History Lesson 
So Long, Cosmic Cowboys
All right, men, we've got this manned spacecraft center, see? And we've got to figure out what to do with it, understand?
(Page 2 of 3)
Sam Houston, though, was not to be denied. If projects and planets were lopped from the NASA budget like so many demented appendages, the Apollo program was spared. America was hell-bent on going to the Moon, and there was no slowing destiny's railroad. At the Manned Spacecraft Center, chastened but not bobbled, technology set about greasing the rails.
FROM THE MOMENT IT CLEARS the launch tower at Cape Kennedy, Apollo 17, like all its space-bound predecessors, is the child of the Manned Spacecraft Center, subject to the electric whims of all the computers, dials, monitors, switches and gauges concentrated here. And there are the men. They are calling it Man's Last Mission to the Moon, the net sum of years of labor and tinkering, and they sit on the leading edge of melancholy like the last week before high school graduation; for the Cosmic Cowboys, it's the Last Roundup.
For the moment though, they are busily trying to rescue their voluminous flight plan from the inconveniences caused by a three-hour launch delay. Before the ship has completed its first orbit, the men at Mission Control obligingly inform the press that all the questions and vagaries resulting from the tardy launch have been answered and resolved—before you can utter the magic words, "slightly-altered-trans-lunar-injection-burn," Apollo 17 is back on its 410-page, 13-day schedule, punctually rocketing through the cosmos like one of Mussolini's trains.
Others at the MSC have more difficulty with the delay.
The combined strength of Boy Scout Troops 300, 873, 952 and 970, all from the NASA area and totalling a veritable Merit Badge Hall of Fame, have been granted permission to raise the Mission Flag. The Mission Flag—the Apollo Pennant in tandem with an all-weather American Flag—has been hoisted by a team of MSC security guards at the instant of lift-off of every manned Apollo mission and flown until the moment of splashdown, safe-guarding Apollo's karma while away from home, an earth-bound talisman at Mission Control.
The Boy Scouts are dutifully arrayed around the flagpole at 8:50, watching through the last minutes for the signal to launch The Flag, to add their energies to Man's Last Mission to the Moon. When the countdown freezes at 30 seconds, and a two hour delay is announced, the Scouts are caught unprepared. Tomorrow is, after all, a Schoolday, and it is fast approaching Boy Scout Bedtime. Undaunted, in the best Boy Scout tradition, they run up The Flag anyway, then disperse for home. The security guards hustle out to repair the situation, bringing down The Flag to await the time for its proper raising. The karmic implications of hoisting The Mission Flag and, worse yet, lowering (crashing?) it, even before the mission itself has begun, are undwelt upon, left to repercuss quietly through the crisp night air at Technology Central.
It has been like everything else at the Manned Spacecraft Center: the technical problems are easily resolved, it's the human ones that are hard to deal with.
ON THE CHILL, BLUSTERY December day before the Apollo 17 launch, there were union picket lines strung across the two main gates to the Manned Spacecraft Center, the result of a strike against a NASA contractor that had ordered wage cuts. MSC officials prevailed upon the union to pull down their pickets for the duration of the flight so as not to tarnish the luster of Man's Last Mission to the Moon, but the bitterness remained just below the high-gloss finish of Technology.
Chuck Wells, business agent for Local 1786 of the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, calls the practices of NASA contractors "totally without compassion, the rottenest bunch of people I've ever dealt with." Far from blaming budget cutbacks, Wells puts the unemployment monkey squarely on the back of Corporate Management: "When you're gonna lose your job on a budget cut, you know a long time in advance, six months or a year or so, and you can do something with that.
"But the longest notice you ever get from the contractors here is three days. Hell, I've seen people get it in three hours. They just flak you; it's terrible. They could tell you in three months if they wanted to. Hell, they bid these contracts on a man-days basis, and they know when they're gonna run over on their costs." [note: Wells made exception for the Lockheed Corporation who, he said, "tries at least to be square with you."]
