continually and did some really astonishing things. 

Our problem in the space arena has been that 

we have first fluctuated our resources that we 

have applied, and we have failed to provide a 

vision of what it is we were trying to accomplish in any fashion, really. And that lack of a 

feeling of where you are going and the inability 

to hire at the right level the right set of people 

40 Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 
on a continuing basis has been a problem. But I 

don’t think there is any difficulty in keeping an 

organization motivated if it has a place to go 

with the things it is going to accomplish. 

The public perception of that can be quite different. And keeping Congress motivated is a 

better question, or how you keep the OMB 

motivated. That is where the real question 

lies. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Anybody else want to comment on that issue? 

DR. FAGET: 

Well, I certainly agree with George. My memories of the NACA, there were very few people 

that weren’t very motivated, that didn’t do a 

great job. The NACA shunned publicity, literally shunned publicity. And 95 percent of their 

programs were in a classified nature; they 

couldn’t talk about them anyway. But even their 

unclassified programs, they didn’t go out of 

their way to brag about what they were doing. 

People knew they were doing good work and 

they were motivated. 

DR. KRAFT: 

I will give you a different answer. I would like 

to take the six people sitting here, I would like 

for you to give me maybe a couple hundred 

more, I would like you to give me a budget, and 

I would like you to send me off to do it again. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

And you think you are ready? 

DR. KRAFT: 

But I think, I am being somewhat cynical, but I 

think that it would take something like that to 

get it started again. I think that this agency has 

become so bureaucratic in the last 10 years, 

and particularly accelerated since the 

Challenger accident, that trying to reinitiate 

this organization into something is going to be 

very difficult to do. It “ain’t” going to be easy. 

I often made speeches around this center here 

and said look, I don’t know what it is, I don’t 

know what the glue is that makes this organization as great as it is. But let me tell you something, if we ever lose it, I won’t know how to 

put it back together again. And I am frightened 

to death of that. And so I think we are rapidly 

approaching that in NASA, and I am frightened 

to death of it. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

I would like to hear the rest of you react to that. 

What is it about the organization today? We are 

sitting here July 21, 1989. Yesterday, President 

Bush said we are going back to the Moon, we 

are going on to Mars. He didn’t put a timetable 

on it. What if he had done that? What if he challenged the agency in 1989 to do another major 

human program beyond Earth orbit? 

DR. KRAFT: 

If he had written a check, I would have volunteered. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

So it all comes down to money? 

DR. KRAFT: 

But he hasn’t written a check. 

MR. MORRIS: 

It is more than money. It is motivation. The 

check is a form of commitment, that I really 

want that job done. If you have that kind of 

commitment from the leadership, I don’t think 

there is any doubt that you can get enough 

good people to go make the thing happen again. 

As a matter of fact, we are kind of talking as if 

the situation deteriorated so that there are not 

good people doing good things. I don’t think 

that is true. The people I go talk to here at the 

center and at Headquarters and at the Cape and 

other places, I find guys working just as hard 

now as we did back in the 60s and early 70s. I 

really do. 

Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 41 
DR. LOGSDON: 

What’s the difference, then, Owen? 

MR. MORRIS: 

The difference is the commitment from above, 

to some extent. I don’t think we have had the 

leadership within the Agency and the relationship between the Agency and the administration for the last 20 years that we had in the first 

10— 

MR. TINDALL: 

It is not just dollars. 

MR. MORRIS: 

—I think that is a big part of it. 

MR. TINDALL: 

It is not just dollars. Everyone knows that it is 

having a schedule, a certain deadline that you 

have to meet. 

MR. MORRIS: 

Right. Exactly. 

MR. TINDALL: 

If you are going to launch on a certain date, that 

gets everybody’s attention. And everyone knows 

that they have got their job to get done by then 

or else they are the ones that are holding it up. 

DR. GILRUTH: 

God forbid, that schedule pressure. 

MR. TINDALL: 

It is schedule pressure. You’ve got to understand, where I am working now, there isn’t any 

schedule pressure at all. Some projects are 

going along, and I am just astounded, all of a 

sudden a project manager will have a schedule 

slip of a year and not care. I am not kidding you. 

DR. KRAFT: 

I will go even further than that. I have spoken 

to one of the major program managers in the 

last few days and said we need to get on with 

the space station. And his answer was well, you 

may want it in a hurry, but what is the hurry. 

MR. TINDALL: 

Yes. 

