budgets and the political climate made it unwise to create a whole new office of life sciences. Nevertheless, the agency decided to do the following: • Place responsibility for all NASA life science activities in the hands of a single director. • Put much of the life sciences staffing under the new director; however, to maintain certain natural working relations—for example, between those working on man-machine interactions and the aeronautical research groups-a few life science elements would still be placed elsewhere in the NASA organization. Require the new director to review and approve all life science budgets, so that a properly integrated total life science program could be developed. • Make the associate administrator the point of contact, within the Office of the Administrator, for the life sciences director. • Arrange for frequent meetings of the administrator and deputy administrator with the director of life sciences to discuss progress and problems. • Create a Committee on Life Sciences under NASA's Space Program Advisory Council. Also, the agency would support a number of life sciences fellowships along the lines recommended by the summer study. Since most of the life sciences budget went into the biomedical program associated with manned spaceflight, the new office was placed administratively under the associate administrator for manned spaceflight. In mid-November the author called Bentley Glass, chairman of the summer study, to inform him of NASA's plans relative to his committee's recommendations. 15 Although NASA's plans did not go as far as the committee had asked, Glass was pleased with the agency's positive response. NASA's failure to put the program office for life sciences at the same level as the other program offices was a disappointment, but in the circumstances understandable. Placing all life sciences under a single director was the improvement most sought by the scientists. The Academy of Sciences made a long list of potential candidates for the new job available to NASA, and several Space Science Board members offered their assistance in trying to get one of these to take the job. But here again, as Administrator Webb had found years before in searching for a chief scientist for NASA, it was not possible to lure first-rate researchers away from their academic posts to take on the bureaucratic headaches of administering a program that had yet to sell itself. So, after considerable search for someone from outside, Dale Myers, head of the manned spaceflight office, appointed a NASA man, Dr. Charles A. Berry, a clinical M.D. who had achieved phenomenal success in dealing with the needs of the medical program for Gemini and Apollo. NASA's advisers were worried about two aspects of this appointment: first, Berry was not a research man; second, he came from the Johnson Space Center, which had consistently frustrated efforts of the community to get NASA to expand the research component of the biomedical program. But having failed to come through with anyone from the outside research commuity to take the job, the scientists were in a rather weak position to complain. Under Berry the new arrangement made sluggish progress toward the objective of a properly unified life sciences program. When Berry left in 1974 to assume the presidency of the University of Texas Health Sciences Center at Houston, Dr. David Winter from the Ames Research Center was named to replace him. Winter, a research man, was closer to the sort of person the life sciences community had hoped to see as director of NASA's life sciences program. In November 1975, after the close of the Skylab project, the life sciences office was transferred from manned spaceflight-now renamed the Office of Space Flight-to the Office of Space Sciences. Although this still left life sciences lower down in the organization than the scientists would like, nevertheless the new location afforded the research atmosphere they desired. Thus, in the 1970s NASA was in a better position than before to work closely with members of the life sciences community in putting space techniques to use for medical and biological research. Inasmuch as the 1970s were to be a period of transition from the use of expendable rockets to the use of the Space Shuttle-which appeared to hold particular promise for life science research in space—it was doubly satisfying that NASA had found a way of accommodating itself more closely to an important group of its clients. 17 Leadership and Changing Times Of all the responsibilities placed on the newly created National Aeronautics and Space Administration, perhaps the most obvious yet the most difficult to define was that of leadership. Glennan's leadership, embracing an enthusiasm for space research and exploration tempered by a willingness to build slowly and solidly, was ideal for getting the nation's space program under way. Space science managers were able to put together a wide-ranging program of earth and planetary sciences, solar physics and astronomy, and some space life sciences. Of equal importance, they were able to establish with the scientific community the kind of relationship that would draw researchers of high quality into the program. NASA'S ADMINISTRATORS Like Glennan before him, the second administrator, James E. Webb, strongly supported a balanced program of science, technology, application, and exploration. His policies assured each of the areas a place in the overall program. On the space science side relations with the scientific community continued to follow the patterns established during Glennan's tenure. The principal changes were those brought about by the expansion of the program that took place under Webb, in which Gemini and Apollo were undertaken, the university program was increased, and the pace of the space science program was stepped up. All in all, the course of leadership during Glennan's time and in the first years of Webb's tenure was relatively smooth. Reasonably wellthought-out projects were relatively easy to sell. With rapidly increasing budgets it was not too difficult to maintain a respectable balance among the various areas, even though different interests might quarrel with the relative emphases NASA gave to the different parts of the program. The problems facing the agency