The IAMAW represents workers at the MSC who are employed by private industry under NASA contract. Personnel employed directly by the MSC are federal employees who are accorded, in theory, job security by the Civil Service. "Lotta nonsense, that civil service protection," says W.G. Folkes, president of Local 2284 of the American Federation of Government Employees, the non-compulsory AFL-CIO affiliate union that seeks to represent federal workers. "Firing people around here is a ridiculous way to save money. It isn't civil servant manpower that's costing the government money, it's these huge expenses and cost over-runs in purchasing and contracting.
"When word comes down from the OMB (Office of Management and Budget for reductions in force, all they do is fire a civil servant and replace him with contract personnel—sometimes in the very same desk. Contractors don't even have to furnish pencils and paper clips, just bodies, and their people don't have to come up with the qualifications that a government employee has to have. It's all a political scheme to delude the public into thinking that there is a small federal work force, and it's a completely unfair way to deprive people of their employment."
Notwithstanding the discomfort and evident hardships involved, the Manned Spacecraft Center still avoided the economic debacle that befell other outposts in the NASA empire. In Michoud, Louisiana, site for test and assembly of the huge Saturn booster, more people were thrown out of work in two years than had ever found it at the MSC. Brevard County, Florida, the formerly barren expanse of sand dunes and swamp grass that surrounds the Kennedy Space Center, plummeted from the fastest-growing county in the nation during the mid-sixties to the status of "economically depressed area" at the turn of the decade; Cocoa Beach became a blasted maze of broken motels and abandoned subdivisions and only the ironic arrivals of Walt Disney (in nearby Orlando) and scores of elderly retirees saved "America's Spaceport" from complete collapse.
The relative good future at the MSC is due to the same reason that the massive influx of space-related industry into the area, so cheerfully envisioned in 1961 by Humble and the Chamber of Commerce, didn't materialize. The MSC was never intended to serve as a center for production but, rather, as Corporate Headquarters of the national endeavor to "conquer space," its employees charged with the management and coordination of tasks and functions that largely went on elsewhere. Like management everywhere, they did the thinking and decision-making, shuffled papers assiduously (enough to stack all the way to the Moon, said one project manager, not facetiously), and manned the internal apparatus required of an organization attempting to transport people into outer space. Again, like management everywhere, they were least affected by the eventual depression. The bludgeoning of the space budget traveled through the nervous system of bureaucracy to arrive only as spasms of austerity at the Manned Spacecraft Center.
From a peak of 4604 in July 1969, the month of the first lunar landing, employment at the MSC dwindled slowly to about 3600 at the beginning of this year, where center officials think it has leveled off. The last major layoff of contract-support personnel, in August of last year when the end of the Apollo program was in sight, dropped contractor strength to under 6000, some 4000 less than the lush year of 1966-67.
It could have been a good deal worse. When the budgetary ax fell, all manner of projects in various stages of preparation were abandoned—even the Apollo program was cut short by three lunar missions—and it nearly appeared as if America was going to forsake manned space travel altogether. This naturally resulted in something of a quandary in Clear Lake City. What after all does one do with a Manned Spacecraft Center when there is no manned space flight? Sam Houston's legacy, though, proved equal to the task, aided once again by Texas' emissaries in Washington (basically Congressmen George Mahon, Olin Teague and Bob Casey, all of whom serendipitously occupy key committee posts).
For short term purposes, there is now the Skylab, a semi-permanent manned orbital laboratory desperately put together out of unused Apollo components (a more ambitious orbiting "space station" had been a budget casualty) and consisting of three missions beginning late this spring.
Picking up soon after is the Space Shuttle project, a reusable launch vehicle more closely akin to the Buck Rogers notion of a "spaceship" than the one-shot rocket boosters currently in use. Designed to take off and land at more-or-less conventional airports, the shuttle project was a bone bitterly fought for by the diverse colonies of the NASA realm, all of which are a little overwrought by their apparently limited futures. The biggest piece of the pie though, landed unerringly at the MSC, once again to accompanying cries of "Politics!" from neglected competitors (especially Floridians who argued, not illogically, that since the shuttle will probably take off and land there it should as well be controlled from there).
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