Lunar Orbiter shows how good sound precepts and directions from the beginning can keep a project on track.

—Erasmus H. Kloman, Unmanned Space Project Management: Surveyor and Lunar Orbiter (Washington: NASA SP-4901,1972), p. 7.

We had some people who weren't afraid to use their own judgment instead of relying on rules.

—Norman L. Crabill, mission designer manager for Lunar Orbiter, Lunar Orbiter Project Office, NASA Langley, interview with author, Hampton, Va., 28 Aug. 1991.

Once NASA had committed itself in 1961 to a manned lunar landing, there was so much that had to be done, and it all had to be done very quickly. The bold plan for an Apollo mission based on rendezvous in lunar orbit held out the promise of landing on the moon by 1969, but it presented many daunting technical difficulties. Success depended on NASA's ability to learn about, and to learn how to do, many different things.

First and foremost, before NASA could dare attempt any type of landing, it had to learn a lot more about the destination. Although humankind had moved some distance from the fantasy that it was made of green cheese, in the early 1960s there still existed all kinds of wild theories about the moon. One theory suggested that its surface was covered by a layer of dust perhaps fifty feet thick. If so, no type of spacecraft would be able to land in it, or be able to take off from it, safely. Another theory said that the moon's dust was not nearly so thick but that it possessed an electrostatic charge that would make it stick to the windows of the lunar-landing vehicle. It would be impossible for astronauts to see their way to a safe landing. A third warning, expressed by an astronomer as credible as Cornell University's Thomas Gold, was that the moon could even be composed of spongy, fairy-castle-like material that would crumble upon impact.¹

At NASA Langley Dr. Leonard Roberts, the imported British mathematician in Clint Brown's Theoretical Mechanics Division, chased the riddle of the lunar surface and came away with an equally pessimistic conclusion. Roberts speculated that, since the moon was millions of years old and had been constantly bombarded without the protection of an atmosphere, its surface was most likely so soft that, if any type of vehicle attempted to land on it, the vehicle would sink and be buried in it as in quicksand. With the commitment to a manned lunar landing made in 1961, Roberts began a rather extensive three-year research program to show just what would happen if an exhaust rocket blasted into a surface of very thick powdered sand. His analysis indicated that an incoming rocket would throw up a mountain of sand, creating a big rim all the way around the outside of the landed spacecraft. After the spacecraft settled down, this huge bordering volume of sand could easily collapse and completely engulf the spacecraft, killing its occupants.²

Apollo mission planners could not rely on telescopes for detailed pictures of the lunar surface because not even the latest, most powerful optical instruments could see through the earth's atmosphere well enough to resolve the moon's detailed surface features. Even an object the size of a football stadium would not show up, and enlarging the telescopic photograph would only increase the blur. To separate fact from fiction, and get the information it needed about the craters, crevices, and jagged rocks thought to be lacing the lunar surface, NASA would have to send out automated probes to take a close look.

The first of these probes took off for the moon in January 1962 as part of a NASA project known as Ranger. A small 800-pound spacecraft was to make a "hard landing," crashing to its destruction into the moon but not before an on-board multiple television camera payload sent back close views of the surface far better than anything ever captured by a telescope. Sadly, the first six Ranger probes were not very successful: in the first three, there were either malfunctions of the booster or failures of the launch-vehicle guidance system; in numbers four and five something went wrong with the spacecraft itself; and in number six, the primary experiment could not take place because the television equipment would not transmit. Although these incomplete missions did provide some extremely valuable high resolution photographs, as well as some significant data on the performance of Ranger's systems, in total the dismal appearance of the highly-publicized record of failures was deeply embarrassing to NASA and highly demoralizing to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, which managed the project. Fortunately, the last three Ranger flights in 1964 and 1965 were successful. They showed that a lunar landing was possible, but definitely not just anywhere. The craters and big boulders had to be avoided.³

A follow-on to Ranger known as Surveyor, another project handled by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, also experienced failures and serious schedule delays but eventually managed to make six successful soft landings at predetermined points on the surface of the moon between May 1966 and January 1968. From the touchdown dynamics, surface bearing-strength measurements, and eye-level television scanning of the local surface conditions, NASA learned that the moon could easily support the impact and the weight of a small lander. Originally, NASA also planned for (and Congress had authorized) a second type of Surveyor spacecraft that, instead of soft-landing on the moon, was intended for high-resolution stereoscopic film photography of the moon's surface from lunar orbit, and for instrumented measurements of its environment. However, what was known as the "Surveyor Orbiter" did not materialize. JPL, whose people and facilities were already overburdened with the responsibilities for Ranger and "Surveyor Lender," simply could not take on another major space flight project.⁴ NASA still wanted a lunar orbiter but it had to give it to someone else.

In 1963 NASA scrapped its plans for a Surveyor Orbiter and turned its ambitions to a separate Lunar Orbiter project. This was to involve an all-new spacecraft system and a different booster rocket, the Atlas-Agena D, rather than the less reliable Centaur used to launch the Surveyors. Unlike the preceding unmanned lunar probes which were originally designed for general scientific study, Lunar Orbiter--not to be confused with last chapter's manned lunar-orbit rendezvous concept--came into being at a time when a manned lunar-landing was a definite national commitment. It was thus a project put together from the start to support the Apollo mission. Specifically, it had to provide information on the lunar surface conditions most relevant to a landing spacecraft. This meant, among other things, that its camera had to be able to capture subtle slopes and minor protuberances and depressions over a very broad canvas of the moon's front side. As an early working group on the requirements of the lunar photographic mission had determined, Lunar Orbiter had to be able to identify 45-meter-size objects over the entire facing surface of the moon, 4.5-meter objects in the "Apollo zone of interest," and 1.2-meter objects in all of the proposed landing areas.⁵

Five Lunar Orbiter missions took place. The first launch occurred in August 1966 within two months of the initial target date. The next four launches happened right on schedule with the final mission being completed in August 1967, barely a year after the first launch. NASA had planned for five flights because mission reliability studies had indicated that it might take five in order to achieve even one success. However all five, not just one, worked. In fact the project met its prime objective, which was to photograph in detail all the proposed Apollo landing sites, after just the third mission. This meant that the last two flights were a bonus, enabling photographic exploration of the rest of the lunar surface for more general scientific purposes. The final cost of the program was not slight: it wound up to be $163 million, which was more than twice the original estimate of $77 million. But that doubling compares very favorably with the escalation in the price of comparable projects, like Surveyor, whose original estimated cost of $125 million finally wound up to be $469 million.

In retrospect, Lunar Orbiter must be, and rightfully has been, regarded as a virtually unqualified success. For the people and institutions most responsible for it, the project proved to be an overwhelmingly positive learning experience on which greater capabilities and ambitions were built. For both the prime contractor, The Boeing Company, a world leader in the building of airplanes, and the project manager, Langley Research Center, a premiere aeronautics laboratory, the involvement in Lunar Orbiter was a turning point. The successful execution of a risky enterprise on which both organizations were staking established reputations and potentially exposing the limits of their abilities became proof positive that they were more than capable of moving into the new world of deep space. Furthermore, for many observers as well as for people deeply involved in the project, Lunar Orbiter quickly became a model of how to handle a program of space exploration. Its successful progress demonstrated how a clear and discrete objective, strong leadership commitment, and positive person-to-person communication skills could keep a project on track from start to finish.⁶

Given this brilliant record of achievement, it may be surprising to find that there were many people inside the American space science community who believed that neither Boeing nor especially Langley were the type of place capable of managing a project like Lunar Orbiter, or of doing the kind of work that supported the integration of first-rate scientific experiments into space missions. After NASA headquarters announced in the summer of 1963 that Langley would manage Lunar Orbiter, more than one space scientist was upset. Dr. Harold C. Urey, a prominent scientist from the University of California at San Diego, in fact wrote a very strong letter to Administrator James Webb asking him, "How in the world could the Langley Research Center, which is nothing more than a bunch of plumbers, manage this scientific program to the moon?"⁷

This harsh questioning of Langley's competency was part of an unfolding debate over the proper place of science within NASA's spaceflight programs. Both the U.S. astrophysics community and Dr. Homer E. Newell's Office of Space Sciences at NASA headquarters wanted "quality science" incorporated into every space mission. But this caused problems. Especially once the commitment had been made to a lunar landing mission, NASA had to decide what should come first: the merits of quality science or the requirements of Apollo. Ideally, it would be nice to be able to do both together, but when that seemed impossible, one of the two had to be given priority, and it was usually the engineering requirements of the manned mission that won out. For Ranger and Surveyor, projects involving dozens of outside scientists and a large and sophisticated space science division at JPL, that meant that some of the experiments would turn out to be less elegant than the space scientists wanted.⁸ For Lunar Orbiter, a project involving only a few astrogeologists at the U.S. Geological Survey and a very few space scientists at Langley, it meant ironically that the primary goal would be achieved so quickly that major science objectives could be added for the last two flights.

The "Moonballs" Experiment

Langley management had entered the fray of this battle between science and engineering during the planning for Project Ranger. At the first Senior Council Meeting of the Office of Spaced Sciences (soon to be renamed the Office of Space Sciences and Applications [OSSA]) held at NASA headquarters on June 7, 1962, which was a year and two weeks after President Kennedy's lunar-landing speech, LaRC associate director Charles Donlan had questioned the priority of a scientific agenda for the agency's proposed unmanned lunar probes now that there was a national commitment to a manned moon landing. The initial requirements for the probes had been set long before Kennedy's announcement and NASA needed to rethink them. Based on his experience at Langley and with Gilruth's Space Task Group, Donlan felt that the space-science people were "rather unbending in not getting scientific data which would assist the manned program." What needed to be done now, he felt, was turn more of the attention of the scientists to exploration having more direct application to the Apollo lunar landing program.⁹

Donlan was distressed specifically by the Office of Space Sciences' recent rejection of a lunar-surface hardness experiment proposed by a penetrometer feasibility study group at Langley. This small group, consisting of a half-dozen people from the Dynamic Loads and Instrument Research divisions, recommended that a spherical projectile dubbed "Moonball" which was equipped with accelerometers capable of transmitting acceleration versus time

signatures during impact into the lunar surface, be flown as part of the follow-on to Ranger.¹⁰ Before the Ranger failures, NASA's plan had been for one or more of the last Ranger spacecraft to make a soft lunar landing; however, with the adverse publicity and the tight fiscal situation for its unmanned space science program, NASA terminated the Ranger program before that ever happened.

The idea behind Langley's "Moonballs experiment" was to obtain data on the hardness, texture, and load bearing strength of possible lunar-landing sites. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, considerable basic research had been done by NASA and others on various aspects of "impact phenomena" as they related to the potentially dangerous possibility of high-velocity meteoric-particle impact with space vehicles. Although much of this work was done at NASA Ames, Langley had also been deeply involved. One of its research divisions had built a very high-velocity, helium-gas gun to fire small pellets from 1/8-inch to one-inch in size into metal targets at impact speeds of up to 14,000 miles per hour.¹¹

Also under preliminary study at NASA research centers were the impact dynamics of different types of moon landings. A successful landing of an intact payload required that the landing lands not exceed the structural capabilities of the vehicle and that the vehicle make its landing in some tenable position so it could take off again. Both of these requirements demanded a knowledge of basic physical properties of the surface material, particularly data demonstrating its hardness or resistance to penetration. Into the early 1960s these properties were still unknown. It was those unknowns that the Langley penetrometer experiment wanted to identify. Without the information, any design of Apollo's lunar lander would have to be based on assumed surface characteristics.¹²

In the opinion of the Langley penetrometer group, its lunar surface hardness experiment would be of "general scientific interest" but would, more importantly, provide "timely engineering information important to the design of the Apollo manned lunar landing vehicle."¹³ Experts at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, however, questioned whether surface hardness was the important criteria for any experiment and argued that "the determination of the terrain was more important, particularly for a horizontal landing."¹⁴ In the end, the Office of Space Sciences rejected the Langley idea in favor of making further seismometer experiments which might tell scientists something more basic about the origins of the moon and its astrogeological history.

For engineer Donlan, representing a research organization like Langley dominated by engineers and by their quest for practical solutions to applied problems, this rejection had been a mistake. The issue came down to what NASA needed the most desperately, and what it needed to know, now. That might have been science prior to Kennedy's commitment, but it definitely was not science after it. In Donlan's view, Langley's rejected approach to lunar impact studies had been the correct one. The consensus at the first Senior Council Meeting, however, was that "pure science experiments will be able to provide the engineering answers for Project Apollo."¹⁵

Over the course of the next few years, the engineering requirements for Apollo would win out almost totally. As historian R. Cargill Hall explains in his story of Project Ranger, there was a "melding" of interests between the Office of Space Sciences and Office of Manned Space Flight followed by a virtually complete sublimation of the scientific priorities originally built into the unmanned projects. Those priorities, as important as they were, "quite simply did not rate" with Apollo in importance.¹⁶

Throughout the rest of the 1960s, many of the same Langley researchers who belonged to the center's original penetrometer group--most notably John L. McCarty, Huey D. Carden and George W. Brooks of the Dynamic Loads Division, plus Alfred G. Beswick of the Instrument Research Division--continued to develop concepts for the study of lunar and planetary impact. A revised version of their original penetrometer experiment did see action with Surveyor Lander. Furthermore, in the mid-1960s, Langley negotiated and managed a $1 million-contract whereby the Aeronutronic Division of the Philco Corporation in Newport Beach, California, made a state-of-the art survey in preparation for the company's development of a lunar penetrometer system for Apollo. Originally, engineers at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston thought it would be a good idea to deploy a penetrometer from the lunar excursion module during its final approach to landing. Its purpose would be to "sound" the anticipated target and thereby determine whether surface conditions were in fact conducive to landing. Should surface conditions prove unsatisfactory, the landing could be flown to another spot or aborted. In the end, NASA deemed the experiment unnecessary. What the Surveyor missions found out about the nature of the lunar soil (that it resembled basalt and had the consistency of damp sand) made NASA so confident about the hardness of the surface that this penetrometer experiment could be deleted. In 1967 and 1968, McCarty and Carden did use Langley's new Lunar Landing Research Facility to evaluate the response of an Apollo lunar-module-type landing-gear assembly while coming down under simulated lunar gravity on to several penetrable target materials. The Langley researchers correlated the responses, which were believed to be equivalent to those of 100 per cent of the anticipated LM vehicle-landing mass, to that of penetrometers impacting the same materials. The data reassured NASA that the landing could be made safely with its current LM design.¹⁷

Initiating Lunar Orbiter

The all-seeing camera eyes of the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft carried out a vital reconnaissance mission in support of the Apollo program. Although NASA also designed the project to provide scientists with quantitative information about the moon's gravitational field and the dangers of micrometeorides and solar radiation in the vicinity of the lunar environment, the primary goal of Lunar Orbiter was to fly over and photograph the best landing sites for the Apollo spacecraft. In this sense, engineering requirements overshadowed the aspirations of pure science. Even without the detailed photographic mosaics of the lunar surface compiled from the orbiter flights, NASA suspected that it might still have enough information about the lunar terrain to land astronauts safely. But certainly the selection of landing sites could be pinpointed much better with the help of high-resolution photographic maps. Lunar Orbiter would even help to train the astronauts for visual recognition of the lunar topography and for last-second maneuvering above it before touchdown.

