Five Management Lessons From the Apollo Moon Landing

At one level this is silly. The U.S. stopped going to the moon because Americans stopped seeing the point of it, not because they stopped being capable of it. The lack of fresh footprints on the lunar surface is not evidence that the U.S. has fallen into a new Dark Age.

Still, the historic Mercury, Gemini, and Apollo programs do have something to teach us. They were a shining success story of building and managing a complex, decentralized technological enterprise that accomplished an audaciously ambitious goal. In November 1968, seven months before the moon landing, the journal Science wrote that the space program’s “most valuable spin-off of all will be human rather than technological: better knowledge of how to plan, coordinate, and monitor the multitudinous and varied activities of the organizations required to accomplish great social undertakings.”

Mission management is as important now as it was in the ’60s. The new moonshots include curing disease, ending poverty, and fixing climate change. But a million things can go wrong when there are a million moving parts. Consider the problems with Boeing Co.’s grounded 737 Max airliner or Lockheed Martin Corp.’s costly F-35 fighter jets. And what about billionaire Elon Musk’s unrelenting challenges, down on the ground, in manufacturing electric vehicles at Tesla Inc.? Each case involves difficulties in mission management.

So, here are five management lessons Apollo taught us:

Have a clear objective. President John F. Kennedy vastly simplified NASA’s job with his May 25, 1961, address to Congress committing to “the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to Earth.” From then on, any decision was made by whether it would aid or impede the agency in meeting that deadline. Experiments that were too bulky or heavy were shelved, however valuable they might have been. Technologies that were superior but not ready for deployment were set aside for later. The Pentagon wanted NASA to research solid fuels, which would be useful for ballistic missiles. But going to the moon required kerosene, liquid hydrogen, and liquid oxygen—so they got the green light.

Having a North Star to follow was essential, because skeptics and critics abounded. Up until 1969, polls consistently found that 45% to 60% of Americans thought the U.S. was spending too much on the space effort. On the left, the tie-dye generation was about thinking small and getting back to the land, not blasting off to outer space. Many people said the money would be better spent feeding and clothing the poor; Gil Scott-Heron performed a protest song called Whitey on the Moon. On the right, Apollo was perceived as a Democratic boondoggle. Republican congressmen applauded in 1963 when Dwight Eisenhower, Kennedy’s Republican predecessor, said, “Anybody who would spend $40 billion in a race to the moon for national prestige is nuts.” Amid protests over the Vietnam War, race riots, and a series of assassinations that punched the nation in the gut, NASA engineers kept their heads down and their slide rules busy.

Contrast that with today, when the direction from the top is lacking or, worse, conflicting. In March, Vice President Mike Pence said he was unhappy with NASA’s goal of getting Americans back to the moon by 2028, saying it should happen “by any means necessary” by 2024. Skeptics pointed out that 2024 is the year Pence could be running for president. Then President Trump muddied the waters in June, tweeting, “For all of the money we are spending, NASA should NOT be talking about going to the Moon—We did that 50 years ago.” In fairness, Trump may have meant NASA should go to the moon, just not be talking about it. But even that is proving difficult. On June 19 the Government Accountability Office said the new moon mission is behind schedule and over budget.

Harness incongruence. In any large organization there is pressure to squelch dissent. That can be deadly, as it was for NASA in the two space shuttle failures, each of which killed all seven crew members. Challenger broke up 73 seconds into flight in 1986; Columbia disintegrated on reentry in 2003. Leading up to both tragedies, “Engineers grew concerned about a technical problem they did not fully understand, but they could not make a quantitative case” and were consequently ignored, David Epstein writes in a new book, Range: Why Generalists Triumph in a Specialized World.

There was more tolerance for ambiguity and doubt during Apollo. Wernher von Braun, the former Nazi who became the chief architect of the immense Saturn V rocket, “went looking for problems, hunches, and bad news,” Epstein writes. Two days after the Eagle landed, he zeroed in on one engineer’s guess about why a liquid-oxygen tank lost pressure, even though it was no longer relevant to the mission. “We must know whether there’s more behind this, that calls for checks or remedies,” von Braun wrote, according to Epstein.

After the bad years of the shuttle disasters, the practice of harnessing incongruence, and learning from mistakes, has staged something of a revival at NASA, which has successfully sent unmanned craft to Mars, Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, and the remote Kuiper belt. Adam Steltzner of the NASA-affiliated Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who helped design the sky crane that gently plopped the Curiosity rover down on Mars in 2011, advises engineers—and others—to “hold onto the doubt.” In The Right Kind of Crazy: A True Story of Teamwork, Leadership, and High-Stakes Innovation, Steltzner writes, “Listen to all that the problem has to say, do not make assumptions or commit to a plan of action based on them until the deepest truth presents itself.”

