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

Exploring the Unknown
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Soon after he entered NASA, the organization implemented a major
reorganization in which the heads of the Field Centers working on Apollo
reported to the Office of Manned Space Flight (i.e., Mueller), rather than
directly to Seamans, the Agency’s Associate Administrator and general manager.
By a combination of his force of will and this reorganization, Mueller “was the
undisputed boss of manned space flight from the day he walked into the office in
1963 until he left six years later.” 34
In the next several months Mueller made a number of key personnel
changes. He assigned George Low and Joseph Shea— both of whom welcomed
the assignments— to the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Low to become
Deputy Director under Robert Gilruth and Shea to head the Apollo Spacecraft
Program Office. On 31 December 1963, Air Force Brigadier General Samuel
Phillips took over the Apollo Program Office at NASA Headquarters. The team
of Mueller and Phillips was to provide strong leadership as the Apollo program
encountered both tragedy and triumph.
Soon after he came to NASA, Mueller asked two veteran NASA engineers not
directly involved in Apollo, John Disher and Del Tischler, to conduct a discrete
independent assessment of the situation within Apollo. They reported to Mueller
on 28 September with the troubling conclusions that the “lunar landing cannot
likely be attained within the decade with acceptable risk” and that the “first
attempt to land men on moon is likely about late 1971.” The two estimated that
the “program cost through initial lunar landing attempt will approximate 24
billion dollars.” (II-36) Mueller had Disher and Tischler present their conclusions
to Robert Seamans, who found the briefing “unsatisfactory.” According to some
accounts, Seamans asked that the briefing material be destroyed to prevent its
conclusions from becoming known inside and outside of NASA. 35
Clearly, bold steps were needed to get Apollo on a schedule that had a good
chance of meeting President Kennedy’s goal of a lunar landing before 1970,
and Mueller soon took them. First he canceled flights of the Saturn 1 booster so
that attention could be shifted to the upgraded Saturn 1B, which would use the
same upper stage as the Saturn V. At an 29 October meeting of his Management
Council, with the senior leadership from Houston and Huntsville present,
Mueller announced a new approach to getting ready for missions to the Moon
that soon became known as “all-up testing.” Mueller “stressed the importance of a
philosophical approach to meeting schedules which minimizes ‘dead-end’ testing,
and maximized ‘all-up’ systems flight tests. He also said the philosophy should
include obtaining complete systems at the Cape [emphasis in original].” (II-37) Two
days later Mueller sent a teletype message to the Apollo field centers proposing
a new, accelerated schedule of Apollo flights; in this message, he reiterated that
his “desire that ‘all-up’ spacecraft and launch vehicle flights be made as early as
possible in the program. To this end, SA-201 [the first flight of the Saturn 1B] and
501 [the first flight of the Saturn V] should utilize all live stages and should carry
complete spacecraft for their respective missions.” (II-38)
34. Murray and Cox, Apollo, p. 160.
35. Ibid, pp. 153–154.