Angle of Attack: Harrison Storms and the Race to the Moon Book

I bought this book because my uncle had been an engineer who worked with North American Aviation/Rockwell International from 1962 to 1992. He worked from the beginning of the Apollo program through the first half of the space shuttle program. He died of leukemia in 1992 at the relatively young age of 54, and I was never able to ask him about all the great stories from his career at that company.

This book, therefore, serves as a kind of surrogate. Although it does not name any of the guys on the shop floor who put together the Apollo spacecraft, this is still about as close as I'll get to the stories I might have heard from my uncle.

Angle of Attack: Harrison Storms and the Race to the Moon is partly a portrait of Harrison Storms, the leader of North American's space projects during the 1950s and 1960s, and it's partly a history of North American during those times.

This paperback was published a couple of years after my uncle died. On the day I bought this book, on a summer day in 1994, by complete happenstance I met a man who also worked at North American--although he said he did not remember my uncle. He too was interested in this book. We spoke for a few minutes, and I went away from that chance meeting with my head spinning, wondering about the odds of meeting one of the engineers who might have worked alongside my uncle.

As background, Angle of Attack describes North American's work on the X-15, one of the great aircraft of all time. The X-15 was the company's crowning achievement prior to the Apollo program. That was Storms' first great success, and arguably it was what later helped land North American its Apollo prime contracts.

The centerpiece of the book is North American's work on the Apollo program. Importantly, it gives an overview of the contract proposal process, and how North American positioned itself for success. Within a space of three months, North American won the prime contracts for the Saturn V S-II second stage and the coveted command and service modules. The outcome was controversial. By most accounts, North American should not have won even one prime contract, much less two. A number of other contractors had more experience and what were deemed to be better proposals, so there was a great deal of grumbling about the fact that North American prevailed over proven rivals. A little disappointingly, the book does not dig any deeper to try to answer those tough questions, but rather softly points to the X-15 program as a probable factor which led to those victories.

By 1966, the Apollo program was not a model of success. North American's quality control and work habits gradually deteriorated, and NASA's oversight of the company's work also tailed off considerably. Those factors contributed to the Apollo 204 (aka 'Apollo 1') fire which killed three astronauts in a launch pad test in January 1967.

Apollo 204 ultimately cost the jobs of three significant people in the Apollo program:

** Harrison Storms, North American's Apollo project manager, who was fired not long after Apollo 204 by the company's CEO, Lee Atwood.

** Joseph Shea, NASA's Apollo spacecraft manager, who suffered a nervous breakdown sometime after Apollo 204 and was removed from his managing position.

** NASA administrator James Webb, who resigned under pressure from the White House in 1968, but not until the Apollo program had made necessary improvements and was back on track for reaching the moon by the end of the decade.

The aftermath of Apollo 204 led to comprehensive changes in North American's culture and work habits. The Apollo spacecraft underwent thousands of improvements, and safety standards were revised on every level. NASA's oversight culture was improved significantly, too. (As the former North American engineer told me during that chance meeting in 1994, 'There was plenty of blame to go around.') NASA assigned a 'tiger team' of astronauts--including Frank Borman and Michael Collins--to work daily with engineers at the North American plant in Downey, California. Together they tightened the reins of oversight and worked closely to improve the quality of all the company's work on Apollo.

This is one of the significant books of Apollo history, primarily for its coverage of Apollo 204 and its causes and effects. I do wish it had a broader scope and included more coverage of North American's culture, history, and most importantly why the company prevailed over stronger rivals for two major Apollo contracts. One part of me also wishes I knew more about its CEO, Lee Atwood, because I think Atwood was even more important to the company's success in that period than Harrison Storms was. So while this is an excellent account in many ways, it seems like it's only a piece of the history that needs telling.