Moon Lander: How We Developed the Apollo Lunar Module (19 page)

Kraft brought the mission and flight operations perspective to the review. He questioned what the crew would have to do to perform different functions in LM and how the Mission Operations people on the ground could support these events. He challenged us to reexamine various design and operational
features for further simplification, making us aware that the crew’s time and energy was the most precious commodity on the mission, more than any other expendable, such as propellant, water, power, or oxygen. Our design must conserve this precious resource. The astronauts were very helpful in evaluating and improving anything they would operate or use. Their detailed suggestions for improving the cockpit, instrument panel, flight controls, equipment stowage, docking techniques and aids, and ingress-egress provisions, among other things, contributed greatly to LM’s success. Nothing was too minor to escape their scrutiny; their suggestions were practical, simple, and readily implemented.

The M-5 review ended with NASA approval of the LM design configuration. The preliminary design phase of the LM project was over. It was now up to Grumman to bring this full-scale model to life as a functioning, dependable lunar landing spacecraft. My colleagues and I were very proud that we had passed muster by NASA’s experts at this comprehensive review. We were also relieved that the required design changes were modest in scope, although we faulted ourselves for not catching the obvious ones sooner.

I packed up my notebook and papers when the M-5 Mockup Board adjourned, and as the crowd dispersed I went up into M-5’s cabin for one more look. Then I descended the ladder and walked slowly around the spacecraft, my eyes catching the thousands of details that had to be converted from dummy mockups to reality. The mockup room was almost empty and someone began turning out most of the overhead lights. In the half-darkness I took one more look at the spectral shape of M-5, standing there as LM would one day stand on the Moon, strange, gaunt, otherworldly. We had so much work to do to make it all happen. I hastened to get on with it.

7

Pushing Out the Drawings

With the preliminary design completed the focus in LM Engineering shifted to getting out the drawings, specifications, and other technical-definition documents that would enable Manufacturing to build the LM. The weekly LM program meeting became increasingly devoted to evaluating progress against the drawing-release schedules and recovering from the many slippages that occurred. Program Manager Bob Mullaney bore down hard on Engineering at these meetings and plainly registered his displeasure whenever Engineering failed to meet drawing schedule release promises. This happened repeatedly, to the point where Engineering was losing its credibility with program management. Rathke and I had to correct this chronic problem.

At our weekly project Engineering meeting Bob Carbee and his design group leaders worked over the schedules and reviewed the problems that required solution. In this early stage of detailed design the estimated number of drawings required was very rough, mainly based on aircraft estimating factors considering weight and complexity. The estimated number of drawings required kept increasing, often by hundreds per week, as more details of the design became available. The list of deliverable end items that Grumman would design and build under the contract kept changing as some test articles and rigs were added and others deleted, depending upon changing evaluations of what tests were required to qualify each subsystem. The biggest unknown was the ground-support equipment, for which the requirements could not be defined until the flight hardware that it supported was designed and the basic mission operations and ground test procedures were established. To me the GSE looked like a bottomless pit in which we were becoming hopelessly mired. We needed to do something drastic to clarify this poorly defined area.

The total engineering drawing workload climbed relentlessly. During 1965 and 1966 our estimated total grew from a few thousand to more than fifty
thousand drawings, of which more than ten thousand were for GSE. There were also about one thousand specifications and procurement packages required and several hundred test and checkout plans and procedures. The whole program faced a moving target of workload, to the near despair of program management and Manufacturing, who were at the mercy of Engineering to define the deliverable end products before they could prepare reliable manufacturing plans, schedules, and cost estimates.

When the cumulative number of drawings to be released was plotted as a graph against time in weeks or months for 1965 and 1966, it looked like we had a mountain of work to climb. On the plot were layers showing the numbers of drawings required for each category of end item, including the flight LMs, LM test articles and mockups, test rigs, special test equipment, and GSE. The drawing-release schedule graph was displayed on large sliding wallboards in the Plant 25 conference room, where Joe Gavin and Bob Mullaney held the weekly program management meeting. Plotted against the current release schedule were the actual releases, lagging below the scheduled lines, and the latest revisions to the schedule including new promised dates to recover from past slippages and to accommodate further growth in the estimated number of drawings. Revising the drawing-release schedule and tracking our actual performance against it occupied much of the time of Subsystem Project Engineer Bob Carbee and his design section heads.