Langley had never managed a deep-space flight project before, and center director Floyd Thompson was not sure that he wanted to take on the burden of responsibility when Oran Nicks, the young director of lunar and planetary programs in Homer Newell's Office of Space Sciences, came up to him with the idea early in 1963. Along with Newell's deputy Edgar M. Cortright, Nicks was the driving force behind the orbiter mission at NASA headquarters. Cortright, though, still contemplated doing the job at JPL using Surveyor Orbiter and the Hughes Aircraft Company, the prime contractor for Surveyor Lander. Nicks had come to think otherwise and worked to persuade Cortright and others that he was right. In his judgment, JPL had more than it could swallow with Ranger and Surveyor and did not need anything else put on its plate, certainly not an entree as filling as the Lunar Orbiter project. NASA Langley, on the other hand, besides having a reputation for being able to handle a variety of aerospace tasks, had just lost the Space Task Group to Houston and might be anxious to take on a tasty challenge like a separate lunar orbiter project. Finally, Nicks believed that it would be "a prudent management decision" to spread out such responsibilities and operational programs between the NASA field centers. NASA needed balance between its research centers. Thus, headquarters needed to get them to take on the kinds of endeavors that would stimulate the development of the "new and varied capabilities" that might prove essential to NASA's future in space exploration.¹⁸

Cortright was persuaded and gave Nicks the okay he needed to approach Floyd Thompson.^* This Nicks did on January 2, 1963, during a Senior Council Meeting of the Office of Space Sciences at Cape Canaveral. He asked Thompson whether Langley "would be willing to study the feasibility of undertaking a lunar photography experiment," and Thompson answered cautiously that he would ask his staff to consider the idea.¹⁹

The historical record does not tell us much about Thompson's personal thoughts about taking on Lunar Orbiter. But one can infer from the evidence that Thompson had mixed feelings about it. Not only did the Langley director give Nicks a less than straightforward answer to his question, he would also think about the offer long and hard before committing the center. While debating it in his own mind, Thompson went to a number of trusted members of his senior staff asking them to share their feelings. For instance, he went to Clint Brown, by then one of his three assistant directors for research, and asked him what he thought Langley should do. Brown told him emphatically that he did not think Langley should do it. An automated deep-space project such as this would be very difficult to manage successfully. The orbiter would have to be completely different from the Ranger and Surveyor spacecrafts and, being a brand new design, would no doubt encounter many unforeseen problems. Even if it were done to everyone's satisfaction--and the proposed schedule for the first launches sounded extremely tight--along the way Langley was bound to handicap its functional research divisions in order to give the project all that it needed. And projects always need a lot. Most of the work would rest in the management of contracts at industrial plants and in the direction of launch and mission control operations at Cape Canaveral and Pasadena. That would take Langley researchers to places they would be better off not going. Brown, for one, did not want to go there.²⁰

But Thompson decided, in what Brown now calls his director's "greater wisdom," that the center should accept the job of managing the project. Some of Thompson's researchers in Brown's own division had been proposing a Langley-directed photographic mission to the moon for some time, and Thompson, too, was excited by the prospects.²¹ Furthermore, the revamped lunar orbiter was not going to be a space mission seeking general scientific knowledge about the moon. It was going to be a mission directly in support of Apollo, meaning that engineering requirements would be primary. It was in the nature of Langley to prefer that practical orientation. Still, whether the "greater wisdom" stemmed from Thompson's own powers of judgment is still not certain. There are informed Langley veterans, notably Brown, who feel that Thompson must have also received some strongly stated directive from NASA headquarters saying that Langley had no choice but to take on the project.

Whatever the case in the beginning, the fact of the matter very shortly came to be that Langley management welcomed Lunar Orbiter with open arms as a major undertaking and a significant challenge for which everyone wanted to do their very best. Floyd Thompson personally stayed on top of many things about the project and for over four years did whatever he could to make sure that Langley's functional divisions supported it fully. Through most of this period, he would meet every Wednesday morning with the top people in the project office, hearing about the progress of their work and offering his own ideas. As one of these staff members recalls, "I enjoyed these meetings thoroughly." Thompson was "the most outstanding guy I've ever met, a tremendously smart man who knew what to do and when to do it."²²

Throughout the early months of 1963, Langley worked with its counterparts at NASA headquarters to establish a solid and cooperative working relationship for Lunar Orbiter. The center also started to draw up preliminary specifications for a lightweight orbiter spacecraft, and for the best optimum vehicle to launch it (already thought to be the Atlas-Agena D). As Langley personnel were busy with that, Thompson Ramo Woolridge's (TRW's) Space Technologies Laboratories, Inc., of Redondo Beach, California, the contract manager of the Air Force's ballistic missile program, was well into a parallel study of a lunar orbiter photographic spacecraft under contract to NASA headquarters. STL representatives reported on this work, which was independent of Langley's preliminary study, at meetings at Langley on February 25 and March 5, 1963. Langley researchers reviewed the contractor's assessment and found that the STL's views on the chances of mission success matched their own closely. If five missions were attempted, the chance of achieving one success was 93 per cent. The chance of achieving two was 81 per cent. Both studies confirmed that a lunar orbiter system using existing hardware would be able to photograph a landed Surveyor and would thus be able to verify the conditions of that possible Apollo landing site. In other words, not only could the Lunar Orbiter project be done successfully, it should be done quickly and done well, given what it could do to benefit the Apollo program.²³

Ironically, Langley's official spokesman for its assessment of the lunar orbiter photographic mission was Clint Brown, the same man who advised center director Thompson not to take on the project in the first place. Shortly after the March 5 meeting at Langley, Brown made a presentation at NASA headquarters to Associate Administrator Robert Seamans. In his talk he said that Langley had "the capability to handle a lunar orbiter project," but that it would "require an additional 100 persons" if the laboratory was "to avoid serious interference" with its commitments to the Office of Advanced Research and Technology, the office at headquarters most responsible for NASA's basic research programs.²⁴ Again, Brown's assessment proved overly cautious. The Lunar Orbiter Project Office, acronym "LOPO," never required more than about fifty full--time professionals and virtually all of them moved over without much fuss from the functional divisions. The total LOPO staff, including secretaries, people on temporary special assignment, and air force personnel brought on as DoD support, never got much over 100 people. Throughout its short four-year lifetime, LOPO remained a lean organization.

Project Management

As discussed in chapter 4, with the exception of its involvement in the X-series research airplane programs at Muroc, project management had not been a major factor at Langley during the period of the NACA. During the spaceflight revolution, it was therefore something that the NASA field center had to learn about quickly whenever it took on the job of managing a project. This was not very often. There were only three major projects assigned to NASA Langley in the early 1960s: Scout, in 1960, for the development of a solid-propellant rocket, NASA's first launch vehicle of its own; Fire, in 1961, for studying the effects of reentry heating on Apollo spacecraft materials; and Lunar Orbiter, in 1963, for photographic surveys of the moon. Project Mercury and its helper, Little Joe, had been managed by the independent Space Task Group while at Langley, and Project Echo had been administered for a while from Langley before moving to Goddard, but no other projects belonged to the research center itself.

To get ready for Lunar Orbiter in early 1963, Langley management reviewed what the center had done to initiate the already-operating Scout and Fire projects. It also tried to learn as much as it could about the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's inaugurating paperwork and subsequent management for Projects Ranger and Surveyor (which was very helpful). Only then did the Center prepare the formal documents required by NASA for the start-up of the project.²⁵

As Langley prepared for Lunar Orbiter, NASA's policies and procedures for project management were just coming out of a flux. Spurred on by its new top man, James Webb, the agency in October 1962 had begun to implement a series of structural changes in its overall organization. These were designed basically to rationalize and improve relations between Headquarters and the field centers, an area of fundamental concern. Instead of managing the field centers through the Office of Programs, as had been the case, NASA was moving them under the line command of the Headquarters program directors. For Langley, this meant direct lines of communication with the Office of Advanced Research and Technology (OART) and the Office of Space Sciences and Applications. With such direct communication, an organizational framework was in place by the end of 1963 for much more effective management of NASA projects.

In early March 1963, as part of Webb's reform, NASA Headquarters issued an updated version of General Management Instruction 4-1-1. This revised document, among other things, established formal guidelines for the planning and management of a project. Every project was supposed to pass through four preliminary stages: (1) Project Initiation, (2) Project Approval, (3) Project Implementation, and (4) Organization for Project Management.²⁶

When Langley entered the picture, the Project Initiation phase for Lunar Orbiter had actually taken place already. The first thing the laboratory had to do was to draw up a "Project Approval Document" or PAD. In this document Langley had to describe what it took to be the general requirements of a lightweight orbiter spacecraft and outline the different resources needed to meet the project's objectives. With help from Captain Lee R. Scherer, a navy captain assigned to Homer Newell's office who would eventually become the program manager for Lunar Orbiter at NASA headquarters, Langley finished a very short version of this document on March 25, 1963. It then forwarded the paper to Associate Administrator Seamans, who had to approve all PADs. Based on the statistics of probability for mission success, it called for five spacecraft to be launched by the Atlas- Agena D. As soon as Seamans approved the PAD, the third phase--that of project implementation--could begin.²⁷

In practice, it already had. On the same day that Floyd Thompson and his chief contracting officer Sherwood L. Butler sent the PAD to Seamans, they also delivered to NASA headquarters a second major document known as the Project Development Plan, or POP. This plan, which according to NASA's new instructions for project management was supposed to follow Seamans's approval of the PAD, asked that the Langley director be given the overall responsibility for managing Lunar Orbiter. The PDP also described how the center planned to manage the project if so assigned. Before Langley could move ahead, Deputy Associate Administrator Homer Newell, the head of the program office responsible for lunar studies (that is, the Office of Space Sciences and Applications), needed to approve the Project Development Plan. This Newell did on August 30, 1963, after hearing from his deputy Edgar Cortright that NASA would indeed have the money required to begin the project: $1.7 million for fiscal year 1963, $27.9 million for FY 1964, and $71 million for FY 1965.²⁸

From the beginning, everyone involved with Lunar Orbiter realized that it had to be a "fast-track" project. In order to help Apollo, everything about it had to be initiated quickly and without too much concern about the letter of the law in the written procedures. Then, as soon as the ball started rolling, everything about the project had to be developed rapidly and in parallel. If the ultimate goal of the project was to be realized--and that goal was to accomplish a successful lunar flight at the very first launch--there was no time for a phased approach where one part of the project waited on the completion of another. Launch facilities had be planned at the same time that the design of the spacecraft started. The photographic, micrometeoroid, and selenodetic experiments had to be prepared even before the mission operations plan was complete. All had to be integrated including the development of the spacecraft, the mission design, the operational plan and preparation of ground equipment, the creation of computer programs, as well as a plan for testing everything. "Sometimes this causes undoing some mistakes," says Donald H. Ward, a key member of Langley's Lunar Orbiter project team, "but it gets to the end product a lot faster than a serial operation where you design the spacecraft and then the facilities to support it."²⁹ In the case of Lunar Orbiter, it meant that from the time the Lunar Orbiter contract was signed on May 7, 1964, to the time the first spacecraft orbited the moon on August 14, 1966, there was to be only 27 months.

With Homer Newell's acceptance of Langley's Project Development Plan on August 30, 1963, Lunar Orbiter moved into the implementation phase. On September 11, director Floyd Thompson formally established the Lunar Orbiter Project Office (LOPO) at Langley, a lean organization of just a few people which in fact had been at work since May. Named as the project manager was Clifford H. Nelson, a NACA veteran since 1941 who had been serving as the head of the Measurements Research Branch of the Instrument Research Division. Thompson knew Nelson to be an extremely bright engineer who had been very active in the development of flight research techniques and instrumentation. Nelson had served as project engineer on a number of flight research programs and Thompson believed that he showed great promise as a technical manager. He worked very well with people and Thompson felt that skill in inter-personal relations would be essential in a project like Lunar Orbiter wherein so much of the work would have to be done externally in terms of dealings with contractors. To help Nelson, Thompson originally reassigned seven men and one woman into the project office: engineers Israel Taback, Robert Girouard, William I. Watson, Gerald Brewer, John B. Graham, Edmund A. Brummer, financial accountant Robert Fairburn, and secretary Anna Plott. This was a far cry from the "additional 100 people" called for in Clint Brown's earlier assessment. The most important technical minds brought in originally to participate came from either the instrument research division (IRD) or from the applied materials and physics division (AMPD), which was the old PARD. There was Taback, the experienced and sage head of the navigation and guidance branch of IRD, who had been working at Langley since 1942; Brummer, an expert in telemetry also from IRD; and two new Langley men, Graham and Watson, brought in to look over the integration of mission operations and of spacecraft assembly for the project. A little later IRD's talented Bill Boyer also joined the group as flight operations manager, as did AMPD's outstanding mission analyst Norman L. Crabill, who had just finished working on Project Echo. All four of these men were NACA veterans and were serving as branch heads at the time of their assignment into LOPO. This is significant given that individuals at that level of authority and experience are often too entrenched and concerned about further career development to risk losing it all in a temporary and high-risk project. Together, they all set up an office in a room located in the large 16-Foot Transonic wind tunnel building in the Langley West Area.

The first major task they faced was the writing of a "Request for Proposals." Theoretically, according to NASA Management Instructions 4-1-1, this document was to be prepared after official approval of the Project Development Plan--which, to repeat, was supposed to come after the approval of the Project Approval Document. In this case, though, everything was happening in technical violation of the NASA procedures. Langley was preparing all three documents at the same time, even before the Lunar Orbiter Project was officially sanctioned. Of the three, the RFP was the key to the progress of Lunar Orbiter because it was the document with which NASA could then go to the aerospace industry in search of the industrial contractors.

As had been the case with its preparation of the PAD and PFD documents, Langley really could not afford to waste much time preparing even this most important document. The only way to do the entire project in the two or three years allowed by the Apollo timetable was for NASA Langley to identify and buy the best design it could find on paper, and then work with the contractors to integrate that design, test it, improve it, and go for "flying it" as soon as everything was put together for the first time. Even as the launch approached, there would not even be the time to simulate the mission completely and put it through a full dress rehearsal.

In terms of writing up the Request for Proposals, the "fast-track" meant that Nelson, Taback, and the others involved could afford to prepare only a brief document, merely a few pages long, that sketched out just a few of the detailed requirements. As Israel Taback remembers, even before the project office was established, he and his few fellow members of what would become LOPO had already done a lot of talking with the potential contractors and "our idea was that they would be coming back to us" with most of those details. "So it wasn't like we were going out cold, with a brand new program." But it was close to it.

The most critical detail that had to be decided upon was the means for stabilizing the spacecraft in lunar orbit. Over this means there turned out to be what Taback calls an "enormous difference" between Langley's attitude and the position taken by NASA headquarters. In brief, the issue was whether the Statement of Work (SOW) that would accompany the Request for Proposals should be written in such a way that the contractors would understand that NASA wanted a rotationally-stabilized vehicle--in other words, a rotating satellite or "spinner." Clearly, the Office of Space Sciences and Applications preferred a spinner based on their previous contractor study by Space Technologies Laboratories. However, Langley's Lunar Orbiter people doubted the wisdom of writing the RFP in such a specific way. It would be far better to keep the door open to other, and perhaps better, ways of stabilizing the vehicle for photography.

