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.

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

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.

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

was pressing him to get on with the job of better resource and schedule management.

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.

15

Jet Propulsion Laboratory: Outsider or Insider?

In the summer of 1958, before NASA had begun to operate, the author flew to California to visit the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. The purpose of the visit was to talk with the director, William Pickering, and his key staff members about the possibility that a group from the Rocket Sonde Research Branch of the Naval Research Laboratory in Washington might transfer to JPL. Discussions within the Department of Defense that had accompanied the congressional debate on the nation's space program during the first half of 1958 had made clear that the Navy, in spite of its pioneering contributions in the rocket exploration of the upper atmosphere and in developing the Aerobee, Viking, and Vanguard rockets, would probably not have a key role in space research and development. Some members of the Navy's high-altitude rocket research group were, therefore, casting about for a more promising situation for pursuing their research in the years to come.

There was good reason for the NRL researchers to consider the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a possibility. Since the 1930s it had been at the forefront of rocket research and development in the United States. During the pioneering years of the 1940s and 1950s, the laboratory had furnished strong leadership to the country in rocket propulsion, making numerous contributions to the development of solid propellants and of rockets like the Army's Corporal and WAC-Corporal. Moreover, JPL had furnished the Explorer satellite that rode the Army Ballistic Missile Agency's Jupiter C rocket in the country's first successful response to the Sputnik challenge.1 It seemed logical that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory would be deeply involved in rockets and space research as it had been in the past.

The laboratory staff expected to play a role, but Pickering and his associates were not sure just what role. The summer of 1958 was primarily a time to wait and see, and anyone who joined the laboratory would have to recognize the uncertainties and take his chances along with the rest of JPL.

Back in Washington the author reported to his NRL colleagues that JPL would probably have much to do with the space program, including space science, but that there was no assurance that the space science at JPL would be the atmospheric and solar research that the Naval Research Laboratory investigators had worked on for the past decade. Moreover, the real center of action on space would doubtless lie with the new National Aeronautics and Space Administration itself. As a consequence the thought of joining JPL was shelved, and the author and his colleagues pursued the idea of going to NASA, where over the next half year many of them found positions either in headquarters or in the newly formed Goddard Space Flight Center.

The Jet Propulsion Laboratory also joined the NASA family, transferred by presidential order on 3 December 1958.2 Once fully under way, having cleared the initial hurdles of switching from largely ground-based research to primarily spaceflight projects, the laboratory proceeded during the 1960s and early 1970s to add luster to its already enviable reputation. Although there were mistakes and various kinds of problems to overcome, in time these minuses were greatly overshadowed by the pluses of spectacular achievements with Rangers and Surveyors to the moon; Mariners to Mars, Venus, and Mercury; and amazing feats in space communications using the JPL deep-space tracking network. The network included ground-based radar sounding of the planets. Most of what JPL did during NASA's first decade and a half concerned space science-the scientific investigation of the moon and planets with unmanned spacecraft-a natural extension of the laboratory's work in the 1950s, when its director was a member of the Rocket and Satellite Research Panel.3

A detailed review of these activities is beyond the planned scope of this book. Here only one issue will be treated, that of developing an effective working relationship between NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. The complex and frequently emotional matter consumed a great deal of time on the part of NASA space science managers on the one side and people of JPL and the California Institute of Technology on the other. The subject is important in illustrating how nontechnical issues can often make the accomplishment of technical objectives far from straightforward.

Singling out one topic from a rich and varied story like that of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory could distort the overall picture by undue emphasis on the one aspect. The reader should remember in what follows that even as the participants wrestled with knotty issues in human relations, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's engineers and scientists were laying the groundwork for the phenomenal successes that were later achieved in investigating the moon and planets. While the very human strife between NASA Headquarters and the laboratory in the first half of the 1960s loomed large

at the time in the minds and emotions of those involved, it was a passing phenomenon. The real and permanent image of the laboratory was to be seen in the utter dedication and superlative competence of its people and in their achievements.

THE QUESTION OF RESPONSIVENESS

Part of the problem was rooted in the unique status of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in the NASA family. While the laboratory grounds, buildings, and equipment belonged to the government, the laboratory itself as an organization, a working team, was a creature of the California Institute of Technology. Within NASA a frequent question was whether the laboratory should be regarded as another center in the NASA complex—that is, as an insider-or be treated purely as a contractor-that is, as an outsider. For its part, JPL took great pride in its connection with Cal Tech, tenuous and neglected as this connection was. The association gave JPL a special access to the academic world. Also, in true academic fashion, Cal Tech accorded the laboratory a great deal of independence to plan and carry out its own research programs, although, as JPL Director Pickering later complained, Cal Tech's desire to have space science done on campus rather than at JPL sometimes stood in the way of JPL's developing the kind of program that NASA wanted.1 It was an independence that the Army had accommodated and to which the JPL staff had become thoroughly accustomed.

In taking possession from the Army, NASA kept the arrangement under which Cal Tech would continue to exercise administrative oversight over the laboratory-for a substantial fee, “which in the early years of the association [with NASA] Cal Tech did very little to earn," as the first administrator, Glennan, put it.5 But the space program would have an entirely different dimension from that of the projects previously engaging the attention of JPL, and NASA would request many things that the laboratory had previously shunned. The question quickly arose as to whether the Jet Propulsion Laboratory would accept program direction from NASA Headquarters or would negotiate a mutually acceptable program with NASA. Space agency managers like Abe Silverstein assumed without question that it would be the former, while the laboratory's management was determined that it be the latter. In fact, JPL people thought there should be no question about it, since the contract just signed with NASA actually did contain a mutuality of interest clause that called for NASA and JPL both to agree on programs and projects assigned to the laboratory.6

For years, until it was finally eliminated, this mutuality clause in the NASA-Cal Tech contract was a source of disagreement. From the very first, NASA Administrator Glennan, Deputy Administrator Dryden, and Asso