Apollo: The Race to the Moon Read Online Free PDF Page A

would be told to make revisions. That was for the technical content. At the end, the Editorial Office would vet the paper for syntax and grammar (so the prose would conform to “the way we say things at Langley”). It could take months to get what Langley called a “Technical Note” through the process.
    But if the pace was slow, the work was indeed elegant. Langley built superb facilities to do all its own development and testing. Langley never contracted any of its work to outsiders—a point of great pride. It had the best wind tunnels, the best model builders, the best technicians, and the most rigorous standards. An Air Force general, having listened to one of N.A.C.A.’s daylong technical briefings, once approached John Victory. The presentations had been superb, he said. Could Victory possibly send some people to the general’s command, to teach them N.A.C.A.’s methods? No point in it, Victory sniffed. The general’s people wouldn’t be able to use them. The Air Force didn’t have the necessary discipline.
    Langley also sustained a uniquely collegial atmosphere. “What was so marvelous about that N.A.C.A. group,” said a senior NASA official who himself came out of industry, “was the opportunity to do real research and to really move things forward. I’ve heard those stories from the fellows—‘I went to work for such-and-such company and found myself on a drawing board, said, “Aw, to hell with it,” and then went down to Langley and a little later I’m working with Tommy Thompson…’” Engineers could do that at Langley—walk in as bright young kids fresh out of school and start working side by side with some of the best aeronautical minds in the country—men like Tommy Thompson, Hartley Soulé, Bob Jones, and Abe Silverstein.
    In the Langley world there was a thin line between work and play. Some Langley engineers flew their own airplanes. Others designed their own houses, leading to some of the strangest-looking homes on the Eastern seaboard. But most commonly, the engineers of Langley would go home and build model airplanes—not from kits, but from their own designs, carved with their own tools, using their own hands. They had a club called the Brain Busters, after the Hampton label for Langley engineers. On Sunday afternoons they would go down to the open meadows adjoining the airfield, a senior branch chief like William Hewitt Phillips alongside a brash junior engineer like Max Faget or a local Hampton boy like Caldwell Johnson or a gangly shop technician like Jack Kinzler. Each would bring his latest creation, a marvelously crafted machine with design touches that might be years ahead of its time. They paid no attention to rank, only to how the airplane performed and how it could be improved.
    From this strange mixture of ambling Southern pace and obsessive perfectionism, family-like closeness and devotion to vocation, Langley turned out gems of aeronautical research. “It wasn’t like NASA,” reminisced Caldwell Johnson, who would become one of the lead designers of the Apollo spacecraft. “The press didn’t care about it—to them, it was a dull bunch of gray buildings with gray people who worked with slide rules and wrote long equations on blackboards.” But to the engineers within, it was a unique and wonderful place. “Just a splendid organization,” Johnson remembered fondly, and that’s the way all the old Langley hands talked. Langley in those years became a kind of Elysium for young engineers in love with aeronautical research.
    On the same day that NASA officially replaced the N.A.C.A., Keith Glennan, NASA’s first administrator, announced that the United States would put a man into space. The Russians were openly working toward this end; the United States didn’t want to be humiliated again; and Eisenhower (once again, reluctantly) went along with a small program to try to beat them. Looking for people to do it, Glennan turned to Langley and, more specifically, to