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

had only been with NASA a few months, having been recruited by Charles Frick, his former boss at General Dynamics, shortly after Frick joined NASA in January 1962. Rector had been a key member of General Dynamic’s Apollo spacecraft proposal team in 1961, and wanting to be part of the program even though his company had lost, he decided to join Apollo with NASA. I had met him at Apollo bidder’s conferences and technical society meetings during the prior two years. He was a friendly, direct fellow with an aerospace engineer’s understanding of technical and program details and the intricacies of doing business with the federal government. I felt a basic rapport with him as one who empathized with the contractor’s problems and concerns. Rector was a tall man with wavy brown hair, a boyish-looking freckled face, a snub nose, and wide, round eyes, which he hid behind owlish horn-rimmed glasses. I thought he looked younger than me, but we were probably about the same age. Because he had only been with NASA a short time, Rector relied heavily on Lang and other NASA veterans for advice, but he was quite capable of making his own decisions. Major agreements and the overall negotiated contract would have to be approved by Bob Gilruth, MSC director, and Frick, as well as by George Mueller, Apollo program director at NASA Headquarters, and his staff.
    At lunch we relaxed with the NASA people with whom we would be intensely involved for years to come. We learned a little bit about them as individuals, and about how they reacted to Grumman’s LM proposal. In general they thought our proposal was ingenious and showed great knowledge of the mission and its technical problems but was naive and simplistic in a number of areas. It promised to be an interesting negotiation.
    Bob Carbee, Arnold Whitaker, Erick Stern, and I at first paired off withOwen Maynard and his chief assistants to review the overall technical approach. NASA explained to us that the LM’s requirements, mission plan, and space environment would continue to evolve as NASA and Grumman worked together closely for the next several months leading to the LM mockup review. NASA, therefore, was not buying the preliminary LM design that Grumman proposed but planned to develop the LM’s design together with Grumman. NASA would provide direction and leadership and share their knowledge of space engineering; Grumman was responsible for developing, implementing, and testing the complete detailed design. True responsibility for the LM’s success or failure would be shared between NASA and Grumman and would depend upon the cooperative efforts and capabilities of both. But for contractual purposes, Grumman’s tasks would be clearly defined by technical performance specifications, cost targets, and schedules. Our task in the negotiations was to envision how the LM was likely to evolve in the next year, to rough out a revised technical approach, a program plan and cost and schedule estimates based upon that vision, and to use this as the basis of the initial LM contract.
    My colleagues and I had not thought of these negotiations in such specific terms before, and initially we followed NASA’s lead. For example, Owen Maynard questioned our fixed, five-legged landing gear. NASA considered it inevitable that the LM’s weight would increase substantially, requiring a greater footprint width of the landing gear that would necessitate a folding, deployable gear. They suggested that our technical approach be changed and cost and schedule estimates increased to account for the design and development of the more complex deployable landing gear. My proposal “rule beater” was very short-lived.
    We entered into the spirit of things, and before long the Grumman people were questioning NASA about the validity of some of our own proposal assumptions. After a few days everything in the proposal was up for grabs as we jointly took on the challenge of guessing what the LM design and program