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The Secret of Apollo: Systems Management in American and European Space Programs (review)

Bureaucracies, particularly government bureaucracies, are intrinsically sclerotic, preferring stability at the expense of change. This statement sums up what has been orthodoxy in our change-besotted popular culture for at least the last quarter century. Associate professor of space studies Stephen Johnson joins the attack on this orthodoxy by arguing convincingly in The Secret of Apollo that the stability provided by bureaucracies has been absolutely necessary for change in the high-stakes, high-risk world of aerospace research and development (R&D) of the 1950s through the 1970s. Johnson examines bureaucracies based on a variety of information practices and command hierarchies collectively known as systems management (SM). These techniques originated with the Air Force soon after World War II. At the dawn of the Cold War a renegade Air Force colonel named Bernard Schriever received a presidential sanction to circumvent the Air Force R&D establishment, centered on Wright Field near Cleveland, and to set up a dedicated project organization to develop the Atlas intercontinental ballistic missile. Schriever believed that the Wright Field organization, arranged along disciplinary and functional lines, was too unfocused for a project as complex as an intercontinental ballistic missile. A dedicated project organization helped, but the Atlas missile’s Achilles’ tendon proved to be the interfaces between the missile’s system components. When a series of spectacular failures during testing in 1956 and 1957 attracted public scrutiny, Schriever (now a brigadier general) resorted to centralizing several key engineering functions, including planning and scheduling, engineering design-change procedures, systems integration, and contractor oversight. Without the technical capacity to perform many of these tasks, Schriever assigned them to a new systems engineering firm, Ramo-Wooldridge, which later morphed into Thompson, Ramo, Wooldridge, Inc. (TRW), and Aerospace Corporation. The centralization of command and control, reified in Schriever’s project-oriented bureaucracy, became the basis for SM or, as Schriever called it, configuration management.