Wiggins, James W and Rossman, Kenneth

Wiggins, James W and Rossman, Kenneth

University of Alabama in Huntsville Archives and Special Collections, Huntsville, Alabama

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Interviews

Audio

ohc_stnv_000052_A

Bilstein, Roger

Wiggins, James W and Rossman, Kenneth

[00:00:07] Roger Bilstein: ‘63 was the definite breaking point at least from the early era.

[00:00:25] James Wiggins: When was the ARPA/NASA office formed, do you remember? That was established and Dr. Lange was made the director of ARPA NASA

[00:00:35] Kenneth Rossman: That was prior to ABMA…I mean to NASA.

[00:00:40] JW: That was before [inaudible] became NASA

[00:00:43] KR: It was July ‘60.

[00:00:45] RB: 1958 I think.

[00:00:47] KR: Yeah, it was ARPA orders in ‘58.

[00:00:51] JW: I talked to Rees a number of times back in those days about forming a project office for ARPA. Of course about that time NASA came into being. They finally established the ARPA/NASA office, and put Dr. Lange in there as the head of it. That was really the origin of the Saturn Systems Office. When we became part of NASA then they changed the name first to the NASA office and just a little bit later to the Saturn Systems Office. That was in ‘59, ‘60. After we became a part of NASA, and then they renamed the office to the Saturn Systems Office. That was about the time I joined the office.

[00:01:49] JW: But prior to that about the time we were becoming a part of NASA down here a little bit before, remember, they sent a consulting firm down here to review our program operating procedures and ABMA and a recommendation of what we'd like to have as a part of NASA, what NASA should have. This guy that the consulting firm sent down here, his name was Jack Young. He was [possibly consulting firm’s name] associate administrator for business or management.

[00:02:37] JW: So recalling all the trials and tribulations we had ABMA program control, I recommended to Jack Young at that time—and I spent most of the time with him for six weeks—that we get away from this system where we get one appropriation, and off the top of that, we have to take salaries and expenses off the top of that and the rest for R&D.

[00:03:08] JW: Now going back over this to give somebody an idea of our programming structure away from the savvys of NASA. I recommended that we get away from the lump sum type funding for salaries, R&D, and equipment, and everything else. I actually wrote a hundred or so pages for Jack Young to take back home with him.

[00:03:31] JW: Well, many of these things that we talked about then and discussed became a part of total NASA management in regards to programs and program approval and project approval documents that I had.

[00:03:48] JW: After the establishment of the Saturn Systems Office, I joined that office when it was pretty young, fairly young, and had the resources management office. My job at that time was to pull together all the resources required to successfully execute a launch vehicle program that later turned out to be the Saturn 1, Saturn 1B, and Saturn V.

[00:04:27] JW: Dr. Lange was head of the Saturn Systems Office. We were a small organization at that time. Later on we had Konrad Dannenberg as the deputy director. We had Bob Lindstrom as the Saturn 1 and 1B manager. In the beginning I guess Dr. Lange was acting Saturn V manager. A little bit later on, sometime maybe in ‘61 or ‘62, Jim Bramley became the Saturn V manager.

[00:05:08] JW: Like I said before I had the program resources office. We were a small group of people. I think we were quite successful in those days in that the program that we proposed to headquarters, we went into quite some depth in establishing the technical requirements and balancing them against the funding and facility requirements. I'm not sure too much of that is done anymore to the depth we did it then.

[00:05:39] JW: For example, I had the resources management office, and yet I was by profession, I was a scientist and an engineer. This was my first crack at resources management. I was in a pretty good position at that time to go out and hunt and go to the laboratories and find out what the technical requirements were, then convert those into dollars and facilities, both manufacturing and tests. I think that was the one thing that made the Saturn Systems Office as successful as it was in those days in managing these very complex programs.

[00:06:30] RB: Because the people had the technical expertise in that office?

[00:06:34] JW: Yeah, in the office, right and we were a small office. We weren't burdened with a lot of people, a lot of administrative problems, personnel problems and what have you. We had access in those days to the laboratories—quite free access, I would say—so we could get to the people out on the [bench?], the people that knew what the technical requirements were.