were those having to do with getting on with the program.1 Manned spaceflight people had to decide on the mission mode for Apollo: whether to use direct ascent, which Abe Silverstein favored; or to go first into a near-earth parking orbit and then on to the moon, which the President's Science Advisory Committee strongly urged; or to go into a lunar parking orbit from which to land on the moon, which the agency finally chose. Applications managers had to work out relations with industrial users of space technology and with other government agencies like the U.S. Weather Bureau and the Department of Defense. Decisions were to be made on the kinds of weather and communications satellites to develop and who would operate them. On the space science side, it was necessary to determine what balance to maintain between observatory-class spacecraft, which Abe Silverstein favored, and the smaller, cheaper ones that the scientific community preferred. Experiments and experimenters had to be selected for the missions to be flown. How much ground-based work should be funded as preparation for later flight experiments had to be decided. Much management time was devoted to resolving conflicts between the manned flight and space science programs-for which purpose George Mueller, associate administrator for manned spaceflight, and the author, associate administrator for space science and applications, finally agreed on the creation of a special manned space science division. It was headed by Willis Foster, one of the scientists who had come to NASA from the Office of Defense Research and Engineering in the Pentagon. Contrary to one of the cardinal principles of organization and management, Foster was to have two bosses-Mueller and the author—an arrangement that was intended to give his division equal access to both the Office of Manned Space Flight and the Office of Space Science and Applications.2 Foster's was an extremely difficult role to play, for the manned spaceflight office tended to view science as something that might support the achievement of the Apollo missions, whereas the space science managers wanted the agency to view manned spaceflight as a technique that could serve pure science and other primary objectives of the agency. Yet, difficult though they were, these problems, including those of Foster's division, were relatively straightforward. In a climate of positive support to the space program, they were part of the price to pay for accomplishing established goals. But in the late 1960s, demands on leadership changed severely in character. Under the best of circumstances the Apollo 204 fire on 27 January 1967 would have been difficult to live down.3 But coming at a time when the country was becoming more concerned about a variety of problems other than whether the United States was or was not ahead of the Soviets in space, the impact of the accident upon the agency was immeasurably increased. A great deal of Administrator Webb's time was taken up in recouping for NASA the respect it had been building up in the Mercury, Gemini, and other programs, and in regaining the confidence of the Congress. That in Apollo the United States was on trial, as it were, before the whole world had much to do with the program's continuing to receive support. But in the aftermath of the congressional hearings and internal NASA reviews, Webb began to sense a slackening of support for the space program. After peaking in 1966, NASA's annual expenditures began to decline sharply as spending on the building of the Apollo hardware passed its peak. Normally one might have expected at this stage to begin a small amount of advanced work on some new project to replace Apollo after it had been completed. And after the considerable effort put into selling Apollo as a project to develop a national capability to explore and investigate space, it was natural for NASA managers to think of putting the Apollo and Saturn equipment to use. NASA planners began to talk of an Apollo Extension System. But when the idea of extending the Apollo project did not go over too well, a new concept was introduced: the Apollo Applications Program.5 The name was meant to emphasize "applying" the Saturn and Apollo capability to other research, thereby capitalizing on the very large investments the country had made to bring that capability into being. During the muddy period of planning for an Apollo Applications Program that was not going to sell, Webb often stated to his colleagues in NASA that he did not sense on the Hill or in the administration the support that would be needed to undertake another large space project. When NASA managers wanted to come to grips with the problem, to decide on some desirable project like a space station or a manned base on the moon and then work to sell the idea, Webb preferred to hold back and listen to what the country might want to tell the agency. It was his wish to get a national debate started on what the future of the space program ought to be, with the hope that out of such a debate NASA might derive a new mandate for its future beyond Apollo. But no such debate ensued. In a country preoccupied with Vietnam and other issues, the space program no longer commanded much attention. If any leadership was to be provided, NASA would have to do it, since that vague "they" out there were not going to. In this climate the administrator became increasingly concerned about the timing of the decision to send astronauts off on their first flight to the moon. Added to the Apollo fire, a disaster out in space in which astronauts were killed in full view of the world might well destroy not only the Apollo project, but NASA itself. In the summer of 1968, as the Manned Spacecraft Center people were coming down the final stretch in their preparations for a circumlunar flight, Webb was in Vienna attending the international symposium on space applications sponsored by the United Nations Committee on the Peaceful Uses of Outer Space (p. 300). Thomas O. Paine, who had been appointed deputy administrator when Robert Seamans decided to leave the agency, was at home in Washington minding the shop, and it fell to him to guide the agency toward the first manned lunar flight. When Webb resigned in October,' the final go-ahead came from Paine as 6 |