Delegate but decide. NASA realized early on that it needed help. About 90% of Apollo’s budget was spent on contractors. Boeing built the first stage of the Saturn V. North American Aviation built the massive F-1 engines for the first stage, as well as the second stage and the command and service modules. Douglas Aircraft Co. made the third stage. Grumman Corp. built the buglike lunar module. International Business Machines Corp. made the computers. And so on. NASA itself was more of a confederation than a single agency. Units included the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala.; JPL, administered by California Institute of Technology; Ames Research Center in Silicon Valley; and Langley Research Center near Washington.

With so many players involved, turf wars were unavoidable. NASA Administrator James Webb was a blustery North Carolina Democrat who’d come of political age during the New Deal. He coined the phrase Space Age Management to describe how he tried to manage conflicts and ensure final decisions were made by headquarters. “Personal relationships and a sensitivity to the total environment are essential parts of leadership responsibilities if the system is to work at all,” he wrote in the foreword to a 1982 book published by the agency, Managing NASA in the Apollo Era.

One of Webb’s masterstrokes was to advocate for the Manned Spacecraft Center to be located in Houston. The choice pleased Al Thomas, the Texas congressman who controlled NASA’s appropriations and whom Kennedy needed for votes on other issues. And it created a new power center to balance Marshall in Huntsville, where the formidable von Braun held sway, writes Piers Bizony in The Man Who Ran the Moon: James E. Webb, NASA, and the Secret History of Project Apollo.

Unfortunately, Webb’s mastery of the complex network was not as thorough as he believed. The death of three astronauts during a routine test on a Cape Canaveral launch pad in 1967 was traced by congressional investigators to deficiencies at North American Aviation of which Webb had been unaware. The deaths cast a pall over NASA and led to Webb’s resignation. Failure, in this case, was as instructive as success.

Effectiveness over elegance. Aesthetically, the Apollo mission was a poor substitute for the Buck Rogers vision of space travel that began to intrigue Americans in the 1930s. The module that touched down on the moon looked like an oversize version of a kid’s cardboard-and-foil science project, all right angles and spindly legs.

Apollo’s return to Earth was equally unglamorous. The spaceship that left the launch pad was awesome, but it shrank as it went. Three stages of rocket were cast off as their fuel was used up. The base of the lunar module was left behind on the moon. Then the service module was ejected as the astronauts began to descend to Earth. That left nothing but a stubby cone, the command module, weighing just 0.2% of the majestic original. By plan, the astronauts had to be rescued from it by frogmen after splashing down in the Pacific Ocean.

But what looks clunky and awkward to an outsider may appear elegant—i.e., efficient, effective—to an engineer. The lunar module was angular because there is no atmosphere on the moon, so streamlining was superfluous. Form followed function. Likewise, the tininess of Apollo 11’s payload in comparison to the hugeness of the rocket engines was dictated by the difficulty of escaping from Earth’s gravity. It was once calculated that giving the astronauts one more 8-ounce shaver would require adding 150 pounds of fuel. There was no sense even trying to build a rocket that would come down looking the same as it went up.

Engineering inelegance, by contrast, is redesigning a machine without fully anticipating the consequences. That seems to describe Boeing’s botched efforts on the 737 Max, which to save fuel carries wider-diameter engines than its low-slung design from the 1960s called for. Boeing had to move the engines forward and make other changes to keep them from scraping the tarmac. But those alterations caused the plane to pitch upward at times. The software patch inserted to counter that tendency is the leading suspect in the two recent crashes that killed 346 people.

Improvise. Making stuff up on the fly is not in anyone’s manual, but sometimes it’s essential. The need for grace under pressure is why military pilots were often chosen as astronauts. As the Eagle was coming in for a landing, its onboard guidance computer started flashing warnings. The underpowered computer was getting overloaded by spurious data. Buzz Aldrin and Mission Control quickly nailed the solution: Reduce the strain on the itsy-bitsy machine by asking for navigation data from Houston instead. And then ignore the alarms. Seconds later, Neil Armstrong realized the Eagle was headed for a crater and boulder field. He took over the controls and coolly steered past them to a smoother spot.

Improvisation averted another crisis after one of the astronauts bumped and broke off the plastic switch for rearming the engine that would lift them off the moon. Aldrin saved the day with a felt-tip pen. “I inserted the pen into the small opening where the circuit breaker switch should have been, and pushed it in; sure enough, the circuit breaker held,” he recalled in his 2009 memoir, Magnificent Desolation: The Long Journey Home From the Moon. “We were going to get off the moon, after all.”

Most of the people alive today had not yet arrived on the planet when Armstrong, Aldrin, and Command Module pilot Michael Collins returned to it after their historic voyage. Never mind that, though. The moon landing was a victory for all of the human race, past, present, and future. The lessons it taught are enduring.

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