[00:07:03] RB: Well, it seems to me too you had an advantage that the Saturn 1 was still pretty much an in-house operation.

[00:07:08] JW: Saturn 1 was an in-house operation, right. In those days too, of course, we were keeping in mind the bigger launch we hit for. We might have called it the C4 or C5 in those days. We had a Nova on the drawing board, but in the early days, we were concentrating on the smaller Saturn vehicles that turned out to be the Saturn 1 and Saturn 1B.

[00:07:39] JW: But the program management, as we exercised in those days, and I was successful for more than just this one reason I just explained to you. There were a number of reasons why it was considered a successful management program. First of all we had this we got into the technical depth of the program and balanced out against the funding and facilities requirements. Also we established a relationship with headquarters that I don't think is prevailing in any other program from my knowledge either before or since.

[00:08:19] JW: We established a certain amount of confidence and trust with the people up there. In other words, I could go up and discuss the program with the people and the requirements and what they're going to take to do the job, and they would believe the story. At times, we would negotiate dollars and cents against some of the requirements. But by and large, we had the confidence of our headquarters counterparts. I'm not saying we didn't have our problems, we had those problems. We always managed to work out the problems that are lower level and present a unified consensus and program to Dr. Von Braun and myself to the Director of Manned Space Flight in Washington. We worked out the problems, whatever they might be, before we presented as a unified front to the Director Von Braun and the Director of Manned Space Flight in Washington.

[00:09:29] RB: So when you get together with the headquarters guys and come to agreement and then you would go to Von Braun?

[00:09:41] KR: One point on the informality that went on that I remember: Jim used to roll up — we used to have an easel, just like that thing right there, a flip chart with a magic marker — I've seen him make up presentations on a flip chart, take it off roll it up with a rubber band, and hit the road to Washington, and present it to T. Keith Glennan administrator of NASA.

[00:10:08] JW: We had program control, too. I had quite an extensive method for accumulating the requirements for a program, and I called it my working papers. We always have them on file. We didn't have 1001 charts showing every little thing we were doing. We had our own [PERT {Program Evaluation and Review Technique}?] system, but the majority of my knowledge was in my working papers. After being with the program from day one, I had a lot of knowledge and things in my head that, you know, you just, there's no way to document it like gut feeling and intuition and what have you. There's no way to document that. I tried it several times, but it never came out.

[00:11:14] JW: In the early days, in our discussions with Washington, it’s decided that we had better institute a formal procedure for submitting our program and for getting the resulting approval from the headquarters level. Ken Rossman was in my office, and we compiled all of our requirements—both technical and funding requirements and facility requirements—and put them into a booklet. We were looking for an acronym or something as sort of an eye-catcher. I think the first thing we came up with was Program Authorization Plan, which is PAP, P-A-P, and we decided to not submit that. [All laugh] You know why. Besides, we don't authorize anything from the center to the headquarters level. They authorize and return. Well, we finally came up with Program Operating Plan, P-O-P.

[00:12:30] RB: This is still in SSO?

[00:12:32] JW: Yeah.

[00:12:33] KR: Yeah.

[00:12:34] JW: Ken and myself and Chuck Williams and a few others put this Program Operating Plan together, and we called it program operating plan. I don't recall the number on it, like it might have been 61, 1961-1 or something like that, where we laid out the entire program, and what it was going to take to do it like the Saturn 1.

[00:13:02] JW: I looked around for someone to sign this thing, and give it some sort of authority at the center, and I couldn't find anyone to sign it. I think most of the people didn't want to go on the record at that time. I finally signed the damn thing myself and sent it off to headquarters. It got approved. From that point on, we started submitting program operating plans, I believe on a quarterly basis. This was our method of operating until the Saturn Systems Office was dissolved in 1963.

