Apollo: The Race To The Moon

by Catherine Bly Cox

Once when a visitor asked him whether he was an “intuitive” engineer, he answered, “I think I’m an intuitive engineer, yes. There is such a thing as a talent for things. I think I have a talent for it. . . . You know, it depends on how you want to use your tools, and how you want to do your analysis. I can almost go in a trance. . . . I can get fully absorbed in a problem, to the point of almost—well, you really have to distract me to get my attention.” How long does this last? he was asked. “I don’t know. I really don’t know. Oh—sometimes days and weeks. You can’t stand it but so long.

Webb enjoyed talking. A colleague from another agency who regularly had lunch with Webb once bet his secretary that he could get through an entire lunch without saying a word. He succeeded, substituting grunts for hello and goodbye. It was one of the best lunches they’d had together, Webb remarked cheerily as his guest left: “I learned so much.”]

“The better is the enemy of the good,” Shea told them again and again.* The biggest problem with a new product in its developmental phase, Shea thought, was that a good engineer could always think of ways to make it better. This was fine, except that they couldn’t keep changing the spacecraft forever. Sooner or later they had to lock it into one configuration, so that they could make that configuration work. Keep the changes down.

Keep it simple—that was the other half of the Shea doctrine. To Shea, it seemed as if everyone was saying, “Apollo is the most complex job in the world; therefore, every part has to be as complicated as possible.” And that was exactly backwards. What they should be trying to do was figure out how to do things as simply as possible, with as few ways as possible to go wrong.

Again and again he preached: “Hey, it isn’t that complicated. It is very understandable. The engines work this way, the guidance system works that way, the transistors work this way, so don’t get yourself in a state of mind thinking that it’s too complex. It really is very simple. It’s piece by piece.” It’s awfully big, that’s all, Shea kept saying. Piece by piece, it’s simple.

Everybody had a thing called a ‘Smarts Book,’ and in that Smarts Book each system engineer had every fact that you could possibly collect about that system that you worked on. . . . You understood that system from womb to tomb and there was nothing in that system you couldn’t recite by heart, including torque values, safety wire specs—you name it and a system engineer down there could tell you what it was.

“There’s a reason for it, because if anybody does anything technically that’s not according to physics, that’s bullshitting about something, I will forever be death on them. I mean, you’d better be exact, you’d better show technical elegance. It doesn’t make any difference how smart you are, you’d better not ever prostitute physics.”

“See, the brain is very clever,” Arabian said to all who would listen. “It can perceive things, it can create things, and all that. But it’s the most undependable, unreliable, unpredictable device that exists.”