Exploring the Unknown: Selected Documents in ... - The Black Vault

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First Steps into Space: Projects Mercury and Gemini
Group, never reached a peak of over 650 people on the program and I would say
this was reached probably at the time of the Glenn flight [Slide 12]. Supporting
NASA work was another 700 people. Obviously a large element was the industrial
support of prime, subcontractors, and vendors and we had, of course, many
people from the Department of Defense, the largest portion of this 18,000 being
the Navy’s recovery forces. And I think it’s interesting in looking at a map, which
spots only the major contractors and the Government agencies and universities
involved, without going into the subs and vendors, and as you can see, fairly well
covered the country, even at this level.
I think, perhaps, to, we should talk a little about the program cost and
I’d like to have the next slide [Slide 13]. These figures, I might point out, are
different from those that are in the chronology that is part of the handout for this
conference. The chronology figures were not complete and left out some of the
essential elements. These figures and this total of $384,000,000 is the best that we
can come up with for now; it’s our estimate of determinations of contracts and
it’s not a fully audited figure, but it’s the best we have at this time and I think this
represents a reasonably correct figure. I think the only thing of real interest here
is that the two largest items of this was the development of the spacecraft itself
and its operation and the implementation of the world network. These items, like
this network, are things that normally aren’t thought of as the cost of a program
– one will concentrate mostly on the [11] flight hardware, but, as can be seen,
this, indeed, was a large part of the total cost of Mercury. However, I may add
that, although we’re charging all of it to Mercury here, it is an investment in
our National capability; it will be used in Gemini, it will be used in Apollo. The
operations figure is primarily the cost of the recovery forces.
Now, this, in a nutshell, is about what Mercury consisted of. We will try to
fill in detail in the next two days. I think we ought to, before I close though, just
summarize what it appears to me we learned in Mercury. One, of course – we did,
indeed, accomplish our objectives and we found that man does have a place in
space, man can function as part of the spacecraft system or the total flight system
and can be effective. I think we learned some very—Very obviously, we learned a lot
about spacecraft technology and how a spacecraft should be built, what its systems
should be, how they should perform, where the critical redundancies are that are
required. I think we learned something about man-rating boosters, how to take
a weapons system development and turn it into a manned transportation system.
I think, in this area, we found primarily, in a nutshell, that this was a matter of
providing a malfunction detection system or an abort system, and, also, we found
very careful attention to detail as far as quality control was concerned. I think that
some of the less obvious things we learned – we learned how to plan these missions
and this take a lot of detail work, because it’s not only planning how it goes, but
how it doesn’t go, and the abort cases and the emergency cases always took a lot
more effort than the planned missions. These are things that must be done [12].
We learned what is important in training crews for missions of this type. When the
crew-training program was laid down, the program had to cover the entire gamut
because we weren’t quite sure exactly what these people needed to carry out the
missions. I think we have a much better focus on this now. We learned how to
control these flights in real time. This was a new concept on a worldwide basis.
I think we learned, and when I say we, I’m talking of this as a National asset, not