[00:13:45] JW: Here again, we had a small number of people in the Saturn Systems Office. We knew what we were talking about. We knew the program. We knew the technical requirements. We knew the facility requirements. We knew the launch facility requirements. We knew the people in headquarters. We knew our own people here at Marshall. We knew how to walk this line amongst all of those five situations. We always managed to get the program approved at the headquarters level. It was, I think, a very good management concept. It was quite informal, other than the program operating plan, which we went to later on.

[00:14:45] RB: Could that system really have worked as you went further downstream when you got in a situation where you weren't doing it in-house anymore?

[00:14:55] JW: We had the system, but we went on into the Saturn V program and laid it out in quite some detail in the Program Operating Plan with our working papers, if you want to call them that, back up the charts. At that time, we made preparations to put the Program Operating Plan on the computer, and the computer started talking about it. The last time it was a mechanical sort of operation — program control. It worked simply because of the people that were doing the program control. The management that had been in the program since the first day, we could see a need for going to a little bit more elaborate system than what we had for the following activities, especially when we got to the manned launches. But there's no reason why that system of management could not work today. I personally think we over-managed the Saturn V program.

[00:16:08] RB: Was the reorganization in 1963 really necessary then?

[00:16:17] JW: I don't think it was necessary for any successful execution of the Saturn V program. It was probably necessary for the center. I guess the main reason for the reorganization in 1963 was to establish a strong program management directorate.

[00:16:45] RB: What was the rationale for that then?

[00:16:54] KR: There was one way to get the engine management program, I guess encapsulated into the second operation.

[00:17:04] JW: Yeah, you might say back in the early days up until that reorganization, the engine project office was located in a laboratory.

[00:17:15] RB: Hans Paul was the same guy, wasn't he, all the way through?

[00:17:20] JW: No. It was Lee Ballou.

[00:17:21] RB:Oh, Lee?

[00:17:22] KR: Skylab lab director. Hans Paul was the technical engineer.

[00:17:26] JW: Technical engineer. He had a technical branch organization.

[00:17:40] JW: And that was always the problem with us in the Saturn Systems Office was to take their program, their budget, and what have you, and work it into the total Saturn program requirements. I think one of the objectives of the reorganization in 1963 was to get the engine development program and the launch vehicle — the stage development program — together under one boss.

[00:18:18] RB: Under Young and then Rudolph.

[00:18:20] JW: Who was the program PM director in those days?

[00:18:28] KR: Bob Young, wasn’t it?


[00:18:29] RB: Bob Young.

[00:18:30] JW: Bob Young. You had an engine development program office, and you had vehicle program development office. Rudolph had a Saturn V vehicle, and Lee Ballou still had an engine development program. You had them sort of under one big boss at that time.

[00:18:55] JW: Another objective at that time was to place more emphasis on program management, which I think was needed. I think something with a little more power than the Saturn Systems Office had, but it wasn't required. I still think they overdid it, manpower-wise.

[00:19:22] RB: In this period of the Saturn Systems Office, is it fair to say that the laboratories and the technical divisions had really more of the premier position within the center?

[00:19:36] JW: At that time, yeah.

[00:19:38] RB: They were Von Braun’s, I hate to say pets, but they were the ones that really wagged the tail.

[00:19:46] KR: Von Braun managed with the board of directors, and they were the board of directors.

[00:19:50] JW: The lab directors were the board of directors. That's the way things were, were managed, those days — by the board of directors, the board of staff, whatever you want to call it.

[00:20:06] KR: A lot of these major decisions, by my understanding I didn't participate, was that they were brought up to actually voted on the board. That's true, isn't it, Jim?

[00:20:17] JW: Yeah. But again, the reorganization of 1963, it not only brought the engine development program into the vehicle program or under the same boss, it also brought some other programs we had at the time like Light and Media and Vehicle Program. I guess the establishment of a program management directorate was in order at that time. I still think we overreacted and overstaffed the organization.

[00:21:01] RB: What about difficulties between I.O. and R&D.O. after this? Because theoretically then I.O. was the one who was calling the shots. They were the ones who were setting up the configuration and establishing schedules and so on. It was no longer the board of directors doing that. Was there friction between I.O. and R&D.O. people after this?