DR. KRAFT: 

What difference does it make whether we get 

the space station in two or three years. And 

frankly, I think that is an attitude that does 

exist. And if you have got that attitude, you ain’t 

going to get it done. 

MR. TINDALL: 

Because all of the other organizations have to 

know that there is a certain launch date, and 

whatever it is going to be they are going to be 

held accountable if they are not ready. Really 

puts a lot of motivation. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

How do you do this decades-long thing? 

DR. KRAFT: 

I don’t know. Maybe there is some serum you 

give somebody. I don’t know, but I said that is a 

very tenuous thing. There isn’t any formula that 

you can write down to make that happen. 

DR. MUELLER: 

It’s called leadership. And fundamentally, 

unless you have got the right set of leaders in, 

you can’t cause it to happen. If you have got the 

wrong set in, it won’t ever happen. 

DR. GILRUTH: 

Yes, but you have to have some real knowledge 

that you can get the funds and you can do it if 

you put together a good enough group. 

Otherwise, you are like we are now. We can’t 

put a good bunch together because we don’t 

know where we would get the money. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Let me go around, maybe start with Chris, and 

go around, the main audience for this videotape 

42 Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 
is the young engineers of the ’90s and beyond. 

What would you tell them the lesson of Apollo 

for them is? 

DR. KRAFT: 

Well, unfortunately, there are a lot of them. But 

you start with the fact that the legacy of Apollo 

is you can do anything you set your mind to do 

in this country. And as evidenced by Apollo, it 

didn’t even help to be very reasonable because 

there weren’t very many of us who thought 

Apollo was reasonable the day that Mr. Kennedy 

said we were going to do it. We didn’t even have 

a man in orbit yet. 

The second thing is, that I think that you can’t 

be afraid of hard work. Because God knows 

that there is not anybody that worked at the 

Johnson Space Center, in the ’60s particularly, 

that didn’t have 10 jobs to do and they had to 

have them done tomorrow, and they spent all of 

their waking hours doing it. Even when they 

were at home having dinner at night they were 

thinking about getting their job done, and 

enjoyed every damn minute of it. And I would 

like to be faced with that problem again. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Bob. 

DR. GILRUTH: 

I think it has been said pretty well, and I don’t 

have anything to add right now. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Max. 

DR. FAGET: 

Well, of course Apollo was really a unique situation, and there is no way that we can recreate 

that. But, basically, I really think that a lot could 

be done towards getting the engineers in NASA, 

giving them the opportunity to do more on their 

own behalf. I know that going back to the good 

old days, to the NACA, is a song that everybody 

is tired of hearing, but back in those days, it 

didn’t make any difference how junior an engineer you were. If you showed any spark of 

capability, you could bet that your supervisor 

would give you a project that would be your 

own, your own responsibility. And you would 

be entirely graded by what you did based on 

your own thinking out of the problem and 

accomplishing it. And that is what you need. 

Howard W. Tindall, Jr., 

second from right, and, 

left to right, Bill Schneider, 

Chris Kraft, and Sig Sjoberg 

monitor a problem with the 

Command Service Module 

used to transport the 

Skylab 3 crew to the orbiting 

Skylab space station cluster. 

(NASA Photo S-73-31875.) 

Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 43 
You need an organization with a culture in 

which an individual can take on a job and get it 

done if given a chance. And I am afraid that has 

to be instilled and I agree with Chris, you need 

leadership to do that. The leader has got to really believe in his organization, and believe that 

they can do things, and find ways to challenge 

them. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Owen. 

MR. MORRIS: 

I think one of the big things that I saw in all of 

the people working on Apollo was a sense of 

pride in doing something right. A sense of being 

willing to take a challenge, find out how to go 

about it, and then go solve it, make the event 

happen whatever it was, and then the sense of 

pride that comes from that. And there is willingness there to go beyond what you are asked 

to do, to go get your hands dirty, to go understand how the hardware is really going to work, 

to understand how the software is really going 

to interface, whatever the job is. And I think 

that willingness to go the extra mile, to get the 

feeling of satisfaction you get when you do the 

job right is something that is really important 

then. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

George? 

DR. MUELLER: 

Well, I had a somewhat different career, in a 

sense, because my first 20 years as an engineer 

and physicist were involved in avoiding management. So, I spent a lot of time working hard 

on benches and things like that and teaching, 

and trying to keep from becoming a manager. 

