Moon Lander: How We Developed the Apollo Lunar Module (5 page)

The briefing was held in Grumman’s mahogany-paneled board room to an audience seated around a large boat-shaped table. Grumman’s president, E. Clinton “Clint” Towl (pronounced “Toll”), and executive vice president, William T. “Bill” Schwendler, were there. Both were founders, in December 1929, of Grumman Aircraft Engineering Corporation in Baldwin, Long Island. Clint Towl led the fledgling company in business management and administration. A reserved man of carefully chosen words and dry wit, he had curly brown hair and an intense stare behind small, gold-rimmed eyeglasses.

Bill Schwendler had been hand-picked by Leroy “Roy” Grumman at the predecessor Loening Corporation to be his engineering protégé and problem solver. Schwendler absorbed everything then known about aircraft design from his talented pilot-engineer-inventor mentor and became the company’s chief engineer as Roy Grumman inevitably became more enmeshed in sales, customer relations, and general management. Bill recruited Vice President of Engineering Dick Hutton and other Grumman engineering leaders and guided the rapid growth of the Engineering Department. He had a ruddy, angular face, blond hair so thin and fine that he appeared almost bald, and vivid blue eyes, which he fixed unblinkingly upon his subject.

Two of Grumman’s earliest employees were also there: Vice President of Engineering Richard “Dick” Hutton, who was chosen by Schwendler to succeed him as chief engineer, and Senior Vice President George Titterton, who directed Contracts, Business Administration, and Marketing. Chief Technical Engineer Ira Grant Hedrick, Grumman’s most respected analytical engineer, rounded out the decision-making group.

On my first visit to the board room, I was awed by this corporate horsepower, some of whom I met for the first time. My briefing went smoothly as
rehearsed. They put me at ease and asked reasonable questions to which, for the most part, I had answers: How fast is the spacecraft going when it reenters the atmosphere? What temperatures does this produce? Are there problems with meteorites and radiation in space? How will the crew know what maneuvers they must perform to reach the Moon?

Schwendler, Hutton, and Hedrick were intent on the technical briefing and wanted to thoroughly understand the basic spacecraft and mission design concepts. The idea of zero gravity caught their imagination; they likened it to a prolonged inside loop in an airplane. (Such a loop was later adopted for training astronauts.) “You’d have to secure everything so it wouldn’t float around. I’ve seen clipboards, maps, and pencils wandering all over the cockpit during a loop that cancels out gravity,” commented Dick Hutton.

Towl and Titterton bore in hard on the management briefing, worried about the size of the investment required by Grumman. After more than two hours of intense discussion, Sanial, Ferdman, and I were dismissed. Later that afternoon Al Munier returned to his office and called Sanial and me inside. The deliberations were still in progress, but he had heard enough before being asked to leave to suspect that a “no prime bid” decision was possible. He wanted to prepare us for that outcome.

“Al, they can’t do that,” I protested. “Not after all the good work we’ve done. We know more about how to do the Apollo mission and design the spacecraft than anyone in the county.”

“For Pete’s sake,” Sanial chimed in, “some of our ideas are in the RFP. We’re in the catbird’s seat.”

“You kids don’t realize—you’re asking them to bet their company.” He fluttered his hands in a far-out gesture. “And on a project that sounds like science fiction. Most people in the company think we’re all crazy.”

“It’s not impossible—you know that, Al. It’s just something new, like supersonic flight. It’s all just engineering and physics and know-how. Grumman has the talent and the tools. We could go to the Moon,” I shouted.

“Take it easy, Tommy,” Munier said in a patronizing tone. “Don’t yell at me; I’m just the messenger. I just wanted to warn you what might happen upstairs.” I went home burning with suppressed rage and hardly slept that night.

The next morning Joe Gavin assembled the team in the Space Sciences enclave and announced that Grumman would not bid Apollo as prime contractor. “Our senior management thinks its too big a job for us,” Gavin said. “We’d be risking the whole company, and the jobs of everyone at Grumman, on this single project. It’s not just the money involved. If the company failed before the world in this project, it would never recover. We’ll have to find a berth on someone else’s team.”