[00:21:26] JW: There was a certain amount of competitiveness. In the beginning, the laboratories looked at industrial operations as more or less the money changers and the schedule, the chart makers, you know, and things like that.

[00:21:50.280] KR: To be perfectly candid, they had no feeling for the schedules. They couldn't care less about the schedules. Technical considerations first and then everything else fell into place. I had an idea that center management leaned that way too. Technical expertise.

[00:22:12] RB: There was a problem with that, though, when you were coping with spacecraft being developed someplace else, and it had its own milestones, etc. and you’re trying to develop KSC then you’ve got to have more of a scheduled guideline.

[00:22:26] KR: That’s like a little evolution. That’s kind of fast. Jim’s talking about 1963. That started getting in gear in ‘65 with spacecraft vehicle. There were a couple years there where the stages were more or less being built independently. Not more or less, but they were major developments in themselves.

[00:22:57] JW: In the earlier days, we were working against really just the launch vehicle program in itself without any consideration to payload the spacecraft.

[00:23:12] KR: Well, it was a good year and a half, two years, deciding whether it's an Earth orbit rendezvous or a straight to the moon. This dictated what kind of a spacecraft.

[00:23:23] JW: We went ahead with a booster development. You gotta have a big booster, you're just going to have a big booster. We were well into the booster development before we ever knew what the spacecraft would look like with an Earth orbit or lunar orbit type of mission. As a matter of fact, we had worked for quite some time here at Marshall, ABMA and Marshall, before the lunar concept came into being.

[00:23:53] JW: This lunar orbit concept was proposed by, I believe, John Houbolt at Langley, was eventually accepted as the mode to go. Up to that time, we'd been working on two modes, here at Marshall in planning phases, was the Earth orbit and the direct flight mode. I guess the Nova was the direct flight vehicle to the moon. You should have seen the monster that we were going to land on the moon and return on, it was ninety feet long. That's back in the direct flight days.

[00:24:40] KR: Roger was asking earlier today, Jim, if you recall how the Saturn V booster grew in engines … Do you remember the C1, C2, C3? [laughter] Had two engines it seemed like.

[00:24:55] JW: Yeah, I remember C2 or C3. I guess the Saturn V at one time had…Weren’t we going to use the M1 engine that was later on cancelled?

[00:25:16] RB: Do you remember that much about the M1 engine that was an Air Force project, wasn't it?

[00:25:22] JW: No, it was a NASA project. It could have been Air Force in the early beginning, but when I first recall M1 engine project, it was managed here at Marshall. It was later transferred to Lewis before it was canceled. It was a liquid hydrogen engine, one million pounds thrust. At one time, what we know as the Saturn V now, we had one configuration where we used M1 engines.

[00:25:58] KR: I was telling Roger once they got up to three engines, it seemed like it all of a sudden jumped up to five. I always just figured it turned out, hell, might as well put five on. Roger mentioned that heat shield problem...

[00:26:29] JW: I just don't remember. I can remember going through some exercises where we had maybe one great big engine. I remember that. I remember where we have maybe five or more M1 engines. Then I guess by that time the development of the F1 engine came into being.
We decided to go with the kerosene and oxygen, RP and oxygen.

[00:27:00] KR: You may recall there was an E1, 480,000 pounds of thrust…

[00:27:05] JW: Yeah, that was going to be used on separate stages...

[00:27:14] RB: Getting back to the management thing, something you said struck me, is that you had very good visibility and rapport with headquarters. I was wondering, though, I had the impression that because of the [jam boxes?] that existed in each of the program manager's offices, this easy exchange with headquarters still continued.

[00:27:37] JW: Still continues when? Today?

[00:27:39] RB: At least from ‘63 to ‘69 when that particular organization chart was in effect.

[00:27:48] JW: Well, it did, but it became more bureaucratic.This exchange was by computer and charts and things like this.

[00:28:00] KR: And the people changed, and you lost that personal contact.