Late one afternoon a slim, blond, freckle-faced fellow stopped into my office and introduced himself. He was Bill Craft, an assistant project engineer with the E2C program and a former structural designer. Although he had a good job, he was intrigued by the space program and wondered if there was any chance of joining LM and working for me. We talked well into the evening, and our personalities seemed to click. I was impressed with his knowledge and experience with engineering drawing production and working with Manufacturing to resolve problems on the shop floor. I also liked his helpful, frank attitude. “Look,” he said, cocking his head to one side and squinting through eyes that were mere slits, “I know what you’re thinking—here’s another hotshot who’s after my job. Well let me assure you that’s not the case. There’s no way I could even think about doing your job. But I’ve had experience in getting drawings out and helping the shops build from them, and I think that’s where you could use help right now.”

After checking with Rathke, Mullaney, and Gavin, all of whom had worked with Craft and thought highly of him, I offered him a job as assistant project engineer. Craft’s initial concentration would be on accelerating drawing releases and working with Manufacturing in drawing scheduling and interpretation. He tackled a difficult job with enthusiasm, persistence, and diplomacy and made a major contribution to our ability to schedule and deliver the drawings on time.

Ground-Support Equipment

GSE began holding weekly meetings with GSE Engineering and Manufacturing because of the variety and complexity of their end items and their differences from flight hardware. GSE was a relatively new specialty area in aerospace projects, growing rapidly in importance. Within Grumman, GSE was designed by the Materials and Processes Group of Manufacturing Engineering, which was originally formed to provide tooling and special process equipment and procedures to the Manufacturing Department. It was built either in Manufacturing’s tool shop or by the Equipment and Processes (E&P) shop, which handled mechanical and fluid devices. These were small, relatively underfunded groups offset from the mainstream Manufacturing and Manufacturing Engineering activities devoted to flight airplanes.

For the LM project GSE Engineering was assigned to me and Rathke and formed a triad reporting to us, along with Systems Engineering and Subsystems Engineering. Coming from Manufacturing Engineering instead of Aircraft (or Vehicle) Engineering, their heritage and loyalties were very different. The same was true of E&P Manufacturing, which had been integrated into LM Manufacturing. I had almost no prior contact with either of these GSE groups, so I had much to learn and a new cast of characters with whom to establish working relationships.

Several hundred GSE items had been identified, and the list was continually growing. They came in great variety, the most complex being the deliverable GSE end items. These were identified by a five-digit number series and name: for example, “61033 oxidizer servicing cart.” After use in LM final assembly and test at Bethpage, these end items were delivered to NASA with the LMs they supported and were installed and operated at Kennedy Space Center or White Sands. (Grumman operated an altitude rocket test facility at NASA’s White Sands, New Mexico, complex, where the LM ascent and descent propulsion systems and the reaction control systems were test fired.) Factory support and test equipment was not deliverable but normally stayed within Grumman for use in assembly and test operations. Items in both categories carried four-digit identification numbers: for example, “3022 ascent-stage workstand.” There were many miscellaneous items, such as adapters, cable sets, installation kits, and so on, that were often designed or revised at the last minute based upon need. The GSE Publications Group prepared installation and operations manuals for this equipment.

Joe Shea, recognizing that North American Aviation and Grumman were not coping adequately with the challenge of GSE, assigned one of his strongest managers, Rolf W. Lanzkron, to be GSE “czar” for the Apollo spacecraft. Hard driving, dedicated, and knowledgeable, Lanzkron attacked Apollo’s GSE problems like a man possessed. With his slicked-back hair, black horn-rimmed glasses, and dark suit, Lanzkron looked more like a lawyer than
an aerospace manager. With dynamic leadership, he quickly commanded the respect of the LM GSE people. He was a tough taskmaster, but he was as hard on himself as anyone else. His searching, pointed questions and comments seldom gave personal offense but shone a relentless spotlight on our failings and shortcomings.