And I think that is something I would like to 

pass on to the young people coming in the 

years ahead, and that is, until you really understand and have built within yourself the technical capability of knowing something very well 

and in-depth, you really ought not to try to manage a program. And so often we think that management is the end point. It really is just one of 

those things that you have to do as career 

develops, but it isn’t the “funness” part at all. 

The fun part is when you are doing something. 

And that is what we fail to really emphasize in 

today’s world. 

MR. MORRIS: 

Amen. 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Bill. 

MR. TINDALL: 

Well, I don’t have that much to add. I think both 

the thing that Chris said and that George said is 

exactly right. I remember through my career, I 

never worried about the next, or any promotions at all. In fact, I was just having a really 

good time, really, really good time. And I guess 

the organization we were in encouraged that. 

That is what both of them were saying. You didn’t really, you weren’t concerned about whether 

you were going to become a program manager 

and quit lifting those 50 pound weights up and 

down hundreds of times a day like I used to do. 

DR. KRAFT: 

Or have hydraulic oil spilled all over you. 

MR. TINDALL: 

That’s exactly right. We don’t want to get in 

there. But the thing that was so outstanding, 

you just hope that the young engineers and scientists that we are talking to here have a 

chance to be, to get into an organization, I don’t 

know whether it has to be a project like Apollo, 

but an organization like we had that really delegated the jobs as tough or tougher than you 

could do and just said go on out there and figure out how you can do it because it was so 

doggone much fun. 

I mean, when Chris was talking, when he started out talking about these terrible 14 and 16 

44 Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 
hour days and all during dinner that you were 

working, but I would just change the word from 

work to play because I never thought we were 

working at all. And that is the honest to God 

truth. It was just so much fun. In fact, I think it 

would be terrible if you had to go through life 

working. Really. 

DR. MUELLER: 

I agree. I would like to add one thing for our 

future managers. Just because you become a 

manager doesn’t mean you no longer can do 

anything technical. Some managers think that 

you are a manager, and therefore you can’t do 

anything useful anymore. 

I remember sometime, about 1968 I guess it 

was, that Sam Phillips asked me to take off my 

hat of manager and start looking at software 

and try to do an in-depth review of our software 

system. It happens that I have some backApollo was really a unique situation, 

and there is no way that we can recreate that. 

ground in software systems. So I did do that. So
 

“

that was quite a separate thing from being man­


ager of a manned spaceflight program. It was a
 

technical challenge, and we did a fairly in-depth
 

review and I think we had some positive impact
 

as a result of that in terms of being sure that the
 

”


software wasn’t going to destroy us half way
 

where ever we were.
 

DR. LOGSDON: 

Apollo, 20 years ago yesterday, for the first time
 

landed humans on the Moon. It is clearly a
 

piece of history, a grand human adventure, but
 

it was also a remarkable engineering, technical,
 

management operation achievement. The six
 

gentlemen that have been sharing their
 

thoughts with you this afternoon are the peo­


ple, and represent many more people, that
 

made that happen. And we may not see the
 

likes of Apollo again, but the future will hold
 

great promise as well. 
 

Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 45 

About the
 

Moderator
 

John M. Logsdon is director of both the Center for International Science and 

Technology Policy and the Space Policy Institute of George Washington 

University’s Elliott School of International Affairs, where he is also professor of 

political science and international affairs. He holds a B.S. in physics from Xavier 

University and a Ph.D. in political science from New York University. He has been 

at George Washington University since 1970, and previously taught at The Catholic 

University of America. He is also a faculty member of the International Space 

University and Director of the District of Columbia Space Grant Consortium. 

Dr. Logsdon’s research 

interests include U.S. 

and international space 

policy, the history of the 

U.S. space program, and

the structure and process 

of government decisionmaking for research and 

development programs, 

and international science and technology policy. He is author of The Decision to Go to the 

Moon: Project Apollo and the National Interest, 

general editor of the highly acclaimed series 

Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents 

in the History of the U.S. Civil Space Program, 

and has written numerous articles and reports 

on space policy, space history, and science and 

technology policy. He is North American editor 

for the international journal Space Policy. 