[00:28:10] JW: If you interview Bob Lindstrom he’s going to tell you this. He’s told everybody else. When everything else failed at Marshall, and they got in the corner and didn't know what was going to happen next, I would go up and sit down with some people I knew and work the program out and bring the money back. I mean, it was just sort of a thing.

[00:28:32] RB: This is during SSO days?

[00:28:33] JW: Yeah.

[00:28:34] RB: Yeah.

[00:28:35] KR: In fact, Jim coined the phrase, give or take a billion dollars. [Laughter]

[00:28:40] JW: Give or take a billion. Don't get locked in, you know? You gotta always have room to negotiate. It was a matter of, with me and Washington, it was a matter of being able to take. I think the record will bear me out that I gave the little ones and took the big ones. You've got to play this game in management of any other program, you can't, a field center can't develop a real hard line and go forth to headquarters, to their own bosses, and demanding things. You've got to, you've got to go up with flexibility and room to sidestep and back up and what have you and negotiate the program that you had in mind in the first place.

[00:29:31] KR: For what it's worth, you may recall, Jim, that we started this Lend-Lease program
—employees from Saturn Systems Office went to Washington spent two weeks to get better acquainted with people. They sent people down here and did the same thing.

[00:29:49] JW: Yeah, we traded people between SSO and headquarters, both sides. Each could find out the problems here and find out the problems up there. The personal relationship, of course, it was a professional type relationship. We would get to know people, and those people at headquarters getting to know you and know that they can trust you. And okay, they screwed me a little bit, but not a lot. We worked these compromises and then take them to our bosses for approval. We bummed around down here and the director of manned space flight up there.

[00:30:39] RB: Would you say that the Saturn V Program Office then had trouble operating in terms of money?

[00:30:46] JW: No.

[00:30:49] RB: Would have the other program offices found themselves short?

[30:52 - 31:17 ] silence due to issues with recording

[00:31:17] JW: In some fiscal years we’d use more money, but we were always under constraint from the headquarters level. We would have an idea of what the market would bear, and we would tailor our program accordingly. I remember one fiscal year, we really got in a bind. Back in those days, we would program and get approval for something maybe like a five-quarter year. We would have enough money to take us over into, through [August?], for example, through the first month of the new fiscal year. One time, we got in a bind, and in order to reduce the budget to stay at the headquarters level, we just simply [lopped?] off the [month of August?] from our program operating plan, and we reduced our budget by 1/12th.

[00:32:20] KR: No impact.

[00:32:20] JW: No impact, in other words. There were a lot of ways for skin a cat.

[00:32:25] RB: What, the one thing that struck me in analyzing the approach to management was the working groups. They originated with the Saturn Systems Office, isn't that correct?

[00:32:36] JW: Yeah. Is that the thing?

[00:32:] KR: It rings a bell, Jim, but I was not personally involved in them. It seemed like a lot of people with Saturn Office chaired those. Deputy chair, I think they had some arrangement where there was a lab guy and a Saturn guy…

[00:32:54] JW: Yeah, the working groups did start. Now, where the idea originated in the Saturn Systems Office, I don't remember. But it did start in those days, and we had internal working groups, not only internal working groups, but about the same time we established working groups with Houston and Manned Space Flight Center. I don't recall really what these working groups were, but they came into being about 1962 or 1963.

[00:33:30] RB: So, at least that early, you were trying to interface with Houston about the payload problems, etc.?

[00:33:41] JW: But as a program evolved from the early ‘60s, on up through the mid ‘60s, you know, the program was evolving and growing all the time. I think the Saturn Systems Office was the way it started, and it was a successful management group. As the program got bigger and became more directly involved in Houston, I think going to the industrial operations concept in 1963 was in order. As the program got bigger and the launches and started putting men on the moon, all of us tended to formalize things to more of an extent than what we experienced in the early days.

[00:34:44] RB: And that tends to slow you down?

[00:34:46] JW: That tends to slow you down, because as you become more bureaucratic, it takes longer to get things done.

