Free Apollo: The Race to the Moon by Charles Murray, Catherine Bly Cox

technicians on the pad, to have been just about as good as his publicity made him out to be. He won from them loyalty and affection as well as professional respect. “He was a noble type of man,” said one American at Huntsville. “That’s the only word I can think of to describe him.”
    Ultimately, von Braun won admiration, though sometimes grudging, even from his peers in the other centers. Robert Gilruth, who got far less attention from the press and who in the early days had to struggle to keep the Space Task Group from being eclipsed when von Braun was brought into NASA, had ambivalent feelings about his counterpart at Marshall. But once, after von Braun died in 1977, Gilruth was listening to another senior NASA official talk about a technical problem on the shuttle. “I wish Wernher were still around to ask about this,” Gilruth broke in suddenly. “You know,” the NASA official reflected, “that was probably the greatest tribute von Braun ever got.” And then the NASA official proceeded to give von Braun his own tribute, the only compliment that really counted in the Apollo fraternity. When you ignored all the P.R. stuff, he said, “von Braun was actually a pretty good engineer.”
    The working end of the rocket team at Redstone Arsenal was divided into eight laboratories, and a German headed each of them. Another German, Kurt Debus, headed the Missile Firing Laboratory at the Cape. They ran these labs in a way that often seemed to caricature the public’s image of Teutonic scientists. Their colleagues were “Mister” or “Doctor,” rarely “Chuck” or “Bill,” even when they had been working together for years. Everything had to be done with meticulous exactness and order. Debus, for example, was known for making the rounds of his subordinates’ offices after hours, sweeping papers and books from desks that didn’t meet his standard of neatness.
    The Germans were extraordinarily conservative in their designs, with margins that were lavish even by aerospace standards—every component had to be able to bear far more weight, tolerate far higher temperatures, withstand far higher dynamic pressures than the rated performance of the vehicle required.* When preparing the hardware, the Germans for many years had no separate inspection function. Each engineer inspected the work of his own technicians, and he was expected to be a good enough machinist or electrician or hydraulics mechanic in his own right to be able to know whether the work was done correctly. The Germans’ testing programs were excruciatingly thorough, “to the point of being ridiculous,” said one American observer with both exasperation and envy.
    [* When during Apollo the spacecraft kept exceeding its weight limits, NASA officials from headquarters went down to Huntsville to find out whether there was any way that von Braun’s people could cut some weight from the launch vehicle and thereby raise its performance beyond its original rating. Sure, one American remembered them saying—“We can cut three thousand pounds, four thousand pounds—it won’t make any difference.” This was at a time when the spacecraft people were trying to shave ounces. The German margins also let them uprate the performance of the engines of the first stage of the Saturn V from 7,500,000 pounds of thrust to 7,650,000. This reservoir of extra performance that the Germans built into the launch vehicle came to the program’s rescue more than once during Apollo.]
    What made this Germanic conservatism and precision remarkable was that by the late 1950s most of the people from Huntsville who were behaving this way weren’t Germans at all, but the Americans who had been hired to work with them. Most of them were men from the small towns of the Deep South, graduates of nearby engineering schools like Auburn and the University of Mississippi and Georgia Tech. The result was a combination of Germans like Eberhard Rees or Karl Heimburg or Walter