George Mueller (NASA) - NASA and The Apollo Program

NASA and The Apollo Program

Mueller became increasingly involved with NASA and the Apollo Program. NASA's Administrator James E. Webb sounded Mueller out for a top job. Mueller would only agree if the agency was restructured, and so over the next month, Webb worked with Associate Administrator Robert Seamans to restructure NASA, shifting three centers over to report to Mueller directly, as well as a local group at Headquarters. Mueller accepted the job - although he took a substantial pay cut.

Encouraged by Webb, Mueller had already investigated OMSF. His first impression; "there wasn't any management system in existence". More seriously, Mueller found no means to determine and control hardware configuration which gave no way to determine costs or schedules. Mueller concluded he would have to "teach people what was involved in doing program control."

In August 1963, Mueller invited each of NASA's field center directors to visit him and explained how his proposed changes would put Apollo back on schedule and solve problems with the Bureau of the Budget. With some directors he had little problem but he had issues with Wernher von Braun who gave "one of his impassioned speeches about how you can't change the basic organization of Marshall." After some argument von Braun accepted Mueller's proposals and reorganized MSFC strengthening its capacity in running large projects.

Mueller's position was strengthened by Webb making the directors at MSC, MSFC and KSC report direct to OMSF. Mueller also reduced attendance at the MSF Management Council to just himself and the Center directors. Borrowing from the US Air Force Minuteman program, Mueller formed the Apollo Executive Group which consisted of himself and the presidents of Apollo's main contractors.

The biggest problem Mueller still faced was Apollo's slipping schedule and huge cost overruns. He had always thought the only way to resolve this, and achieve a lunar landing before 1970, was to reduce the number of test flights. Mueller wanted to use his "all-up testing" concept with each flight using the full number of live stages. This approach had been used successfully on the Titan II and Minuteman programs but violated von Braun's engineering concepts. The von Braun test plan called for the first live test to use the Saturn's first stage with dummy upper stages. If the first stage worked correctly then the first two stages would then be live with a dummy third stage and so on, with at least ten test flights before a manned version was put into low earth orbit.

The Saturn V program manager Arthur Rudolph cornered Mueller with scale models of Saturn and Minuteman. The Saturn dwarfed the Minuteman but Mueller replied, "So what?"

Eventually von Braun and the others were won over. As von Braun stated: "It sounded reckless, but George Mueller's reasoning was impeccable. Water ballast in lieu of a second and third stage would require much less tank volume than liquid-hydrogen-fuelled stages, so that a rocket tested with only a live first stage would be much shorter than the final configuration. Its aerodynamic shape and its body dynamics would thus not be representative. Filling the ballast tanks with liquid hydrogen? Fine, but then why not burn it as a bonus experiment? And so the arguments went on until George in the end prevailed."

Mueller's concept of all up testing worked, the first two unmanned flights of the Saturn V were successful (the second less so), then the third Saturn V put Frank Borman's Apollo 8 crew in orbit round the Moon on Christmas 1968, and the sixth Saturn V carried Neil Armstrong's Apollo 11 to the first lunar landing.

In an interview Mueller acknowledged what would have happened if all up testing had failed, "The whole Apollo program and my reputation would have gone down the drain".

With this battle won, in November 1965, Mueller reorganized the Gemini and Apollo Program Offices, creating a five box structure at HQ and field center. This structure replicated Mueller's concept of system management and provided far better program overview. The cleverness of the idea was that inside these "GEM boxes" (named from his initials) managers and engineers communicated directly with their functional counterparts in NASA HQ bypassing all the usual chain of command and bureaucracy.

Mueller's GEM box idea worked but not until after several months of chaos at NASA HQ.

With another battle won, Mueller still found that he could not always find the right people with the right skills. Using his background in Air Force projects Mueller sought Webb's permission to bring in skilled Air Force managers. He proposed Minuteman program director General Samuel C. Phillips as program controller of OMSF. Webb agreed, and so did AFSC chief General Bernard Schriever but only on the condition that Phillips became Apollo Program Director. Phillips in turn agreed and brought with him 42 mid-grade air force officers and eventually 124 more junior officers.

Seamans (promoted in 1965 to Deputy Administrator) stated that Mueller "didn’t sell; he dictated - and without his direction, Apollo would not have succeeded."

Also well known were Mueller's Project Status Reviews often held on Sundays and in brutal detail. The presentations were nicknamed "“pasteurized" as the tired managers' ability to absorb the detail was waning, and the charts were merely "past your eyes."

After the Apollo 1 fire, NASA Administrator James Webb became distrustful of Mueller, but commented. “Even if I wanted to, I couldn't fire him because he was manager of our successful Apollo project, and one of the ablest men in the world ... The last thing I wanted was to lose him, but I also had another desire, which was not to let his way of working create too many difficulties.”