[00:34:52] RB: Weren't there a lot of telephone calls between guys who said, “Okay, we'll do this, and I'll follow up with the documentation next week?”

[00:34:58] JW: Yeah, there was a lot of that.

[00:35:00] RB: That was the only way to get around it then, so the program still moved ahead?

[00:35:04] JW: Well, in the early days, we could commit on the telephone like that. We could indeed follow up with the communications, correspondence. Today I'm not real sure you can do that.

[00:35:14] KR: But when you get so many channels set up, you just don’t know whether you can or not.

[00:35:23] RB: Yeah, okay. I can see that.

[00:35:25] KR: Too many people approve it to know whether they’re going to get up on the right side of the bed that day.

[00:35:32] RB: Were you in ABMA before? You were, okay. If you’d remember, going back to about 1958, was the ABMA group really working on kind of a Saturn 1 idea when the ARPA order came? Or did the ARPA order spark this as a brand new concept?

[00:35:50] JW: No, I think some people at ABMA were thinking of a big booster prior to the ARPA order. I don't recall the point in time, at one time he called it “The Big B.” The Juno 5. There was a mountain top program.

[00:36:14] KR: We go back to 1956, we got facilities approved, and one of them was the structured mechanics complex. I remember specifically the doors down there, making a last minute call to [Mr. Pellaro?] was saying what's the biggest thing you ever expect to have because we want to size these doors. Maybe twenty-two feet. Turned out that the Saturn 1b was twenty-two feet some inches [laughter]

[00:36:46] JW: I recall planning on some big, big launch vehicles before the ARPA order. I don't know what, Juno 5? You remember Juno 5?

[00:37:00] RB: Was that a single tank concept or were you thinking about the multiple tanks? The multiple tanks didn't come in until after the ARPA order then?

[00:37:09] JW: Right.

[00:37:11] KR: Well, you know, time gets hazy.

[00:37:14] JW: But I know this.

[00:37:15] KR: Remember the multiple tanks with those Redstones and then Jupiter was in there.

[00:37:21] JW: Dick Canright, who was in headquarters at that time, was in ARPA, as a matter of fact, had a lot to do with the cluster tank concept. It was a convenient concept all around because one of the selling points was that we could use Redstone Jupiter tooling, those redstone tanks and the engines and so forth. We could proceed you know in the state of the art.

[00:37:48] RB: Yeah, the S3D engine…I think so, yeah.

[00:37:56] JW: But one of the selling points was we'd use existing Redstone Jupiter tooling in the cluster tank concept. I would imagine if you're trying to give credit to anybody for part of the cluster tank concept, it would probably be Dick Canright who was in ARPA at that time then later on NASA.

[00:38:19] RB: Is he still in headquarters?

[00:38:21] JW: He's in Pennsylvania someplace now.

[00:38:24] KR: I remember telling Jim a while back, I saw him on television on why he's [quit his ship?]. He went to Douglas, and then he went to Douglas again.

[00:38:38] JW: There were a number of reasons for the cluster tank concept, one of them being of course we could use the [Glenn Icing?] tooling facilities and what have you. Two were the common bulkhead problems at that time. It would’ve been a real advancement in the state of the art in the materials there, especially insulation in the common bulkhead route.

[00:39:07] RB: Did NASA have a common bulkhead?

[00:39:12] JW: Well, yeah but there was a bit of a sloshing problem.

[00:39:19] RB: Because the tanks are so big.

[00:39:19] JW: Yeah.

[00:39:20] RB: Yeah, okay.

[00:39:24] JW:That used to be a great concern back in the early days.

[00:39:27] RB: Still had to put slosh baffles in the S1 as I recall. It was an addition that happened later on. Something else I understood too from this early period too is that when the order from ARPA came down just to do a static test, so it was just designed for static test only basically.

[00:39:49] JW: Yeah. I recall it was a three or four million dollar order. Seems like it was four million dollars to demonstrate the cluster tank concept. A million and a half pounds thrust. I know it was later amended to ten million and then to sixteen million, but that first order would be the three or four million. Four million, and for that we were going to design and build the first stage, and that's one stage, and modify the Jupiter static test facility.

