Apollo and America's Moon Landing Program: The Saturn Management Concept - The Reasons Behind the Success of the Saturn V Moon Rocket Program (NASA CR-129029)

This official NASA history document - converted for accurate flowing-text ebook format reproduction - is a review of the management of the Saturn launch vehicle program which successfully developed America's Apollo moon rocket.

Management of the Saturn launch vehicles was an evolutionary process, requiring constant interaction between NASA Headquarters, the Marshall Space Flight Center (particularly the Saturn V Program Office), and the various prime contractors. Successful Saturn management was a blend of the decades of experience of the von Braun team, management concepts from the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Government, and private industry. The Saturn V Program Office shared a unique relationship with the Apollo Program Office at NASA Headquarters. Much of the success of the Saturn V Program Office was based on its painstaking attention to detail, emphasis on individual responsibilities (backed up by comprehensive program element plans and management matrices), and a high degree of visibility as embodied in the Program Control Center.

This brief study is the result of the initiative taken in the spring of 1973 by the Saturn V Program Office (Richard G. Smith, Manager) of Marshall Space Flight Center, through its Program Control Office (Thomas S. Johnston, Chief). The study is intended to satisfy numerous requests by individuals, private enterprise, and other Government agencies for a record of how the Saturn V Program Office conducted its activities and how it succeeded in managing an enterprise as large and complex as the Saturn V launch vehicle.

Table of Contents: Background * Early Saturn Management * Reorganization of 1963 * The Saturn V Program Control System * Interfaces and Inter-Center Coordination * Meetings and Reviews * Relationships With The Contractor * Types of Contracts * Reliability and Quality Control * The Program Control Center * Summary and Conclusions * References

In 1962, pausing to look back over a career in which he played a key role as a leader in rocket research, Wernher von Braun noted two significant factors of success. First, the group of German rocket experts, known as the von Braun team at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, had been what von Braun called a "fluid, living organization," as it was shaped by external forces and, also, as it responded to them. Secondly, von Braun noted the three decades of consistent activity at the forefront of rocket development, an activity conducted with a "singleness of purpose, " in advancing the infant art of rocketry. "We have had only one long-range objective: The continuous evolution of space flight," he emphasized. "Ever since the days of the young Raketenflugplatz Reinickendorf in the outskirts of Berlin in 1930, we have been obsessed by a passionate desire to make this dream come true."