Moon Lander: How We Developed the Apollo Lunar Module (35 page)

Aside from all the problems with LM-1 itself, everything else in the test and checkout operation was simultaneously being developed and tried out for the first time. The ground-support equipment—the cable sets, connectors, adapters, fluid servicing carts, and propellant-loading equipment that connected LM-1 to the computer-controlled automated checkout equipment—also was being designed, built, tested, and evaluated by spacecraft checkout. Hundreds of GSE end items were required, each of which had to be qualified as a deliverable item to the government. Howard Peck, an assistant project engineer, led a team of several hundred engineers and technicians in the development of LM GSE. Even the ACE computers and consoles, developed and maintained by General Electric, were regularly modified and improved as experience was gained in actual test operations.

The test procedures specified each step of test operations, no matter how trivial or routine, and required constant rewriting and improvement to be usable under actual test conditions. It was not unusual at this stage for a test procedure to be rewritten three or four times before a document emerged that could actually be used to conduct the test. With continual interruptions for spacecraft and GSE troubleshooting, repairs, and modifications, test procedure rewrites, and ACE hardware and software upgrades, a nominal six-hour test could take weeks to complete.

That LM-1 advanced through its scheduled sequence of testing at all under such conditions was a tribute to the persistence and drive of the LM-1 test team, and particularly its leader, spacecraft team manager Jim Harrington. Jim was a short, freckle-faced Irishman with a brown cowlick and a bouncy, confident manner. He endeared himself to me during a high-level meeting with NASA’s top leadership. George Mueller had asked to meet Harrington, as he was concerned about LM-1’s inability to hold schedule. While questioning
him in front of the assembled NASA and Grumman top brass, including our president, Lew Evans, Mueller ventured an opinion that LM-1 was having so much trouble getting through its test and checkout phase that it could never be relied upon in flight, and that perhaps it should be converted to a “hangar queen” while LM-2 became the first flight vehicle.

“That’s a fine theory, Dr. Mueller,” said Jim, staring unblinkingly at him while flashing a beatific smile, “but you’re absolutely wrong.”

Harrington then outlined the various causes for LM-1 delays, many of which did not even involve the spacecraft itself but would have affected whatever LM was the first to undergo rigorous test and checkout. He ended up convincing Mueller and the other NASA officials that when it was delivered, LM-1 would be a reliable, high-quality product.

Jim’s capable leadership and unfailing good humor carried LM-1 forward on the assembly floor too, and by late May it had completed the final and comprehensive all-systems test, the redoubtable OCP 61018. The ascent and descent stages were then demated and moved for pressurized fluid systems testing in the reinforced concrete bunker cold flow facility, located across the parking lot behind the Plant 5 LM assembly hangar, and we scheduled the formal customer acceptance readiness review with NASA for 21 June.

The CARR was such a tragicomic circus that I recounted it at length in
chapter 1
. Suffice to say here that we did, after a long, difficult day of briefings and “chit” dispositions, receive approval from NASA’s Apollo Spacecraft Program Office to ship LM-1 to KSC, subject to cleaning up a long “crab list” of questions, documentation, and minor retests. On 22 June 1967, I stood on the Grumman Bethpage runway in a stiff wind and bright sunshine and watched as the specially designed shipping containers holding LM-1’s ascent and descent stages were loaded into the bloated belly of the “Guppy” aircraft, a modified Boeing Stratocruiser used to transport the outsized Apollo spacecraft. With great relief I watched the huge airplane slowly lift off and climb skyward, using most of the six-thousand-foot runway. It was bound for KSC—our first flight spacecraft delivery.

Our relief was short lived. LM-1, scornfully derided as “junk, garbage” by NASA’s Petrone, was promptly rejected by receiving inspection at KSC due to plumbing leaks, triggering Skurla’s demands for action. A concentrated leak-fix effort led by Will Bischoff, our subsystem engineer for Structures and Mechanical Systems, was successful, but the damage was done. LM-1 had given Grumman a bad name for quality at KSC, a bad name from which we would be slow to recover.

A week after the LM-1 CARR, NASA and Grumman held a CARR on LTA-8. This was much smaller than the LM-1 extravaganza, and it was held in the austere but acoustically adequate conference room in Plant 25. Titterton did not attend, nor did Low; the NASA and Grumman delegations were chaired by Gilruth and Joe Gavin, respectively. This CARR did not result in approval to ship LTA-8 to the Manned Spacecraft Center but generated a long series of action items and discrepancy reports to be worked off. Some of these required lengthy rework in the shop, such as an action to replace all the cockpit instrument panels with another set in which the wiring had the latest fire retardant potting, booties and overcoating. The all-systems test, OCP 61018, had to be repeated after the new panels were installed. The manned LTA-8, in addition to requiring all the changes resulting from the Apollo 1 fire, also had an extensive DFI installation, which had at least as many problems as LM-1’s version of DFI.

Tom Kelly (
left
) and Dick McLaughlin at Grumman-Bethpage for delivery of the LM-1. (Courtesy Northrop/Grumman Corporation) (
Illustration credit 12.3
)

An Uphill Climb

Gradual improvement in S/CAT’s performance took place over the summer, as we worked simultaneously on LTA-8, LM-2 to LM-5, and M-6. The latter was a steel boiler-plate mockup of the LM crew compartment completely outfitted inside with flight-type plumbing, wiring, and equipment, in which ignition tests would be conducted in 5 psia pure oxygen to verify that our cabin was safely fire resistant. In September we completed the action items and DR closeouts for LTA-8 and delivered that unique, nonstandard vehicle to MSC for installation in the large thermal vacuum chamber, where it would perform an extensive, manned test program that was rife with uncommon test conditions and potential safety issues. At least it was out of Bethpage and we could concentrate on building and testing flight LMs!