The goal of the project, after all, was to get the best possible high-resolution pictures of the moon's surface. To do that, NASA needed to create the best possible orbital platform for the spacecraft's sophisticated camera equipment, whatever that turned out to be. From their preliminary analysis and conversations about mission requirements, Taback, Nelson, and the others felt that it would be far easier to take these pictures from a three-axis (yaw, pitch, roll), attitude-stabilized device than it would be from a spinner. With a spinner, there would be distortions of the image due to the rotation of the vehicle. One of Langley's own people, John F. Newcomb of the Aero-Space Mechanics Division (and eventual member of LOPO), had done the mathematics to show that this distortion due to the spacecraft's spinning motion would destroy the resolution and thus seriously undermine the overall quality of the pictures. This was a handicap that the people at Langley quickly decided they did not want to live with, not in their project.

Thus, for good technical reasons, Langley insisted that the design be kept an open matter and not be frozen in the RFP to the one concept of a spin-stabilized spacecraft. Even if Langley's engineers were wrong and it turned out that a properly-designed spinner could be operated more effectively, it still made sense to see what the aerospace industry might be able to produce on its own volition before deciding upon a spin-stabilized system.³¹

For several weeks in the summer of 1963, Headquarters tried to resist the Langley position. Preliminary studies by both Space Technologies Laboratories for the Office of Space Sciences and Applications and by Bell Communications for the Office of Manned Space Flight indicated that a rotating spacecraft using a spin-scan film camera similar to the one developed by the RAND Corporation in 1958 for an Air Force satellite ("spy in the sky") reconnaissance system would work well for Lunar Orbiter. Such a spinner would be less complicated and would cost considerably less than the three-axis-stabilized spacecraft preferred by Langley.³²

But Langley would not cave in over an issue so fundamental to their project's success. Eventually Newell, Cortright, Nicks, and Scherer in OSSA offered a compromise that Langley could accept: the RFP could say that "if bidders could offer approaches which differed from the established specifications but which would result in substantial gains in the probability of mission success, reliability, schedule, and economy," then NASA most certainly invited them to submit those alternatives. At the same time the RFP would also have to emphasize that NASA wanted a lunar orbiter that was built from as much off-the-shelf hardware as possible. There was not the time for development of many new technological systems.³³

Other differences of opinion between Langley and Headquarters about the RFP also forced some compromise. For example, Langley and OSSA had to come to an agreement about their respective--and hopefully complimentary--roles in the management of the program and how not to interfere or get in each other's way. This was worked out without too much difficulty over the course of a few meetings. A more serious problem arose over the nature of the contract. Langley's chief procurement officer, Sherwood Butler, took the conservative position that a traditional cost-plus-a-fixed-fee (CPFF) contract would be best in a project such as this in which a number of unknown development problems were bound to arise. Within this kind of contract, NASA would pay the contractor for his actual costs plus a sum of money fixed by the contract negotiations as a reasonable profit.

NASA headquarters, on the other hand, felt that some attractive financial incentives needed to be built into the contract similar to those that had been used successfully in the Pioneer project. This was an earlier project of unmanned lunar and interplanetary probes (1958 to 1968) for which Space Technologies Laboratories, Inc., the same firm now studying Lunar Orbiter, had provided the first two spacecraft. Although unusual up to this point in NASA history, an incentives contract was needed, Headquarters believed, when it was impossible to know exactly how things were going to proceed but when everyone expected to run into some significant problems as the project evolved. Such a contract would assure that the contractor would do everything possible to solve all the problems encountered and would alway give 100 per cent effort to make sure that the project worked. The incentives could be written up in such a way that if, for instance, the contractor lost money on any one Lunar Orbiter mission, the loss could be made back with a handsome profit on the other missions. The efficacy of a cost-plus incentives contract rested in the solid premise that nothing motivated a contractor more than making money. NASA headquarters apparently understood this better than did Langley's procurement officer who wanted to keep tight fiscal control over the project and who did not want to do the hair-splitting that often came with evaluating whether the incentive clauses had been met.³⁴

On the matter of incentives, Langley's project engineers sided against their own man and with NASA headquarters. They, too, thought that incentives were the best way to do business with a contractor--as well the best way to illustrate the urgency that NASA attached to Lunar Orbiter.³⁵ The only thing that bothered them was the vagueness of the incentives being discussed. When director Floyd Thompson understood that his engineers really wanted to take the side of Headquarters on this issue, he quickly concurred. He insisted only upon three things: one, to have incentives based on clear stipulations tied to cost, delivery, and performance, with penalties for deadline overruns; two, that the contract be fully negotiated and signed before Langley started working with any contractor (in other words, work could not start under a letter of intent); and, three, that all bidding be competitive. In Thompson's mind, there was reason to worry that OSSA might be biased in favor of Space Technologies Laboratories as the prime contractor because of STL's prior attention to the requirements of lunar orbiter systems and the two's prior contractual relationship. As has been suggested previously in this chapter, Langley's engineers had sound technical reasons to question the correctness of STL's spin- stabilized spacecraft and wanted to hear and evaluate other concepts.³⁶

In mid-August 1963, with these problems worked out with Headquarters, Langley finalized the Request for Proposals and associated Statement of Work and delivered both to Captain Scherer for presentation to Ed Cortright and his deputy Oran Nicks. The documents stated explicitly that the main mission of Lunar Orbiter was "the acquisition of photographic data of high and medium resolution for selection of suitable Apollo and Surveyor landing sites." The RFP set out detailed criteria for such things as identifying "cones" (that is, planar features at right angles to a flat surface), "slopes" (that is, circular areas inclined with respect to the plane perpendicular to local gravity), and other subtle aspects of the lunar surface. Getting information about the size and shape of the moon and about the lunar gravitational field was deemed as less important. By not giving any detailed description of this secondary objective, the RFP made it absolutely clear that "under no circumstances" could anything "be allowed to dilute the major photo-reconnaissance mission."³⁷ What was driving Lunar Orbiter was the urgency of the national commitment to a manned lunar-landing mission. About that, there was to be no confusion.

On August 30, Bob Seamans signed the Project Approval Document and approved the release of the RFP to potential bidders. The Lunar Orbiter project was now officially under way. The critical next step was the selection of a prime contractor, a process very new to Langley engineers accustomed to doing almost everything themselves "in-house."

The Source Evaluation Board

Cliff Nelson's LOPO moved quickly in September 1963 to create a Source Evaluation Board that would possess the technical expertise and good judgment to help NASA choose wisely between the industrial firms bidding for Lunar Orbiter. Different groups of a rather large board of reviewers (involving over 80 evaluators and consultants from different NASA centers and other aerospace organizations) evaluated the technical feasibility, cost, contract management concepts, business operations, and other critical aspects of the proposals. One group, the so-called "Scientists' Panel," judged the suitability of the proposed spacecraft for providing information of value to the scientific community after the photographic mission had been completed. Langley's two representatives on the Scientists' Panel were Clint Brown and Dr. Samuel Katzoff, an extremely insightful engineering analyst, 27-year Langley veteran, and assistant chief of the Applied Materials and Physics Division. Serving along with them were Jack Lorell from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Dr. Bruce Murray from the California Institute of Technology, Norman Ness from Goddard, and Robert P. Bryson from NASA headquarters. Although the opinions of all the knowledgeable "outsiders" were taken very seriously, Langley intended to make the decision.³⁸ Chairing the Source Evaluation Board was Eugene Draley, who like Clint Brown was one of Floyd Thompson's assistant directors. When the board finished interviewing all the bidders, hearing their oral presentations, and tallying the results of its scoring of the proposals (a possible 70 points for technical merit and 30 points for business management), it was to present a formal recommendation to Thompson. He in turn would pass on the findings with comments to Homer Newell's office in Washington.

Five major aerospace firms replied to Langley's RFP and submitted proposals for the Lunar Orbiter contract. There were three from California firms, from TRW's Space Technologies Laboratories in Redondo Beach; Lockheed Missiles and Space Company of Sunnyvale; and Hughes Aircraft Company of Los Angeles. The other two bids came from The Martin Company of Baltimore and The Boeing Company of Seattle.³⁹

Three of the five proposals were excellent. Hughes, which had been developing an ingenious spin-stabilization system for geosynchronous communication satellites, submitted an impressive proposal for a rotator-type vehicle. With Hughes's record in spacecraft design and fabrication, the Source Evaluation Board took its proposal very seriously. Another good proposal for a spin-stabilized rotator came from Space Technologies Laboratories. This came as no surprise, of course, given STL's prior work for Surveyor as well as its prior contractor studies on lunar orbiter systems for NASA headquarters.

The third outstanding proposal--entitled "ACLOPS" for "Agena-Class Lunar Orbiter Project"--came from Boeing. This was a very interesting development, because the well-known airplane manufacturer had not been among the companies originally invited to bid on Lunar Orbiter and was not recognized as the most logical of contenders. However, Boeing had just come out of a solid performance in the Bomarc missile program and was looking anxiously to get into the civilian space program. That was especially so now that the Department of Defense was cancelling Dyna-Soar, an Air Force project for the development of an experimental X-20 aerospace plane. This cancellation released a number of highly qualified U.S. Air Force personnel, who were residing at Boeing, to support a new Boeing undertaking in space. Company representatives had visited Langley to discuss Lunar Orbiter, and Langley engineers had been so excited by what they had heard that they had provoked center director Thompson to persuade Associate Administrator Seamans to extend an invitation to Boeing to join the bidding. The other two proposals--from Martin, a newcomer in the business of automated space probes, and Lockheed which, on the other hand, had years of experience handling the Agena space vehicle for the Air Force--were also quite satisfactory. In the opinion of the Source Evaluation, however, these final two proposals were definitely lacking in comparison especially with the proposals from Boeing and Hughes.

LOPO and its Langley representatives decided very early on in the evaluation that they wanted Boeing badly; on behalf of the technical review team, Israel Taback had made that desire clear both privately and in his formal presentations to the Source Evaluation Board. The basic reason for the strong preference was, as should be expected, that Boeing proposed to build a three axis-stabilized spacecraft rather than a spinner. For attitude reference in orbit, the spacecraft would use an optical sensor similar to the one that was being planned for use on the Mariner C spacecraft which fixed on the star Canopus.

Having an attitude-stabilized orbiter meant, first and foremost, that there would not be the need for extensive development of a focal-length spin-type camera. This type of photographic system, first developed by Merton E. Davies of the RAND Corporation in 1958, could take care of the distortions in pictures when taken from a rotating spacecraft. Instead, Lunar Orbiter could use a photo subsystem designed by Eastman Kodak and already flying and working quite well on Department of Defense spy satellites.⁴⁰ This subsystem worked automatically and with the precision of a Swiss watch. It employed two lenses that took pictures simultaneously on a roll of 70-millimeter-wide aerial film. If one of the lenses failed, the other still worked. One lens had a focal length of 610 millimeters (24 inches) and could take pictures from an altitude of 46 kilometers with a high resolution for limited-area coverage of approximately one meter. The other, which had a focal length of about 80 millimeters (three inches), could take pictures with a medium resolution of approximately eight meters for wide coverage of the lunar surface. The film would be developed on board the spacecraft using the proven Eastman Kodak "Bimat" method. The film would be in contact with a web containing a single-solution dry processing chemical which eliminated the need to use "wet" chemicals. Developed automatically and wound onto a storage spool, the processed film could then be "read out" and transmitted by the spacecraft's communications subsystem to receiving stations of the worldwide Deep Space Network here on earth.⁴¹

How Boeing had the good sense to propose an attitude-stabilized platform based on the Eastman Kodak camera, rather than to propose a rotator with a yet-to-be developed camera which accommodated for the spinning, as the other four bidders did, is not totally clear. Langley engineers had conversed with representatives of all the interested bidders, so it is possible that Boeing's people picked up on Langley's concerns about the quality of photographs from spinners. The other bidders, especially STL and Hughes, with their expertise in spin-stabilized spacecraft, might have picked up on those vibrations, but were too confident in the type of rotationally-stabilized system they had been working on so diligently to change course in mid-stream.

Furthermore, Boeing had been working closely with the Radio Corporation of America (RCA), which for a time was also thinking about submitting a proposal for Lunar Orbiter. RCA's idea was for a very lightweight (200-kilogram) three-axis, attitude-stabilized and camera-bearing payload that could be injected into lunar orbit as part of a Ranger-type probe. A lunar orbiter study group chaired by Lee Scherer at NASA Headquarters, had evaluated the RCA approach in October 1962, however, and found it lacking. First, it was too expensive ($20.4 million for flying only three spacecraft); and, second, its proposed vidicon television unit could not cover the lunar surface either in the detail or the wider panoramas NASA wanted.⁴²

Boeing knew all about this rejected RCA approach. After talking to Langley's engineers, the company shrewdly decided to stay with an attitude-stabilized orbiter but to dump the use of the inadequate vidicon television. In its place, it would put something that derived from an instrument with a proven track record in planetary reconnaissance photography: the Eastman Kodak spy camera.⁴³

On December 20, 1963, two weeks after the Source Evaluation Board made its formal recommendation to Administrator James Webb in Washington, NASA announced that it would be negotiating with Boeing as prime contractor for the Lunar Orbiter project. Along with the excellence of its proposed spacecraft design and Kodak camera, NASA singled out the strength of Boeing's commitment to the project and its corporate capabilities to carry it out on schedule without relying on too many subcontractors. Still, the choice was a bit ironic. Only fourteen months earlier, the Scherer study group had rejected RCA's approach in favor of a study of a spin-stabilized spacecraft proposed by Space Technologies Laboratories. Now Boeing had outmaneuvered its competition by proposing a spacecraft that incorporated essential features of the defeated RCA concept and almost none from the STL's previously victorious one.

Boeing won the contract even though it asked for considerably more money than did any of the other bidders. The lowest bid, from Hughes, was $41,495,339, or less than half of Boeing's $83,562,199, and that last figure would quickly go up when the work started. Not surprisingly, NASA faced some congressional criticism and had to defend its choice. In large part, the agency justified its selection by referring confidently to what Boeing alone proposed to do to ensure protection of the Lunar Orbiter's photographic film from the hazards of solar radiation.⁴⁴

This was a technical detail that deeply concerned Langley's Lunar Orbiter Project Office. Experiments conducted by Boeing and by Dr. Trutz Foelsche, a Langley scientist in the Space Mechanics (formerly Theoretical Mechanics) Division who specialized in the study of space radiation effects, suggested that even small doses of radiation from solar flares could fog up ordinary high-speed photographic film. This would be true especially in the case of an instrumented probe like Lunar Orbiter whose exterior vehicular shielding would be very thin. Even if the thickness of the shielding right around the film was increased tenfold (from 1g/cm² to 10g/cm²), Foelsche judged that high-speed film would not make it through a significant solar-particle event without serious damage.⁴⁵ Thus, something extraordinary had to be done to protect the high-speed film. Better yet, a way had to be found not to use that sort of film at all.

