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Beyond the Atmosphere:
Early Years of Space Science
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- CHAPTER 14
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- STRAINS ON THE FAMILY TIE
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- [250] The Goddard
Space Flight Center and NASA Headquarters, only half an hour's
drive apart, were connected by close ties. Between the two staffs,
many personal associations dated from the days of the Rocket and
Satellite Research Panel and the sounding rocket and satellite
programs of the International Geophysical Year. An easy
relationship existed from the very start of the center. John
Townsend-who served as acting director of the center until the
permanent director, Harry Goett, formerly of NACA's Ames
Aeronautical Laboratory, took over-had been associated with John
Clark and the author at the Naval Research Laboratory. For many
years Townsend had been the author's deputy in the NRL's Rocket
Sonde [251] Research Branch. Harry Goett and Eugene
Wasielewski, whom Goett brought into Goddard as associate
director, had long been acquainted with Abe Silverstein from the
days of the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics. These
friendships served to mitigate the divisive forces between head,
quarters and field, but were not enough to avert an ultimate
break.
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- Harry Goett assumed the directorship of
Goddard in September 1959. As was his nature he quickly entered
personally into every aspect of the center's work. From his first
day until he left, he kept in close touch with every project. As
an untiring battler for the center and his people, Goett endeared
himself to his coworkers. He was a warm, emotional person who
showed a deep interest in the men and women working for him, and
on both sides a deep affection developed.
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- In the first weeks and months of NASA's
planning for its program, many center people had been drawn into
headquarters working groups to help get things under way. But as
center project work grew, these assignments, which tended to
persist, began to interfere with center duties. Finding Goddard
people still working on headquarters tasks a year after NASA's
start, Harry Goett began to protest that his personnel should be
relieved as fast as possible of these additional duties. On the
other hand, center people's taking part in headquarters planning
was advantageous to the center. Both organizations tried to keep
center participation within reasonable bounds.
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- As Goett, Townsend, and their people built
up Goddard and launched their initial projects, program managers
were developing their own methods of keeping themselves and their
superiors informed. Simultaneously the Congress was increasing its
demand for detailed information, which it was incumbent on
headquarters to supply. As the requirements for reporting
increased, project managers complained that they were spending too
much time with program managers and in preparing reports, time
that would be better spent in getting on with the projects. In
mounting crescendo Goett complained to the author and his deputy
in the headquarters space science office, Edgar M. Cortright, that
headquarters managers were getting in the way of center
management. Goett urged that headquarters people keep their hands
off project management.
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- While agreeing in principle with the
Goddard director, Cortright and the author strove to get him to
see that in the existing climate of continuing congressional
scrutiny, keeping informed was an important part of headquarters
work. That, space science management insisted, was an absolutely
essential part of the program manager's job, but not to usurp the
project manager's duties or to interfere with his work. Cortright
and the author urged upon their people great care in working with
the project managers to avoid any kinds of action that would
undercut, or appear to undercut, the project manager's
responsibilities and authority. It was no [252] advantage
to the program for any project manager to feel that his
responsibilities had been in any way lifted from his
shoulders.
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- Headquarters was far from Simon pure in
these matters, unfortunately, and there was considerable justice
in Goett's complaints. The natural urge to meddle plus the
incessant pressure to keep informed led many program managers to
get into the project business. Sometimes this led to strong
adversary relations between program and project managers; at other
times to close "buddy-buddy" relations. Both situations caused
problems for center management and called for continuing
attention.
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- By the fall of 1962, Goett found the
situation so disturbing that he felt impelled to complain openly
at a NASA management meeting held at the Langley Research Center
that headquarters got too much into projects and should stick to
program management. His barbs were aimed not only at space science
managers, but also at those responsible for applications programs
and for tracking and data acquisition. He felt that there was not
enough contact between the center director and the associate
administrator.13 Goett also felt he did not have enough contact with
the author. The last complaint stemmed from the mode of management
the author had adopted, about which a few words are in
order.
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- Being a scientist, the author felt it wise
to name as deputy an engineer whose training and experience would
complement his own. Edgar M. Cortright, an aeronautical engineer
with considerable research experience in the National Advisory
Committee for Aeronautics, filled the bill very nicely. An
implication of this philosophy of organization was that he deputy
should be more than an understudy, more than just someone to it in
when the principal was away. Rather, the deputy should take
responsibility for important aspects of the top management job
that came within his sphere of expertise. This was the arrangement
agreed on between Cortright and the author. Cortright would handle
engineering matters, which meant oversight of much of the project
work, dealing with contractors, and a great deal of the relations
with the space science centers. The author would work on program
planning, advisory committees, and most of the space science
program's external relations including those with the Academy of
Sciences, the scientific community, and the universities. Such an
arrangement had worked well at the Naval Research Laboratory,
where John Townsend's engineering and experimental bent had
complemented the author's theoretical background. Moreover, in
addition to providing the top level of management in the office
with talents and experience complementing those of the director,
it was an effective way of providing a deputy with substantive
work and to continue his professional growth. A deputy with
nothing more to do than to wait around for the principal to be
away must find life deadly dull, unrewarding, and
stultifying.