[00:40:27] RB: But then, after you got into building and actually cutting hardware came down to fly the thing instead. So actually you were flying a thing that you hadn't really designed to fly in the first place.

[00:40:42] JW: We probably always had in mind flying it eventually.

[00:40:52] RB: So it wasn't that much different stuff?

[00:40:56] JW: No.

[00:40:57] RB: Those tanks were all basically flying hardware anyhow. It wasn't that much of a change over maybe.

[00:41:09] JW: The clustered concept was new. Well, it wasn't new, but something besides it was new. I guess they had test flown some Nike Hercules. That's a cluster of four solid rocket motors.

[00:41:27] RB: How does the Saturn clustered concept compare a historical breakthrough to the Russians, who were already using clustered vehicles to launch their stuff?

[00:41:40] JW: Well, I don't know too much about the Russians, their cluster concept. I didn't know much about it, and I still don’t. I mean as much as anyone else. I think the only experience we had to go on here in this country was very limited, you know. I just pointed out, the Nike Hercules, and that was a cluster of four solid rockets.

[00:42:14] RB: Yeah.

[00:42:18] JW: Of course, you know, not man-rated, which makes a difference. I think the cluster concept was more of a straight engineering problem than it was a design problem. There are expansions of the tank in extreme temperatures and the thrust takeoff points and things like that. It was a complex engineering problem. I'd say more than a design problem.

[00:43:05] RB: After the reorganization of ‘63, were you involved still in one of the program offices somewhere? Or where did you go after that?

[00:43:16] JW: I went up as an assistant to Dr. Rees after the 1963 reorganization. The job I have presently became open in late ‘63 or early ‘64, and I asked for the job and was assigned to it.

[00:43:42] RB: How would you comment on Rees’ association with Von Braun? How did that work? That's something that never really seemed to me come out, and I really don't have a handle on it.

[00:43:54] JW: Well, I essentially worked for Rees all of the years in the Saturn program, even though I worked very closely with him... Generalized, you could say that Rees was the in-house operator and Von Braun was the outhouse operator [laughter]. If you just want to get very general about it. Von Braun got deeply involved in the in-house operations, too, but he relied heavily on Rees. Rees knew when to make decisions and when to let Von Braun make them. Rees seemed to have made the most decisions at that time in the total program operations like budgets and facilities. The requirements, they ran them by [inaudible] concentrating on the concepts and the philosophies of space operations.

[00:45:02] RB: Was Rees kind of Von Braun's troubleshooter, too, as a [inaudible] man. He did a lot of traveling out to the contractors when they had problems. I heard him described as Von Braun’s hatchet man. [laughter]

[00:45:14] JW: Well, I think troubleshooter probably is a better word for it.

[00:45:22] RB: Yeah. But he carried a lot of authority then when he made his little parade to contractors usually to deliver a specific message or something else?

[00:45:31] JW: In those days, as you recall back in the late ‘50s, early ‘60s, Von Braun was spending a lot of time in Washington and other places, Congress, promoting space travel.
And Rees was at home, running the shop, so to speak.

[00:45:55] RB: Yeah. When the switch came from ABMA to Marshall Space Flight Center, the Von Braun team as such really operated as a research and development group, at a lower scale, kind of, in the organizational structure. All of a sudden, they found themselves, you know, managing an entire center. Were there any serious problems or difficulties really in this period? Did they slip right into it nicely and take over? Or did they have some problems with adjusting to this kind of overall concept now?

[00:46:29] JW: Well, there were some problems in adjusting to the fact that we were now an agency, I mean, a center, a field center of a new agency. We had some people in Von Braun's organization, though, kind of the adhesive that kept things together. One of them was George Constan. I think Rees had a lot to do with it.

[00:46:55] KR: There's one thing you must remember, there is, from 1945 to ‘60, 15 years of Von Braun completely relied on the Army for all the logistics and all the procurement, everything that goes to support an operation. Then, zap! One day, then, it's all different in those particular areas, to the best of my recollection. There were some growing pains just getting procedures and..

