Samuel C. Phillips

• 1. Introduction

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  Samuel C. Phillips was a general who flew fighters over occupied Europe, helped design the missiles that defined the Cold War, and then ran the program that put Americans on the Moon. Not bad for the son of an electrician from Springerville, Arizona.

  When NASA's Apollo program was hemorrhaging money and falling behind schedule in the early 1960s, the agency's leadership turned to a man they described as one of the most capable project managers in the US military. He was not a rocket scientist. He was not a test pilot. He was an Air Force officer who had spent years managing complex weapons systems, and he brought that discipline to a civilian agency that had never quite figured out how to run a project that large.

  What did he actually do when he got there? How did an Air Force general convince NASA engineers to follow Air Force procedures? And what happened when a fire on the launch pad threatened to unravel everything he had built? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. The Making of a Systems Man

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  Phillips was born on the 19th of February 1921 in Springerville, Arizona. His father was an electrician, and the family eventually settled in Cheyenne, Wyoming, where he graduated from Cheyenne High School in 1938. He was drawn to radios and electrical equipment from an early age, earning an amateur radio license as a teenager.

  A Civil Aeronautics Authority radio station sat near the high school, close to the local airport, and Phillips used it to learn about both radio and aviation at the same time. He won a scholarship to the University of Wyoming, where he earned a Bachelor of Science in electrical engineering in 1942. During his summer break in 1941, a year before he graduated, he added a private pilot license to his credentials.

  He was the oldest of six children, with three brothers and two sisters. That combination of technical aptitude and an instinct for keeping track of complicated moving parts would define his professional life for the next three decades.

• 3. Combat and Cold War Weapons

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  Phillips flew two combat tours with the 364th Fighter Group in the European Theater. The group, part of the Eighth Air Force based at RAF Honington, converted to the North American P-51 Mustang in the summer of 1944. Its primary mission was escorting Boeing B-17 Flying Fortress bombers on long-range bombing raids into enemy territory. He came home with the Distinguished Flying Cross and an oak leaf cluster, seven oak leaf clusters on his Air Medal, and the French Croix de Guerre.

  After the war, he stayed close to the most sensitive technologies of the era. He served as an electronics officer during Operation Greenhouse, the nuclear weapons tests at Eniwetok Atoll. He then worked as project officer on the Boeing B-52 Stratofortress, the AIM-4 Falcon air-to-air missile, and the Bomarc surface-to-air missile program. He earned a Master of Science in electrical engineering from the University of Michigan in 1950, threading academic credentials through his operational assignments.

  In 1956, back in England with the Strategic Air Command's 7th Air Division, he helped negotiate the agreement between the United States and the United Kingdom for the deployment of Thor nuclear-armed intermediate-range ballistic missiles. That negotiation earned him the Legion of Merit and brought him fully into the world of strategic weapons management.

• 4. Minuteman and the Art of the Schedule

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  In 1958, Phillips was assigned to the Air Force Ballistic Missile Division in Los Angeles as Director of the Minuteman ICBM program. By April 1961, he had been promoted to brigadier general, making him the youngest general officer in the US armed forces at that time.

  In July 1960, he made a decision that illustrated how he thought about complex programs. He froze the Minuteman's design even though he knew its range fell 1,000 miles short of its specified requirement. Achieving the full range would take an estimated six months to a year of additional development. Faced with a choice between meeting the technical specification and meeting the delivery schedule, he chose the schedule.

  His reasoning was rooted in geography. When the first Minuteman missiles were based at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana in 1962, they could still reach their assigned targets despite the reduced range. The longer range was achieved in time to equip the second Minuteman wing. He also decided, on his own authority, to install field maintenance points on the missile so that repairs could be made without pulling the weapon from its silo. This contradicted the original design, but his years on the B-52 program had convinced him it was necessary.

  Phillips left the Minuteman program with a reputation inside the Air Force for delivering on time and within cost. That reputation reached NASA just when NASA needed it most.

• 5. Inside the Apollo Machine

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  George E. Mueller, NASA's incoming Associate Administrator for Manned Space Flight in 1963, faced cost overruns and scheduling slippages that threatened President Kennedy's end-of-decade deadline. Mueller had worked for Ramo-Wooldridge on the Minuteman project and was aware of how Phillips had managed it, though the two had not worked together. He asked General Bernard Schriever, head of the Air Force Systems Command, if Phillips could be lent to NASA.