Lanzkron transmitted a sense of urgency to all of us. His message was simple: the LM GSE mess must be quickly cleaned up and properly managed or the whole Apollo program would be held up by Grumman’s ineptness, with dire consequences for all involved. He held weekly GSE meetings in Bethpage, having just come on the “red-eye” flight from Los Angeles after a similar meeting at NAA the day before. His meeting started promptly at 7:00
A.M
.; the normal Grumman starting time of 8:00 was too late for him. With all Grumman’s GSE leadership assembled in the straight-backed chairs in the Plant 25 main conference room, Lanzkron sat at the conference table facing them and methodically went through the status, problems, and corrective actions of every end item in the GSE program. A large set of sliding wall boards were prepared and statused, listing the end items and showing their schedule position.

These meetings were long and painful. Lanzkron would not accept waffled answers to his questions. If the person he was cross-examining implicated someone else as part of his excuses, Lanzkron insisted that the third party be brought into the meeting immediately to defend himself or rebut the charges. If information was lacking, he demanded that it be located and presented before the meeting adjourned. The meetings frequently continued until 8:00 or 9:00
P.M
. with no break for lunch. When the meeting began Lanzkron prominently displayed on the table in front of him an apple and a glass of water, which everyone knew was his lunch. The Grumman people either brought brown-bag lunches or slipped out in ones and twos for a quick bite in the Plant 5 cafeteria.

After holding his first few LM GSE meetings, Lanzkron requested a management meeting with Gavin, Mullaney, Rathke, and me. He expressed shock and dismay at what he had found at Grumman. Calmly and methodically he presented the data our own people had given him, which showed that we were making no progress against the GSE schedules but steadily falling further behind. His devastating assessment was that Grumman’s GSE management was not up to the job and Grumman’s corporate GSE capability was inadequate. He demanded strong corrective action from management. Gavin and Mullaney admitted that we were deficient in the GSE part of the program and asked for time to prepare a corrective action plan. Smiling triumphantly, Lanzkron gave them two weeks. He confirmed the time of the follow-up meeting with Gavin before he left the room.

Unknown to me at the time, this pressure on GSE from NASA reinforced a similar thrust from the navy, which required more GSE to support fleet operations and maintenance of Grumman’s aircraft and their ever more complex
systems. This resulted in a major change in Grumman’s corporate organization—the creation of a new operating department for Integrated Logistic Support (ILS). On a level with the traditional departments of Engineering, Flight Test, and Manufacturing, ILS was responsible for every activity and product required to support Grumman’s aircraft and spacecraft in their operating environment. This included GSE design and manufacture, spare-parts provisioning, logistic-support analyses, and publications and manuals. The former Materials and Processes (M&P) Engineering and E&P Manufacturing groups were included in the new department, and there was a reallocation of Engineering and Manufacturing floor space to support ILS expansion. To lead this new organization management selected Edward Dalva, a veteran Grummanite and proven project engineer and manager who had directed the development of the W2F and E2A airborne early-warning aircraft systems. Dalva proved effective in infusing energy and a “can-do” spirit into what had been a neglected backwater activity. He greatly expanded Grumman’s sales in the ILS area, making it a major segment of the company’s business base and increasing our customers’ satisfaction with the total performance of Grumman’s products.

But LM could not wait for corporate GSE to get its house in order; we needed help now. Gavin and Mullaney moved to strengthen the LM GSE management. Our LM GSE project engineer, Dick Spinner, and the Manufacturing manager, Bob Wagenseil, were simply no match for Lanzkron, often withering pathetically under his onslaughts. John Coursen, a savvy project engineer with a record of accomplishment on the F10F and Fin programs, replaced Spinner, and Tony Oddo, assistant director of E&P Manufacturing, replaced Wagenseil. They recruited other capable people to bolster LM GSE management. Gavin and Mullaney also set in motion a plan to expand and integrate LM GSE manufacturing and test facilities, which were scattered throughout various tooling and E&P shops. In the brief follow-up meeting with Lanzkron, he nodded approvingly when these changes were announced and said he looked forward to seeing what these new people could do.