NOVA; To the Moon; Interview with Robert Channing Seamans, Jr., Deputy Administrator at NASA and Professor at MIT, part 2 of 3

Well, Vice President Johnson, who was the head of the Space Council, conducted quite a few meetings where he invited in all kinds of people, a disparate group of newspaper people and scientists and people from NASA and so on. Jim Webb, Winnevon Braun, Admiral Rick Over and so on. What should we do? It was a question he kept asking. And finally, he did write a memorandum to the President, indicating how he's coming with his study, which is also in the Kennedy Library. And then, he finally, someone in exasperation wrote a letter to both Jim Webb and who was head of NASA and McNamara, who was secretary defense and said, in effect, you two guys are going to have to carry out whatever is recommended by the President. So we ought to have your views on the subject. What do you recommend

that we do? And by absolute sheer coincidence, the meeting was planned ahead, but it took place the day after Shepard went into space. And it was over in McNamara's office. And I went with Jim Webb. And McNamara had Ross Gilpatrick, and somebody named John Rubel, with a technical person. We had Abe Hyatt with us. And McNamara and his inimitable style said, okay, Jim, let's lay our cars in the table. You go first. And what do you think we ought to do? Well, we had agreed ahead of time that we were going to recommend that we have a lunar program. There's already been discussions internally. We believe that it would be possible if we had full support to go to the moon in 1967. And we felt that the cost was going to be of the order of 20 billion. Our numbers indicated that we carried

out very elaborate studies, preparation for this, that it might cost around 12 or 13 billion. A web said, I'm going to put my administrators discount on this. I'm going to discount your ability to think of everything that has to be done. So we're going to call it 20. And so we laid that down on the table. And McNamara said, an amazing thing. He said, how do you know, Jim, that the Soviets may not already have the capability of going to the moon. And they're going to booby traps again. Why don't we say we're going to Mars? And that thought of that absolutely boggle my mind. And I put up a very strong defense against any such thoughts of going to Mars. And then we got into detail discussion of various things that should be done in addition. Communication satellites and various other things. And when it was all done, McNamara said,

well, this is fine. And he said, we've already written a report. We only have to fill in the details. And Whitehall, John, Rubel and Bob Siemens finish off the report. And we'll sign it and have it in and have it in Johnson's hands on Monday morning, which is exactly the time that Shepard is going to arrive at the White House. And then we take it up to the Capitol and so on. It was obvious at the time that we had the meeting. We already had quite a bit of information on the impact that Shepard's flight had had, not just in this country, but in Europe and in other places. And it was so positive that we put in the report something that had never been really mentioned before that prestige was an important element in this race program. And getting the report written was a saga in itself, and I won't go into that in any detail, except to say that it was finally agreed to by all parties. Mr. Webb came over after, in effect, tucking the Shepard's into bed Sunday night, came over and worked until two in the morning on that

report. And the next morning I was back there at about eight o'clock to see what the secretaries had typed and go over it with John Ruble, and then Mac them are aside and Webb signed it. And it went to the Johnson who in turn submitted it to the president on Monday before heading for Southeast Asia. Great. Okay, hold on a second. Cut. Well, after we submitted the report, we really didn't, at least I didn't have any direct contact with President Kennedy myself. It's obvious, and history I think shows this very clearly, that President Kennedy was not going to just rely on one report to make his decision. And he had discussions with a large number of people both before and after that report was written. But we heard officially, maybe perhaps Jim Webb heard directly from the president, I'm not sure that, that he was going to make a major address to the Congress. And he's going to include the lunar program as one of his

recommendations, along with other things unrelated to space. About two days before the president went up to Congress, we received a message from Ted Sarranson that he was about to send over that part of the president's message that was about space. And it came in the afternoon, and Jim Webb called me in with you dry knowing what over it. And the one thing that really concerned us was that he he'd included the date of 1967. And we felt that that was fine for planning and for for managerial purposes, but that the country should not stick its neck out to that extent. And so right there, the call put into Ted Sarranson, who said, as you can imagine, well, what do you recommend? And Jim Webb said, well, within the decade. And so that became that that was put in this duly foot in the speech. And then of course, it became a debate as to when

does a decade end? Well, we got off in Congress. Then when did it end when 1970 arrived or or the end of that year? Big debate about that. Because it finally turned out to be December 31, 1969, where the date we we had to beat and we did. Great. Good. Okay. Cut. That's terrific. There was there was we're going on when I joined NASA in September 1, 1960. We're going going on planning what the space program should be and particularly what the man program should be. And in addition to the mercury program that was a specific contracted for project, there were a lot of studies going on that went beyond what went beyond just one man going in orbit around the earth. There was space station studies going on. There were studies of flight