He is an elected member of the International 

Academy of Astronautics and the Board of 

Trustees of the International Space University, 

and Chair of the Advisory Council of the 

Planetary Society. He is a fellow of the 

American Association for the Advancement of 

Science and the American Institute of 

Aeronautics. He is currently a member of the 

Committee on Human Exploration of the 

Space Studies Board, National Academy of 

Sciences, the Commercial Space Transportation Advisory Committee of the Department of 

Transportation, and on a blue-ribbon international committee evaluating Japan’s National 

Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 47 
Space Development Agency. In past years, he 

was a member of the Vice President’s Space 

Policy Advisory Board, the Aeronautics and 

Space Engineering Board of the National 

Research Council, the National Academy of 

Sciences—National Academy of Engineering 

Committee on Space Policy and the NRC 

Committee on a Commercially Developed 

Space Facility, NASA’s Space and Earth 

Science Advisory Committee, and the History 

Advisory Committee of the National Air and 

Space Museum. He is a former chairman of the 

Committee on Science and Public Policy of the 

American Association for the Advancement of 

Science and of the Education Committee of 

the International Astronautical Federation. 

Dr. Logsdon has lectured and spoken to a wide 

variety of audiences at professional meetings 

and colleges and universities, international 

conferences, and other settings, and has testified before Congress on numerous occasions. 

He is frequently consulted by the electronic 

and print media for his views on various space 

issues. He has been a fellow at the Woodrow 

Wilson International Center for Scholars and 

was the first holder of the Chair in Space 

History of the National Air and Space 

Museum. Dr. Logsdon has served as a consultant to many public and private organizations. 

48 Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 
Monographs in 

Aerospace History 

Launius, Roger D., and Gillette, Aaron K. Compilers. The Space Shuttle: An Annotated 

Bibliography. (No. 1, 1992). 

Launius, Roger D., and Hunley, J.D. Compilers. An Annotated Bibliography of the Apollo Program. 

(No. 2, 1994). 

Launius, Roger D. Apollo: A Retrospective Analysis. (No. 3, 1994). 

Hansen, James R. Enchanted Rendezvous: John C. Houbolt and the Genesis of the Lunar-Orbit 

Rendezvous Concept. (No. 4, 1995). 

Gorn, Michael H. Hugh L. Dryden’s Career in Aviation and Space. (No. 5, 1996). 

Powers, Sheryll Goecke. Women in Aeronautical Engineering at the Dryden Flight Research 

Center, 1946-1994 (No. 6, 1997). 

Portree, David S.F. and Trevino, Robert C. Compilers. Walking to Olympus: A Chronology of 

Extravehicular Activity (EVA). (No. 7, 1997). 

Logsdon, John M. Moderator. The Legislative Origins of the National Aeronautics and Space Act 

of 1958: Proceedings of an Oral History Workshop (No. 8, 1998). 

Rumerman, Judy A. Compiler. U.S. Human Spaceflights: A Record of Achievement, 1961-1998 

(No. 9, 1998). 

Portree, David S.F. NASA’s Origins and the Dawn of the Space Age (No. 10, 1998). 

Logsdon, John M. Together in Orbit: The Origins of International Cooperation in the Space 

Station Program (No. 11, 1998). 

Phillips, W. Hewitt. Journey in Aeronautical Research: A Career at NASA Langley Research 

Center (No. 12, 1998). 

Braslow, Albert. Laminar Flow Control Flight Research at Dryden, from the 1960s to the F-16XL 

(No. 13, 1999). 

Those monographs still in print are available free of charge from the NASA History Division, Code 

ZH, NASA Headquarters, Washington, DC 20546. Please enclosed a self-addressed, 9x12” envelope 

stamped for 15 ounces for these items. 

Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 49 

Index
 

A 

Air Force, U.S., 15 

American Association for the Advancement of 

Science, 4, 48 

Apollo, project, 3, 4, 5, 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 18, 