As NASA explained successfully to its critics, all four of the other bidders for the Lunar Orbiter contract relied on high-speed film and fast shutter speeds for their on-board photographic subsystems. Only the Boeing-Kodak camera did not. When delegates from STL, Hughes, Martin, and Lockheed were asked at a bidders' briefing in November 1963 about what would happen to their photography if a solar event occurred during an orbiter mission, they all had to admit that the film would be damaged seriously. Only Boeing could claim otherwise. Even with minimal shielding, the more insensitive, low-speed film used by the Kodak camera would not fog up from high-energy radiation, not even if the spacecraft moved through the Van Allen belts.⁴⁶ Such in fact proved to be the case. During the third mission of Lunar Orbiter in February 1967 a solar flare with a high amount of optical activity did occur. But the film came through it unspoiled.⁴⁷ Negotiations with Boeing, because they were so intense, did not take very long. Formal negotiations began on March 17, 1964, and ended just four days later. On May 7, Administrator Webb signed the document that made Lunar Orbiter an official NASA commitment. Hopes were high. But in the cynical months of 1964, with Ranger's setbacks still grabbing headlines and critics yet faulting NASA for failing to match Soviet achievements in space, it was still very hard for people to believe that the proposed date of Lunar Orbiter's first flight to the moon was just a little over two years away.

Nelson's Team

In any big project, most things are run by only a handful of people. This usually amounts to no more than four or five key individuals, who then delegate jobs and responsibilities to others. This was certainly true for Lunar Orbiter. From start to finish, Langley's Lunar Orbiter Project Office remained a very lean organization, with the original nucleus of nine staff members never growing any larger than some 50 professionals. As Langley management understood, this meant that when the project ended and LOPO closed its doors, there would be a minimum number of employees for whom positions would have to be found back in the functional divisions. Rather than building all the competencies into a large project office, and thereby sticking several careers out on an organizational limb, it was far better for a small project office to be able to pull in people and assistance as needed from a matrix of research and technical divisions long accustomed to helping out on an as-needed basis.⁴⁸

In the case of Lunar Orbiter, the four men who ran the project were Cliff Nelson, the project manager; Israel Taback, who was in charge of all activities leading to the production and testing of the spacecraft; Bill Boyer, who was responsible for planning and integrating launch and flight operations; and James V. Martin, the assistant project manager. Nelson had accepted the assignment with Thompson's assurance that he would be given a lot of latitude in choosing the men and women he wanted to work with him in the project office. As a result, virtually all of his top people were handpicked.

The one significant exception was his chief assistant, Jim Martin. In September 1964, the Langley assistant director responsible for the project office, Gene Draley, brought in Martin, a senior manager at Republic Aviation, to help Nelson cope with some of the stickler details of Lunar Orbiter's management. A senior engineer in charge of Republic's space systems requirements, Martin had a tremendous ability to anticipate and see business management problems, plus plenty of experience in taking care of them. Furthermore, he was a very well-organized and skillful executive when it came to planning, putting together schedules and due dates, and other such things that had to be put down and followed through on paper. It was this troublesome area of management of a major project in which Cliff Nelson, a quiet people-oriented person, was proving to be a little weak. Draley knew about the fire-breathing Martin from Republic's involvement in Project Fire, another project Langley managed, and was hopeful that Martin's acerbity and business- mindedness would complement Nelson's good-heartedness and greater technical depth, especially in dealings with contractors.

The personalities of Cliff Nelson and Jim Martin were so entirely different, almost like black and white, that there were a few internal problems in LOPO. But on the whole the alliance worked quite well, forced though it was by Langley management. Martin proved enormously helpful with respect to the many subsystem items coming due from Boeing and its subcontractors, while Nelson generally oversaw the whole endeavor and made sure that everybody worked together as a team. For the monitoring of the day-to-day progress of the project's different operations, Nelson relied on the dynamic Martin. For example, when there turned out to be some problems with the motion-compensation apparatus for the Kodak camera that were not obvious at the beginning of the program (see later in this chapter), Martin went to the contractor's plant and saw that the people were not making progress because, in Martin's view, their management was not placing a great enough emphasis on the meeting of schedules. It was his manner of contribution, not Nelson's, to act tough, pound on the table, and make the contractor put workable schedules together--and to do it quickly. For the gentler persuasion and subtler interpersonal relationships, as well as for the deeper engineering analyses, Martin, who was technically competent but not as talented as Nelson, generally deferred to the project manager. Thus the two men, absolute opposites, worked together for the overall betterment of Lunar Orbiter.⁴⁹

Getting an excellent person with just the right specialization into just the right job was one of the most important elements behind the success of Lunar Orbiter, and for this eminently sensible approach to project management, Cliff Nelson and director Floyd Thompson deserve the lion's share of credit. Both men cultivated a management style that emphasized direct dealings with people and often ignored formal organizational channels. Both emphasized teamwork and would not tolerate any individual, however talented, willfully undermining the "esprit de corps." Before filling any individual slot in the project office, Nelson specifically gave the selection a lot of his own time and thought. He questioned whether the person being considered was compatible with the others already in his project organization. He wanted to know whether the candidate, based on his past record, was goal-oriented and if he was ready to commit himself totally to do whatever it took in terms of overtime, travel, and being away from one's family to meet the goal.⁵⁰ Because Langley possessed so many employees that had been working at the lab for so many years, the track record on most people was quite well known or easy to ascertain. Clearly, given what would be the outstanding performance of Lunar Orbiter and what everyone involved claims to have been an exceptionally healthy environment for good work in the project office, Nelson did an excellent job of predicting who would make a good member of the project team and who would not.⁵¹

Considering Langley's historic emphasis on fundamental applied aeronautical research, one might imagine that its scientists and engineers would have tried to hide themselves inside the dark return passage of a wind tunnel rather than get diverted into a spaceflight project like Lunar Orbiter. Something quite like that had happened at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory when NASA gave it the responsibility for the Surveyor project. In Pasadena, a great number of the best research professionals were skeptical that any such tour of duty outside the general research programs could help their careers. They feared that separation from their technical specialties entailed not only additional hours of work but also a serious risk to a rapid pace of advance up the career ladder to higher salaries and enhanced prestige.⁵¹

This preference for general research investigations over project work also existed at Langley; in some of the divisions, the feelings for it were in fact quite strong. But it did not dominate in this instance. Unlike a number of people who came grudgingly to work for Surveyor at JPL, all of the individuals who joined the Lunar Orbiter Project Office came enthusiastically. Otherwise Cliff Nelson would not have had them. LOPO's spacecraft manager, Israel Taback, who had been running the Communications and Control Branch of the lab's Instrument Research Division, remembers having become distressed with the thickening of what he calls "the paper forest": the preparation of five-year plans, ten-year plans, and other lengthy documents needed, among other things, to justify NASA's budget requests. The work he had been doing with airplanes and aerospace vehicles was interesting (he had just finished providing much of the flight instrumentation for the X-15 program), but not so interesting that he wanted to turn down Cliff Nelson's offer when he came to get him for Lunar Orbiter. "The project was brand new and sounded much more exciting than what I had been doing," Taback remembers. It appealed to him also because of its high visibility both inside and outside the laboratory. Everyone had to recognize the importance of a project directly related to the national goal of landing a man on the moon.⁵²

Norman L. Crabill, the head of LOPO's mission design team, also made a conscious decision to join the project. On a Friday afternoon, he had received the word that one man from his branch of the Applied Materials and Physics Division would have to be named by the following Monday as a transfer to LOPO; as branch head, Crabill himself would have to make the call. That weekend he thought about it. He asked, "what's your own future, Crabill? This is space. If you don't step up to this, what's your next chance. You've already decided not go with the guys to Houston." He immediately knew the answer, "It was me." That was how he "got into the space business." And in his opinion, it was "the best thing" that he ever did.⁵³

Dealings with the Contractor

In watching over the progress of the prime contractor's work on Lunar Orbiter, Cliff Nelson's team had the good sense to realize that it was not supposed to do Boeing's own work for Boeing. A much more sensible approach to the management of a contractor's activities rested in a philosophy of shared responsibility and mutual respect which held that "once a contractor had been selected, it was his job to perform the work at hand while the field center retained responsibility for overseeing his progress and assuring that the job was done according to the terms of the contract." For Lunar Orbiter, this philosophy meant specifically that the project office would have to keep "a continuing watch on the progress of the various components, subsystems, and the whole spacecraft system during the different phases of designing, fabricating and testing them."⁵⁴ It meant also that frequent meetings would take place between Nelson and his lieutenants and their counterparts at Boeing to discuss all the critical items. What it did not mean was that Langley was supposed to assign all the jobs, solve all the problems, and micro-manage every detail of the contractor's work. It also did not mean that Langley had to have a massive force of supervisory personnel on site at Boeing and at the plants of Boeing's subcontractors to look over their shoulders on a daily basis and make sure that everything got done right.

As has been suggested by a 1972 study done by the National Academy of Public Administration, the Lunar Orbiter project can serve as a model for how relations between a prime contractor, a project office, a field center, a program office, and headquarters can be handled successfully. From start to finish nearly everything important about those relations worked out superbly well in Lunar Orbiter. "People kind of threw their badges away," says LOPO's Israel Taback. "Everyone worked together harmoniously as a team whether they were government, from headquarters or from Langley, or from Boeing." No one tried to take any advantage from prerogative of rank or to exert any undue authority because of an official title or organizational affiliation.⁵⁵

The Langley-NASA Headquarters relationship was much more harmonious and effective than had been the case between JPL and headquarters in the Surveyor project. During Surveyor, Ed Cortright eventually saw the need to intervene actively because of serious problems in JPL's management of its contract with Hughes. Initially, JPL had tried to monitor the contract with only a small staff that provided little on-site technical direction. However, due to unclear objectives, a growing number of uncertainties in the open-ended project (involving such basic things as what experiment packages would be included on the Surveyor spacecraft), and a too highly diffused project organization within Hughes, this manner of "laisser-faire" project management did not work. As the problems snowballed, Cortright found it necessary to shake things up and compel JPL to assign a regiment of on-site supervisors to watch over every detail of the work being done by Hughes. Thus, as one analyst of Surveyor's management has observed, "the responsibility for overall spacecraft development was gradually retrieved from Hughes by JPL thereby altering significantly the respective roles of the field center and the spacecraft systems contractors."⁵⁶

Nothing so unfortunate happened in Lunar Orbiter, partly because NASA had learned by the false steps and outright mistakes, its own and those by others, in Surveyor. The first lesson was that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory was much too busy with Surveyor and Ranger to take on another big project; that was why Cortright and Nicks had decided to offer Lunar Orbiter to Langley. A second lesson was that there needed to be, before implementing a project, an extensive preliminary dialogue between everyone involved. Everyone had to be certain about the project's goals, absolutely clear about their individual and shared responsibilities, and absolutely confident of maximum cooperation and minimal unnecessary interference from others. Before Lunar Orbiter got under way, all that happened.

Consequently, the Boeing-Langley relationship worked out beautifully for both sides. Both organizations clearly understood the objectives of the project. Both welcomed the assignment and were highly motivated to do everything necessary to complete it successfully. Both formed excellent technical and administrative project staffs and were able to find exceptionally skillful individuals to lead them. The man in charge for Boeing, Swedish-born engineer Robert J. Helberg, was a very hard worker who had just finished directing the company's work on the Bomarc missile. Helberg was absolutely straight as a die, and all his people respected him immensely--as would everyone in the Lunar Orbiter Project Office at Langley. Fellow Swede Cliff Nelson, LOPO's manager, got along with Helberg, on very friendly and helpful terms, so from top to bottom there were no major obstacles stopping ideas or concerns from passing back and forth freely. Nelson and his people "never had to fear the contractor was just telling you a lie to make money," and Helberg and his tightly knit, 220-member Lunar Orbiter team never had to complain about uncaring, paper-shuffling bureaucrats who were mainly interested in dotting all the i's and crossing all the t's and making sure only that nothing illegal was done that could bother government auditors and put their necks in a wringer.⁵⁷

That is not to say that there were no problems in the contract management. In any large and complex technological project involving several parties, some problems are bound to happen. The world just does not work in any other way. The important thing is how they are resolved.

At the start of Lunar Orbiter, there were some serious concerns about the work to be done by Boeing's two major subcontractors: Eastman Kodak, which (for $22.4 million) was providing the photographic subsystem, and RCA, which (for $22.6 million) was responsible for the communications subsystem. Boeing had to negotiate out of some difficulties because neither company wanted to agree to the cost-plus-incentive contract which Boeing had accepted from NASA. Fearing what they considered to be "a risky and untested method of contracting," Kodak and RCA held out for traditional cost-plus-fixed fee (CPFF) contracts, and they got them. Both Boeing and NASA were disappointed and feared that the absence of incentives on the two major subcontracts might "undercut the impact of the incentives in the overall spacecraft system development."⁵⁸ Fortunately, that absence really did not hurt that much. It certainly did not hurt Boeing's effort, which was the key, and Kodak worked as hard as it could on its camera without incentives. If there was any weakness, it was slight and came in RCA's performance. Everyone was so "incentivized" simply by the exciting objectives of Lunar Orbiter and its place in the bigger Apollo program that formal incentives were helpful but not absolutely necessary.

The single biggest headache for Langley in the first months of the contract was Boeing's inflated rate of expenditure. When the actual costs of the project were compared to the estimated costs for the first time in August 1964, the Lunar Orbiter Project Office learned that Boeing was spending money at a rate 45 per cent higher than the company had estimated. More than a million dollars over the estimate had been spent in only the first three months of the project, in large part because Boeing had not yet been able to sign Eastman Kodak and RCA to definitive contracts, and because the development of the Kodak camera was proving to be much more expensive than stated in the Boeing proposal.⁵⁹ Over this critical financial matter, Langley needed help and understanding from NASA headquarters. The budget for Lunar Orbiter was becoming very tight just at this time and something needed to be done quickly to help Cliff Nelson's project office gauge the flow of expenditures much better. At the same time, Langley wanted Boeing to get all the money it needed to do the job. In that feeling the Lunar Orbiter Project Office had the support of center director Thompson. When he heard that the necessary funds for Lunar Orbiter might be lacking, Thompson wrote a memorandum to OSSA's Oran Nicks in which he remarked, "if we aren't prepared to play table stakes, we shouldn't be in the incentive poker game."⁶⁰ In other words, "when the government asks a contractor to assume the risk of an incentive contract, it must assume itself the responsibility for funding the contractor as he needs it."⁶¹

Before long, NASA did raise the ceiling on spending for Lunar Orbiter from an original $94.6 million for FY 1965-1966 to $105 million. This gave Langley the flexibility to adapt to the contractor's higher-than-estimated costs. It could then reassure Boeing that its acceptance of an incentives-type contract had not been a mistake. At the same time, however, Langley and NASA Headquarters agreed to follow a policy of holding frequent meetings to discuss funding problems and, even more importantly, find ways to keep contract changes, and thus the growing costs, to an absolute minimum.⁶²

Another early concern at Langley was that Boeing did not have a solid enough understanding of the requirements of the non-photographic experiments that NASA planned to have on board the spacecraft. In sum, there were going to be three of these experiments on Lunar Orbiter. The first, designed by a group of Langley researchers led by William H. Michael of "parking orbit" fame, aimed at getting information about the moon's gravitational field. It planned to do this by incorporating a range-rate transponder and associated instrumentation that could deliver precise information about the trajectories actually followed by the spacecraft during its orbits over a sixty-day period, thirty days of which would come after the end of the photographic mission. The planetology advisers to the Office of Space Sciences and Applications, as well as LOPO members themselves, viewed the selenodetic objective of this experiment as potentially vital to the Apollo program. They feared that gravitational anomalies due to large mass concentrations what came to be known as "mascons") could distort a spacecraft's orbital trajectory in some significant ways, especially during low elliptical orbits, and thereby pose serious dangers to missions, including future Lunar Orbiter as well as Apollo flights, that would be going as low 32 kilometers above the moon.⁶³

About the selenodetic experiment and the special instruments it required, Boeing demonstrated a good initial understanding and had no trouble with the procurement. It was about the other two non-photographic experiments, both of which were designed to evaluate potential hazards in the lunar environment, that the prime contractor ran into a little trouble. LOPO had not made it plain enough to Boeing's people what they wanted the experiments to do.

