Rocketry Birthplace : Huntsville Learns Price of a Failure

Cape Canaveral and Houston are flashier names but the Marshall Space Flight Center here is the guts of the operation, the original component of the nation’s space program, the place where the engines were developed that catapulted man into space.

The center, part of the 38,000-acre Redstone Arsenal complex where U.S. rocketry began, gave Huntsville its lifeblood, its pride and reprieve from the poverty in the rest of this rural Southern state. They say here that there is Huntsville and then there is the rest of Alabama.

But now, in the wake of the disastrously short voyage into space of the shuttle Challenger, comes the price of failure in Huntsville. Now comes the glaring scrutiny, the angry questions, the defensive answers in this high-tech town.

The Jan. 28 explosion of Challenger 73 seconds into its flight brought a presidential investigation, finger-pointing and a meandering path leading to Alabama, because here are the National Aeronautics and Space Administration people responsible for developing the rocket that apparently failed as America watched.

Last week, glaring television lights were turned on the Redstone runway as William R. Lucas, the center’s director, came home on a NASA turboprop after three days of questioning by investigators in Washington. Clearly an exhausted man, his face drawn from lack of sleep, Lucas drove off quickly in his aging black Volkswagen.

Stinging Questions

The next day, after 12 years of running Marshall and more than 30 years in the space program here, he would field stinging questions about whether he planned to quit, about why warnings of engineers who advised against a launch had not been heeded.

And others here, in hindsight, would wonder aloud if Marshall had not taken on too much, what with the ambitious shuttle program, the drive to develop a space station for use in the 1990s and other scientific projects that clogged the space center’s agenda so much that neither Lucas, nor anyone else, could keep track of the details.

Wernher von Braun, some said, would not have been pleased.

Von Braun was Huntsville’s hero. The 3,500-seat convention center is named after him. Marshall’s modern 10-story administration building is affectionately known as the “Von Braun Hilton.” He was the head of the team of German rocket experts who surrendered themselves to the United States at the end of World War II and came here in 1950. Over the course of the next 20 years Von Braun oversaw the American space effort, from the tiny Explorer rocket to Apollo’s first landing on the moon.

Sleepy Cotton Town

When Von Braun arrived here, Huntsville was a sleepy little cotton town of 17,000, the first capital of Alabama, but a place that success had passed over in succeeding generations. But with the space center as the impetus, Huntsville now has 160,000 people, 6,000 of them engineers. Forty-three companies on the Fortune 500 list operate here.

Karl Heimberg was with the Von Braun team. He came to Huntsville and, with less than $10 in the bank, bought a house. Then he went to work as the head of missile testing.

Heimberg retired in 1973. He saw his share of failures in those early days, but also great success. And he recalled that Marshall was different then, when everything was done on site, from the initial design to the construction of a rocket to its testing while bolted to the ground. Rocket shock waves broke windows and cracked walls and muddied wells in Huntsville. Testing and retesting of those in-house prototypes--called “shop queens”--was the ironclad rule, so that success on the launch pad would be almost assured.

An ‘Arsenal Approach’

They had what was called an “arsenal approach” to building rockets--developing and making them at Marshall and then turning them over to private industry for manufacture.

“Industry didn’t like that too much,” he said. “You had a good idea about cost, about what was necessary to manufacture it.”

Heimberg is certainly no critic of the space program, now that he is out of it. He believes the decision-making process at NASA, which came under attack by Chairman William P. Rogers of the presidential investigation commission, is the only one that will work in the complicated world of space technology. He thinks failure is the price that periodically must be paid.

But he also compared the ambitious shuttle schedule and the pressures involved to his own time when the Saturn program had a similar timetable. He said that, as time went on, the planned 20 flights a year dwindled to two. He preferred the latter; grand plans led to problems.

“The high launch figure was wrong,” he said. “If you have too many in line, that is a mess.”

A Von Braun Idea

Ed Buckbee is the director of the Alabama Space and Rocket Center. It is the largest space museum in the country, the product of a Von Braun idea. Buckbee was Von Braun’s spokesman for years, and he has watched Marshall evolve over the years from his unusual niche just outside the space center.

He has seen Marshall assume its present role as a place where one major function is to oversee the billions of dollars of contract work given to the aerospace industry.

The change came in the late 1960s, as the Apollo effort was winding down and the shuttle program was in its formative stages. The government took the view that it was cheaper to contract projects out. Buckbee saw whole divisions shut down. The era of the “shop queen” went by the boards.

“Those labs were so well staffed and equipped, they could draw up, fabricate a rocket and test it on a bench, wear it out and build another one,” Buckbee said. “That’s how we got reliability. In the Saturn days, every piece was ground tested.”

Division of Labor

Buckbee does not believe that Marshall should return to those days. Instead, he thinks there should be a division of labor--that Marshall should continue research and development, but that the shuttle should be given over to the private sector.

“Is it time for the shuttle to be looked upon as a program that should be operated by a team of contractors?” he asked. “It seems like the government has gotten out of the business of hardware and said: ‘Let the private sector do that.’ With the shuttle, it’s time we took one more step. If we want to commercialize the shuttle, why not let the total effort be taken over by the private sector?”

Buckbee, however, isn’t in favor of NASA’s pulling out of the shuttle business altogether. He said NASA should continue to own and fly one shuttle, using it as the “shop queen,” refining and improving it for the next generation of space transportation.

Konrad Dannenberg, another of the original German scientists, said that he, too, thinks the transfer of the shuttle to private industry might be an idea whose time has come.

‘A Good Thought’

“It’s certainly a good thought,” he said. “It could be done without causing any damage to NASA. This accident may push it in that direction.”

But now, with the shuttle program on indefinite hold, the crucial questions here are: What caused the Challenger disaster and how will it affect the people who work at Marshall? Until the questions are answered, the space center is likely to remain in a defensive posture.

But there is also pride here, born of all those years of success in the space program, when no one had ever died because the rockets failed. Bob Marshall, director of program development at the space center, said that is one thing that has not changed.

“There’s a work ethic that the center has maintained,” he said. “We’re a very excellence-oriented cadre of people. The organization has a dynamism to it. We’re future-oriented. . . . We have pride in being a part of the frontier of space.”