HOW IT WAS MANAGED

WHEN John F.Kennedy committed the U.S. to landing men on the moon before the end of this decade, virtually none of the equipment capable of making the half-million-mile journey existed. Now, eight years later, a great spaceship made of more than 15 million parts is poised for the flight. If Apollo 11 completes its momentous mission, Kennedy's pledge will have been redeemed with five months to spare--a remarkable accomplishment. It is all the more remarkable for the fact that man did not actually enter the space age until twelve years ago, when the Russians launched Sputnik.

The U.S. space program was truly embryonic when Kennedy, on May 25, 1961, set a lunar landing as the nation's goal. Only two months earlier, he had decided to put off a decision on whether to go ahead with the Apollo program. Then came Cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin's orbital flight, the first ever made by man. Two days after the Soviet breakthrough, Kennedy convened the nation's top space experts at the White House. "If somebody can just tell me how to catch up," he said. "There is nothing more important."

Neither, it seemed, was there anything more difficult. Before Kennedy made his moon-landing announcement, the nation's entire manned space experience totaled 15 min. 20 sec.--the length of Alan Shepard's suborbital fling down the Atlantic test range on May 5, 1961. Rockets had been blowing up on their Cape Canaveral launch pads with humiliating frequency; from 1958 to 1964, the U.S. suffered 13 straight failures in its efforts to send rockets around or onto the moon.

Most discouraging of all was the estimate that more than 10,000 separate tasks would have to be performed before the U.S. could put a man on the moon. James Webb, administrator of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration between 1961 and 1968, compared the problem to "having to take a caterpillar and make it into a butterfly when we had never seen a butterfly."

That the butterfly now exists is, above all, a tribute to superb management techniques. This was the biggest and most imaginative Government-industry-university team ever put together for a single project. At its peak in 1966, Apollo involved 400,000 men and women at 120 universities and laboratories and 20,000 industrial firms; its budget for that year alone was $5.9 billion.

In building the team, NASA all but threw away the rule book. It was clear, for example, that university brains would have to be tapped. But instead of following the usual practice of giving Government scholarships directly to stu dents, and allowing the students to shop for berths at a few Ivy League universities, NASA turned the money ($100 million so far) over to a large number of universities, thus ensuring greater cross-fertilization of ideas.

NASA took a similar tack toward American industry. At the outset, General Electric approached NASA with a proposal that it be awarded a single massive contract covering the entire program. The agency demurred. For one thing, space officials feared that a single contractor might at times decide to manufacture a part or system itself rather than buy it elsewhere. For another, the officials reasoned that a fruitful exchange of technology would occur if many companies were involved. Accordingly, NASA selected 16 prime contractors, who, in turn, have assigned work to tens of thousands of subcontractors. The firms range in size from North American Rockwell, which has 105,000 employees and builds the giant Saturn 5, to the Space Electronics Supply Co. of Melbourne, Fla., a two-man operation that makes fuse holders for Apollo.

When fire killed Astronauts Gus Grissom, Ed White and Roger Chaffee on the launch pad during a routine test in 1967, the trauma rocked the space agency at every level. Work stopped, tempers flared and accusations flew. The attempt to land on the moon was set back at least a year. But the tragedy spurred NASA to tighten up operations and to fashion a mechanism that has performed almost flawlessly ever since.

For every dollar now spent on designing and manufacturing Apollo parts, another dollar is spent testing them. Before an Apollo vehicle is approved for flight, it is tested, probed, checked and rechecked for four months; no fewer than 25,000 pages of procedures cover the painstaking process. "One of the keys to success," says Rocco A. Petrone, 43, director of the Apollo launch operations, "is the quality testing that the program has taken to the nth degree."

Such unrelenting attention to the most microscopic detail carries right through the missions. The astronauts themselves carry 40 lbs. of documents aboard the spacecraft--flight plans, check lists, manuals and so on. While they are aloft, a NASA team keeps track, day and night, of nearly 40,000 key people in the contractor network. Thus, should a tiny valve go awry during a mission, an official at a console in Houston can pick up a telephone at any hour and discuss the problem with the man who designed the part. Says Lieut. General Samuel Phillips, manager of the Apollo program, "We tattoo responsibility on a man's head." Even so, the members of the NASA team have not forgotten how to cross their fingers.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.