NASA designed the first of the two experiments to measure solar radiation near the moon. The inspiration for this experiment came from Dr. Trutz Foelsche, the same Langley scientist who had been warning about the damage that flares could do to high-speed camera film. Foelsche's idea was to build a very lightweight sensoring system into the Lunar Orbiter that could "acquire a maximum amount of information on radiation on the way to the moon and near the moon, insofar as this could be achieved [by sensoring equipment] within the weight limitation of two pounds." By monitoring in real time any high radiation doses that would accumulate on the unprocessed film, this sensor would make it possible for Lunar Orbiter's mission controllers to protect the photography by executing certain operational msnuevers, such as reorienting the spacecraft so that the structure of the spacecraft would shield the film cassette from a solar flare.⁶⁴

The second experiment about which there was some confusion called for the detection of micrometeoroids in the near-lunar environment. A number of NASA's planetary scientists and lunar specialists were worried especially that numerous small or "secondary" micrometeoroids created by the impact of "primary" meteoroids into the moon could pose a serious danger to an approaching spacecraft. To measure the intensity of this "meteoroid flux," Langley researchers Charles A. Gurtler and William H. Kinnard came up with the idea of equipping a Lunar Orbiter with twenty very thin (0.0225 millimeter) beryllium copper detectors; these small pressure cells were to be mounted all around the middle of the spacecraft. The detectors, which held sensitive microswitches inside them, could measure the rate at which small objects hit and punctured their surface and could then telemeter this valuable information back to earth.⁶⁵

It took some time before Boeing fully understood what LOPO needed for these experiments. After the preliminary design review was held at Boeing in late October 1964, Israel Taback, LOPO's spacecraft manager, and Martin J. Swetnick, a scientist with the Lunar Orbiter office at NASA Headquarters, expressed alarm that Boeing's proposal to subcontract for the two experiments did not come close to meeting Langley's specifications. Boeing's specifications document did not even "demonstrate an understanding of the experiments which the Lunar Orbiter Project Office desired to have on board the spacecraft."⁶⁶ In particular, the NASA representatives were bothered by the confusion they saw about the radiation experiment. In Swetnick's words, Boeing's proposal "did not in any way provide the bidders [Space Technologies Laboratories and Texas Instruments, Inc.] with a description of the requirements for the radiation data." Neither did it present a clear statement of the experiments' objectives nor give a very complete description of what should be done. All of this surprised Swetnick and Taback, as they had not foreseen any such lack of understanding.

In the second case, that of the micrometeoroid experiment, what upset Langley was not so much that Boeing did not understand it but that Boeing had changed it without consulting with NASA's interested parties--notably the experiment's principal investigator at Langley, Charles Gurtler. Instead of locating the pressure cells all around the middle deck of the spacecraft, Boeing proposed to locate them only on its periphery. This meant that instead of twenty micrometeoroid detectors, Lunar Orbiter could have only fifteen and that the leads from these fifteen to the respective electronics would now have to pass through instead of around the spacecraft's thermal blanket. When Gurtler heard about this change, he was not happy. In his opinion, the experiment could not provide important omnidirectional data on micrometeoroid strikes unless it had no fewer than twenty detectors. Taback passed along the message to Boeing that "Langley would have to examine this alteration very carefully before making a decision on the experiment's final design."⁶⁸ In the end, Boeing made the adjustments and procured the experiment in line with Langley's thinking.

The problems in all of these affairs amounted to little more than a failure to communicate. When both sides realized that was the case, most of the difficulties between them were relatively easy to resolve simply by strengthening the ties and improving the dialogue between Boeing's project staff in Seattle and Langley's project staff in Hampton. The fact that the two groups up to this stage in the procurement had not been talking to one another quite as much as they should have been is not that surprising given the continental distance that separated them. But the important thing was that both really wanted to bridge the distance that separated them. In the end both the contractor, Boeing, and the customer, technically the U.S. Government, eventually came to have the greatest respect for each other's points-of-view and respective abilities.

The 'Concentrated' versus the 'Distributed Mission'

The most fundamental issue in the pre-mission planning for Lunar Orbiter involved how the moon would be photographed. Would the photography be "concentrated" on a pre-determined single target or it would it be "distributed" over several selected targets across the moon's surface? On the answer to this basic question--over which Boeing and Langley also had to work out a serious difference of opinion--hinged the successful integration of the entire mission plan for Lunar Orbiter.

For Lunar Orbiter, as with any other spaceflight program, mission planning involved the working out of a complicated sequence of first-order events. When should the spacecraft be launched? When does the launch window open, and close? On what trajectory should the spacecraft arrive in lunar orbit? How long will it take the spacecraft to get to the moon? How and when should orbital "injection" take place? How and when should the spacecraft get to its target(s) and at what altitude above the lunar surface should it take the pictures? When is the best time, photometrically, to get to the target(s)? In other words, where does the spacecraft need to be, and at what time, in order to take advantage of the optimum position for taking pictures of the moon's surface relative to the position of the sun? Answering those questions also meant that NASA's mission planners had to define the lunar orbits, determine how accurately those orbits could be navigated, and know what the fuel requirements would be (which went back, again, to the launch and arrival times). The complete mission profile had to be ready many months before launch. And before all the critical details of the profile could be made ready, there had to be a final determination of the targeted areas on the lunar surface and a decision on how many of them were to be photographed during the flight of a single orbiter.⁶⁹

Originally NASA's plan was to do the concentrated mission. The Lunar Orbiter would go up and target a single site of very limited dimensions. The country's leading astrogeologists would help in the site selection by identifying the smoothest and most attractive possibilities for a manned lunar landing. With the help of the U.S. Geological Survey, which from the best available telescopic observations had been drawing huge and very detailed maps of the lunar surface, NASA would then zero in on one of these sites as the prime target for each of the five Lunar Orbiter missions. The spacecraft would travel into orbit, get low over the target at the "perilune" or low point in the orbit of about 50 kilometers, start taking pictures, do successive orbits that were very close together longitudinally, and resume the picture taking every time the spacecraft passed over the site. The high-resolution lens would take a one-meter resolution picture of a small area four-by-sixteen kilometers in size, while at exactly the same time the medium-resolution lens would be taking an eight-meter resolution picture of a wider area that was 32-by-37 kilometers. The lenses together would capture a rapid series of simultaneous pictures taken at such a rapid interval that the high-resolution pictures would just barely overlap. For the wide-angle pictures, there would be a conveniently wide overlap. This manner of photography would go on for about a day; all of the camera exposures would take place in 24-hours time, minimizing the threat to the film from a solar flare. All of the roughly 200 photographic frames would be devoted to the one location. The result would be one contiguous area shot in adjacent, overlapping strips. By putting them together, NASA could take a look at a central one-meter-resolution area that was surrounded by a broader 8-meter resolution area--in other words, at one big and immensely rich stereoscopic picture of a choice spot on the lunar surface. NASA would learn an awfully lot about that one ideal-looking landing place, and the Apollo program would be well served.⁷⁰

The plan sounded fine to everyone----at least in the beginning. Langley's Request for Proposals had specified the concentrated mission and Boeing had submitted its winning proposal based on its development. Moreover, intensive, short-term photography like that called for in a concentrated mission was exactly what Eastman Kodak's high-resolution camera system had been designed to do. It was a derivative of a spy satellite photo system created specifically for earth reconnaissance missions specified by the Department of Defense. In the top-secret DoD system the camera with the film inside apparently would reenter the atmosphere inside a heat-shielded package which parachuted down and was hooked and physically retrieved in midair, if all went as planned, by a specially-equipped Air Force C-119 cargo airplane. It was obviously a very unsatisfactory system, but in the days before advanced electronic systems, which would prove to be far superior, it was the best high-resolution satellite reconnaissance system that modern technology could provide. Very few NASA people were ever privy to many of the details about how the "black box" actually worked, because they did not have "the need to know." However, they figured that it had been designed, as one LOPO engineer has described in much oversimplified layman's terms, "so when a commander said, 'we've got the target,' bop, take your snapshots, zap, zap, zap, get it down from orbit, retrieve it and bring it home, rush it off to Kodak, and get your pictures."⁷¹

But, as LOPO's mission planners gave more thought to what it was they really wanted their Lunar Orbiter spacecraft to be able to do, a major flaw in the concentrated-mission approach revealed itself. Norman Crabill, Langley's head of mission integration for Lunar Orbiter, remembers when he first began to wonder, "what happens if only one of these missions is going to work," as the probability suggested. "This was in the era of Ranger failures and Surveyor slippage. When you shoot something, you had only a twenty per cent probability that it was going to work. It was that bad." On that premise, NASA planned to fly five Lunar Orbiters, hoping that it would get one to do what it was supposed to do. "Suppose we go up there and shoot all we had on one site and it turns out to be no good? "Crabill and others began to fret. What if that site was not as smooth as it appeared in the U.S. Geological Survey maps or there turned out to be some gravitational anomaly or orbital perturbation that made that particular area of the moon unsafe for a lunar landing? And what if that Lunar Orbiter turned out to be the only one to work? What then? The program ends in serious failure.⁷²

Over the course of several weeks in late 1964, the Lunar Orbiter Project Office at Langley grew ever more convinced that it should not be putting all the eggs in one basket. The concentrated approach called for in the legal documents with Boeing was still one type of mission that LOPO might want to do, but it was no longer the mission that LOPO most wanted to do. "We developed the philosophy that we really didn't want to do the concentrated mission; what we really wanted to do was what we called the 'distributed mission,' recalls Crabill. The advantage of the distributed mission was that it would enable NASA to get a good look at a number of choice targets in the Apollo zone of interest, and get that good look with only one spacecraft.

In early 1965 Norm Crabill and Tom Young of the LOPO mission integration team, traveled out to the office of the Geological Survey in Flagstaff, Arizona. There the Langley engineers consulted with U.S. government astrogeologists John F. McCauley, Lawrence Rowan, and Harold Masursky. Jack McCauley was Flagstaff's top man at the time, but he assigned Larry Rowan, "a young and upcoming guy, very reasonable and very knowledgeable," the job of bringing the Flagstaff branch of "lunar smarts" to the Lunar Orbiter site selection problem. "We sat down with Rowan at a table with these big lunar charts," and Rowan politely reminded the Langley duo that "the dark areas on the moon were the smoothest." Rowan then identified the very smoothest-looking dark places all the way across the face of the moon.⁷³

There were about ten really good targets. Crabill and Young laid on orbital calculations and began to salivate. It took them only a few moments to realize that what they really wanted to do was the distributed mission. Rowan and his colleagues in Flagstaff also got very excited about the prospects. This was undoubtedly the way to catch as many landing sites as possible. The entire Apollo zone of interest was plus-or-minus 45 degrees longitude and plus-or-minus five degrees latitude, along the equatorial region of the facing or near side of the moon. Within that zone, the area which could be photographed via a concentrated mission was very small. How much better it would be if a single Lunar Orbiter could photograph at least ten sites of that size all within that region. Then, if the data showed that the astrogeologists back on earth had not been so smart in their predictions of the very best landing site, NASA would have excellent photographic coverage of nine other prime candidates. In sum, the distributed mode would give NASA the flexibility to ensure that Lunar Orbiter would provide the landing site information needed by Apollo even if only a solitary Lunar Orbiter mission proved successful.

But there was one big fly in the ointment: Eastman Kodak's photo system was not designed for the distributed mission. It was designed for the concentrated mission in which all the photography would involve just one site and be loaded, shot, and developed in 24-hours time. Now there were to be ten sites, meaning that the shooting of pictures had to be broken up into different orbital phases. It would take at least two weeks to proceed from east to west across the entire face of the moon doing a distributed mission. The film system would have to sustain operations over a much longer period of time than for which it was designed. If it had to sustain operations for more than a day or two, the Bimat film would stick together. The exposed parts of it would dry out. The film would get stuck in the loops. The photographic mission would be completely ruined.

When Boeing first heard that NASA had changed its mind and now wanted to do the distributed mission, Helberg and his men stopped short, like a horse coming to a hurdle it had not been trained to jump over. According to LOPO's Norman Crabill, Boeing's representatives said, "Look, we understand you want to do this. But, wait. The system was designed, tested, used, and proven in the concentrated mission mode. You can't change it now because it wasn't designed to have the Bimat film in contact for long periods of time. In two weeks' time, some of the Bimat is just going to go, pfft! It's just going to fail!" In short, Boeing's people answered, "No, we're not going to do that. We're going to do the concentrated mission. Give us the lunar coordinates for the site you want targeted." The LOPO engineers shot back, "No, you don't understand. This is the government talking." Unabashed, Boeing retaliated, "No, it is you who do not understand. We've got a contract, and the contract says we only have to do the concentrated mission."⁷⁴

It was not that Boeing did not understand the good sense of the distributed mission. But as the prime contractor, the company faced a classic technological dilemma. The customer, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, wanted to use the system in a way it was not designed--and which could very possibly cause a disastrous failure. Boeing had no recourse but to advise the customer that what it wanted to do did not make good engineering sense.

The Langley engineers wanted to know from Boeing just how bad they thought the problem was and whether it could be fixed. They suggested that Boeing get some quantitative data and that the company would just have to do some tests and find out the limits of the film system. "We don't know for sure," the Boeing men countered, and "we don't have the time to find out." Anyway, "that's not in the contract." The legal documents called specifically for the capability to do the concentrated mission. If NASA now wanted to slip in the requirements for developing another very different type of mission, then a new contract would have to be negotiated.

This manner of unsettling conversation was taking place into the early months of 1965--and it was just a little more than a year before first launch.

Before the Lunar Orbiter Project Office at Langley could hope to persuade Boeing to accept the idea of changing such a basic requirement, it had to know more about the difference in reliability between the distributed and concentrated missions. If the distributed mission proved to be far less reliable in the analysis, then even LOPO might want to reconsider its attitude.

Crabill gave the job to Tom Young, a young researcher from the Applied Materials and Physics Division whom Crabill had specifically asked for assignment into LOPO mission integration because, in his opinion, Young was "the brightest guy I knew." On the day Young had reported to work with LOPO, Crabill had given him "a big pile of stuff to read, thinking he would be busy and out of my hair for quite a while." But two days later, Young returned, a quick study, having already made his way through all the papers and clearly showing a good understanding of their contents. Later on, when given the job of the comparative mission reliability analysis, Young went out to Boeing in Seattle. In less than two weeks, he found what what he needed to know and figured out the percentages: the reliability for the concentrated mission was a not-so-good 60%, but for the distributed mission it was only slightly worse, 58%. "It was an insignificant difference," Crabill thought when he heard Young's numbers, especially because nobody then really knew how to do that type of analysis. "We didn't gag on the fact that it was pretty low anyway, but we really wanted to do this distributed mission." That was LOPO's mindset. It made sense to the Langley researchers to do Lunar Orbiter that way, if the Kodak system could be made to last for the extra time and if Boeing could be persuaded to go along with the distributed mission willingly.⁷⁵

LOPO hoped that Young's analysis would prove to Boeing that there was no essential difference in reliability between the two types of missions. But the hope went at least temporarily unfulfilled. As Crabill remembers, the Boeing people said, "that's great, but we still aren't going to do it," because the concentrated is the legal requirement not the distributed. Boeing lamented, "why didn't you tell us in the first place you wanted to design the system this way?" It was a classic case of implementing a project before even the customer was completely sure of what he wanted that project to accomplish. In such a situation, the only sensible thing to do was to be flexible and roll with the punches.

