Joseph Francis Shea

• 1. Introduction

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  Joe Shea helped decide how America would reach the Moon. Only months into his NASA career in 1962, he worked through competing proposals for the lunar landing approach. His analysis guided the agency toward the design every Apollo mission would follow. George Mueller, who led NASA's Office of Manned Space Flight, would later call him 'one of the greatest systems engineers of our time.' Flight director Chris Kraft had appeared on the cover of Time magazine in 1965. By early 1967, the same honor was being planned for Shea. In January of that year, three astronauts died inside an Apollo command module during a ground test. Shea never recovered from it.

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• 2. A Bronx Beginning

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  Joe Shea was born on the 5th of September 1925, the eldest son in a working-class Irish Catholic family in the Bronx. His father worked as a mechanic on the New York City Subway. As a child, Shea had no interest in engineering. He was a good runner who hoped to become a professional athlete.

  He graduated from a Catholic high school at sixteen, then enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1943. The Navy enrolled him in a program that put him through college. He began at Dartmouth, moved to MIT, and finally settled at the University of Michigan. In 1946, he was commissioned as an ensign and received a Bachelor of Science in Mathematics. He earned a master's degree from Michigan in 1950 and a doctorate in Engineering Mechanics in 1955. While completing his doctorate, he taught at the university and held a job at Bell Labs. In 1955, after receiving his degree, Shea accepted a full-time position at Bell Labs in Whippany, New Jersey.

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• 3. The Titan Years

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  At Bell Labs in Whippany, Shea's first major assignment was the guidance system of the Titan I intercontinental ballistic missile. The system used a hybrid radio-inertial design. He later moved to the inertial guidance system of the Titan II. His specialty, systems engineering, was a young discipline developed in the 1950s. It focused on coordinating the work of engineers and contractors across large-scale projects and turning that work into one functioning whole.

  George Mueller later wrote that Shea 'contributed a considerable amount of engineering innovation and project management skill' to the Titan I project. Mueller added that Shea was 'directly responsible for the successful development of this pioneering guidance system.' During the most demanding phase of the Titan work, Shea moved into the plant and slept on a cot in his office to be available at any hour. He brought the project in on time and on budget. Colleagues noticed personal eccentricities his subordinates found endearing: a fondness for bad puns and a habit of wearing red socks to important meetings.

  In 1961, his reputation in the aerospace community well established, Shea accepted a position at Space Technology Laboratories, a division of TRW Inc. He had barely settled there when NASA invited him, in December 1961, to interview for the position of deputy director of the Office of Manned Space Flight. D. Brainerd Holmes, the director of that office, was searching for a deputy with deep expertise in systems engineering to help oversee the Apollo program as a whole. A colleague of Holmes' who had worked with Shea at Bell Labs made the recommendation. 'I could see they needed good people in the space program,' Shea later said. 'And I was kind of cocky in those days.'

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• 4. Choosing the Moon Route

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  When Shea joined NASA, President Kennedy's commitment to landing men on the Moon was only seven months old, and no one had settled on the fundamental approach. Most NASA engineers and managers favored two leading options. Direct ascent would have a single spacecraft land on the Moon and return to Earth as one unit. Earth orbit rendezvous would assemble the vehicle while still in orbit before departure. A Langley engineer named John Houbolt advocated a third approach, considered more risky by most of his colleagues. He called it lunar orbit rendezvous. A small lander would descend to the Moon's surface while a command and service module remained in orbit. The lander would then return to dock with the module, which would carry the crew home.

  In November 1961, Houbolt had sent a paper advocating this approach to Robert Seamans, NASA's deputy administrator. Seamans passed a copy to Holmes, who placed it on Shea's desk with the instruction: 'Figure it out.' Shea started with a mild preference for Earth orbit rendezvous. Space historians Charles Murray and Catherine Cox write that he 'prided himself on going wherever the data took him.' The data took him to NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, where he met with Houbolt and the Space Task Group and came away convinced that lunar orbit rendezvous deserved serious consideration.