out to the vicinity of the moon or going around the moon or even possibly landing on the moon. Now, the further out you went away from the earth, I would say the more conceptual the studies were, but at each the point where there were studies of a new launch vehicle called Saturn. Now, the Saturn that was initiated actually in the Eisenhower administration from a design standpoint would only take a large volume up into Earth orbit. It would not have gone all the way to the moon. But by the time President Kennedy went before the Congress, we had laid out design of a much larger vehicle, which is called Nova, which would take the men all in one package to the moon, land them, and then be able to come back just with one launching from the

earth with no rendezvous. And all of these designs were being worked on at Huntsville on the vehicle side or down at Langley Field where the space task group was located then. And this is a group of a thousand people that eventually moved to Houston and now the Johnson Space Center. You talk about the Nova rocket and you talk about the various approaches. What was wrong with Nova? Nova, Nova, Nova of promising? What finally did it in? Well, what finally did it in was that we did not need Nova. Nova would have been roughly twice as large as the Saturn that took the men to the moon. And the vehicle that took men to the moon was pretty good sized. And so when we realized that the rendezvous was going to work out and we actually solidified that mode of operation, we no longer needed Nova. But we were very happy that we had

$2 million in our budget for it, which we could transfer over under the Saturn. Now, talk to me about how we made the decision. Nova, the direct launch versus Earth orbit versus lunar orbit and this guy, John Hupolt, what was the reaction to John Hupolt and his idea of rendezvous and docking and lunar orbit? How was he received in that first meeting? When I first joined NASA, I was fortunate to have about a month's time to go around to all the centers and see what was going on and get familiar with the program. And the first place I went was Langley Field, which is in Virginia. And that's where the space task group was. One of the first things I did when I got there was to meet John Glenn and be scrapped into a mercury simulator and have him sort of go through the routine and, you know, it all very exciting. And then I went around to various laboratories and one of them, a gentleman named John Hupolt,

had a very sort of a primitive exhibit. It was obviously a grease pencil chart that he'd made the night before where he was explaining his studies on lunar orbit rendezvous. Now, this is something that hadn't been that I was not familiar with at the time. You can either go to the moon directly, as I've already indicated with a large vehicle called Nova, or you can imagine putting a lot of pieces together in Earth orbit the way we're now putting together the space station. And you get enough together and you can figure out how to refuel it, or fuel it, and then you can take off and go to the moon. But the idea- Okay, good. Start a film. We're going to change film. Take one. lunar orbit rendezvous was unconventional. It's at first blush didn't seem to have much merit. But when you worked it through you could see that by not taking the return vehicle down to the moon

where you have to decelerate 4,000 miles per hour and then have to accelerate again 4,000 miles per hour to get back in Earth orbit was going to be a big saving and fuel. Well, why was it not looked at right from the beginning as this is a pretty ingenious plan? What were the objections? People like Max Fajet in that first meeting. Well, at the time that I was down in Langley Field in September of 60, all of the possible ways of going to the moon had not been considered. And this one- nobody was against it. Nobody was for it except for John Hubeholt. And here I can tell in the team that he had working on it. And nobody else had really considered it seriously. It was not a matter of debate because it hadn't even made an entry yet. And the great saving in fuel worked back here on Earth to a vehicle that would have been at least twice as large or put another way instead of the Nova vehicle that was being considered

as a large field for going to the moon, you could get away with something half as big. And that was a tremendous advantage in ground facilities and the cost of all the equipment and out of fuel, all the things you could imagine going to cost the cost of going to the moon. So it's really wrung a bell with me because in my professional life earlier, I'd been involved with fighter aircraft and interceptors and even possibility of intercepting satellites last year before I joined NASA. And so the idea of intercepting something in space seemed perfectly natural to me at that time. So I was not really concerned about that aspect of his ideas. But now in that first meeting in December of 1960, Hubeholt got up and laid his figures out about the savings and Max Bache got quite upset. Do you recall that?

No, it's this first meeting that I'm describing. I was there alone with John Hubeholt and three others. And the three others and John were proponents and it was just me listening. There was no discussion there of any negative factors. But it wasn't taken seriously, even then. I mean, it was some time. Hubeholt wrote you a couple of letters saying nobody's listening to it. Yeah, but see, but see, that was a year later. I was at Langley Field in September's of Indicator of 60 and then finally, things get serious in March and April of 61. And obviously to carry out studies of what was going to be involved and trying to cost it out, we had to have an idea of how we're going to go. And all the studies that we made were of either director cent or of lunar of it, rendezvous. Now, we had a number of study teams that, frankly, I put together, one was under somebody named Bill Fleming, who worked for me and other under Don Heaton.