The problem for Boeing, of course, was that such flexibility might cost the company its financial incentives. If a Lunar Orbiter mission failed, the company worried that it would not be paid the bonus money promised in the contract. Over this issue, many private conversations took place, especially between LOPO leader Cliff Nelson and Boeing's project manager Robert Helberg. Langley director Floyd Thompson participated in many of them and even made a personal visit to Seattle before there was an accommodation. In these discussions Helberg finally became satisfied that the change from a concentrated to a distributed mission would not impact Boeing's incentives. If a mission failed because of the change, LOPO would assume the responsibility. Boeing would have done its best according to the government request and instructions--and for that they would not be penalized.⁷⁶

But there would be no such mission failures. NASA and Boeing would handle the technical problems involving the camera by testing the system to ascertain the definite limits of its reliable operation. From Kodak the government and the prime contractor got hard data regarding such questions as: how long can one leave the film set in one place before the curls or bends in the film around the loops become permanent and the torque required to advance the film exceeds the capability of the motor? From these tests, Boeing and LOPO established a set of mission "rules" that had to be followed very precisely. To keep the system working, for example, Lunar Orbiter Project mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory had to move the film one frame every eight hours whether they wanted to or not. The rules even required that film sometimes be advanced without opening the door of the camera lens, just because "we had to move film." Mission controllers called these non-exposure shots their "film-set frames." Langley, which had responsibility for mission control at JPL, even had people there whose job it was during operations to keep track of the "film budget." "We gotta shoot one. We gotta move film tomorrow morning," they would say. "You got anything you want to shoot?"⁷⁷

Partly as a result of these rules, the distributed mission turned out be a much busier type of operation than would have been the case with the concentrated. Each time there was to be a photograph, the spacecraft had to be maneuvered; and each time there was a maneuver, there was a risk. Everything that was done, including film-set frames, required unique commands, and all of this commanding and risk-taking was spread out over two weeks. The big difference between the distributed and concentrated modes, therefore, was time--and time meant major technical considerations particularly in terms of possible mechanical, thermal, and chemical problems with the camera system. It also meant greater risk of radiation, because the film would be exposed for fourteen days instead of just one. In the first Lunar Orbiter mission in August 1966, the spacecraft was taking pictures well after two weeks. The staff at missions operations had just finished up and cut off the Bimat when a solar flare started radiating the spacecraft. If the solar flare had come in the middle of the mission, there would have been a vastly different result.⁷⁸

Occasionally, though, even an agreed-upon rule had to be violated. For instance, NASA and Boeing had a rule that nothing unplanned should be done during a Lunar Orbiter mission unless there was very clearly some gain to be gotten from it. That included any deviation in the mission plan in terms of the spacecraft's trajectories and the "burns" it would take to get it into and out of certain desirable orbits.

However, during the first mission, the velocity/height (V/H) sensor would not work properly. This was the instrument that was supposed to compensate for the 3000-feet-per-second motion of the spacecraft as its camera focused for a hundredth of a second on a given little spot on the lunar surface moving by down below. Without the V/H sensor, this spot would appear smeared. The imaging problem was not unlike the one facing a person trying to take a snapshot out of the side window of a moving car. In this case, though, Eastman Kodak had devised a small and delicate instrument--the V/H sensor--to move the film plane. At just the right instant just before and after a shutter exposure, it would give the film a short almost inconsequential kick, just enough to cancel out the motion factor. But for some reason during the first mission the little mechanism was not working quite right. It was compensating nicely for the low-resolution but not for the high-resolution lens, and it was the high-resolution from which the big payoff in terms of the best pictures was to come.⁷⁹

Cliff Nelson was not ready to give up on the high-resolution photographs. He told everyone at mission control that "we came here to get the highest resolution we can" and we are not about to let the failure of the V/H sensor stand in our way. The only alternative was to bring the spacecraft down to a lower altitude. "If we go down to 46 kilometers and the IMC [image-motion compensation] doesn't work any better than its working now, we'll still get better resolution than we would up there at 200 kilometers. So let's take the risk."⁸⁰

Once again, the Boeing people were distressed. First the Langley people had changed their minds about their own basic mission requirement; now they were breaking one of their most important operation rules. This rule was to keep the spacecraft up fairly high (200 kilometers) over the lunar targets within its elliptical orbit and for mission control to risk a burn down to 50 kilometers only after the entire system had been checked out. If everything was working well, it would be okay to take the spacecraft down to 50 kilometers--but no lower. In going down to 46 kilometers, there were several dangerous uncertainties. This included such uncertainties as pointing errors in applying the thrust vector, the magnitude of the thrust vector itself, and thus even about where the spacecraft was actually located and where it might be led.

"But, Cliff, you said, we weren't going to improvise like this." What if there are significant orbital perturbations at such a low altitude due to solar winds or gravitational anomalies? Or what if the spacecraft's accelerometer does not cut off and it drives the spacecraft even lower? What if the accelerometer does not count right, or there is some glitch in the software? Think what could happen then. Mission control might be driving the spacecraft right into the ground!

To these worries Nelson replied, "But, listen to what I say now! We've worked out the numbers. It's worth the risk!" Besides, he added, by coming down closer to the moon, "we'll be pushing the IMC into another operating regime, and maybe it will work then."⁸¹

That was a "maybe" to which the Boeing engineers could have no good answer. It was clear that Nelson and his men were in too deep to back off now because of some mission rule--even one they had preordained themselves. They were not about to stay up and loaf around at 200 kilometers with a malfunctioning V/H sensor and take inferior pictures when there was a good chance that they could circumvent or fix the problem by going down closer to the moon. Again, they reassured the prime contractor that NASA would bear the responsibility if anything went wrong.

Unfortunately, the maneuver did not completely succeed. The Lunar Orbiter came down to 46 kilometers and got its pictures--but the problem with the V/H sensor did not fix itself. The resulting pictures were not as excellent as everyone was hoping for, though they were still quite good. In terms of their resolution relative to the large area of the lunar surface that was covered, the Lunar Orbiter photography contributed significantly more than had the more limited television pictures of the Ranger probes or Surveyor Randers, which provided tremendous resolution but only of a particular spot. Unashamedly, NASA called the first Lunar Orbiter mission a success. Cliff Nelson's bold decision to go down to 46 kilometers, in retrospect, had to be judged as the right one.

The 'Picture of the Century'

Unlike many projects in which the contractor does only what is necessary to receive his money and the sponsoring agency conversely has to milk the contract for everything it is worth, Lunar Orbiter benefitted from relations of mutual respect, high integrity, self-motivation, respect, and reasoned persuasion. As shown in Boeing's final acceptance of the distributed mission, people did not say no to a good idea merely because the system was not originally designed for it or because the contract did not specifically allow it.

To appreciate this highly advantageous institutional environment in the management of Lunar Orbiter, one need only to look at the now famous picture of the earth that was taken from orbit around the moon during the mission of Lunar Orbiter I on August 23, 1966. In the opinion of many commentators at the time, this spectacular black-and-white photograph--the world's first view of the earth at a distance--amounted to "the picture of the century" and even "the greatest shot taken since the invention of photography." It was certainly one of the most awe--inspiring of the hundreds of sensational pictures taken by Lunar Orbiter. Not even the color photos of the earth taken from the moon during the Apollo missions superseded the impact of this first shot of our precious little island of life floating in the black and infinite sea of space.

It was a picture that no one had planned to take--and that almost was not taken. Boeing's engineers wanted it done and had been thinking about how to do it, and so too had the Langley people, but Helberg and the rest of Boeing management balked at the idea. Turning the spacecraft around so that its camera could catch a quick view of the earth tangential to the moon's surface entailed some technical difficulties and there was the ever--present danger that, once the spacecraft's orientation was changed, something might go wrong that made it impossible for mission controllers to regain control of the spacecraft. When NASA first suggested that such an exciting picture be taken, Helberg had said no.⁸²

In some atmospheres, that might have been the end of it. People would have been forced to forget about the picture and to live within the circumscribed world of what had been legally agreed upon. But the ides of the photograph was too good to pass up. In another series of private huddles at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, where the mission control for Lunar Orbiter was located, Cliff Nelson, Floyd Thompson, and Lee Scherer convinced Helberg that he was being too cautious and that "the picture was worth the risk." If there was any mishap with the spacecraft, they would make sure that Boeing received compensation and got a part of its incentive for taking the risk that they had encouraged.

Surrounded on all sides by people who wanted it done, the thoughtful and competent Helberg gave in. The flight controllers executed the necessary maneuvers to point the camera away from the lunar surface and take a look at the earth just as Lunar Orbiter I was about to pass behind the moon. They did this twice, on the sixteenth and twenty-sixth orbits. The results, as has been said, were wonderfully emotive, showing how precious Planet Earth really is. The unprecedented photos also were useful because they provided the first oblique perspectives of the lunar surface. All the other photographs taken during the mission number one were shot perpendicular to the surface and did not create the same feeling for the moon in its three dimensions. In subsequent missions, NASA made sure to include this sort of oblique photography more often.

The importance of this story of how the first photographs of the earth from the moon were taken illustrates the team spirit of everyone involved in the Lunar Orbiter project. The decision to go ahead and take the calculated risk of reorienting the spacecraft and shooting the picture was made because everyone recognized that it was a good idea that, if at all possible, should not be turned aside. Helberg agreed because of NASA's gentle persuasion and the technological enthusiasm of his own people. He changed his mind, not because the government confronted him with a dramatic "you're going to do it or else" ultimatum because he was a contractor, but because Cliff Nelson and Floyd Thompson negotiated with him reasonably and would not let legalities get in the way of doing the right thing.

It is the way things should always get done. But sadly it is not the way the world often enough works.

Mission More Than Accomplished

In the end Lunar Orbiter defied all the probability studies. In the beginning, one will remember, NASA's idea had been that it needed to fly five spacecraft in order to assure that one would work. In the end all five worked extraordinarily well. The first mission in August 1966 was followed by four more enormously successful flights, the last one taking place as quickly as August 1967. This meant that all five flights took place in the span of just thirteen months. What was more, with the minor exception of a short delay in the launch of Lunar Orbiter I due to trouble in getting the Eastman Kodak camera completely ready for launch, all of the missions came right on schedule--and just three months apart. This virtually perfect record was a remarkable achievement for its time--especially considering that this was the era of Ranger failures and serious schedule delays in the Surveyor program. The record is especially remarkable when one remembers that Langley, an organization whose heritage rested in aeronautical research, had never before managed any sort of flight program into deep space.

In fact, the record of Lunar Orbiter is remarkable for any time. That should be clearer to us now than it was even to the contemporaries who had witnessed dozens of failures in the early space program. American experience of the late 1980s, when the country could not launch much of anything, not even into earth orbit, demonstrates that getting hardware into space is hardly a sure thing. Without a clear objective, without national commitment, and without effective management, space projects do not easily or routinely make it into space--and they do not accomplish much when they get up there.

Lunar Orbiter accomplished what it was designed to do, and more. From the five flights came 1,654 photographs. More than half of the photos--840 of them--looked at the proposed Apollo landing sites. Lunar Orbiters I, II, and III took these pictures from low-flight altitudes, thereby providing detailed coverage of 22 select areas along the equatorial region of the near side of the moon. One of the eight sites scrutinized by Lunar Orbiters II and III was a very smooth area in the "Sea of Tranquility." A few years later, in July 1969, Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong would bring the lunar module "Eagle" down on to a spot on this site, the historic first manned lunar landing.⁸⁵

By the end of the third Lunar Orbiter mission, all of the photography needed to cover the Apollo landing sites had been taken. NASA was then free to redesign the last two missions, move away from the pressing engineering objective imposed by Apollo, and go on to explore other regions of the moon for the benefit of science. Eight hundred and eight of the remaining 814 pictures returned by Lunar Orbiter IV and V focused on the rest of the near side, on the polar regions, or on the mysterious far side of the moon. These were not the first looks at the "dark side;" a Soviet space probe, Zond III, had taken pictures of it during a fly-by into a solar orbit a year earlier, in July 1965. But they were higher quality than the Russian pictures and illuminated some lunarscapes that had never before been seen by the human eye. Six of the remaining photos took the spectacular look back at the distant earth. By the time all the photos were taken, about 99 per cent of the moon's surface had been covered.

Even when the photography mission was over, the Lunar Orbiters kept on contributing to our understanding of the moon. The continued flight of the spacecraft offered clues to the quixotic nature of the lunar gravitational environment. NASA found these clues valuable in the planning of the Apollo flights. Telemetry data clearly indicated that the moon's gravitational pull was not uniform. The slight dips in the path of the Lunar Orbiters as they passed over certain areas of the moon's surface were being caused by gravitational perturbations due to the mascons. The extended missions of the Lunar Orbiters also helped to confirm that radiation levels near the moon were in fact quite low and not much danger to astronauts unless a major solar flare occurred while they were exposed on the lunar surface. Also, a few months after each Lunar Orbiter mission, NASA purposefully crashed the spacecraft into the lunar surface in order to study the lunar impacts and their seismic consequences. This manner of destroying the spacecraft also made sure that a deteriorating Orbiter over which mission controllers had lost control would not wander and thereby jeopardize the path of some future mission.⁸⁶

Whether the Apollo landings could have been made successfully without the photographic insights from Lunar Orbiter is a difficult question to answer. Without the photos, the manned landings could certainly still have been tried. Along with the photographic maps drawn from telescopic observation, there were also some very good pictures from Ranger and Surveyor. So manned landings perhaps could have been made successfully. But the detailed photographic coverage of 22 different possible landing sites definitely made NASA's final pinpointing of ideal spots much easier. The decision about a landing site could be made with far greater confidence.

Furthermore, there was some important photometric information gained through the mission design of Lunar Orbiter that helped the Apollo program. Photometry involves the science of measuring the intensity of light--a factor that naturally had to be handled wisely in Lunar Orbiter because its basic mission was to take pictures. One should not underestimate the difficulty of planning such a mission. Nearly everything about it had to be calculated for the benefit of taking superior, high-resolution shots of the lunar surface. When a person snaps a shutter here on earth, one normally wants to have the sun to one's back, opposite the target. But the lunar surface is a very funny thing. If one looks straight down on the moon and takes a picture of it with the sunlight coming from directly behind, the surface looks like a piece of white bread. Even minor topographical features are indistinguishable because of the intensity of the reflecting sunlight from the micrometeorite-"filled" lunar surface. In designing the Lunar Orbiter missions, the engineers in the project office at Langley thus had to figure out how to design the spacecraft's orbits, how to position the spacecraft within orbits, and which way the camera needed to be looking in order to accommodate for this "photometric function." After studying the problem (Taback, Crabill, and Young led the attack on this problem), LOPO's answer was that the sun should indeed be behind the spacecraft but photos should be taken at something on the order of a 15-degree sun elevation. In other words, a geometric situation equivalent to high noon would not result in a good view of lunar surface features.

