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Local Engineering and Systems Engineering: Cultural Conflict at NASA's Marshall Space Flight Center, 1960-1966

Wernher von Braun, who pursued the art of rocket building for forty years, also practiced the art of organization building throughout his career. In 1932, when the German army began sponsoring his work, he had just a single mechanic as his assistant.1 Thirty years later he was director of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, with a staff of seven thousand and tens of thousands more employed by its contracting firms. The Marshall Center was then the largest field center of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA), still expanding to meet its responsibility for developing the Saturn launch vehicles for the Apollo program. At that moment of organizational prosperity, however, von Braun expressed concern about the center’s rapid growth: “We have a phobia against getting too large at Marshall. We have had, I think, some rather noteworthy successes on several assigned rush projects because we are a moderately sized and well-integrated organization.”2 When von Braun wrote this in 1962, the Marshall Center did in fact possess a mature, well-integrated capability for rocket building. In von Braun’s view, however, further expansion of the center and its tasks, accom-