INNOVATION THE NASA WAY: Harnessing the Power of Your Organization for Breakthrough Success by ROD PYLE

Author:ROD PYLE
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Education
Published: 2014-05-19T16:00:00+00:00

AN URGENT CALL

One Saturday, an urgent call was transferred to his temporary work area at the North American plant. Borman assumed that it was just another nuisance call from NASA headquarters. It was a hot August weekend in southern California, and the air conditioning at the plant—such as it was—did little to keep up with the intense heat. Borman was already edgy and did not need interference from the top. When he was told that the call was from Deke Slayton, head of the astronaut office, he became more perplexed than irritated. At least Deke was a former astronaut, and he cut through the bullshit—it must be important.

“Frank, get back to Houston right away. I need to talk to you,” Slayton barked.

“Talk to me now, Deke; I’m busy!” retorted Borman.

“I can’t do this over the phone. Grab a plane and get back here,” said Slayton with finality.

Deke was much like Frank: a no-nonsense, get-to-the-point kind of guy. Borman knew he had to get to Houston, so he did.

When he got to Slayton’s office, Deke told him a story that was fantastic in its scope and implications. It was a tale of boldness, vision, and . . . danger. It ended with a question, and Borman had said yes to the assignment without even checking with his Apollo 8 crewmates.

In short, the story went like this: since early 1967, the Soviets had been dealing with their own Apollo 1 –type issues: Soyuz 1 had had big problems during reentry, killing the lone cosmonaut. It was an amazing bit of timing, following the Apollo fire by three months. Both the United States’ and the Soviet Union’s lunar programs had been slow to recover. But while the issues with both the Apollo and the Soyuz capsules were being ironed out, the rockets—the U.S. Saturn V and the Russian rockets—moved aggressively forward.

The CIA reports and other top-secret documents showed a troubling trend. The Russians were refining their midsized booster while continuing work on a larger Saturn V–class rocket. The problem was that the Soviet program was so secretive—it operated under the Russian military—that little was known beyond (1) what was trumpeted (only after a successful mission) in the state-run newspaper TASS and (2) what was visible to the U.S. Corona satellites as they slowly gathered visual evidence from their distant orbits high above. But this indirect evidence was what had the CIA, and, by extension, NASA, so worried.

And there was more. The Soviets had also flown a series of unmanned missions that they called Zond, which was simply Russian for “probe.” How innocuous. The first three had been just that: unmanned probes. But then in March of 1968, they lofted Zond 4, and this time it was a modified unmanned Soyuz spacecraft, clearly experimenting with round-the-moon trajectories. Zond 5 would follow months later. Between them, they tested the ability to leave low Earth orbit, reenter at high speeds, engage in glancing reentries (which allowed the craft to skip off the atmosphere once before reentry,

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