Free Moon Lander: How We Developed the Apollo Lunar Module by Thomas J. Kelly

more months, and the barrackslike World War II buildings at Ellington Field were filled with the burgeoning NASA Apollo program staff. All available speculative office space in southeast Houston had already been leased by NASA, so they had to be ingenious to find more.
    NASA located a real estate developer who was building a large garden apartment complex off the Gulf Freeway in southeast Houston, next to the just completed Gulfgate Shopping Mall. They leased two apartment buildings that were completed structurally but not finished on the interior and had the developer make them into temporary offices. They had water, electricity, air conditioning and heating, telephones, bathrooms, and basic interior white paint but lacked carpets and flooring, kitchens, and many of the doors, fixtures, and decorations. These finishing touches to make the buildings into attractive apartments would be added later, after their use as a makeshift office complex had ended. Openings were cut into some of the walls between apartments to permit interior access and circulation throughout the building, and the parking area adjacent to the buildings was temporarily paved with crushed oyster shells from the Gulf of Mexico. A permanent asphalt surface would come later, after the traffic of heavy construction equipment subsided.
    We were greeted at Gulfgate Gardens by Charles Frick, Apollo spacecraft program manager, and many other members of the NASA LM Negotiation Team. Gulfgate Gardens was a large, not unattractive complex of two-story red-brick residential apartments, with white architectural trim and white shutters on the windows. The buildings contained ten or twelve duplex units, each with a separate front door, and were widely spaced, surrounded by lawns and young, sticklike trees and shrubbery, all newly planted.
    NASA had two adjacent buildings on a quiet street in the interior of the complex. When we arrived, furniture trucks were parked outside the NASA buildings and workers were busily unloading the desks, chairs, and file cabinets NASA had rented. Inside was mostly antiseptic white, but there were clumps of construction debris in the corners here and there. Wires dangling from ceiling electrical boxes and covers missing from wall switches and plugs emphasized the unfinished nature of the place. The rooms had been assigned to some thirty specialty teams that would fact-find and negotiate each area of the proposal. The NASA and Grumman team members paired off and got acquainted in their new quarters.
    I joined Gavin, Mullaney, and Rathke in a meeting with the NASA leadership. NASA said they wanted to review our backup data showing the detailedbasis for our proposal, including technical approach; program, manufacturing, test, logistics, and staffing plans; subcontract plans; and manpower, cost, and schedule estimates. After this joint fact finding we would discuss changes to the proposal, which would become the negotiated basis of the LM contract. NASA thought this process should take about two weeks and targeted completion the day before Thanksgiving. They asked, however, that we plan to remain in Houston over Thanksgiving and into December in case the negotiations took longer than expected. We agreed to a weekday schedule with counterpart meetings beginning at 10:00 A.M . and continuing nominally until 5:00 P.M .; this allowed each side to hold summary status meetings beginning at 7:00 or 8:00 A.M . and use the evenings when necessary for continued counterpart discussions and for separate problem resolution and status accounting on each side. Saturdays would be used as necessary; Sundays would be days off. Before launching into this demanding regimen, NASA invited the combined negotiating teams to a “kick-off” luncheon at a nearby Gulfgate restaurant.
    The NASA LM Negotiation Team was led by Bill Rector, LM program manager for the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office (ASPO), with Dave Lang, MSC contracts director, as the team deputy Rector