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

stripped of their best men. Gilruth recalled later that Thompson “was all for me, because he knew that if we didn’t succeed, NASA wouldn’t succeed. But when I gave him my memo of all the people I wanted he said, ‘Okay, Bob, but for every one that you want to take from Langley, I want to add one that I want you to take from Langley.’” And so that’s how it worked out. “All of them to this day wonder which half they were in,” Caldwell Johnson wryly observed.
    Practically everyone was young. At forty-five, Gilruth was the old man. His deputy, Charles Donlan, was forty-two. The head of engineering, Max Faget, was thirty-seven, as was Chuck Mathews, head of flight operations. The rest were mostly in their early thirties or twenties, all the way down to the baby of the original forty-five, Glynn Lunney at twenty-one.
    They were uniformly young partly because so few of the senior staff from the old N.A.C.A. wanted to be part of the Space Task Group. In 1958 and 1959, manned space flight did not look like the kind of venture on which to bet one’s career. So far, Congress and the President had authorized only Project Mercury, in which a man riding in one of the Space Task Group’s capsules atop one of von Braun’s Redstones would be lobbed into the upper reaches of the atmosphere; on subsequent Mercury missions, he would be launched into earth orbit on the Air Force’s Atlas. No one knew what was supposed to happen after this initial series of launches. No one even knew whether men could function in space. No one knew whether there was anything useful for them to do even if they could function. And the whole thing was going to be unspeakably expensive, with no obvious return on the investment. To most of the senior engineers at Langley, manned space flight had the earmarks of a fad.
    Nor was it just that manned space flight was a risky career path. To many of the Langley engineers, it was an unattractive way to spend one’s time. “You must remember,” said Chris Kraft, the man who would later become famous as the manned space program’s director of Flight Operations, “that ‘space’ was a word that wasn’t even allowed in the N.A.C.A. library. If it was anything that had to do with space, that didn’t have anything to do with airplanes, so why were we working on it?” To one young engineer in P.A.R.D., it seemed as if the people who went to the Space Task Group were outcasts. A senior Langley engineer came to him and told him not to go with the Space Task Group. “I have a job for you in my division,” he said to the young man. “You don’t want to ruin your career. There’s nothing going to come of this, and you’re going to be hurt by it.”
    It just wasn’t the Langley Way, this business of “implementing a manned satellite project,” as the order creating the Space Task Group charter had phrased their mission. Langley didn’t “implement” things; Langley did research, and it did everything itself. This manned space project was going to contract work to the outside. It would turn its engineers into bureaucrats. Gilruth remembered colleagues coming up to him during the first years and asking him, “Well, have you let any good contracts today?” Far from envying him his new position, most of his peers thought that he had chosen “a horrible fate,” and none of them took the same road. Not one of the other engineers of Gilruth’s age or older transferred into the program. “They wanted to support us,” said one engineer who went to the Space Task Group, “but through the traditional research avenues.” Thus, in the years that followed, old-line Langley personnel would affect the decision on how to get to the moon and would help to develop the lunar-landing trainer at Langley. But they did not join up.
    The Langley engineers were right to be suspicious. The Space Task Group was going to cut corners and ignore protocol in ways that pained those trained in the Langley Way. It was