CHAPTER 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.⁴ 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 PL 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 Associate 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?⁷

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 Committee 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.⁸ 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 t o 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,⁹ 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 development 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 encouraged to compete with JPL for planetary projects, especially when the planetary area had long since been assigned to the laboratory. Wernher von Braun echoed Sparks on behalf of the Marshall Space Flight Center.¹⁶

In the debate that ensued headquarters people undertook to rationalize their actions, but the important point had been made that headquarters had to set its own house in order even as it pressed the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to make improvements. Each side worked hard, and with sincerity, on these problems. But accommodation was difficult since two different philosophies were involved. The laboratory continued to insist on its independence and fell back on the mutuality clause in the contract with NASA to sustain its position. NASA insisted that JPL was a member of the NASA team with the same responsibilities to headquarters that other NASA centers had.

As time passed, technical problems-not unexpectedly-arose in JPL projects, piling additional stress on that caused by the philosophical differences. The successful flight of Mariner 2 to Venus in 1962 was encouraging, but the momentary elation was muted by a series of failures in the Ranger project.¹⁷ JPL might take some consolation in that it was the launch vehicle, not the JPL spacecraft, that was the culprit in the first several Ranger failures, but could hardly evade overall responsibility for the missions. Both launch vehicle and spacecraft had to work to achieve a successful mission, and until that happened both the laboratory and NASA were on the spot.

To add to the difficulties JPL was also getting a reputation among scientists of being intolerably difficult to work with. A subtle issue was the construction of flight equipment to go on JPL spacecraft. JPL usually insisted on taking prototype instruments developed by the scientists and having the flight hardware made itself.¹⁸ The logic of this procedure was obvious, but the potential impact on the scientific experiments was serious, and experimenters usually objected. Many of the instruments were new, developed specifically for the experiments to be performed. Only the experimenter and original designer of the instrument, who thoroughly understood the principles and details of the experiments to be performed, could sufficiently appreciate the idiosyncrasies of the equipment to ensure suitable calibration. It was essential, therefore, that experimenters participate in the preparation not only of prototypes but of flight hardware as well. Indeed, in recognition of these points NASA policy was that experimenters be held responsible for the proper functioning of their equipment. The JPL approach kept the experimenters at arm’s length and tended to frustrate their attempts to discharge their responsibilities.

Illustrating the difficulty of working with JPL as the scientists saw it were complaints that Herb Bridge of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and John Simpson of the University of Chicago aired in the fall of 1963.¹⁹ Both scientists had similar stories of extreme difficulties in trying to work with JPL: no focal point for getting timely decisions; too many people in the loop; delays at JPL in meeting requirements of the scientists making the laboratory for all practical purposes the selector of experiments to go on a payload, rather than the Space Science Steering Committee in NASA Headquarters; intolerable delays in getting contracts out and money flowing to the experimenters so that they could get their work done on time; correspondence unanswered; a mixture of arrogance and rigidity, as, for example, when JPL considered itself sufficiently competent to try new instruments and techniques but would not allow the experimenters to do so. Van Allen of the State University of Iowa told of the frustration of having Iowa-built equipment pass all the tests that had been prescribed by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory only to have JPL people open up the equipment and then reject it because the construction techniques used were not those employed by JPL. If the tests prescribed by the laboratory were valid, then equipment that passed the tests, Van Allen insisted, should be accepted for flight.

JPL difficulties with the university community were of special concern to Administrator Webb. As pointed out earlier, he expected the connection with the California Institute of Technology to enable the laboratory to do a superior job in dealing with the university scientists and thus in making the opportunities to do space science more readily available to academic institutions than might perhaps be possible in the government centers. In fact, the administrator made much of this expectation in justifying to Congress NASA’s paying Cal Tech more than $2 million a year to manage the JPL contract. Webb spent a great deal of time with Cal Tech President Lee DuBridge trying to get him to appreciate the importance of producing more for the annual fee than the mere routine administration of a contract, which NASA could have done for itself more cheaply.

As 1963 drew to a close, NASA stepped up its efforts to get the management of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to improve performance and to strengthen the organization for managing big projects. Earl Hilburn, deputy to Associate Administrator Robert Seamans, was assigned the task of working with Cal Tech to resolve some of the fundamental differences. Hilburn, a technical man himself and a hard- nosed businessman to boot, insisted, with the weight of the Administrator’s Office, that the laboratory find a suitable general manager. On 24 December 1963, Pickering informed the author by phone that he was in the process of setting up a new position of assistant laboratory director for technical divisions. Brian Sparks would be the new assistant director.²⁰

This was progress, but in NASA’s view fell far short of what was needed. An assistant director would not be the equivalent of a deputy director responsible for the internal management of the laboratory and empowered to make decisions binding on the director. But for the moment this appeared to be about as far as Pickering would budge. It took the dramatic failure of Ranger 6 to break the logjam.