“What do you think, Joe?” someone called out.

“I’m an eternal optimist, so I think we could do it, but I don’t have the whole company to worry about,” he replied.

“What about our study teammates, Honeywell and STL?” another asked.

“They’ll have to join someone else’s team also.”

After some grousing we went back to our desks to consider our options. Gavin and Munier placed calls to some of the avowed prime bidders with whom we had prior discussions. Within a week Gavin and Titterton again addressed our group to announce a deal with General Electric: Grumman would support GE’s bid and have major responsibility for the command module. We would all soon be temporarily assigned to a proposal headquarters that GE was setting up in Philadelphia.

A few days later, before we headed for Philadelphia, Gavin and Munier put me in charge of the Grumman technical proposal effort. Although disappointed, Sanial accepted this change graciously. Coming out of Munier’s office, where Joe and Al had privately broken the news to him, he came over to my desk, shook my hand self-consciously, and promised his full support.

General Electric set up a large Apollo proposal headquarters on two floors at 30 Broad Street, in a modern office skyscraper in downtown Philadelphia, not far from Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell. Although the GE Space Division had moved to a new campus in suburban Valley Forge, they still had facilities downtown, including 30 Broad and the Chestnut Street building in which the division began, which gave them a convenient base from which to quickly staff and equip the proposal center. Logan Cowles, a stern, silver-haired veteran GE engineer, was Apollo program manager, reporting to the division president, Hilliard Paige. George R. Arthur was proposal manager, and Ladislaus W “Lad” Warzecha his deputy; they had headed GE’s funded Apollo feasibility study.

With the rest of Grumman’s Apollo team, I moved into a hotel near the proposal headquarters and spent five or six days a week working there, returning home via Amtrak and the Long Island Railroad for one- or two-day weekends. Isolated from our homes and families, we poured all our energies into the proposal, often putting in fourteen- to sixteen-hour workdays.

The response deadline for the Apollo RFP was early October. GE led an intense, well-organized proposal effort, and the proposal headquarters itself was spacious and fully equipped. Each team member company had its own area, with partitioned cubicles and offices for the managers and supervisors and open “bullpen” areas for the workers. The attractive environment was well lighted, with window walls and recessed fluorescent lighting overhead, carpeted floors, and comfortable air conditioning—a major improvement over Grumman’s PD rabbit warren back home. Near the GE office area were large conference rooms and an open area in which everyone could assemble for general meetings.

GE established a schedule of daily and weekly meetings that assured good communication among the proposal staff, which at its peak numbered more than six hundred people. Specific assignments were given, and the results
were reviewed with technical management groups in the various specialties, selected to include all the participating companies.

GE introduced us to the use of “flip charts”: large, easel-mounted pads of paper for developing and recording the ideas of brainstorming sessions and meetings. One session developed the idea that we could get “extra credit” and increase the depth of our proposal by conducting a comparative study of the various ways of performing the lunar landing mission. This was not required by NASA’s RFP, which was largely silent on the mission approach to be used because NASA had not yet seriously confronted this choice.

The team members listed all possible mission approaches and the pros and cons of each. Each company team was asked to choose one of the approaches to study. I reviewed the options well into the night with Stern, Watson, and others and decided that lunar-orbit rendezvous—using a vehicle that could separate from the spacecraft in orbit around the Moon, land on the surface, and then launch itself back into orbit to join up with the spacecraft again—was the simplest way to get to the Moon and back. The next morning Gavin agreed, and we volunteered to conduct the LOR study for GE.

Erick Stern led a brief but useful study that produced a description of how the LOR mission could be performed, gave a rough cut of the size and weight of the major flight elements (booster and spacecraft), and outlined the major unknowns and technology hurdles. Most notable was our finding that the mission could be launched with a single Saturn 5, the huge rocket booster under development by Wernher von Braun and his team of German rocket engineers at NASA’s Marshall Spaceflight Center (MSFC) in Huntsville, Alabama. The competing approaches all required at least two Saturn 5 launches or a much larger booster rocket, dubbed Nova. LOR’s major risks were the lunar-orbit rendezvous maneuver itself, conducted far from Earth and ground-based guidance systems, and the development of a unique manned spacecraft optimized for lunar landing and liftoff.