  Schriever was reluctant to give up one of his best project managers, but he saw an angle. The Air Force's Dyna-Soar and Manned Orbiting Laboratory programs might benefit from the experience his officers would gain inside NASA. He agreed to the arrangement, but on one condition: Phillips had to be brought in as the director of the entire Apollo program, not as a subordinate. In December 1963, the deal was done.

  Phillips immediately began requesting Air Force officers to fill program management positions. His initial request for two officers was followed by one for 55 more, which set off negotiations between NASA and the Air Force. The US Secretary of the Air Force, Eugene M. Zuckert, agreed to consider the request once NASA provided position statements that would protect the officers' career development. By the end of the process, Phillips had secured the assignment of 128 additional officers. Most were stationed at the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston, Texas. His deputy was Brigadier General David M. Jones. Colonel Carroll H. Bolender became the Apollo mission director.

  He described his own role to New York Times reporter John Noble Wilford with unusual clarity: "I'm at the level which knows all the things you have to know to make a major decision. Below the program director, there isn't anyone who has the whole picture. Above the program director, the men have so many other responsibilities." Phillips spent roughly 75 percent of his time on the road, visiting contractors. He was promoted to major general in February 1964.

• 6. The Phillips Report

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  In November 1965, Phillips personally led a tiger team to North American Aviation's facility in Downey, California. North American was the prime contractor for both the Apollo Command/Service Module and the Saturn V's S-II second stage, and both were running behind schedule with quality problems. On the 19th of December, he wrote a memo to NAA president Lee Atwood, attaching his findings and a set of recommended corrections. He also sent the report to Mueller, who followed up with his own letter demanding a response from Atwood by the end of January 1966 and a follow-on visit from Phillips's team in March.

  Phillips privately wrote to Mueller recommending that Harrison Storms, president of NAA's Space and Information Systems Division, be replaced. Atwood brought in Robert Greer, a retired Air Force major general, to manage the S-II project directly.

  Phillips also targeted Grumman, the contractor building the Lunar Module at its headquarters in Bethpage, New York. He sent a management review team headed by Wesley L. Hjornevik to examine Grumman's operations. The team found significant faults in both management and procedures. Grumman adopted a "work packages" system that broke the project into discrete tasks with separate personnel, budgets, and managers. In February 1967, Grumman vice president George F. Titterton was sent back from the executive suites to the factory floor to replace Thomas J. Kelly as project manager.

  When the Apollo 1 fire killed three astronauts during a ground test on the 27th of January 1967, a Congressional investigation surfaced the existence of Phillips's report. NASA Administrator James E. Webb was called before Congress, and when Senator Walter Mondale questioned him, Webb testified that he had been unaware of the report's existence. He learned about it from Phillips and Mueller only after that hearing. Congress found no fault with Phillips's management approach. Webb now pushed hard for Storms to be removed; he was replaced by William D. Bergen.

• 7. From the Moon to Later Commands

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  At a small dinner party before the launch of Apollo 10 in May 1969, Wernher von Braun, the director of the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, credited Phillips as the person most responsible for pulling the many pieces of the Apollo program together and making them work on schedule. During the Apollo 11 mission in July 1969, as the program achieved its goal of a manned Moon landing, Phillips announced that he would return to Air Force duty.

  He assumed command of the Space and Missile Systems Organization in Los Angeles in September 1969 and received the Air Force Distinguished Service Medal for his NASA service that same month. In August 1972, he became the seventh Director of the National Security Agency and Chief of the Central Security Service. On the 26th of September 1971, the Smithsonian Institution awarded him the Langley Gold Medal for his Apollo contributions. He was the fourteenth recipient of that award since it was first presented to the Wright Brothers in 1909.

  He was appointed commander of Air Force Systems Command at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, in August 1973, and retired from the Air Force as a full general in 1975. After the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster in 1986, NASA Administrator James C. Fletcher asked Phillips to lead a review of NASA's management. Phillips found that the agency's discipline had eroded since the Apollo era, with individual centers asserting their independence from headquarters. He recommended placing both the Space Shuttle and Space Station Freedom under a single manager.

  Phillips died of cancer in Palos Verdes, California, on the 31st of January 1990. He was buried with military honors at the United States Air Force Academy Cemetery in Colorado Springs. His papers were placed in the Library of Congress.