ciate Administrator Richard Horner were faced with a showing of independence and what headquarters viewed as a lack of responsiveness by JPL. These administrators had to spend what they regarded as an inordinate amount of time on questions of prerogative, time that would have been better spent on getting ahead with the space program. As Glennan would write years later:

I think that JPL was the beneficiary of tolerance by NASA peers, was not really thought of as a responsibility by Cal Tech. I suppose that the payoff of success is the final answer-but did it need to cost so much in dollars, in tolerance and accommodation by Newell and others??

As will be seen, the problem was not quickly resolved and if anything was even more intense when the second administrator, James E. Webb, took over in January 1961. Hugh Dryden and Robert Seamans, who had succeeded Richard Horner as associate administrator, continued to strive for a resolution of the problem.

But to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the mutuality clause was essential to preserve a cherished way of life that the laboratory viewed as a right, not only inherited from the past but also earned by competence and achievement. Moreover, JPL personnel could hardly be chided if from time to time they told themselves that it was circumstance rather than any previous history of leadership in rocketry that had put so many employees of the National Advisory Committe for Aeronautics in the driver's seat in the space program. To NASA managers, however, being in charge imposed responsibilities upon the agency. Were the Jet Propulsion Laboratory a Civil Service center, there would be no question about the authority of NASA Headquarters to decide on project assignments to the center. As a contractor the laboratory should be no less responsive to NASA direction.

Thus, while NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory began their association with enthusiasm and great expectations, they also started with an arrangement that was interesting, to say the least. Add to this the principal players in the drama that was about to unfold, and conflict became a virtual certainty. Abe Silverstein, self-assured and customarily certain about what was the right way to go, would run a taut ship. He would welcome ideas and suggestions, but, once the decision was made-by NASA-he would expect his team to fall in line.

William Pickering was as stubborn as Silverstein was domineering. He had worked in cosmic ray physics at the California Institute of Technology, had been a charter member of the Rocket and Satellite Research Panel, and had shared in the pioneering of rocket instrumentation. In 1954 he became director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. More than almost anyone else in NASA, except perhaps Wernher von Braun, he had a keen sense of his role as champion of his team, and he was not about to

relinquish any of the laboratory's traditional independence without a fight.

When James E. Webb became administrator of NASA, the potential for conflict between NASA and the California Institute of Technology was substantially increased. Webb saw in the unique setup with JPL an opportunity to pursue within the NASA sphere itself the kinds of objectives he sought with individual universities in the memoranda of understanding he later attached to NASA's facility grants (pp. 232-35). Webb expected Cal Tech, with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory as a powerful drawing card, to foster and facilitate in the university community-particularly in California-interest and participation in space research. In this Webb would be pressing his hopes upon Lee DuBridge, president of the California Institute of Technology.

DuBridge, with an illustrious career in physics to point to and the successful management of the Radiation Laboratory at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology during World War II on his record, had no doubts about his ability and that of Cal Tech to run the Jet Propulsion Laboratory properly. An extremely sensitive person, DuBridge found any expressed or implied criticism of his institute or its laboratory distressing, and not always understandable. But he also found it difficult to satisfy Webb, or even to understand what the administrator wanted.

So the stage was set, and the story began to unfold in the fall of 1958.

MOON AND PLANETS

From the outset most assumed that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory would concentrate on the investigation of the solar system. This was much to the laboratory's liking, but the real interest was in the planets, not in the moon. In this, JPL immediately came into conflict with Administrator Glennan's desire to tackle the moon first. Just as the earth sciences had come before the moon and planets in the orderly and moderately paced development of space science, so in Glennan's view the moon should come before the planets. The JPL managers were, however, convinced that the Soviet Union, with the great lead it had already gained in space exploits, would quickly move ahead in the investigation of the moon also. America's only chance of recapturing the lead, they felt, would be to proceed at once to the planets.

This and other differences of view came out in a series of meetings of Abe Silverstein, the author, and other NASA representatives with William Pickering and his associates. The meetings at JPL in mid-January 1959 were devoted to a discussion of plans and policies, the hope being to found a close working partnership between NASA and the laboratory.

Pickering made it clear that JPL would like to do nothing in 1959 that did not contribute to deep space probes. In particular he urged the devel

opment of a spacecraft fully stabilized in three axes, which would be a most effective vehicle for investigating deep space and the planets. The laboratory would do the engineering itself, using outside firms as subcontractors. The laboratory's past experience lay on the experimental side, and JPL wished to continue being the doer, keeping the supervision of other NASA programs to a minimum.

In turn, Silverstein emphasized the rugged job that lay ahead of NASA in monitoring the national space program and the hope that JPL would consider itself a part of NASA, not an outsider. As a member of the NASA family the laboratory would have to bear its share of monitoring outside contracts. Pickering responded that the laboratory would be glad to participate in headquarters committees, analyses, planning, and the like, but would refuse to undertake the detailed technical supervision of contracts. In that reply can be seen the underlying insistence on negotiating mutually acceptable work assignments that would be a central issue for the next several years.