ACCOMMODATION

When Ranger 6 separated from its launch vehicle on 30 January 1964 and slid onto a perfect trajectory toward its intended target on the moon, spirits ran high. As the telemetry record continued to show that the spacecraft was operating properly, success at long last appeared to be at hand. Three days later project people, NASA and JPL managers, contractors, experimenters, congressmen, and numerous visitors followed the progress of Ranger 6 as it approached the moon; and when in the last seconds of the flight the signal was sent to turn on the television cameras, all were prepared to heave a sigh of relief. But then the unbelievable happened. The cameras didn’t work!²¹

The dejection of JPL and NASA personnel was complete. Although Congressman Miller, chairman of NASA’s authorizing committee in the House of Representatives, expressed confidence in the Ranger program and congratulated NASA and JPL on hitting the target aimed at, there was no avoiding a thorough review of the project by the Congress. The author, at NASA headquarters, forwarded Congressman Miller’s letter to Pickering with a note assuring JPL that NASA would work vigorously alongside the laboratory and expressing confidence that Ranger would succeed.²² To determine what had gone wrong and what was needed to fix the spacecraft, NASA set up a review board under the chairmanship of Earl Hilburn.²³ On the Hill, Joseph Karth, chairman of the Subcommittee on Space Science and Applications in the House, got the job of probing the Ranger failure. From 27 April to 4 May 1964 the author and his colleagues in NASA, Jet Propulsion Laboratory managers, and JPL contractors -particularly the Radio Corporation of America, which had been responsible for the television equipment-were on the carpet.²⁴

Although the congressmen were deeply interested in the technical side of the story and delved deeply into what had gone wrong, they gave their most serious attention to management matters. Karth, well aware of the mutuality clause in the NASA contract with the laboratory, appeared to feel that laboratory unresponsiveness to NASA direction might be the underlying cause of the trouble. Moreover, he wondered what, if anything, the government was getting in return for the large management fee paid to the California Institute of Technology. Although these were the very questions that NASA continually debated with Cal Tech and JPL, during the congressional inquiry NASA and the laboratory closed ranks in mutual defense. During the hearings the author tried to make the point that at the heart of the so-called unresponsiveness of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory lay the sort of individual competence and self-reliance that NASA was seeking to use in the space program. Testimony also pointed out that the kinds of problems that NASA was having with JPL at the moment stemmed from the very difficult undertakings being attempted, and in the nature of things the agency had the same kinds of difficulties with its Civil Service centers. When the chairman observed that if relations with NASA’s centers were as bad as with JPL, then perhaps the investigation ought to be broadened to include the management of all NASA centers, the author replied that the proper point of view was that management relations with JPL were basically as good as with the other centers. But it had become clear that that line of defense was one to abandon as quickly as possible.

As a result of the investigation, the congressmen made clear to NASA that they were unhappy with the management arrangements between NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They expected NASA to tighten up the government’s control and to get rid of the mutuality clause in the contract with Cal Tech and JPL. Moreover, they were not at all convinced that the government was getting its money’s worth for the $2 million annual fee to the California Institute of Technology. Considerable pressure was put on NASA to eliminate that fee, one way of doing which would be to convert the laboratory to Civil Service.

The pressure to remove the fee was excruciating to Lee DuBridge, for over the years Cal Tech had built the fee into its funding structure so that now it formed about 10 percent of the university’s basic support. Sudden withdrawal of that sum would cause considerable difficulty. This possibility, and the publicity generated by the Ranger investigation, finally drew the attention of the Cal Tech Board of Trustees, who pledged themselves to help find a solution to the problem.²⁵

Fortunately for Cal Tech, Webb was not in favor of pulling out. As mentioned earlier, the NASA administrator saw in the Cal Tech-JPL arrangement great possibilities for the kind of university-government relationships he was hoping to develop in the broader aspects of the agency’s university program. Webb, therefore, stood firm against the outside pressure to change the management arrangement and renewed his efforts to wrest from DuBridge and Cal Tech the benefits he sought. As long as DuBridge was at the helm at Cal Tech, Webb strove in vain, for if ever two people spoke the same language with different meaning, those two were Webb and DuBridge. In whatever he said, Webb had in mind the broad, sweeping contribution that he thought a university should be able to make to government in expertise and wise counsel, while DuBridge never relinquished his dedication to the traditional independence of academic institutions and of the individuals within those institutions.