The proposal was wrapped up in early October, at which point GE took over the final editing, publication, and delivery. Venturing forth from the office tower for an unaccustomed leisurely lunch in a nearby restaurant, I was surprised at the cool midday breeze. I had missed summer!

To help me unwind from work on the proposal, Joan and I enjoyed a long Columbus Day weekend on Nantucket. We had a brief but happy escape and discovered a wonderful island resort to which we returned many times with our young children. We liked to stroll down to nearby Brant’s Point in the evening and watch the last ferry from the mainland make the tight turn around the lighthouse, its festive lights dancing on the dark water. Then I would look up at the Moon and say, “Look up there, kids. Your Daddy’s going to build a spaceship to go there someday.”

“Can we go too?” was the usual reply, accompanied by a frown from Joan, who knew we hadn’t won the competition yet. That was my major worry
also. Getting to the Moon should be easy compared with winning the contract, I thought.

On 28 November 1961 NASA announced that North American Aviation (NAA) was the Apollo spacecraft contractor. I collapsed into an emotional funk. In the drab PD mezzanine, the gloom was funereal. Sanial and I hung black crepe over the blackboard in our cubicle and wrote a note on it: “Thanks for all your help and hard work. We’ll win the next one!”

There was not much more we could say. I was discouraged by the loss and felt that things might have been different if we had been prime contractor. Not that I could fault the way GE ran the proposal, but I did think they had assembled too large and complex a team.

A Second Chance

As the gloom subsided, Sanial, Munier, and I decided that our best remaining chance would be to take the LOR side dish from our work with GE and make it a main course: we would sell the LOR mission approach to NASA and then compete for the lunar landing spacecraft it required. The lunar lander was another exotic space flying machine that Grumman was as qualified as anyone else to produce. Gavin and Hedrick counseled that although this seemed to be a logical plan, perhaps we should seek NASA’s advice directly. Grant Hedrick called his old friend Bob Gilruth, with whom he shared an interest in the design of high-speed hydrofoil watercraft, and set up a meeting for us with NASA’s Space Task Group.

Early on a clear, cold Pearl Harbor Day we left the Bethpage airport in Grumman’s G-1 propjet executive airplane, bound for NASA’s airfield at the Langley Research Center in tidewater Virginia. The group included Gavin, Hedrick, Ferdman, Sanial, Watson, Stern, and others. We planned to present a summary of our latest study results on LOR and notional designs of the lunar lander. We spread out our material on the tables in the luxuriously appointed airplane and nervously reviewed the points we wanted to make. Unstated, but palpably present, was the realization that this was our last chance at Apollo.

We were warmly greeted by Bob Gilruth and Max Faget. A number of STG engineers, including Bob Piland, Owen Maynard, and Caldwell “Cadwell” Johnson, gathered to hear our briefings. The briefings went on all morning, with questioning and discussion by the NASA people and steadily growing attendance. I felt that we made a strong case for LOR and showed good understanding of the principal problems and tradeoffs involved in the design of the lunar lander. When we spilled out into the hallway at the lunch break, I overheard Gilruth tell Faget, “I think you should show them everything we’ve done.”

After lunch in the building’s cafeteria, Faget told us they were impressed with our results, which seemed to match NASA’s own internal study findings.
He proposed that they show us their results and compare them with ours. For the next three hours we held detailed engineer-to-engineer discussions on the merits of LOR versus the competing approaches: direct ascent and Earth-orbit rendezvous (EOR).

We also looked at NASA’s designs for the lander, which they were calling the lunar excursion module, or LEM.
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Of particular interest were comparisons of configurations and equipment arrangements and weight estimates for the NASA and Grumman versions. There were novel features of each group’s designs, but the total weight estimates were approximately the same. Gilruth and Faget said that they believed LOR was the approach NASA should select for the Apollo mission, although this opinion was still not prevalent among NASA management.
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They thought we had made a good start with our LM designs and encouraged us to pursue them further in anticipation of a possible industry competition.