[00:47:27] JW: There were a lot of problems.

[00:47:28] RB: Where did they get the expertise for that then? Hard knocks?

[00:47:32] KR: Well, again, they had it. They were with ABMA, the Army people that weren't in DOD...

[00:47:38] RB: Was Harry Gorman one of those?

[00:47:40] JW: No, Harry Gorman came in later.

[00:47:44] KR: He was the second deputy we had.

[00:47:45] JW: Yeah. He came in as an assistant to [Del Morris?] Or he was one of those two deputies at that time. Well, there were a lot of problems when we became a field center
rather than a division of ABMA. There were many of us that had been ABMA had an idea about how we would like to see things go. And it was a wonderful opportunity to...

[00:48:21] KR: By the same token when we went to NASA, it was NASA here, NASA headquarters, and the president, so to speak, you know. Where in the Army you had all of the change of commands. We got out from under them.

[00:48:35] JW: We have some real good people in NASA headquarters, like Bill Lilly, that we counseled with, and he gave us all sorts of good directions. I spoke some time ago about this fellow, Jack Young, that came down, and I spent about six weeks with him in the program operating procedures.

[00:48:55] KR: Was he a colonel?

[00:48:56] JW: No.

[00:48:57] KR: No, it was a different Young was it?

[00:48:59] JW: But he became one of the top men at NASA, shortly after he made the study.
Most of the things that I recommended was made a part of procedure within NASA. The fact that we recommended them, and they were reviewed here at the center, I know all my stuff was reviewed on a daily basis almost with Rees. The fact that we had a major part to play in the total operating procedure as we know them today, the adjustment for us was probably a hell of a lot easier.

[00:49:43] KR: And NASA wasn't all that old. They started in ‘58. They were just two years old, so it wasn’t a big bureaucratic conglomeration yet.

[00:50:01] RB: What about the tenure that Bob Young spent here? Is there any way to characterize that? Was it just kind of waiting until O'Connor took over to really get hold of it, or did he really get it cranked up and down the road?

[00:50:22] JW: I don't know.

[00:50:24] KR: He was a different personality than what we're used to around here. When I say different, he was rough, and people didn’t know what to make of this guy coming in from the industry on a temporary basis. He went home to California every weekend and all that kind of stuff. I think there was a little mystique about him. Again this is hindsight. After a while he sort of got ineffective.

[00:50:55] JW: I think under the new organizations of 1963, the industrial operations, you call it, when Bob Young came in, I think the program kept going based on the old Saturn Systems Office concept. It was mostly the same people. You’re always adding of course, but your main operators were essentially the same people. You just kept operating with headquarters…

[00:51:24] KR: Jim, you may recall, before we went into I.O., the Saturn Systems Office had already broken up into stages, or programs within the Saturn like Lindstrom on Saturn Rocket 1B, and Bramley on Saturn 5, so the whole nucleus, the biggest portion of I.O. was already established as an organization…

[00:51:49] JW: What they did was just come in and just man-load the staffing plan with the organization we had set up, and then bring the engine office in. I don’t know how to assess really what Bob Young contributed. I’m sure he contributed some. He was from industry. I don’t really know what he contributed.

[00:52:22] KR: Yeah, I think he contributed something. [inaudible] before his tenure was gone he was completely ineffective because people knew he was a short-timer. He lost all interest best I recall in the program.

[00:52:38] RB: Why did he come down in the first place?

[00:52:41] JW: Mr. Webb.

[00:52:44] RB: This is a superimposed decision from headquarters.

[52:48] KR: [inaudible] potential contractor here [inaudible]

[00:52:57] JW: Did he go back to Aerojet then?

[52:58] KR; Yeah [inaudible]

[00:53:07] RB: Well, we've covered a lot of ground, skip back and forth, but I really want, I think I've got a little bit better idea about how the Saturn Systems Office functions a little bit. Anything else you want to add?

[00:53:20] JW: No.

0:53:36