I also visited the Goddard Space Flight Center in Beltsville, Maryland, on the road from Washington to Baltimore. Goddard was an offshoot of the Navy that had been given the job of coming up with the Vanguard satellite during the International Geophysical Year, 1957-58. I also took a September trip to the west coast, where I visited the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). Located very near the Rose Bowl in Pasadena, JPL was a key operation for NASA at the time, with responsibility for Ranger and Mariner, the robotic lunar and martian probes. But it was also a NASA oddball, because it was not civil service but privately operated by the California Institute of Technology (Caltech). All the other centers were run by people on the government payroll. This caused considerable difficulties for Abe Silverstein, director of Space Flight Programs at our Washington office. Being private, JPL didn't like the firm hand of Abe Silverstein on the back of its neck, but there was reason for Abe to keep his hand there. We had about $100 million worth of effort being contracted out of JPL at that time. What's more, Caltech was bleeding off funds as "their fee" to pay for the risk they were taking. When we tried to negotiate these matters with Caltech's president, we were told, in effect, "If you don't like it, lump it. If you want us to run the program, we're going to run it our way." At an impasse, we finally decided that not all lunar and planetary probe exploration would go to JPL, as previously planned. We gave the Lunar Orbiter program, which JPL was expecting to manage, to Langley instead. This was a controversial move. Langley had never run a big project before, and there was a real question as to whether we ought to take our research people and put them on one. But we did it; Langley did a miraculous job; and we finally got JPL's attention.

My September tour of the centers set a good pattern for my years at NASA. I tried to move outside the circle of ten or fifteen people assembled around my office as often as possible. If an issue came up involving Goddard or one of the other centers, I would try, to the extent that time permitted, to get out to Beltsville or wherever the action was taking place. In this way I could understand the issues better while demonstrating that headquarters cared.

Moving the Decimal Point

I was highly impressed with the number of extremely competent people I met in my first tour of NASA. What's more, there was an extraordinary team spirit in the whole endeavor. I won't say there weren't jealousies or animosities, but these struck me as minimal compared with those I had seen in academic and industrial settings. At NASA, there seemed to be a lot less competition and a lot more getting on with national objectives.

Like every other citizen, I had wondered about the inaction and waste of bureaucracies and about the heavy load they put on taxpayers' shoulders. So it came as a great surprise to find that these bureaucrats were, in the main, able, dedicated people. And when it came time to visit Capitol Hill and the White House, I was equally impressed with the level of competence of most everyone I met.

Everything at NASA was much bigger than anything I had ever encountered before. In my fifteen years at MIT, the largest program I had been involved with had a total budget of about $20 million over eight years. RCA operated on a billion-dollar budget, but my program was a tiny piece of that, with an annual budget of no more than $15 million. Now suddenly I was the de facto general manager of a billiondollar-a-year program, with resources dotted all over the country and countless contractor personnel intimately linked to every phase of it.

In a way, though, it was only a matter of moving the decimal point over a couple of places. Or this was how it seemed to me. World War II had forced quite a few people in my generation to move into big jobs without much prior experience. In the armed services, twenty-fiveyear-olds had been promoted to full colonel in the field. If it hadn't been for the war, I wouldn't have been an instructor at MIT at the age of twenty-three, before getting my master's or doctor's degree. Ordinarily, you're not considered for a faculty appointment at MIT until you've got your doctor's degree.

Still, at RCA I had never had my boss come into my office and say, "Come with me. We need to go over to the White House to talk with the President and his budget director about a couple of things." And there was no denying the excitement and electricity of working in what would become perhaps the glamor program in American gov

ernment during the 1960s. I was working shoulder to shoulder with people who were going to orbit the Earth and fly to the Moon.

The Question of Organization

NASA was not all glamor during my first nine months there. The agency had so far failed, in the three years since Sputnik, to catch up with the Russians. We weren't even close. The American public had watched Vanguard and Centaur rockets blowing up on live TV. Only about half of our launches had even left the pad. For good reason, Congress and the public did not have the necessary confidence in the program, and NASA was getting lacerated by the press. We had to be pretty hard-boiled inside of NASA. That's essentially what I was brought in to do as general manager.

When I discussed this with Keith, he said, "We want you to get in there and take charge!" He clenched his fist and made a driving motion, and that was about it. I took this to mean that there was a real need to get on top of the management of the activities at each of the centers. But it wasn't yet clear how to do so.

After about a month on the job, he asked me, "When are you really going to get ahold of this organization?"

I said, "I'm working on it, Keith."