In spite of the differences, the laboratory moved out on its assigned work and during the next two years well into the development of the Ranger lunar spacecraft and the planetary Mariner, largely in-house with assistance from outside subcontractors. For its part, NASA supplied the resources for expanding the laboratory's facilities and equipment and for increasing the staffing. NASA also undertook to reestablish the military channels previously open to JPL when it had worked for the Army-for example, to the Army Ballistic Missile Agency in Huntsville and to Cape Canaveral. In addition NASA continued to press JPL to expand its productivity through outside contracting. When work was begun on a Surveyor spacecraft to be soft-landed on the moon, a contract was given to Hughes Aircraft to do the job under the supervision of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, 10

With JPL, as with the rest of NASA, the first year produced both progress and wasted motion. It was a period of learning. At the request of the JPL leaders, the Vega upper stage intended for deep-space missions was assigned to the laboratory in the first months, only to be canceled within the year in favor of the Centaur stage.11

By the end of 1959, NASA management found it necessary to restrain its centers from diversifying their activities too broadly. Centers naturally tended toward self-sufficiency. An interesting line of research was often followed beyond the initial goal, even when this led a center into an area in which some other center was already competent. NASA management decided, therefore, that centers should be required to specialize more than they appeared to be doing and to avoid gross duplications. To this end Associate Administrator Richard Horner sent out letters assigning roles and missions to each center. The letter that went to William Pickering on 16 December 1959 confirmed that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory would

have responsibility for lunar and planetary missions. On 21 December Abe Silverstein wrote Pickering, giving guidance on lunar and planetary missions for the immediate future. A week later the author with several of his colleagues from headquarters visited JPL to discuss the guidelines. 12

Pickering quickly pointed out that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory had recommended emphasizing planetary investigations, whereas Silverstein's guidance seemed to start with a great deal of lunar work. Much to the displeasure of the JPL people, the NASA representatives made clear that the agency indeed was stressing the lunar work initially. In a lengthy discussion of policy for the space science program, it was agreed that NASA Headquarters would make tentative selections of experiments and experimenters for JPL missions, with the collaboration of the laboratory. The scientists would then develop prototype models or experiment designs and deliver them to the laboratory for evaluation. Final selection would be made on the basis of the JPL evaluation. Although this procedure was followed for awhile, actually it assigned to the laboratory more authority in allocating space on NASA payloads than was eventually permitted in NASA policy.

In this discussion the ever recurring issue of how to work with university and other outside scientists came up. Here the problem was how to meet both the needs of the project engineers who wanted to pin specifications down and fix schedules as early as possible and those of the scientists who wished to polish their experiments until the very last minute. NASA people sensed an inflexibility in this matter on the part of JPL engineers that boded trouble for the future.

Another topic that would recur many times over the years was how to attract the scientific community into the program. For the lunar and planetary areas JPL proposed to set up a committee along lines Pickering had suggested in an earlier letter to Silverstein, 13 but the NASA representatives indicated that headquarters would do this. After some debate it finally emerged that the laboratory was afraid that NASA would use the committee already established under Robert Jastrow for this purpose. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory would find it anomalous and disturbing to have a man from another center-the Goddard Space Flight Center-chairing a committee in a field that had been assigned to JPL. Once they appreciated what was disturbing the JPL members, the NASA people agreed to find a headquarters person to chair the committee.

That, however, was not the end of the matter. On 22 March 1960 Pickering returned to the subject in a letter opposing the idea of scientific discipline subcommittees to the Space Science Steering Committee in headquarters.14 Pickering recommended that NASA get its advice on experiment proposals directly from the centers. JPL felt that the centers could, through their contacts with the scientific community, adequately represent

the interests of that community. Pickering's proposal failed to recognize that NASA centers would also be competitors with outside scientists in seeking space on NASA spacecraft, and that there was a need to shield the centers from charges of conflict of interest-or even theft of ideas as was alleged on a few occasions-by having headquarters groups ultimately responsible for the selection of experiments and experimenters.

As work progressed, trouble continued to brew. NASA managers came to feel that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory's traditional matrix organization, which might have been fine for general research and smaller projects, was totally inadequate for large-scale projects with pressing deadlines. NASA also found the laboratory's record keeping, contract administration and supervision, and reporting inadequate. As a result NASA began a campaign to get Pickering to tighten up the organization and to improve the administrative side of the house. Since Pickering spent a great deal of time on outside matters-for example, with the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, in whose establishment he had played a leading role, and with the International Astronautical Federation and the International Academy of Astronautics—headquarters at first urged and later demanded that Pickering appoint a deputy to give continuous attention to the internal running of the laboratory. This last suggestion was especially disturbing to Pickering, who, despite NASA management's doubts about the quality of his leadership,15 felt keenly his role as defender of his people. The question of a deputy for the laboratory remained a bone of contention for a long time, and even when one was appointed NASA felt that Pickering did not make proper use of the position.

The laboratory had its own complaints. At the NASA management meeting at the Langley Research Center in October 1962, at which Harry Goett had lashed out at headquarters for meddling too much in center affairs, Brian Sparks of JPL ran through an almost identical list of charges, showing that headquarters looked pretty much the same to the different centers. Sparks said that the laboratory felt headquarters took on too much project as opposed to program responsibility. For example: JPL did not have any real say on the matter of launch vehicles to be used; headquarters program chiefs dealt personally with individual project personnel instead of going through the project manager; the program office inserted itself into contracting matters and even asked contractors to quote prices for additional units on contracts managed by JPL; and headquarters insisted on approving the use of assigned construction funds. Additional complaints were that the Office of Space Sciences insisted on passing on the acceptability of every project the laboratory undertook, including study contracts, while the Office of Advanced Research and Technology similarly insisted on approving all advanced research before any funds could be released. JPL found it particularly irritating that other centers had been