  Robert Gilruth's Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston and Wernher von Braun's Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville were not on good terms, and building consensus between them was Shea's hardest task. Von Braun and his team were among those who initially resisted the lunar orbit rendezvous concept. Bringing them around was a major step in the program's development. NASA announced its decision at a press conference on the 11th of July 1962, only six months after Shea had joined the agency. Space historian James Hansen concluded that Shea 'played a major role in supporting Houbolt's ideas and making the decision in favor of LOR.' Building that consensus across centers that functioned largely as autonomous bodies was, by any measure, one of his most significant contributions.

  In May 1963, Shea formed a Panel Review Board at the OMSF, bringing together representatives of the many committees coordinating work between NASA's centers. Under his direction, that coordination became significantly more efficient.

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• 5. Running Apollo

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  In October 1963, Shea took over as manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office in Houston. Technically a demotion from his earlier role, the position gave him direct responsibility for the design and construction of the command and lunar modules. His most difficult relationship was with North American Aviation, the contractor building the command module. He later described the company's first program manager as 'a first-class jerk' and characterized its management more broadly as having 'no discipline, no concept of change control.'

  His staff assembled a looseleaf notebook of more than a hundred pages each week, delivering it to Shea on Thursday evenings. He spent his weekends annotating it with questions, instructions, and decisions. Every change to the Apollo spacecraft required his personal approval. Harrison Storms, the project leader at North American, had his own frustrations: he felt NASA had delayed key design decisions and then persisted in changing the specifications after construction had begun.

  Flight director Chris Kraft recalled that 'the animosity between my people and Shea's was intense.' Not having come up through the Space Task Group at Langley, Shea was seen as an outsider by officials who had. His relationship with Marshall Space Flight Center was even more uneasy. Von Braun's culture at Marshall emphasized the incremental testing of components, one step at a time. What Shea and Mueller proposed instead was to test the Saturn V rocket as one complete unit on its very first flight. Marshall's engineers resisted but came to accept the approach in late 1963. When later asked how he and Mueller had persuaded von Braun, Shea answered plainly: 'We just told him that's the way it's going to be, finally.'

  Space historians Charles Murray and Catherine Cox described the period as 'Joe Shea's glory days.' He was, they wrote, a gifted but enigmatic man 'taking an effort that had been foundering and driving it forward.' Harrison Storms, for his part, believed Shea never fully grasped the difficulties of manufacturing at scale. That friction would persist through the months of spacecraft testing that followed.

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• 6. Apollo 1

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  The spacecraft acceptance review for the first crewed Apollo mission took place on the 19th of August 1966. One issue raised at the meeting was the Velcro lining the cabin interior. The material posed a potential fire hazard in the pure-oxygen atmosphere of the spacecraft if any spark occurred. Shea grew impatient with the discussion. 'Look, there's no way there's going to be a fire in that spacecraft unless there's a spark or the astronauts bring cigarettes aboard,' he said. 'We're not going to let them smoke.' He then issued orders to clean up the spacecraft and ensure all fire rules were followed.

  When the meeting ended, the crew, Gus Grissom, Ed White, and Roger Chaffee, presented Shea with a photograph. The three men were shown seated around a model of the capsule, heads bowed in prayer. The inscription read: 'It isn't that we don't trust you, Joe, but this time we've decided to go over your head.'

  On the 25th of January 1967, the crew began a series of countdown tests at Cape Kennedy. The spacecraft suffered repeated technical problems during testing, including broken and static-filled communications. Wally Schirra, the backup commander for the mission, suggested that Shea enter the spacecraft himself to experience the problems firsthand. Shea seriously considered it. Running a fourth communications loop for him would require threading extra wires through the open hatch, however. With the hatch open, the emergency egress test scheduled for the 27th could not be completed. Shea later described the idea of joining the crew as 'highly irregular.'

  On the 27th of January, a 'plugs-out' test simulating the launch countdown was underway. Shea had been in Florida for the start of the test but left before it concluded. He arrived back at his Houston office at about 5:30 p.m. CST. At 5:31 p.m. CST, a fire broke out in the command module. Grissom, White, and Chaffee could not escape. All three died. For the rest of his life, Shea displayed the photograph the crew had given him in the front hallway of his own home.