19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 26, 27, 37, 38, 39, 40, 

43, 44, 45 

Apollo 8, 26, 30, 31, 35 

Apollo 11, 35, 36, 38 

Apollo 12, 31 

Apollo 13, 30, 35 

Apollo 15, 36 

Apollo 17, 39 

Apollo Command Module, 20 

B 

Bell Laboratories, 18, 40 

Bureau of the Budget, BOB, 36 

Bush, President George H.W., 41 

C 

Canada, 17 

Cape, Canaveral, 15, 18, 41 

Catholic University of America, The, 47 

Challenger, orbiter, 32, 41 

Civil War, 3 

CNN, 3 

Congress, U.S., 12, 18, 39, 41, 48 

D 

District of Columbia Space Grant Consortium, 

47 

E 

Earth, 11 

Echo, project, 11, 13 

England, 17 

F 

Faget, Maxime (Max) A., 5, 11, 12, 13, 15, 17, 

18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 29, 30, 31, 34, 

35, 41, 43 

Florida, Miami, 3 

G 

Gemini, project, 11, 14, 20, 21, 22, 27 

Gilruth Recreation Center, JSC, 4, 9 

Gilruth, Robert (Bob) R., 5, 11, 12, 14, 15, 16, 

17, 18, 23, 24, 25, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 

38, 39, 41, 43 

Grumman, aerospace company, 30 

H 

Houston, Texas, 16 

Huntsville, Alabama, 16, 35 

I 

International Academy of Astronautics, 11 

International Astronautical Federation, 48 

International Space University, 47 

J 

Johnson, Mrs. Lyndon B., 40 

Johnson Space Center, JSC, 4, 5, 9, 11, 12, 21, 

40, 43 

K 

Kennedy Space Center, KSC, 14, 22 

Kennedy, President John F., 3, 12, 43 

Kraft, Christopher C., Jr., 5, 11, 12, 13, 14, 17, 

18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 

30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 

43, 44 

Kranz, Eugene F., 22 

L 

Langley Research Center, LaRC, 5, 11 

Launius, Roger, 6 

Loftus, Joseph P., 5, 9 

Logsdon, John M., 9, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 

18, 19, 20, 21, 23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 

31, 32, 33, 35, 36, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, 

45, 47 

Low, George, 11, 25, 30, 31 

M 

Manned Spacecraft Center, MSC, 5, 15 

Mars, 39, 41 

Marshall Space Flight Center, MSFC, 14, 15, 22 

Mercury, project, 5, 11, 13, 14, 20, 21, 22, 27 

Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo 51 
Mission Control, Houston, Texas, 22 

Monographs in Aerospace History, 5, 6, 49 

Moon, 3, 4, 11, 12, 14, 31, 35, 36, 37, 38, 39, 45 

Morris, Owen W., 5, 11, 19, 20, 22, 23, 25, 27, 

28, 29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 36, 37, 39, 41, 

42, 44 

Mueller, George E., 5, 11, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 22, 

23, 24, 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 30, 31, 33, 34, 35, 

36, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42, 44, 45 

N 

National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics, 

NACA, 11, 12, 13, 15, 17, 19, 21, 40, 41, 43 

National Aeronautics and Space 

Administration, NASA, 4, 5, 6, 15, 18, 19, 

20, 21, 22, 23, 32, 40, 43 

National Research Council, NRC, 48 

National Space Development Agency, Japan, 

48 

New York, New York, 38 

New York University, 47 

Nixon, Richard, 38 

O 

Office of Management and Budget, OMB, 41 

Oklahoma, 17 

P 

Pearl Harbor, 3 

Phillips, Samuel (Sam), 45 

Pioneer I, project, 14 

Pratt & Whitney, 20 

R 

Rockwell, aerospace company, 30 

S 

Sagan, Carl, 35 

Salinas, Maria Elena, 3 

Saturn V, 26, 30, 38 

Schlesinger, Jr., Arthur M., 3 

Science, magazine, 4 

Shea, Joseph (Joe), 11 

Shilberg, Sig, 17 

Skylab, 38 

Space Policy Advisory Board, President’s, 48 

Space Policy Institute, George Washington 

University, 9, 11, 47 

Space Shuttle, 5, 22, 38 

Space Station, 33 

Space Task Group, 5, 11, 12 

Stuhlinger, Dr. Ernst, 15 

T 

Texas, 17 

Teague, Tiger, 19 

Tindall, Howard W. (Bill), Jr., 4, 11, 13, 14, 17, 

18, 22, 23, 27, 28, 31, 32, 33, 34, 35, 38, 40, 

41, 43, 44 

Townes, Charlie, 18 

U 

United States, U.S., 3, 5, 11, 12, 39, 40 

Univision, 3 

V 

Vietnam, 38 

von Braun, Wernher, 4, 15 

W 

War of the Roses, 3 

Washington, D.C., 11, 18, 25 

Webb, James, 4 

Western Electric, 18 

Woodruff, Judy, 3 

Woolridge, William, 14 

World War II, 3, 11 

X 

Xavier University, 47 

Z 

Zimmerman, 14 

52 Managing the Moon Program: Lessons Learned From Project Apollo