The Man Who Ran The Moon

By Piers Bizony

Published in Australia in 2006 by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd

266 pages. ISBN-13:978-1840467-64-2

Available for $39.95 from Paragon Media (10% off for Australian Sky & Telescope subscribers)

In Spring 1961 former Washington businessman James E. Webb took charge of the grandest exploration project ever known: America's bid for the Moon. He persuaded John F. Kennedy to support him and gained control of 5% of the US federal budget. Webb's NASA supervised half a million workers across America as they built new machines, launch pads and control centres.

But in 1967 a spacecraft caught fire, killing three astronauts. The press exposed a series of failures, as well as the profiteering of Webb's business partners. To protect NASA's future, Webb faced political and press interrogations, and took the blame for the corruption and deaths. His sacrifice enabled his colleagues to land on the Moon by the end of the decade. America had won the Space Race - but the name of the man who made it possible was wiped from history.

Piers Bizony is a science journalist and space historian who writes for magazines such as Focus and Wired as well as the Independent.

Below is the review from the May/June 2007 issue of Australian Sky & Telescope.

The Moon Dance

Review by Frank H Cole

Slated for launch next decade, the Hubble Telescope’s replacement is called the James Webb Space Telescope. Who, you may well ask, is James Webb? Well, during the Sixties there was hardly a corporation of any substance in the free world that was not trying to emulate the style and accomplishments of NASA’s organizational genius – James Webb. Under his leadership and the influence of his disarming North Carolina mannerisms, NASA fearlessly implemented the procedural steps to take a man to the moon. In doing so it undertook one of the largest and most complex engineering projects ever proposed.

In writing The Man Who Ran The Moon Piers Bizony pulls down the façade and tells the fascinating real story of the wheeling and dealing that took place away from public glare. Webb, influenced by the boldness of Roosevelt’s New Deal after the great depression, trumpeted his “Space Age Management” structure as the modern organisational model for Government and Industry.

Bizony tells how NASA with Webb now at the helm, emerges from its wimpish ‘space race’ start. The Cold War is in full swing and Russia’s Sputnik is in space – proof that Russia has gained supremacy in the high altitudes. America has been caught off-guard. NASA’s objectives are clear. They have to regain control of aerospace and demonstrate technological superiority by putting a man on the Moon.

During the space race, millions of dollars in contracts were let. To the outside world the monolithic NASA seemed like a well-oiled machine. Prominent USA author and journalist Norman Mailer was prompted to write:

“Everybody at NASA was courteous, helpful, generous of information, saintly at repeating the same information a hundred times, and subtly proud of their ability to serve interchangeably for one another, as if the real secret of their discipline and their strength and their sense of morale was that they had depersonalised themselves.”

But Bizony explains how that was not the case. NASA wasn’t the bastion of all that is right and correct. NASA too had its skeletons in the closet.

Perhaps it is as well to point out that Webb did not simply carry out the directional commands of his masters – the President and Congress. At every turn NASA was breaking new ground, whether it was in science, technology, internal organisational structure, external support structure or dealing with the dichotomy within Congress of those who wholeheartedly supported the Space Program and those who were lukewarm, or did not. Ambition, greed, some questionable contract letting, some shady deals, shady side issues, politics and the mob all went into the melting pot that made up this functional nightmare. But the continual tweaking of organisational control and solid practices introduced by NASA’s Administrator, James Webb kept this vital project moving forward.

And yet, modern practitioners in the art of project management may be a little taken aback. In Bizony’s account of a heated meeting Webb has with President Kennedy, it is Webb himself who has fallen into the trap of idealistic expansion of objectives - that undesirable element known as ‘scope creep’ that project leaders have come to dread - and it is Kennedy who tries to rein in his project leader.

The book explains how the Apollo 1 fire that claimed the lives of three astronauts put Webb’s activities at NASA under the microscope. In a backdoor business philosophy based on the giving and calling-in of favours, it is the seemingly innocuous changeover of a vending machine contract at North American Aviation that provides the lever for upright members of Congress to flush out the mob’s involvement and the double-dealing that takes place.

Bizony’s focus is on the human factors: human greed; human insecurities; human ambition; that can combine and threaten to disassemble the fabric of a well-organised and well-intentioned objective.

It’s a fascinating story about what happened behind the public face of a respected organisation. It is very well told. At times it appears that the author has a side-issue story that he would prefer to get out, but the reader soon discovers that Bizony is adding dimension to the human characters. It’s a ‘must read’ for Project Managers, Line Managers, Engineers, Scientists, corporate employees and people with a general interest in what went on behind the scenes. Well worth reading.

Frank H. Cole lives beneath dark skies in Queensland. He is a freelance writer who has been a Specialist Engineer, Line Manager and Project Leader in the IT industry.

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