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- [253] Under this
arrangement, problems of the kind Goett was wrestling with would
normally have been taken up by Cortright. But Goett was not
willing to deal with a deputy. As director of the Goddard
Center-even though the author was meticulously careful to support
agreements Cortright worked out-Goett felt that he should deal
directly with the principal in the office for which the center was
working. Under the circumstances the author took special pains to
make it clear that he was available to Goett at any time, yet
expressed the hope that Goett would work with Cortright in the
normal course of day-to-day matters.
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- The strain caused by the
project-management versus program-management conflict took
increasing amounts of time and attention. A great deal of the time
spent with Goett was devoted to this problem. John Townsend,
Goett's man for space science matters, pointed out that if a
program manager had only one project under way in his program,
then it became very difficult to draw a line between program and
project, and the pressure on the program manager to get into
project management was overwhelming. Townsend recommended that
programs be put together in such a way that a program manager
would have several projects to deal with. Under such an
arrangement a program manager could no longer give the
single-minded attention required by a project, and should find it
much easier to confine himself to program matters. Cortright and
the author agreed and tried to avoid single-project
programs.
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- Goett pointed out that it was not just the
cases in which program and project managers were at odds that gave
trouble. When the two got along well together, often they would
team up to promote their project over other projects which the
center management-taking into account existing constraints on
dollars, manpower, and facilities-might judge to be more
appropriate. Thus, program and project managers working hand in
glove for their own projects-perhaps to enlarge them or to extend
them beyond existing commitments-were not always working for the
best interests of the center.
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- Goett was most disturbed to have program
managers, in the name of keeping in touch, attend meetings with
outside contractors. Even if the headquarters people came with the
determination to keep their mouths shut, contractors'
representatives had a penchant for tossing questions to the
headquarters representatives, with the implication that that was
where the final word would lie. And when headquarters people did
volunteer comments, their comments tended to take on more weight
than the word of the project manager. These difficulties became
even worse when the headquarters man was technically more
competent than the project manager-which Goett didn't feel could
happen very often. In that case the project manager tended to
defer to the headquarters person for decisions [254] and
recommendations that the project manager should make himself, an
the contractors were easily confused as to who was calling the
shots.
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- Goett's solution to these problems would
have been to keep program managers away from project management
meetings, and especially away from meeting with contractors.
Considering the program manager's basic responsibility to see to
the health of his program and the corresponding need to keep
informed-a need that was enhanced by the growing amount of
attention given by congressional committees to NASA's programs and
projects-Goett's solution was not acceptable. Cortright and the
author spent a great deal of time trying to get Goett to
appreciate headquarters' needs and to agree to some
middle-of-the-road way out of the dilemma. A written description
was prepared of the distinction between program management and
project management, and the author committed himself to ensuring
that his program people understood the bounds of their authorities
and responsibilities. But the author also insisted that the way be
kept open for headquarters people to keep adequately informed.
Goett was not satisfied. In a letter to Associate Administrator
Robert C. Seamans 5 July 1963, he outlined some of the problems as
he saw them.14 Shortly thereafter, on 26 July 1963, the Office of
Space Science and Applications proposed a revision of NASA
Management Instruction 37-1-1.15 In Appendix A were specific definitions of
program and project.
The instruction made the point that
the headquarters job concerned itself with program matters
primarily, while project managers normally were at field centers.
On 5 November 1963 the author wrote Harry Goett on the subject of
headquarters-center relations.16 The letter outlined agreements that it was hoped
had been reached to keep headquarters people properly informed,
without undercutting the center's position with contractors. But
matters continued to deteriorate.
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- Complaints were not confined to the center
side. In a talk given to a number of managers of space science and
applications projects, at Airlie House near Warrenton, Virginia,
the author spoke on relations between program managers in
headquarters and project managers in the
centers.17 By giving what was viewed by headquarters people as
too much emphasis to the rights and prerogatives of project
managers, the author drew forth some howls from the former. On 30
December 1963 the staff of the Office of Space Science and
Applications met to discuss relations with the Goddard Space
Flight Center's.18 Program people complained that Goddard seemed to be
waging a war to keep headquarters at arm's length. It was
difficult to find out about contractor meetings in time to attend.
Although Goett had stated that headquarters should keep itself
informed by means of the reports it received, still Goddard
habitually did not turn in reports on time. The center was being
too independent in formulating its plans for supporting
[255] research-i.e., the general background
research of the kind all centers undertook in support of their
project work. Program chiefs felt a need to specify reporting
requirements for this supporting research, since most of the money
for such research came from portions of the budget for which the
program chiefs had responsibility. Another complaint concerned
Requests for Proposals, documents which centers sent to potential
contractors asking for bids on work that the center wanted done.
