Apollo Guidance Computer Activities

AGC - Conference 1: Management issues

Apollo Guidance Computer History Project

First conference

July 27, 2001 

From left: Cline Frasier and Dave Hoag

Management Issues

RAMON ALONSO: Why don't you mention what you see as the difference between NASA then and NASA now from the point of view of how you manage a complex project?

CLINE FRASIER: Well, NASA now is bureaucratic and very long. But I mean, if I go through -- The particular flight we're talking about, I guess it's Apollo 5, the unmanned one, then just before the flight we had a gyro that showed a 25 MERU shift in the acceleration sensitive drift, or something like that. That was an indication that you were getting some wear, and then there was a big argument about whether we should replace the inertial platform. And to replace the inertial platform would have been an enormous deal, but at the same time we could get a decision, we could fight like mad and get a decision made right away to go ahead with the flight. And anymore, especially now, I think that would get flushed forever.

And in Apollo 12, I believe, I'm pretty sure it was 12, sitting on the pad, it's like four hours before launch, and there are two of these displaying keyboards in the vehicle, in the command module. And one of them, bingo, pops up all eights. Every element lit up on it, and then it went away. This caused great consternation, as you might imagine. I think it happened kind of a second time. There were only three people in the country, I believe, that kind of knew what caused that and could explain it. One of them was Eldon. One was Hugh Brady who was in freeway traffic in Los Angeles because he had left, and myself.

I got called out of a meeting, and had to go over and explain to these guys, to Don Arabian and his crew that there was probably a little dirt particle, and it got caught between two elements, and that would light it all up. We knew all about that because we had fought it for six months on a Block 1 system, and it probably wouldn't reoccur. Plus, they had two DSKYs so they went ahead and launched. And now everybody would be scared to do that.

I think the thing Ramon was referring to is you could actually get decisions made. You could run things, design decisions, run things through and get them done pretty quickly. I don't remember dealing with, I don't know that I ever met, a lawyer on the entire project, in my 9 or 10 years on the project. And the management from the people that worked for me, all the way up through NASA, all the way to Webb were either reasonably good, or very good technical people.

And the same thing was true with the people we dealt with at, of course, at the Instrumentation Lab they were all technical. At General Motors, the program manager, he reported to another guy who reported to the head of the entire division. Both of those two were MIT engineering graduates; one a Ph.D. So you had people who you could actually talk to about what was going on, and they knew enough so that they had confidence in their decision making. So that you didn't get into this endless committee business, and study, after study, after study. You could kind of go forward.

JOHN TYLKO: How much of that was due to the fact that NASA at that time was really an entrepreneurial start-up environment; where you had gone from 35 people in a space task group at Langley to a big organization. But where people knew each other, a lot of their capabilities? 

It seems like the bureaucracy has worked against the organization. Charles Murray, who wrote one of the books about Apollo basically says that if you really wanted to go to the moon again, or do anything ennobling in space, that you should set an impressive goal, get behind it in terms of making the resources available, but then give it to a bunch of 20 year olds and get out of the way, and let them basically go at it. Several of you have described how these were people in their 20's developing computers.

CLINE FRASIER: We would have never made it if it were given to a bunch of 20 year olds, okay? The people in their 20's were really important, but it was also critical that you had Joe Shea came down from Washington as program manager. Joe had, among other things, driven through the Titan II guidance program from the day he wrote the proposal, to when he got called back in when the program was in trouble. He slept in his office for I don't know how long to drive that program through to completion.

JOHN TYLKO: But he was in his mid-30's. I mean, Gilruth was 40 --

CLINE FRASIER: He was, well, he was in his late 30's, you're right.

JOHN TYLKO: Gilruth was, I think 43 during --

__: He was four years younger than I was.

CLINE FRASIER: But Gilruth had been through experimental test flight programs. He was an experienced structural engineer. He had been involved with test programs where people had been killed. The same thing is true with Hugh Brady. I don't know how he -- He would have been in his early 40's, but he had flown I don't know how many missions over Tokyo, and he had been involved with TRW on the Minuteman guidance system, the Titan guidance system. 

So you had a lot of seasoned people as well, that had a wide range of experience where they had made a lot of mistakes themselves. And so you didn't -- If you just had only young folks, they're very bright and they have a lot of good ideas, but they haven't made enough mistakes to have good judgment.

JOE GAVIN: That gets around to something that is important. In those days the average engineer could work on three different programs in ten years. Today, a young engineer can spend his whole career on one program. And I think it was that wealth of experience, at least speaking for myself.

I had been involved with about four different programs before I got to Apollo. And as you say, I had had my share of mistakes, and that breadth of experience doesn't exist in the same age group today.

DAN LICKLY: That was a point. A lot of us had experience, even though we were young, and we worked for Davey who had guided the Polaris right through from beginning to end. He was a wonderful guy to work for. He was our mentor and the one that showed us the way. 

But we had, you know, we felt there were things we had done before, so it wasn't new, but there were aspects of it that were very new, like going to the moon. (Laughter)

Integration issues


site last updated 12-08-2002 by Alexander Brown