In his hopes Webb was repeatedly disappointed. Cal Tech showed little interest in broadening the use of the JPL capability by other universities, which Webb very much hoped to bring about in the national interest. To make matters worse, JPL proved to be pretty good at antagonizing outside experimenters assigned by NASA to JPL spacecraft, by keeping them at arm’s length and imposing unreasonable schedules and what seemed to the experimenters to be arbitrary and unnecessary construction and test requirements for their instruments.

Having got through the congressional inquiry, the Ranger managers bore down again on preparations for another flight. Oran Nicks, head of the Lunar and Planetary Program Office within NASA Headquarters, and his people-who through all that had happened had remained unshakable in their faith in and esteem for the laboratory-redoubled their efforts to assist JPL in whatever ways they could. Walter Jakobowski, Ranger program manager, did what he could to facilitate the work. Benjamin Milwitsky, program manager for Surveyor, which was having plenty of troubles of its own, worked assiduously to keep Surveyor from repeating the Ranger 6 fiasco. But it was the JPL engineers and their contractors who pulled it off. They left no possibility for trouble unprobed, no component, no subsystem unchecked, no test undone, to ensure that the next flight succeeded.

The going was not easy. Troubles continued to turn up in ground-based tests, so that in June 1964 the Office of Space Science and Applications set up its own review board separate from that chaired by Hilburn, it; purpose to leave no stone unturned in the effort to make Ranger succeed.²⁶

Simultaneously pressure continued for JPL to tighten up its management and to be more responsive to NASA direction. After all that had happened following the Ranger 6 failure, after all that had been said about the need to tighten up management and improve responsiveness, one would have thought that JPL had the message. The author and his deputy, Edgar Cortright, were shocked, therefore, to learn in a conversation with Pickering in early July of 1964 that JPL considered Surveyor a low-key project which could be kept on the back burner, with the contractor left pretty much to his own devices. Cortright and the author disagreed on the spot, and on 13 July a letter went out to Pickering underlining that Surveyor was considered one of the highest priority projects in the space science program and that the project had to have proper management attention. The letter asked that Pickering be certain “that JPL is properly staffed and organized, the Hughes contract is adequately monitored, and NASA Headquarters appropriately informed of Surveyor needs, to insure the earliest and fullest possible success of the Surveyor program.”²⁷

The following day a second letter to Pickering dealt with management problems. It requested that JPL develop a more formalized discipline in both business and project management. In particular NASA requested that the rather loose matrix organization that JPL had favored be tightened into a more direct project organization. The letter expressed concern that space science had a fuzzy sort of place in the laboratory structure and asked that it be given a firmer, more independent status. NASA asked that JPL work on improving relations with experimenters. The following September the author repeated these requests to Lee DuBridge, president of Cal Tech and accordingly Pickering’s boss.²⁸

The continuing lack of response to NASA’s requests led NASA management to give serious consideration to insisting that Cal Tech remove Pickering as director of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But Pickering had too much to offer to make this a palatable move. Another option seriously considered was that of converting the laboratory to Civil Service as some congressmen had favored. But again the administrator considered this too drastic. Setting aside the question of whether the necessary personnel authorizations could be obtained from an administration that was trying to reduce the total number of government employees-and ignoring the dislocations that would be generated in adjusting to Civil Service salaries, retirement plans, and fringe benefits-there was still the question of how many of the employees would stay. The fierce pride that JPL people took in their heritage as part of the Cal Tech family left grave doubts as to whether the laboratory could be converted without seriously disrupting the ongoing program.

At any rate, none of these unsavory options was adopted. Instead the contract with the California Institute of Technology was revamped.²⁹ The mutuality clause was removed, and JPL was required to be responsive to NASA direction. Specific organizational and management arrangements were required, including the strengthening of contract administration and provision for adequate accounting, record keeping, and reporting. On Webb’s insistence the new contract called for NASA managers to evaluate semiannually the performance of Cal Tech and JPL, with the total fee to Cal Tech depending on the rating received in the evaluation. Of all the provisions in the new contract, the one requiring the institute and the laboratory to undergo periodic evaluation-an indignity that DuBridge pointed out was not imposed on other NASA centers-rankled the most. Sweetening the pill, however, NASA agreed to provide a small fund (a few hundred thousand dollars annually) for the director of the laboratory to use at his own discretion to support research he deemed especially important.

