page_title: George Mueller (NASA)
section_title: NASA and the Apollo program
hierarchical_section_title: George Mueller (NASA) / NASA and the Apollo program
caption_attribution_description: English: Dr. George Mueller gives Saturn V orientation to President John F. Kennedy and officals in Blockhouse 37. Front row, left to right: George Low, Dr. Kurt Debus, Dr. Robert Seamans, James Webb, President Kennedy, Dr. Hugh Dryden, Dr. Wernher von Braun, General Leighton Davis, and Senator George Smathers.
context_page_description: George Edwin Mueller, was an American electrical engineer who was an associate administrator at NASA who headed the Office of Manned Space Flight from September 1963 until December 1969. Hailed as one of NASA's "most brilliant and fearless managers", he was instrumental in introducing the all-up testing philosophy for the Saturn V launch vehicle, which ensured the success of the Apollo program in landing a man on the Moon and returning him safely to the Earth by the end of 1969. Mueller also played a key part in the design of Skylab, and championed the space shuttle's development, which earned him the nickname, "the father of the space shuttle."
  More recently, Mueller was chairman and chief vehicle architect of the now defunct Kistler Aerospace Corp.
context_section_description: Mueller became increasingly involved with NASA and the Apollo Program. NASA's Administrator James E. Webb sounded Mueller out for a top job. Mueller would only agree if the agency was restructured, and so during the fall of 1963 Webb worked with Associate Administrator Robert Seamans to restructure NASA, shifting three key centers (Manned Spacecraft Center (MSC), Marshall Space Flight Center (MSFC), and the Launch Operations Center (LOC)) to report directly to Mueller, as well as a local staff at Headquarters. Mueller accepted the job, and took a substantial pay cut. The reorganization of NASA and the Office of Manned Space Flight (OMSF) was announced in November 1963.
  Encouraged by Webb, Mueller had studied the three centers, speaking with people he knew from his work at Ramo-Wooldridge. His impression: "there wasn't any management system in existence". More seriously, Mueller found no means to determine and control hardware configurations, which gave no way to determine costs or schedules. Mueller concluded he would have to "teach people what was involved in doing program control."
  In August 1963, Mueller invited each of his three field center directors to visit him and explained how his proposed changes would put Apollo back on schedule and solve problems with the Bureau of the Budget. Change did not come easy and he had some problems with Wernher von Braun who gave "one of his impassioned speeches about how you can't change the basic organization of Marshall." After some argument, von Braun accepted Mueller's proposals and reorganized MSFC, strengthening its capacity in running large projects.
  Mueller's position was strengthened by directors at MSC, MSFC and LOC reporting directly to OMSF. Mueller also reduced attendance at the Manned Space Flight Management Council to just himself and the Center directors. Borrowing from the US Air Force Minuteman program, Mueller formed the Apollo Executive Group, which consisted of himself and the presidents of Apollo's main contractors.
  The biggest problem Mueller still faced was Apollo's slipping schedule and huge cost overruns. He had always thought the only way to resolve this, and achieve a lunar landing before 1970, was to reduce the number of test flights. Mueller wanted to use his "all-up testing" concept with each flight using the full number of live stages. This approach had been used successfully on the Titan II and Minuteman programs but violated von Braun's engineering concepts. The von Braun test plan called for the first live test to use the Saturn's first stage with dummy upper stages. If the first stage worked correctly then the first two stages would be live with a dummy third stage and so on, with at least ten test flights before a manned version was put into low earth orbit.
  The Saturn V program manager Arthur Rudolph cornered Mueller with scale models of Saturn and Minuteman. The Saturn dwarfed the Minuteman but Mueller replied, "So what?"
  Eventually von Braun and the others were won over. As von Braun stated: "It sounded reckless, but George Mueller's reasoning was impeccable. Water ballast in lieu of a second and third stage would require much less tank volume than liquid-hydrogen-fuelled stages, so that a rocket tested with only a live first stage would be much shorter than the final configuration. Its aerodynamic shape and its body dynamics would thus not be representative. Filling the ballast tanks with liquid hydrogen? Fine, but then why not burn it as a bonus experiment? And so the arguments went on until George in the end prevailed."
  Mueller's concept of all-up testing worked. The first two unmanned flights of the Saturn V were successful (the second less so), then the third Saturn V put Frank Borman's Apollo 8 crew in orbit round the Moon on Christmas 1968, and the sixth Saturn V carried Neil Armstrong's Apollo 11 to the first lunar landing.
  In an interview Mueller acknowledged what would have happened if all-up testing had failed, "The whole Apollo program and my reputation would have gone down the drain".
  With this battle won, in November 1965, Muel
caption: George Mueller gives a briefing to Kennedy six days before his assassination.
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