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• 7. Breakdown

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  Shea and his Houston colleagues boarded a NASA plane for Kennedy Space Center within hours of the fire. They landed at about 1:00 a.m., roughly five hours after the blaze. Named to the advisory group supporting the official review board, Shea threw himself into the investigation, working 80-hour weeks. The precise source of ignition was never found. It appeared most likely that a chafed wire had caused an electrical short somewhere in the command module.

  NASA engineers pointed to what they saw as shoddy workmanship at North American Aviation. North American executives offered their own argument: NASA had chosen to pressurize the command module with pure oxygen at a pressure far above what space conditions required. In such an atmosphere, almost any material would ignite instantly if exposed to a spark. Shea remained haunted by the feeling that he personally bore responsibility for the deaths of the three men.

  Barbiturates and alcohol became Shea's tools for coping in the weeks after the fire. Robert Seamans wrote that colleagues from Houston 'would fly up to Washington to testify and literally sob all the way on the plane.' One of Shea's subordinates reportedly suffered a complete breakdown and was taken to a mental hospital in a straitjacket. A few weeks after the fire, Shea himself began behaving erratically. Chris Kraft, whose father had suffered from schizophrenia, watched Shea rise calmly to give a report on the investigation in one meeting. Within a minute, Kraft later wrote, Shea was rambling. Within thirty seconds, he was incoherent. 'I looked at him and saw my father,' Kraft wrote, 'in the grip of dementia praecox.'

  NASA administrator James Webb grew worried that Shea could not handle the congressional inquiry into the fire. Senator Walter Mondale had publicly accused agency engineers of 'criminal negligence' in the design and construction of the command module. Webb sent Robert Seamans and Charles Berry, NASA's head physician, to ask Shea to take extended voluntary leave. A press release had already been prepared. Shea refused, threatening to resign rather than comply. He agreed instead to see a psychiatrist and accept whatever assessment followed. One of his friends later described what happened: the psychiatrists returned full of praise for his brilliance, unable to see past his intellect to the danger beneath.

  On the 7th of April 1967, NASA announced that Shea would be transferred to Washington, D.C., as George Mueller's deputy in the Office of Manned Space Flight. George Low replaced him as head of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office. Once in the posting, Shea grew increasingly dissatisfied. 'I don't understand why, after everything I had done for the program,' he later said, 'I was only one that was removed. That's the end of the program for me.'

  When the reassignment was announced, an anonymous friend gave an interview to Time magazine. 'If Joe stays in Washington, it'll be a promotion,' the friend said. 'If he leaves in three or four months, you'll know this move amounted to being fired.' Shea left roughly two months after the transfer. 'It was as if NASA was trying to hide me from the Congress for what I might have said,' he told others afterward. He joined the Polaroid Corporation in Waltham, Massachusetts, and was never called to testify before the congressional inquiry into the fire.

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• 8. After Apollo

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  In 1968, Shea joined Raytheon in Lexington, Massachusetts. He remained with the company until his retirement in 1990, serving as senior vice president for Engineering from 1981 through 1990. After leaving Raytheon, he became an adjunct professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT.

  In February 1993, NASA administrator Daniel Goldin appointed Shea to chair a technical review board. The board would oversee the redesign of the International Space Station, which had become a troubled project. Shea was hospitalized shortly after his appointment. By April, he had recovered enough to attend a meeting where the design team presented its preliminary findings.

  The Washington Post reported that Shea delivered a rambling, sometimes barely audible two-hour presentation. A longtime friend remarked: 'That's not the real Joe Shea. He is normally incisive and well-organized.' The day after the meeting, Shea offered his resignation, becoming instead a special advisor to Goldin. NASA cited health reasons. A publication called The Scientist offered a different interpretation, quoting sources who speculated that the bluntness of his remarks, including criticisms of Goldin, had made his continued role untenable.

  Joseph Francis Shea died on the 14th of February 1999, at his home in Weston, Massachusetts. He was survived by his wife Carol, six daughters, and one son. Systems engineering was still a relatively new specialty when Shea first encountered it at Bell Labs in the 1950s. His last formal role was teaching it, as an adjunct professor, to the next generation of aeronautics students at MIT.

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