A History of the Kennedy Space Center : Kenneth Lipartito and Orville R. Butler , U. Press of Florida, Gainesville, FL, 2007. $39.95 (478 pp.). ISBN 978-0-8130-3069-2
Kenneth Lipartito and Orville R. Butler’s A History of the Kennedy Space Center is the most comprehensive review ever done of the nation’s rocket-launch center. It traces the program from the US Bumper rocket initiative in the late 1940s to the space shuttle Columbia disaster in 2003 to the International Space Station (ISS) and beyond.
Lipartito, a professor of history at Florida International University, and Butler, an associate historian at the American Institute of Physics, discuss the interactions among the researchers, developers, and manufacturers, and their disdain at attempts by the operations engineers and technicians at NASA’s Kennedy Space Center (KSC) to give input in the design and manufacturing processes. Development centers have rarely taken operations requirements of the space program into consideration in their design process; that omission has led to inefficiencies and costly delays. Also, it took many years for KSC to refute the space hardware designers’ “ship-and-shoot” mentality, that is, the philosophy that once a rocket or payload has been shipped, it’s essentially ready to go. Management approaches and techniques vacillated from the early German hands-on operations to US Air Force program management methods, and they eventually incorporated elements of both.
The first director of KSC, Kurt Debus (July 1962–November 1974), characterized by many as the center’s “father,” was a member of Werner von Braun’s team at Peenemünde in northern Germany. A charismatic leader who carried a dueling scar on his face from his college days in Germany, Debus was considered by his US colleagues as a “hands-on rocket guy.” He brought with him the German rocket tradition that stressed close, vertical integration of all parts of the process of designing, fabricating, preparing, testing, and firing rockets. Debus’s initial in-house approach allowed close working relationships among designers, builders, testers, and operators. But as rockets became bigger, missions more complex, and schedules tighter, even Debus included elements of the air force model of program management. From 1963 to 1968, leading up to Apollo 11, the workforce of 8000 launch-operations workers and 10 000 support workers were contractors, supervised by 800 civil servants. The need for government workers to be the continuing thread in the fabric of the operations workforce continues to this day.
The book begins with the most important launch ever from KSC: Apollo 11, the first US manned lunar landing mission, viewed by a million people on-site and by a worldwide television audience. Preceding that event were many rocket firings, from the 24 July 1950 successful launch of the Bumper-8, a V-2 combined with a WAC (Women’s Army Corps) Corporal second-stage rocket, through the many launches of Redstone, Jupiter , Delta, and Atlas rockets from Cape Canaveral. While the operations at Cape Canaveral were taking place nearby, engineers and technicians were constructing the infrastructure of KSC and designing and building the ground-support equipment for the huge Saturn rockets, with the US Army Corps of Engineers managing the actual facilities construction.
Before KSC became NASA’s independent operations center in 1962, it was the Marshall Space Flight Center’s launch operations directorate. The center was responsible for the planning and supervision of the integration, test, checkout, and launch of vehicles. President Lyndon B. Johnson renamed the center the John F. Kennedy Space Center on 29 November 1963, just a week after Kennedy’s assassination. A communications satellite, Relay I, launched into orbit from Cape Canaveral the year before, covered Kennedy’s funeral as the world’s first real-time television event.
Debus has been succeeded by eight KSC directors, several of whom were instrumental in the back-and-forth shifts in management approach from the German hands-on method to the air force project management system as resources, programs, and missions changed. The loss of the space shuttle Challenger in January 1986 occurred on Richard Smith’s watch (September 1979–August 1986), and Forrest McCartney (August 1986–December 1991), an air force lieutenant general, came in to return the shuttle fleet to flight. Morale was very low, but McCartney, an R&D engineer who had headed the US Air Force Space Command, restored the confidence of the workforce, and flights resumed.
Jay Honeycutt (January 1995–March 1997), the sixth KSC director, was the most successful in having KSC engineers and technicians participate in the design and manufacturing processes of both the space shuttle and payloads. Honeycutt finally got operations requirements back in the design centers and factories by having KSC personnel stationed at those locations to insist that operations needs be met. He also made a strategic placement by putting John “Tip” Talone in charge of the ISS effort at KSC. Talone was most successful in penetrating the design and manufacturing processes and in using the Apollo and space shuttle facilities and equipment so that elements of the ISS could be connected, checked out, and tested on the ground before being flown into orbit. Talone was also successful in refuting the ship-and-shoot mentality.
Other key players who were instrumental in successes at KSC were Rocco Petrone, Apollo launch director, and George Page, the first space shuttle launch director. Both were brilliant, driving managers. The chief design engineer, Don Buchanan, not only designed most of the ground support equipment and facilities but also solved many real-time operations problems with innovative thinking.
Few other books have been written about KSC. Moonport: A History of Apollo Launch Facilities and Operations by Charles D. Benson and William Barnaby Faherty, published by NASA in 1978 and available for free online (http://history.nasa.gov/SP-4204/contents.html), is very detailed and technical, but is limited to the Apollo program. The Kennedy Space Center Story (1972) by Gordon Harris and published by KSC is also limited and does not address the evolution of the center’s management systems.
In preparing A History of the Kennedy Space Center, Lipartito and Butler conducted many interviews at KSC, other NASA centers, and NASA headquarters in Washington, DC, to flesh out their research of archives and personal papers of Debus and others. They bring alive and personalize the trials and frustrations, and the joy and excitement, of the launch operations crew at the center.