Program people were required to follow the progress of such RFPs
through the headquarters paper mill and to assist in expediting
their progress. It was important, therefore, for them to keep in
close touch with the formulation of the work statements that would
go into the Requests for Proposals. Yet the center appeared to be
making it difficult for the program managers to keep in touch. The
Interplanetary Monitoring Platform project was considered an
illustration of the center's intentions in this regard. Since a
decision that program people would attend "working group" meetings
of projects, Paul Butler, manager of the IMP project, had ceased
to hold working group meetings. Instead he held what he called
"coordination meetings" with his staff, which headquarters people
were explicitly told they were expected not to attend.
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- While the managers in the Office of Space
Science and Applications were most intimately involved in the
day-to-day relations with the center, the problems also had the
continuing attention of Webb, Dryden, and Seamans. Concerned about
overruns and schedule slips in NASA projects, the Administrator's
Office noted that many of the bad examples were
Goddard's.19 As general manager of the agency, Associate
Administrator Seamans maintained pressure on the Office of Space
Science and Applications to correct the deficiencies. Although
Seamans had known and worked with Harry Goett since 1948 and
admired him very much, Seamans could not accept Goett's insistence
that headquarters leave Goddard to its own devices. As Seamans
wrote years later:
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- ... it was essential if NASA was to
continue to receive Congressional support, that we tighten the
management of our projects in order to keep costs and schedules
closer to plan. We could not, in the public interest, take it on
faith that Harry Goett was doing all that could be done to manage
these projects properly. It was necessary for NASA Headquarters to
have direct access to a variety of management data as was the case
with other NASA centers. I kept Dr. Dryden and Mr. Webb fully
informed of the Headquarters/Goddard relationships and of
important issues.20
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- But the problems did not end. Discussions
with Goddard management seemed to elicit too much explanation of
why it was in the nature of things for schedules to slip and not
enough desire to change matters. The Goddard [256] scientists
especially could not see why there should be any urgency about
adhering to a schedule if additional work would produce a better
experiment. As for the experiments, usually there was no reason
why they should be done now rather than later, unless, of course,
they had to be timed to coincide with some natural event. But
NASA's record of doing what it said it would do on time and within
cost was important to those who had to fight for the agency's
appropriations. Schedules and costs were most visible to a
carefully watchful Congress, and for years NASA continued to feel
that it had to sell itself. Besides, it was just plain good
management to estimate costs and schedules correctly and then keep
to those estimates.
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- Whatever opinion the Administrator's
Office might have had as to who was the more to blame for the
strains caused by projects versus programs, the apparent
unresponsiveness of the center on tightening up project management
overshadowed the other concerns. Both Associate Administrator
Robert Seamans and his deputy, Earl Hilburn, pressed continually
for better performance. But when, in a stressful meeting with
Seamans, Goett took such a rigid position that he left no
maneuvering room for headquarters, the associate administrator
decided that Goett had to go. With the concurrence of both Webb
and Dryden, on 22 July 1965 Seamans removed Goett from the
directorship and replaced him with Dr. John F. Clark, who had been
chief scientist in the Office of Space Science and
Applications.21
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- It was a traumatic experience for Harry
Goett and for others. The author found it a most unpleasant duty
to go out to the Goddard Space Flight Center to meet with key
managers and inform them that their director was being replaced.
Goett was beloved of his people; he had been a conscientious,
hard-working, imaginative director, under whose regime the center
had achieved most of the space accomplishments of NASA's first few
years. Goett himself had played a key role in establishing a
productive relationship with the academic community. Those
accomplishments were, of course, the real story of the Goddard
Space Flight Center, not the struggles over how to manage. It was
tragic that Goett's obsession over one concept of
headquarters-field relationships-born perhaps of his past
experience in the NACA-made him unable to appreciate the new
climate in which NASA had to operate. It was unfortunate that the
author was unable to work out some accommodation that would have
kept Goett at the Goddard helm. Harry Goett s departure was a
distinct loss to NASA.
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- Not having Goett's flair for the
controversial, John Clark projected a more pedestrian image for
the center. Yet under his administration, Goddard continued its
record of successful space science and applications flights. The
problems remained, and both center and headquarters had to work
continuously to keep them under control. But both sides approached
the problems with a better understanding of each other's needs. In
short order Clark was telling headquarters where to head in, and
headquarters [257] was pressing him to get on with the job of
better resource and schedule management.
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- The difficulties experienced by the Office
of Space Science and Applications with the Goddard Space Flight
Center occurred in various forms and varying degrees with all the
other centers. The task of finding ways for headquarters and field
to work together harmoniously and effectively is never ending. Nor
is it to be expected that tension between headquarters and field
will ever disappear. Should this happen, one or the other will
probably not be doing its best job.
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