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

plan would look like after a year or more of intensive development. It was an unusual negotiation for a government agency and a contractor—repeatedly the government pointed out where Grumman’s estimates were incomplete or oversimplified and the more likely approach would be more complex and expensive. Contrary to the usual practice, NASA was negotiating the price up, not down!
    At our morning summary meetings we learned that these upward negotiations were occurring throughout the program. In some areas, such as ground-support equipment and logistics, NASA considered that we had grossly underestimated the scope of the job and ignored major areas of required GSE and logistic support. They also realized that we did not understand how NASA conducted factory and development testing on the Apollo program. We had little knowledge, for example, of the functioning and requirements ofthe automated checkout equipment (ACE), which was developed by General Electric and would be installed and operated by them at Grumman’s factory in Bethpage and in the LM checkout area at Kennedy Space Center. The rigor and discipline with which NASA documented every action on the factory floor during spacecraft assembly and checkout also was beyond our ken. We never imagined that NASA required written step-by-step procedures, witnessed by an inspector, whenever a spacecraft or any flight hardware was touched, as in this procedure for attaching a support clamp to tubing:
Step 45. Place support clamp P/N AN269972 on water line P/N LDW 390–22173–3 at location shown in sketch.
Step 46. Verify that rubber grommet on clamp is properly seated with no metal touching the tubing.
Step 47. Align holes on clamp with hole in structure P/N LDW 270–13994–1….
    It was inevitable that requirements such as this, which we dimly perceived after NASA pointed them out, would have a major impact on cost and schedule estimates.
    As the negotiations proceeded the scope of the LM job was rapidly growing. Using their experience in manned spaceflight with Projects Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo, NASA was very helpful in identifying areas of underestimation in our proposal, and in visualizing the form in which growth might occur. There were other areas, however, in which even NASA had limited insight: such as the nature of the lunar surface, the difficulty of cislunar navigation and lunar landing, the limits of astronaut performance on the Moon, and the requirements of the space and lunar environments. In such cases our discussions produced consensus speculation, inevitably more complicated and difficult for the LM.
    It became obvious that we were not going to finish by the Thanksgiving deadline. There were simply too many areas of the proposal to be redefined and reestimated. We told our team members to prepare for a longer haul; with luck and hard work we would be home before Christmas. As gently as possible we broke the news to our loved ones back home.
    I was getting to know some of the NASA leaders with whom I would be working closely for the next few years. As NASA’s LM Engineering manager, Owen Maynard was my direct counterpart. He was a young engineer from Canada, about my age, with a friendly, outgoing personality and an understated, dry sense of humor that made him a pleasure to deal with. Maynard was of medium height and build, with brown hair and narrow squinting eyes that often showed a mischievous twinkle. After becoming accustomed to the soft southern accents or southwestern drawls of most of the NASA people, Maynard’s clipped Canadian speech sounded very different. His sentences were frequently punctuated with “Eh?” (rising inflection), which was not a question but a pause or acknowledgment, roughly equivalent to a NewYorker’s “uh huh” or “y’know.” The words “oot” (out) and “aboot” (about) also signaled his Canadian background. Of course, Maynard thought that the Grumman “Noo Yawkers” spoke with strange accents, too, which he