Long before it was time for the first Apollo launch, LOPO's handling of the lunar photometric function was common knowledge around NASA and in the aerospace industry. This knowledge made its way into Apollo most directly through BellComm, a NASA contractor that participated in the mission design review of Lunar Orbiter and then also played a major advisory role in the planning for the Apollo missions at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston. The BellComm scientists and engineers picked up quickly on the importance of the photometrics. Astronauts going down to the moon were also going to be looking at landing sites through the camera lens of the human eye. Although a computer program fed with information flowing to it from rendezvous and landing radar sets was to pinpoint the Apollo landing site, there was a very good chance that the computer's choice might not be so good and that the pilot of the LM, at a critical point, might have to take over and land visually. If the astronaut's imaging device--again, his eyes--could not make out the craters and boulders, then his choice of a landing spot could be tragically mistaken.

Apollo 11 commander Neil Armstrong might have faced this problem during the first lunar landing--and lost rather than won--if not for the understanding of lunar photometrics acquired through the Lunar Orbiter project. Armstrong, one might recall, did not like the area picked by the computer for the landing. Armstrong saw that it was "littered with boulders the size of Volkswagons." So he flew on. He had to go another 1500 meters before he saw that he could set lunar module "Eagle" down safely. And all that time bells were ringing in his ears, warning him that he was using up all his reserve fuel.⁸⁸

The key point here is that Armstrong and the other six pilots that subsequently landed on the moon had to be able to see and know when not to land on the "X" picked by the computer. They could see because, well in advance of those missions, NASA had worried about and taken care of the lunar photometric function. It was known that the landings had to be done at the right times of day and not with the astronaut-pilots looking straight down on the moon's surface with the sun shining from directly overhead. Best to land with a low morning sun when the astronauts coming down could see the surface quite well and after landing would have plenty of time yet that day for exploration on the surface.

Again, NASA might have figured all of this out for Apollo without Lunar Orbiter. But the proven experience of handling the photometrics for Lunar Orbiter made NASA that much more knowledgeable and confident that its astronauts would be able to see what they needed to see to avoid the hazards and to know--as Neil Armstrong knew--when not to land. This is a subtle contribution from Lunar Orbiter that too easily might be forgotten.

Secrets To Success

In the early 1970s Erasmus H. Kloman, a senior research associate with the National Academy of Public Administration, completed an extensive comparative investigation of NASA's handling of its Surveyor and Lunar Orbiter projects. After a lengthy review, NASA published a shortened and much distilled version of Kloman'a larger study as Unmanned Space Project Management: Surveyor and Lunar Orbiter (Washington: NASA SP-4901, 1972). The result--even in the expurgated version, with all names of responsible individuals left out--was a penetrating study in "sharp contrasts" that should be required reading for every project manager in business, industry, or government.

Based on his analysis of Surveyor and Lunar Orbiter, Kloman concluded that there are really no "secrets to success in project management, as such. What one is talking about simply are positive feelings--in terms of wanting to get a job done and having a clear objective--and positive relationships--in terms of having thoughtful and supportive dealings between the various people and organizations involved. The history of Surveyor and Lunar Orbiter, Kloman wrote, "serves primarily as a confirmation of old truths about the so-called basic principles of management rather than a revelation of new ones. But the history brings out rather sharply that the application of basic principles may not always be a straightforward matter. It illustrates that what may be one man's basic principle may be another's shibboleth. Old truths are not always easily recognized or acknowledged." In Lunar Orbiter the "old truths" and "basic principles" were followed very well; in Surveyor they were not. Ultimately, both projects achieved success. But they did it in very different ways. "Surveyor's success depended upon overcoming many unforeseen technical problems of serious proportions," Kloman judged. "The endeavor eventually required a time-consuming and costly upgrading of organization and management to assure mission fulfillment." On the other hand, Lunar Orbiter, "although it was by no means without its problems, progressed for the most part according to plan. Its objectives were achieved almost by 'playing it by the book'."⁸⁹

By 'playing it by the book,' however, Kloman did not mean that success was achieved in Lunar Orbiter through a thoughtless following of formal procedures or management theories. As we have seen in this chapter, Kloman understood that Langley's project engineers broke a lot of rules and made up much of what they did as they went. What Kloman meant by 'playing it by the book' was that Lunar Orbiter serves as an excellent model of how a complex technological project should be managed. "Whereas the Surveyor lessons include many illustrations of how 'not to' set out on a project or how to correct for early misdirections," he argued, "Lunar Orbiter shows how good sound precepts and directions from the beginning can keep a project on track."⁹⁰

What were these "sound precepts and directions"? And what political, institutional, environmental, and other contextual factors explain the extraordinary peformance of Lunar Orbiter? Based on Kloman's rich analysis, as well as on this chapter's own narrative study, here is an outline of some of the keys to success:

 

(1)	It was clear to everyone from the start that the requirements of the Apollo program, plain and simple, would be driving Lunar Orbiter. Thus, there was a crystal clear objective--and one tied into the most urgent national commitment in space at that time. That had not been the case with Surveyor. It had been conceived in 1959, two years before the lunar-landing commitment, as "a large, ambitious, and almost open-ended undertaking," and one devoted to the noble but more nebulous pursuit of lunar science and exploration. Later that diversified pursuit was "curtailed" as a project in support of Apollo. In contrast, outset, Lunar Orbiter's goal was "discretely defined" from the outset.91
(2)	Lunar Orbiter's task was less complex and more technically feasible than Surveyor's. Most of the technology--including the essential Eastman Kodak camera--came from off the shelf. The Surveyor project, on the other hand, required the development of a brand new rocket booster, the problem-riddled Centaur, which was based on a still-to-be-proven fuel mixture of liquid hydrogen and liquid oxygen. This is not to say that risky undertakings should not be tried. Rather, it is to argue that if terribly demanding technological enterprises such as Surveyor are to succeed, their overall environment for quality project management must be especially healthy. Such was the case in Lunar Orbiter.
(3)	Lunar Orbiter benefitted greatly from the mistakes made in Surveyor. Several of these mistakes were the responsibility of NASA headquarters. These mistakes included: originally underestimating the complexity of Surveyor; imposing unrealistic manpower and financial ceilings; insisting for too long on an "unreasonably open-ended combination of scientific experiments for the payload;" making too many changes in the scope and objectives of the project; and tying it to the unproven Centaur launch vehicle.92 But NASA headquarters learned from its mistakes. It would make far fewer of them in Lunar Orbiter. In adddition, Langley representatives learned, sometimes vicariously, from JPL's mistakes and problems. They talked to people in Pasadena about Surveyor at great length both before and after accepting the responsibility for Lunar Orbiter. From these conversations Langley acquired a great deal of knowledge about the design and management of an unmanned space mission. JPL scientists and engineers even conducted an informal "space school" that helped to educate a number of Langley's LOPO members and Boeing's team about key details of space mission design and operations.
(4)	NASA Langley looked long and hard at Lunar Orbiter before accepting the responsibility for it. LaRC management wanted to make sure that the center had the expertise to handle the assignment, without asking for too much sacrifice from the functional divisions, before agreeing to do it.
(5)	Once Langley accepted the responsibility for the project, center management supported it very enthusiastically and regarded the commitment as one of the most important ones ever made by the laboratory. Floyd Thompson had a strong personal interest in Lunar Orbiter and followed its progress closely, partly by having weekly Wednesday morning meetings with Cliff Nelson, Israel Taback, and other leading members of the project office. Langley management at all levels was determined to make Lunar Orbiter an unqualified success. When that is the case, as Kloman states, "the odds for its successful completion obviously improve."93
(6)	A positive attitude and enthusiasm infected the entire project staff. Some of Langley's top talents had volunteered to be part of LOPO. The resulting in-house staff was a tightly knit and cohesive unit whose members loved what they did while always feeling challenged by it. When the project was over, there was an "almost universal feeling" among Lunar Orbiter personnel that the involvement had been a "net plus" in their careers.94
(6)	LOPO established a very close and effective working relationship with the officers in charge of lunar programs at NASA headquarters. In reporting to the Office of Space Sciences and Applications, it made "no effort to hold back information concerning problems that arose." In turn, OSSA "reciprocated with full cooperation and support."
(7)	LOPO established an even more important working rapport with their counterparts at Boeing, the prime contractor. Cliff Nelson, the LOPO head, and Robert Helberg, the project manager, got along very well personally. From top to bottom in the two project offices, members of the respective staffs respected each other's abilities and were committed to working out differences for the overall success of the project. Regardless of ID badges, everyone worked together as a team.
(8)	Although Boeing's concern about getting its incentive payments did lead to some interesting predicaments as the mission profile of Lunar Orbiter changed in some fundamental ways, the incentives-type contract was an overall plus. Boeing was highly motivated to perform at the peak of its corporate capability. NASA was able to convince Boeing that its incentives were assured as long as Boeing did everything it could to meet the revised instructions.
(9)	The "human skills" of the individuals most responsible for Lunar Orbiter appear to have been the essential key to success. These skills centered more on the ability to work with other people than they did on what one might presume to be the more critical and esoteric managerial, conceptual, and technical abilities. In Kloman's words, "individual personal qualities and management capabilities can at times be a determining influence in overall project performance." In the case of Lunar Orbiter much more so than in Surveyor, what carried things along so well were positive human skills: interpersonal relations, compatibility between individual managers, and most especially the ability of managers to stimulate effecting working relationships between people. The individuals most responsible for stimulating this teamwork were Langley's Cliff Nelson and Boeing's Robert Helberg, the project managers, both of whom were selected because of their experience along these lines in prior project activities. Both men were--and still are--universally admired by their peers and subordinates in the former Lunar Orbiter project offices. It does not matter if one speaks to Lunar Orbiter people at Langley, Boeing, or NASA headquarters, Nelson and Helberg are admired for the leadership qualities and thoughtully pragmatic decisions that allowed everyone involved to work "in an environment marked by mutual respect and confidence of all participating organizations."96

Why did the Lunar Orbiter project work, then, and why was it such a useful thing? When asked this question, LOPO mission design manager Norman Crabill has given an answer that confirms Kloman's conclusion. "We had some people who weren't afraid to use their own judgment instead of relying on rules," Crabill remembers with a proud gleam in his eyes. "These people could think and find the essence of a problem, either by discovering the solution themselves or energizing the troops to come up with an alternative which would work. They were absolute naturals at that job."⁹⁷

Lunar Orbiter was a pathfinder for Apollo, and it was an outstanding contribution to the early space program by Langley Research Center. In terms of the project's impact on the laboratory, Lunar Orbiter definitely left a sweet taste in everyone's mouth. The old NACA aeronautics laboratory proved not only that it could handle a major deep space mission, but that it could achieve an extraordinary record of success that matched or surpassed anything yet tried by NASA. When the project ended, and LOPO members went back into functional research divisions, Langley possessed a pool of experienced individuals who were ready, if the time came, to plan and manage yet another major project. That opportunity came quickly in the late 1960s with the inception of Viking, a much more complicated and challenging project designed to send unmanned reconnaissance orbiters and landing probes to the planet Mars. Not surprisingly, considering the success of Lunar Orbiter, when Viking was approved, NASA headquarters once again raised some eyebrows in the space science community by assigning the project to "those plumbers" at Langley. Forming the nucleus of Langley's much larger and more institutionally-demanding Viking project office was the former LOPO team. And once again Langley would manage a project that would be virtually an unqualified success.

