The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs (review)

With The Secret of Apollo, Stephen Johnson, associate professor of space studies at the University of North Dakota and editor of Quest: The History of Space Flight Quarterly, has filled a slender niche in aerospace history, but his book also merits an audience among students of technology management. He describes how trial and error made systems management into the standard means of planning space missions in the United States and Europe because it generated maximum reliability, provided superior financial control, and satisfied the greatest number of human needs. "Scientists received credit for conceiving novel technologies," Johnson writes. "Military officers gained control over radical new weapons and their associated organizations. Engineers earned respect by creating reliable technologies. Managers gained by controlling organizations within a predictable (but hopefully large) budget" (p. 219). His case studies are insightful and cautionary. They could be applied to any nascent technology requiring interplay among scientists, engineers, industry, and government.

The story really starts in chapter 2, with the development of the intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) under air force general Bernard Schriever, who first adopted concurrency (design-as-you-go). Given problems of reliability, timeliness, and cost, Schriever turned to systems management, a product of World War II and cold war labs at the California Institute of Technology, MIT, and Bell Telephone, then being implemented by Simon Ramo of Hughes Aircraft. Johnson contrasts the air force with the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, showing how work on the Corporal also taught academics "how not to develop a missile" (p. 88). A move to systems management, Johnson argues, accounted for the eventual success of the two programs, which improved from a 50 percent to an 80-95 percent reliability rate (pp. 221-24).

Next, Johnson shifts to manned spaceflight, and this section, with its conflicts and tensions stemming from the Apollo 1 fire, is the most compelling emotionally. Chapters 6 and 7 address one of the book's key contentions, that the importation of American systems management brought about Europe's space success in the early 1970s. The European Space Vehicle Launcher Development Organization (ELDO) failed because it was a managerial disaster, but the European Space Research Organization (ESRO), which focused on satellite design, succeeded thanks to extensive outreach by NASA plus ESRO's decision to implement American systems management. Here Johnson draws on enough primary-source detail about European actions, about the contributions of NASA and U.S. aerospace firms, and about international tensions over commercial space applications to avoid making America look like a white knight and Europe a damsel in distress—but just barely. He ends this section with the evolution of ESRO into the European Space Agency (ESA) in 1975, and wraps up his book with an overview and analysis that should be required reading for students of technology management.

One might compare this book to W. Henry Lambright's administrative biography Powering Apollo: James E. Webb of NASA (1995) or Howard McCurdy's Inside NASA (1993), about the space agency's corporate culture. One could relate its management issues to those of other programs, technologies, or policies of international scope, like Douglas Mudgway's Uplink-Downlink: A History of the Deep Space Network 1957-1997 (2001), Andrew Butrica's Beyond the Ionosphere: Fifty Years of Satellite Communication (1997), or Kazuto Suzuki's Policy Logics and Institutions of European Space Collaboration (2003). However, The Secret of Apollo is about something importantly different. It is the history of the evolution of a new means of thinking, organizing, interpreting, planning, evaluating, and succeeding.

This does make for some disconnectedness in the narrative. On first pass, The Secret of Apollo reads like a succession of journal articles; it jumps suddenly from America to Europe, from U.S. Air Force to NASA to ESA, and a chapter on manned space flight interrupts a chronology of unmanned programs. The reader takes it on faith that somehow Johnson will connect everything, and he is indeed...