Another step forward was the official designation of Spacecraft Assembly and Test as a major operational organization within the LM program at Grumman, replacing the temporary and rather vague command-post structure. President Lew Evans kicked off the new S/CAT organization with a rousing speech to the program and the corporate department heads, during which he also formalized the position of the spacecraft directors as leaders of the assembly and test teams for each LM. The spacecraft directors were all highly experienced test engineers, mostly from the Flight Test Department, and one of them, LM-3 director Tom Attridge, was a senior experimental test pilot. Evans challenged the new organization to rapidly improve its ability to increase quality and maintain schedules. I was given carte blanche to add up to fifty test engineers to S/CAT, either by recruiting internally from Engineering and Flight Test or by external hiring. I followed through quickly on this, since I already had a list of internal prospects whom I had intended to pursue as soon as I received budget authority.

The spacecraft directors were a feisty group, accustomed to command positions and pumped up by Lew Evans’s charge to straighten out S/CAT, getting it to meet schedules and maintain quality. They worked hard to make their LMs the best of all, and developed a dedicated engineering and manufacturing team devoted to that particular vehicle.

An upturn in our fortunes was the addition to S/CAT management of Lynn Radcliffe, who three years earlier had established a lunar module rocket propulsion test facility at a new NASA site on the White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Radcliffe built it into an effective test facility where the LM ascent and descent propulsion systems and reaction control system were test
fired under simulated high-altitude conditions, using both boiler-plate and flight-weight test rigs. Joe Gavin wisely observed that Wright and I were wearing down from the unremitting strain of endless deadlines and problems and around-the-clock operations. We needed help at our level, real
help
. The scale of S/CAT operations had grown to involve hundreds of people, all being pushed hard to do quality work but also meet schedules, and personnel and human relations problems were escalating. Radcliffe’s greatest strengths lay in human relations, administration and organization, areas that sorely needed strengthening in S/CAT.

After all the internal power plays of the corporate department heads, Radcliffe was a breath of fresh air. He declared that he was working
for me 100 percent
, not as a supernumerary reporting back door to Gavin. With his open features and winning smile, he was outgoing and infectiously enthusiastic—just what we needed. Wright and I spent a full Saturday with him in the trailers getting to know each other—our personality “chemistry” blended perfectly, and we achieved instant trust and rapport. Radcliffe would be deputy S/CAT director of Operations, reporting to me, on an equal level with Wright, who was deputy S/CAT director of Engineering. He took a special assignment to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of the S/CAT organization and people and develop a plan to “humanize” the operation, which we agreed was simply using its people, not developing or motivating them.

Radcliffe first tackled the problem of assigning key engineers and technicians to individual LM test teams. The test teams were staffed with supervisors and a few key operatives permanently assigned to a particular LM, but the bulk of the personnel required for LM assembly and test was drawn from a pool of skilled people assigned as required for each shift, test, or assembly activity. Since some individuals became recognized as the best in their particular craft, fierce competition existed between the teams to get the “best” people assigned. This competition for scarce resources consumed management time and energy, frequently requiring Wright or me to be the final arbiter.

Radcliffe enlisted Wright to help devise a more efficient approach to personnel allocation. They decided to divide the S/CAT personnel into four permanent teams containing all the skills and manpower required to build and test the LMs. Three of the teams were for the LMs in the S/CAT flow—one in the early phase of assembly and test, one midphase, and one late phase. The fourth team covered test preparations and integration—the operational checkout procedures, test preparation sheets, ground-support equipment validations, and quality documentation without which nothing could be done on the S/CAT assembly floor.

To finalize and implement the “full team” approach, we summoned all the spacecraft directors and team leadership to a marathon “football draft” meeting, at which Radcliffe and Wright explained the concept and presented their version of the “draft picks,” with 110 to 120 people named to each team. After
a day of haggling, a final version of the list was solidified, with the proviso that informal loans of individuals could be worked out between spacecraft directors at any time if both sides agreed. This new arrangement proved more efficient, largely eliminating the disputes over people assignments and developing a healthy esprit de corps and competition between teams. When a lunar module was delivered to KSC some of the team went with it, while the rest of the people were recycled into the team of the new LM just entering the S/CAT flow.

Radcliffe was also concerned that most S/CAT personnel were widely scattered over the Grumman complex, which made it more difficult to develop a cohesive team spirit. Most S/CAT people rotated periodically onto the assembly floor in Plant 5 to perform scheduled tests or assembly operations. When not required on the floor, they returned to their office or shop areas to hold meetings, review results, prepare for the next activity, or complete documentation. As S/CAT grew into a three-shift, seven-day-a-week operation with fourteen to fifteen hundred people, its people were housed in eight different Grumman Bethpage plants. A larger building to house S/CAT people was urgently needed.

Patiently probing the Grumman corporate bureaucracy, Radcliffe located an available building across the road from Plant 5, formerly owned by the printer who did the LM proposal, and persuaded Tripp and Gavin to have the company buy and refurbish it for S/CAT. Because of the time required for the purchase and extensive renovations, this valuable improvement in S/CAT operations did not take place until I was about to turn S/CAT leadership over to my successor.

After an overwrought test conductor broke down sobbing at his console one night and later revealed his concern about medical symptoms that had recently appeared, we established a program of medical examinations for over 465 S/CAT people, to provide a baseline and identify individuals who should avoid stressful assignments or long hours. We set up a training program in supervisory management for all test conductors and managers, since we had thrust many people into managerial positions without any guidance or training. Although they called it “charm school” and downplayed its importance, it was well attended (250 people), and our people took it as evidence that at last somebody cared about
them
.