Notes

1.		See R. Cargill Hall, Lunar Impact: A History of Project Ranger (Washington: NASA SP­4210, 1977), p. 285, and Michael Collins, Liftoff: The Story of America's Adventure in Space (New York: NASA/Grove Press, 1988), p. 117.
2.		Leonard Roberts, "Exhaust Jet-Dust Layer Interaction During a Lunar Landing," unclassified report presented at 13th International Aeronautical Congress, Varna, Bulgaria, 24­28 Sept. 1962; "The Interaction of a Rocket Exhaust with the Lunar Surface," unclassified report presented at Specialists' Meeting of the Fluid Dynamical Aspects of Space Flight, Marseilles, France, 20­24 Apr. 1964. Copies of both papers are in the LaRC Technical Library.
3.		See R. Cargill Hall's comprehensive and well-told Lunar Impact: A History of Project Ranger (Washington: NASA SP­4210, 1977).
4.		There has not yet been a complete, published history of the Surveyor program. Besides the information on Surveyor in Hall's Lunar Impact, one should read what Homer E. Newell has to say about Surveyor in his Beyond the Atmosphere: Early Years of Space Science (Washington: NASA SP­4211, 1980), pp. 263­272. There is a fine summary of Surveyor in the NASA Historical Data Book, Volume II: Programs and Projects, pp. 325­331. For an analysis of NASA's problems in the management of the Surveyor project, see Erasmus H. Kloman, Unmanned Space Project Management: Surveyor and Lunar Orbiter (Washington: NASA SP­4901, 1972).
5.		The chairman of this lunar photographic mission study group was Capt. Lee R. Scherer, a naval officer on assignment to NASA Headquarters and program engineer with the Surveyor project. In Oct. 1962 NASA gave him the job of heading an Office of Space Sciences-Office of Manned Space Flight working group whose chief task was to identify the information about the moon most essential to the landing mission. See Scherer's Study of Agena-based Lunar Orbiters, NASA Headquarters, Office of Space Sciences, 25 Oct. 1962, copy in LaRC Technical Library. See also Bruce K. Byers, Destination Moon: A History of the Lunar Orbiter Program (Washington: NASA Technical Memorandum (TM) X­3487, 1977, multilith), pp. 20­23. Byers's study is the most complete history of Lunar Orbiter yet produced.
6.		Erasmus H. Kloman, Unmanned Space Project Management: Surveyor and Lunar Orbiter (Washington: NASA SP-4901, 1972).
7.		Clinton E. Brown interview with author, 17 July 1989. Brown acted as Langley's spokesman in early discussions at NASA Headquarters in 1963 regarding Langley's proposed management of the Lunar Orbiter program.
8.		Cargill Hall, Lunar Impact, p. 157.
9.		"NASA Minutes of the First Senior Council for the Office of Space Sciences," 7 June 1962, copy in E1­2A, Langley Central Files (LCF). Also quoted in Hall, Lunar Impact, p. 157.
10.		Penetrometer Feasibility Study Group, Langley Research Center, "Preliminary Project Development Plan for a Lunar Penetrometer Experiment for the Follow-On Ranger Program." 18 Aug. 1961, Library Code N­101, 24218, LaRC Technical Library. See also the following memoranda: E. M. Cortright (for Abe Silverstein, Director of Space Flight Programs), to Ira H. Abbott, Director of Advanced Research Programs, "Lunar Surface Hardness Experiments," 29 June 1961; E. C. Kilgore, Assistant Chief, Engineering Div., Langley Research Center, to Charles J. Donlan, LaRC Associate Director, "Meeting at Jet Propulsion Laboratory on July 18, 1961, attended by representatives of the Langley Research Center, Aeronutronics Division of Ford Motor Company, NASA Headquarters, and JPL, to discuss a penetrometer experiment for the follow-on Ranger program," 21 July 1961; John L. McCarty and George W. Brooks, "Visit to NASA Headquarters, Washington, D.C., by George W. Brooks and John L. McCarty, Vibration and Dynamics Section, DLD [Dynamic Loads Div.], June 28, 1961, to discuss possible Lunar Penetrometer Experiment on Ranger Spacecraft," 7 July 1961; Floyd L. Thompson to NASA Headquarters, "Lunar surface hardness experiments," 27 July 1961; and George W. Brooks to Associate Director Charles J. Donlan, "Langley action on lunar penetrometer experiment for Ranger follow-on program," 27 July 1961. All of these memos are in the LCF, Code A200­1B.
11.		NASA had featured its impact research at the 1959 Inspection; see the 1959 inspection brochure, pp. 15-16, preserved in the "Inspection Files" in the Langley Historical Archives (LHA). The NASA Ames exhibit concerned impact studies exclusively. Ames's talented H. Julian "Harvey" Allen, a former NACA Langley researcher, was keenly interested in lunar "pot marks" and how the surface of the moon got to look the way it did.
12.		See John L. McCarty and Huey D. Carden, "Impact Characteristics of Various Materials Obtained by an Acceleration-Time-History Technique Applicable to Evaluating Remote Targets," NASA Technical Note (TN) D­1269, June 1962.
13.		Penetrometer Feasibility Study Group, "Preliminary Project Development Plan for a Lunar Penetrometer Experiment," p. 1.
14.		Kilgore to Donlan, "Meeting at Jet Propulsion Laboratory," A200­1B, LCF.
15.		Hall, Lunar Impact, p. 158.
16.		Ibid., pp. 156­163.
17.		Ivan D. Ertel and Roland W. Newkirk, The Apollo Spacecraft: A Chronology, IV:24.
18.		Oran Nicks quoted in Byers, Destination Moon, p. 26.
19.		Floyd L. Thompson to Dr. Eugene Emme, NASA Historian, "Comments on draft of Lunar Orbiter History dated November 4, 1969," 22 Dec. 1969, in folder labeled "Lunar Orbiter Historical Notes" in Floyd L. Thompson Collection, LHA. See also Byers, Destination Moon, p. 25.
20.		Clinton E. Brown interview with author, Hampton, Va., 17 July 1989.
21.		On 12 July 1961, six weeks after President Kennedy's lunar-landing speech, three men in Clint Brown's Theoretical Mechanics Division--William H. Michael, Jr., Robert H. Tolson, and John P. Gapcynski--had put forward a "Preliminary Proposal for a Circumlunar Photographic Experiment." The idea was essentially to support the Apollo program by adapting the Ranger spacecraft so that it could perform a circumlunar mission that could take high-resolution color photographs during the lunar-approach phase of a "single-pass," circumlunar trajectory. In the cover memorandum to this unpublished proposal, one of its authors, Bill Michael, wrote that "A desirable situation would be that of Langley having prime responsibility for the photographic experiment, in a role similar to that of chief experimenter in other specific experiments carried by the Ranger and other vehicles." See William H. Michael, Jr., Head, Mission Analysis Section, to Langley Associate Director Charles J. Donlan, "Preliminary Proposal for a Circumlunar Photographic Mission," 17 July 1961. See also C. I. Cummings, Lunar Program Director, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, to Bernard Maggin, Office of Programs, NASA Headquarters, 9 Nov. 1961, and Maggin to Clinton E. Brown, 14 Nov. 1961. Copies of all of this documentation is in A200­1B, LCF.
22.		Israel Taback interview with author, Hampton, Va., 13 Aug. 1991.
23.		Floyd L. Thompson to NASA Headquarters, Code SL (Attn: Capt. Lee Scherer), 6 March 1963, A200­1B. Attached to this memo is a "system block diagram" for the Lunar Orbiter as well as the data from the mission reliability analysis.
24.		Floyd L. Thompson to Dr. Eugene Emme, "Comments on draft of Lunar Orbiter History," 22 Dec. 1969, p. 2, copy in Thompson's papers, LHA. See Byers, Destination Moon, p. 29.
25.		On the genesis of NASA's system for project management, see Robert L. Rosholt, An Administrative History of NASA, 1958-1963 (Washington: NASA SP-4101, 1966), pp. 145­158 and 273­276.
26.		NASA Management Manual, Part I, General Management Instructions, Number 4­1­1, chap. 4, p. 4. See also Edgar M. Cortright interview with author, Yorktown, Va., July 1988, copy of transcript in LHA, pp. 8­9.
27.		Byers, Destination Moon, pp. 31­33.
28.		Langley Research Center, Project Plan for Lunar Orbiter Project, 25 March 1963, Project No. 814­00­00, p. II­2. This plan was updated twice, in Dec. 1964 and June 1966. Copy in LaRC Technical Library.
29.		Donald H. Ward, One Engineer's Life Relived (Utica, KY: McDowell Publications, 1990), p. 61. Ward served as head of spacecraft launch operations for Langley's Lunar Orbiter Project Office.
30.		Taback interview, 13 Aug. 1991.
31.		See Byers, Destination Moon, pp. 40­41.
32.		See Dr. A. K. Thiel, Space Technologies Laboratories, Inc., to Oran W. Nicks, Director, Lunar and Planetary Programs, OSS/NASA, Washington, D.C., 20 Sept. 1962, copy in Floyd L. Thompson Collection, LHA. See also Byers, Destination Moon, pp. 16­17.
33.		See Byers, Destination Moon, p. 43­44.
34.		Interview with Sherwood Butler, Hampton, Va., 23 Aug. 1991. Butler was Langley's chief procurement officer at the time. For an analysis of the benefits of incentive contracting in Lunar Orbiter, see Kloman, Unmanned Space Project Management, pp. 34­36. See also Byers, Destination Moon, pp. 39­40. For a contemporary news story covering the details of the novel incentives contract for Lunar Orbiter, see Richard G. O'Lone, "Orbiter is First Big NASA Incentive Job," Aviation Week & Space Technology, 79/15 (7 Oct. 1963): 32.
35.		Taback interview, 13 Aug. 1991.
36.		See Byers, Destination Moon, pp. 40­47.
37.		Ibid., pp. 43­44.
38.		Taback interview, 13 Aug. 1991: see Byers, Destination Moon, p. 56.
39.		Byers, Destination Moon, pp. 57­70.
40.		For the basics of the Lunar Orbiter camera system, see Leon J. Kosofsky and S. Calvin Broome, "Lunar Orbiter: A Photographic Satellite," paper presented to the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers, Los Angeles, 28 Mar.--2 Apr. 1965, copy in LaRC Technical Library. Broome was the head of the photo subsystem group in Langley's Lunar Orbiter Project Office; Kosofsky was the camera expert in Lee Scherer's office at NASA Headquarters. For a more general description of the photographic mission and Eastman Kodak camera, see The Lunar Orbiter (revised April 1966), a 38-page booklet prepared by Boeing's Space Division and published by NASA Langley, especially pp. 18­20 and 22­26, and The Lunar Orbiter: A Radio-Controlled Camera, a glitzy 14-page brochure that was published by NASA Langley with Boeing's assistance after the Lunar Orbiter project had ended.
41.		Kosofsky and Broome, "Lunar Orbiter: A Photographic Satellite." See also Israel Taback, "A Description of the Lunar Orbiter Spacecraft," reprinted in Highlights of Astronomy (Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Co., 1968), p. 464. Taback presented this paper at the XIIIth General Assembly of the International Astronomical Union (IAU) in Prague, Czechoslovakia, in 1967. At this meeting, renowned astronomers from all over the world, took off their shoes, and crawled around the floor looking at a huge layout of photographs taken by the Lunar Orbiters.
42.		Scherer, Study of Agena-based Lunar Orbiters, 25 Oct. 1962; see Byers, Destination Moon, pp. 20­23.
43.		Telephone interview with Thomas Costello of the Boeing Co., Colorado Springs, Col., 15 Aug. 1961. Costello was an engineer with Boeing who worked on the company's proposal for Lunar Orbiter and then served as one of its project engineers from 1963 to 1966.
44.		See "Boeing to Build Lunar Orbiter," Aviation Week & Space Technology 79 (30 Dec. 1963): 22; "NASA to Negotiate with Boeing for Lunar Orbiter Spacecraft," NASA Langley Researcher, 2 June 1989; "NASA Explains Choice of Boeing over Hughes in Lunar Orbiter Award," Missiles and Rockets 14 (9 Mar. 1964): 13.
45.		Dr. Trutz Foelsche, "Remarks on Doses Outside the Magnetosphere, and on Effects Especially on Surfaces and Photographic Films," paper presented at the Meeting to Discuss Charged Particle Effects, NASA Office of Advanced Research and Technology (OART), 19­20 March 1964, Washington, D.C., p. 8. A copy of this paper is in the LaRC Technical Library.
46.		Byers, Destination Moon, pp. 72­74.
47.		See Lee R. Scherer, The Lunar Orbiter Photographic Missions, p. 2. This is a 20-page typescript booklet published by NASA Langley in late 1967.
48.		Erasmus H. Kloman, "Organizational Framework: NASA and Langley Research Center," p. 7. This is a chapter draft from Kloman's comment copy of his subsequent Unmanned Space Project Management. In draft form, Kloman's book included many more details including the names of responsible individuals which would be omitted in the shortened version published by NASA. The author wishes to thank Thomas R. Costello, former engineer in the Boeing Lunar Orbiter project office, for making available a copy of Kloman's comment edition.
49.		The portraits of Cliff Nelson and James Martin come from statements made to the author by a number of people who were part of Langley's Lunar Orbiter project office.
50.		Kloman, "Organizational Framework: NASA and Langley Research Center," pp.10­11.
51.		Kloman, Unmanned Space Project Management, pp.18­19, 38.
52.		Taback interview, 13 Aug. 1991.
53.		Norman L. Crabill interview, Hampton, Va., 28 Aug. 1991.
54.		Kloman, "Organizational Framework: NASA and Langley Research Center," p. 9.
55.		Taback interview, 13 Aug. 1991.
56.		Kloman, Unmanned Space Project Management, p. 25.
57.		Taback interview, 13 Aug. 1991. See also the press release from News Bureau, The Boeing Co., Seattle, "Robert J. Helberg, Lunar Orbiter Program Manager," 27 Sept. 1965.
58.		Kloman, Unmanned Space Project Management, p. 35.
59.		Lunar Orbiter Project Office, LaRC, Project Lunar Orbiter, Narrative Analysis, 14 Aug. 1964, copy in LaRC Technical Library.
60.		Thompson quoted in Byers, Destination Moon, p. 102.
61.		Lee R. Scherer to Oran W. Nicks, 4 Sept. 1964, p. 2, copy in A200­1B, LCF.
62.		Byers, Destination Moon, p. 104.
63.		See William H. Michael, Jr., and Robert H. Tolson, "The Lunar Orbiter Project Selenodesy Experiment," paper presented at the Second International Symposium on the Use of Artificial Satellites for Geodesy, Athens, Greece, 27 Apr.­1 May 1965, copy in the LaRC Technical Library. For an historical summary of this experiment and the significance of its results, see Byers, Destination Moon, pp. 134­13.
64.		Dr. Trutz Foelsche, "Radiation Measurements in Lunar Orbiter Missions I through V," paper presented at Manned Spacecraft Center Seminar, Houston, 21 June 1968, copy in the LaRC Technical Library.
65.		Byers, Destination Moon, pp. 139­145. See also C. A. Gurtler and Gary W. Grew, "Meteroroid Hazard Near Moon," Science 161 (2 Aug. 1968): 462.
66.		Byers, Destination Moon, p. 164.
67.		See Swetnick's report on trip to Boeing on 27­29 Oct. 1965, dated 5 Nov. 1964, p. 2, copy in A200­1B, LCF.
68.		Byers, Destination Moon, p. 165.
69.		The author wishes to thank LOPO member Norman L. Crabill for his careful explanation of what went into the mission planning for Lunar Orbiter. Crabill interview with author, 28 Aug. 1991. For a lengthy written account of mission planning in relation to the design of the Lunar Orbiter spacecraft system, see Thomas T. Yamauchi, The Boeing Co., and Israel Taback, NASA Langley, "The Lunar Orbiter System," paper presented at the Sixth International Symposium on Space Technology and Science, Tokyo, Japan, 1965. A copy of this paper is in the LaRC Technical Library.
70.		For the details about the evolution of the early mission plans for Lunar Orbiter, see Byers, Destination Moon, pp. 177­194.
71.		Crabill interview, 28 Aug. 1991.
72.		Ibid.
73.		Ibid.
74.		Ibid.
75.		See A. Thomas Young to N. L. Crabill, "Mission Reliability Analyses and Comparison for the Bellcomm Mission and TBC's S­110 Mission," copy in A200­1B, LCF.
76.		In the end Boeing earned nearly an extra $2 million dollars in incentives. See Newport News (Va.) Daily Press, "Orbiter Incentive Award is $1.9 Million," 28 Jan. 1967; "Lunar Orbiter Successes Earn Boeing $1,811,611" 17 Nov. 1967; "Lunar Success Pays Dividend for Boeing Co.," 18 Nov. 1967.
77.		Crabill interview, 28 Aug. 1991.
78.		See L. C. Rowan, "Orbiter Observations of the Lunar Surface," AAS (American Astronomical Socity) Paper, 29 Dec. 1966; and L. R. Scherer and C. H. Nelson, "The Preliminary Results from Lunar Orbiter I," in Spacecraft Systems, Vol. I, International Astronautical Federation, 17th International Astronautical Congress, Madrid, Spain, 9­15 Oct. 1966.
79.		See Byers, Destination Moon, pp. 235--240. On the workings of the velocity/height (V/H) sensor, see the Boeing Space Division's booklet The Lunar Orbiter (NASA Langley, revised Apr. 1966), p. 23.
80.		Crabill interview, 28 Aug. 1991.
81.		Ibid.
82.		See Byers, Destination Moon, pp. 241­243.
83.		Taback interview, 13 Aug. 1991.
84.		Following the first mission, Boeing prepared a booklet entitled Lunar Orbiter I--Photography (NASA Langley, 1968), which gave a detailed technical description of the earth­moon photographs, see especially pp. 64­71.
85.		See Lunar Orbiter Photo Data Screening Group, "Preliminary Geological Evaluation and Apollo Landing Analysis of Areas Photographed by Lunar Orbiter II," Langley Working Paper (LWP)-363, March 1967, copy in Milton Ames Collection, LHA.
86.		Byers, Destination Moon, pp. 243­244.
87.		Crabill interview, 28 Aug. 1991.
88.		Michael Collins, Liftoff, p. 8.
89.		Kloman, Unmanned Space Project Management, p. 7.
90.		Ibid.
91.		Ibid., p. 3.
92.		Ibid., p. 33.
93.		Ibid., p. 39.
94.		Ibid., p. 40.
95.		Ibid., p. 19.
96.		Ibid., p. 21­23.
97.		Crabill interview, 28 Aug. 1991.
	*	The Office of Space Sciences' Edgar Cortright and Oran Nicks would come to have more than a passing familiarity with the capabilities of Langley Research Center. In 1968 NASA would name Cortright to succeed Thompson as the center's director. Shortly thereafter, Cortright named Nicks as his deputy director. Both men then stayed on at the laboratory into the mid-1970s.