And there are other studies that I had run out of both Houston and Huntsville. And in none of these studies that came when they were finished, was there really any consideration of lunar orbit rendezvous? Now, I was not party to the discussions that went into putting these studies together, but I kept wanting to at least have the lunar orbit rendezvous considered seriously. I wasn't sure that was a way to go, but I thought it looked very attractive. And nothing was happening on that front. And then I got my first letter from John Hubeholt. And I first thought, well, I wish that guy would get off my back. I mean, maybe I should call his boss, director of the laboratory, and tell him that, you know, you're not really supposed to cut across, I don't know, six or seven layers of management that way. But I thought, but I think he may be right. So I went over to Brainerd Holmes, who was then the manager, the man flight,

and said, you know, we really ought to consider it more seriously than we are. And then nothing happened. And I'd see Brainerd, I'd be talking to him, you know, I wasn't a daily basis. And once in a while, I'd say, how about that lunar orbit rendezvous? And he said, well, we're considering it. But he didn't sound very, very interested. And about that time, I got John's second letter. And it was a blistering letter. And he said, I really shouldn't be writing this letter. And I realized that this is not protocol to be doing something of this sort. And then he went on to express his views very forcibly. So again, I made sure that the Brainerd Holmes took a good careful look at it. And then it wasn't more than a week or two later, when I was talking to Brainerd. I guess he came over for a management review, or something of that sort. And he said, you know, we are seriously considering it, and is looking better and better all the time. And he said, not only do you have a great saving and fuel, but another advantage is that you can divide, you can design a vehicle

that is just to go to the moon. You don't have to design a vehicle. It has to land on the moon under those very unusual conditions. Then come back and go through the atmosphere. You can design one vehicle to go come back home, and another vehicle to go to the moon, and keep them separate. And he said, that's what Bob Gilruth is very excited about. And of course, Max Vajé works for Bob. But the Huntsville team still were not sold. And they were really dug in on, let's build that big vehicle and go for it. And there were others, Dr. Silvestine, who had been in charge of the space program, and by then was the director of the Lewis Center, the propulsion center, and others in NASA were not sold. But then one day, and I can't tell you what was in Werner's mind, Werner von Braun's mind, but he said, I think we ought to go

to Lunarov at rendezvous. Now, Werner was a politician in part. And that may be part of what he was thinking. That is a, might as well go with the flow. But he absolutely surprised his 12 apostles, as I think they were called. But he finally brought them around, too. Now, it goes without saying that in all these discussions, I was keeping Mr. Webb and Dr. Dryden informed. And Dr. Dryden, you may remember, was an old NACA. He was ahead of the NACA. And he had, well, and he was a little bit on the fence at first. But finally, everybody in NASA was aboard, and we're all set to let the contracts when we couldn't believe it. But the White House developed a tremendous interest in this decision, which is very unusual for what was basically a technical

decision. And it turns out that a Nick Gollivan, who worked for Dr. Weasner, felt that this was a very high-risk idea. And it was so risky that we could be leaving men orbiting the moon. And that would be, obviously, a very unattractive outcome. Now, Nick Gollivan had worked for NASA in risk management and so on, and then had gone to work for Jerry Weasner. So we knew him, and we knew that he was a very difficult person to argue with. And that's the way it turned out. We had to discuss this whole matter with the president. And we had briefings of Jerry Weasner and his staff with Mr. Webb present. And Joe Shae joined us at that time. And he tells me that one of my first instructions to him when he won the job was, I said, just to make sure the White House agrees

that we should go lunar orbit rendezvous. And he was a great help in that. And finally, it came down to Kennedy, President Kennedy, saying to Jerry, he said, you know Jerry, you've got 10 people working for you. And Jim Webb has quite a few tens of thousands working for him. And I'm going to go with him. And because he's got the responsibility of carrying it out. And Jerry was not sold then. And I talked to him after we went to the moon. He still wasn't sold. We went the right way. Oh, that's good. That's great. Okay, we're yet bridge wide. Okay. That move would be so fast. I mean, I didn't even know what an engine, my father was an engineer, but I didn't even know

what it was all about till I, till I work with these people. And it was just incredible. I mean, I learned so much during those years. I just unbelievable, just unbelievable. Okay. Okay. That's the end of it. Okay. And I thank you very much. You hung in there. I'll tell me about you both. I will tell you about you both. Thank you, gentlemen. Yes.