The new contract provided no magic solution. Much still had to be done to settle the dust of battle and to establish a smooth working pattern. That occupied an appreciable amount of management time during the next several years. But the road had been cleared and it was a matter of bending to the task. Moreover, with the Ranger hurdles behind, successes became the rule, failures the exceptions, on JPL missions. In the light of these successes the earlier troubles faded farther and farther into the background. On 28 July 1964 Ranger 7 took off from Cape Kennedy for the moon, matching Ranger 6 in the flawlessness of its flight. But this time the television worked perfectly. The cameras returned superb pictures of a lunar mare-later designated Mare Cognitum, or “Known Sea,” by the International Astronomical Union. Those pictures taken just before the spacecraft hit the moon were a thousand fold more detailed than any that could be obtained through ground-based telescopes. On 31 July, three days after the launching and immediately following the completion of the mission, Dr. Pickering and a beaming JPL team held a happy press conference in which some of the Ranger pictures were shown and their scientific value discussed. Then Pickering and the author flew to Washington to brief President Johnson, who expressed his great pleasure in the achievement. On 11 August Congressman Karth, who half a year earlier had dug so grimly into the Ranger troubles, inserted into the record of the House of Representatives a paper by the U.S. Information Agency describing the worldwide admiration that Ranger 7 had evoked.³⁰

Ranger 8 (20 February 1965) and 9 (24 March 1965) were equally successful and more visible, since they were covered on live television. Then, after excruciatingly troubled years of development and testing, the very first Surveyor landed gently on the moon’s surface on 2 June 1966 and began to send pictures and other lunar data back to earth.³¹ Not a vestige of doubt remained that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory could match technical performance with the best that the country had to offer.

Not that the laboratory itself or those in NASA’s lunar and planetary office had ever doubted that they could do it. Oran Nicks and his people would frequently say that they were working with the most competent team in the space science program. In the end, results were eminently satisfying.

At the division level much effort had been invested in trying to understand each other’s needs and aspirations. NASA representatives had spent a great deal of time at JPL keeping in touch with what was going on. In return JPL members had been invited to spend tours of duty at NASA Headquarters to become familiar with the problems on the Washington end. Without doubt this was helpful. On returning to JPL, Gregg Mamikunian wrote the author in May 1966 expressing appreciation for the opportunity to work at NASA Headquarters for a while. He expressed his painful realization and awareness that decisions in regards to projects or missions at headquarters are not arbitrarily or whimsically arrived at (as is the ... consensus at the centers and universities) but with ... regard ... to the objectives of the scientific community at large and of the nation.”³²

Webb’s new contract requirement for a periodic evaluation of the laboratory was intended to generate at the upper management levels the kind of familiarity with each other’s views that those at the working level had already achieved to some extent. In this the device was successful. A pattern developed in which, before the actual evaluation, NASA and the laboratory agreed on the items to be rated, on both the technical and administrative sides. Then a preliminary written evaluation was drawn up from suggestions from the various NASA managers. Cal Tech and JPL were given an opportunity to review the preliminary evaluation and prepare for a face-to-face meeting with NASA, where JPL and Cal Tech could take exception to ratings they deemed unfair. Following the meeting the Office of Space Science and Applications revised ratings as appropriate and submitted the resulting evaluation to the administrator for approval.

Fortunately, by the time of the first evaluation in June 1965 the Jet Propulsion Laboratory had a number of items on which it could be given a rating of outstanding, including recent Ranger successes.³³ But it was quite a while before many outstanding ratings could be handed out for the administrative side. Nevertheless, as time went on the ratings improved.³⁴

The process forced a continuing attention to the many administrative problems that had dissatisfied NASA in the past, and the ratings provided JPL and Cal Tech with a measure of how well they were meeting the NASA requirements. Thus, as the 1960s drew to a close and JPL was preparing for the spectacularly successful flights of Mariner to Mars in 1969, administrative relations between the center and headquarters were on an even keel. Not that all problems were solved, but the most significant matters were now the technical ones, as one would want.

In retrospect, given the Jet Propulsion Laboratory’s former style of in-house engineering and distaste for much that was required in contracting with industry for projects, given also the laboratory’s priority over the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in rocket research, and considering the strong personalities involved, an intense struggle between JPL and its new bosses was predictable. No doubt, in time some sort of accommodation would have been worked out by degrees. But the Ranger 6 failure did not permit the gradual course. To preserve the arrangement that Administrator Webb wished to exploit in the university community, NASA had to tighten up management and insist on a visible improvement in performance. A revamped contract provided the basis for working out a solution. Strong efforts by men of good will on both sides made it work.