He said, "You'd better move."

This is how NASA was organized when I arrived in 1960. In the Office of the Administrator, there were two people, Keith and his deputy, Hugh Dryden, the only two presidential appointees at NASA. As associate administrator, directly in line beneath them, I was NASA's highest-ranking nonpolitical appointee. Eventually, I had a series of deputies-Tom Dixon, Earl Hilburn, and others. I was slow to name them at first. In response to Keith's promptings, I said, “I don't want to think about a deputy until I know what my job is. Then I can figure out who will be my deputy." It was only after I had been in government for some time that I realized that deputies were not only common, they were in most cases an absolute necessity. The heaving and hauling required of each key individual is so great that it's pretty hard to get the job done without a team of two (sometimes three) to put their shoulders to the same wheel.

Below my office in the line organization were the so-called program offices located at our Washington headquarters. Space Flight Programs, under Abe Silverstein, was responsible for satellites of all types, from meteorological to manned. The Large Launch Vehicles office, under Don Ostrander, had responsibility for all of the booster stages and rocket engines used to launch satellites. Research and Advanced Technology (what amounted to the old NACA) was initially run by Ira ("Ez") Abbott, an old-line bureaucrat. This office continued state-of-the-art research in aerodynamics, propulsion, materials, and so on. The NACA research functions became less and less critical in the scheme of NASA as the nation's space program grew in stature, but we continued to believe that it was important to the country that research continue in aeronautics and long-term space technology.

Beneath the program offices in the hierarchy were the centers, out of which all contracting was done. In other words, the centers were where the work was accomplished. In the organization chart, each center fell under the program office with which it was most closely associated. So Abe Silverstein had Goddard and JPL. Don Ostrander's principal operation was Marshall. Ira Abbott had the old NACA laboratories at Langley, Ames, and Lewis, as well as Edwards Flight Test Center in the Mojave Desert.

Having centers and program offices might seem a redundancy. Why not have the people in the field do the work and forget about headquarters staff? Because an agency has to plan for the future, and it has to defend its programs before Congress, the media, and the public. If people kept coming in from the field to look after these things, work would never get done. There was also a crying need for systems management, a responsibility of the program offices. We had to be sure that the capsule (designed at Langley and in Houston) and the rocket (designed at Marshall) fitted together!

There was always a very delicate balance between the program office and center. After a couple of years I had serious complaints from Harry J. Goett at Goddard, who said, "If I'm running this laboratory, I want to have the power to refuse having people from headquarters come in if I don't want them on my territory. I'm going to be the one to decide what goes on in my center."

That may have sounded like common sense. Only there were fifty

projects going on at Goddard, and there was no way that one person could stay on top of them all. The director would be the bottleneck. The people at the program level were complaining that they were not allowed in the Goddard door, and Harry was complaining that he was supposed to be responsible for something while decisions were being made he didn't know anything about!

We finally came to the sad day when I had to ask Harry Goett to come and see me. I had known him since 1948. I admired and respected him, but I had to say, "Harry, you're not able to handle this job." C'est la guerre. Harry then became special assistant to the NASA administrator and a year later took a job in the aerospace industry.

Despite its inherent logic, the NASA organizational structure was fraught with contradictions. One example: Abe Silverstein was responsible for Space Flight Programs, but the Space Task Group, set up under Bob Gilruth at Langley to develop manned capsules, officially reported not to Abe, but to Ez Abbott, because Ez had the old NACA centers under him. Another concern was George Low's place in the organization chart. As program chief of Manned Space Flight, he had virtually the most important job in all of NASA, yet he was several levels down on the chart. He didn't even report to Abe directly.

I addressed some of these concerns at lunch one day with Keith Glennan and Hugh Dryden. I suggested that we make George Low director of Manned Space Flight, reporting directly to Abe Silverstein. I also suggested that, in effect, we promote Bob Gilruth and have him report to Abe rather than through Tommy Thompson and Ira Abbott. These steps were taken immediately and addressed a further concern of mine, that manned flight be given top priority. I believed that the future viability and funding of NASA would largely depend on whether or not we were successful in putting an American in space and bringing him back safely.

Still, as for taking charge (in Keith Glennan's fist-pumping sense) of this large, unwieldy network of program offices and centers, I had a hard time. The way the organization was set up, it was difficult for me to exercise my responsibility. There was no system of checks and balances. There was no place for me to grab hold of the total NASA program. It was not until the following summer when, under a new administrator, I took fiscal control of the organization, that I was able effectively to "take charge."