Joseph Francis Shea (September 5, 1925 – February 14, 1999) was an American aerospace engineer and NASA manager. Born in the Bronx borough of New York City, he was educated at the University of Michigan, receiving a Ph.D. in Engineering Mechanics in 1955. After working for Bell Labs on the guidance systems of the Titan I and Titan II intercontinental ballistic missiles, he was hired by NASA in 1961. As deputy director of NASA's Office of Manned Space Flight, and later as head of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office, Shea played a key role in shaping the course of the Apollo program, helping to lead NASA to the decision in favor of lunar orbit rendezvous and supporting "all up" testing of the Saturn V rocket. While sometimes causing controversy within the agency, Shea was remembered by his former colleague George Mueller as "one of the greatest systems engineers of our time".
Deeply involved in the investigation of the 1967 Apollo 1 fire, Shea suffered from stress. He was moved to an alternative position in Washington and left NASA shortly afterwards. From 1968 until 1990, he worked as a senior manager at Raytheon in Lexington, Massachusetts, and thereafter became an adjunct professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. While Shea served as a consultant for NASA on the redesign of the International Space Station in 1993, he was forced to resign from the position due to health issues. He died in 1999.
Early life and education Shea was born September 5, 1925, and grew up in the Bronx, the eldest son in a working-class Irish Catholic family. 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 and hoped to become a professional athlete. He attended a Catholic high school and graduated when he was only sixteen. On graduating in 1943, Shea enlisted in the U.S. Navy and enrolled in a program that would put him through college. He began his studies at Dartmouth College, later moving to MIT and finally to the University of Michigan, where he would remain until he earned his doctorate in 1955. In 1946, he was commissioned as an ensign in the Navy and received a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics. Shea went on to earn a MSc (1950) and a Ph.D. (1955) in Engineering Mechanics from the University of Michigan. While obtaining his doctorate, Shea simultaneously taught at the university and had a job at Bell Labs.
Systems engineer After receiving his doctorate, Shea took a position at Bell Labs in Whippany, New Jersey. There he first worked as systems engineer on the hybrid radio-inertial guidance system of the Titan I intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), and then as the development and program manager on the inertial guidance system of the Titan II ICBM. Shea's specialty was systems engineering, a new type of engineering developed in the 1950s that focused on the management and integration of large-scale projects, turning the work of engineers and contractors into one functioning whole. He played a significant role in the Titan I project; as George Mueller writes, "[H]e contributed a considerable amount of engineering innovation and project management skill and was directly responsible for the successful development of this pioneering guidance system." In addition to Shea's technical abilities, it quickly became obvious he was also an excellent manager of people. Known for his quick intellect, he also endeared himself to his subordinates through small eccentricities such as his fondness for bad puns and his habit of wearing red socks to important meetings.
During the critical days of the Titan project, Shea moved into the plant, sleeping on a cot in his office so as to be available at all hours if he was needed. Having brought in the project on time and on budget, Shea established a reputation in the aerospace community. In 1961, he was offered and accepted a position with Space Technology Laboratories, a division of TRW Inc., where he continued to work on ballistic missile systems.
NASA career In December 1961, NASA invited Shea to interview for the position of deputy director of the Office of Manned Space Flight (OMSF). D. Brainerd Holmes, Director of the OMSF, had been searching for a deputy who could offer expertise in systems engineering, someone with the technical abilities to supervise the Apollo program as a whole. Shea was recommended by one of Holmes' advisors, who had worked with him at Bell Labs. Although Shea had worked at Space Technology Labs for less than a year, he was captivated by the challenge offered by the NASA position. "I could see they needed good people in the space program," he later said, "and I was kind of cocky in those days."
Lunar orbit rendezvous When Shea was hired by NASA, President John F. Kennedy's commitment to landing men on the Moon was still only seven months old, and many of the major decisions that shaped the Apollo program were yet to be made. Foremost among these was the mode NASA would use to land on the Moon. When Shea first began to consider the issue in 1962, most NASA engineers and managersincluding Wernher von Braun, the director of the Marshall Space Flight Centerfavored either a direct ascent approach, where the Apollo spacecraft would land on the Moon and return to the Earth as one unit, or Earth orbit rendezvous, where the spacecraft would be assembled while still in orbit around the Earth. However, dissenters such as John Houbolt, a Langley engineer, favored an approach then considered to be more risky: lunar orbit rendezvous, in which two spacecraft would be used. A command/service module (CSM) would remain in orbit around the Moon, while a lunar module would land on the Moon and return to dock with the CSM in lunar orbit, then be discarded.
In November 1961, John Houbolt had sent a paper advocating lunar orbit rendezvous (LOR) to Robert Seamans, the deputy administrator of NASA. As Shea remembered, "Seamans gave a copy of Houbolt's letter to Brainerd Holmes [the director of OMSF]. Holmes put the letter on my desk and said: Figure it out." Shea became involved in the lunar orbit rendezvous decision as a result of this letter. While he began with a mild preference for earth orbit rendezvous, Shea "prided himself", according to space historians Charles Murray and Catherine Cox, "on going wherever the data took him". In this case, the data took him to NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, where he met with John Houbolt and with the Space Task Group, and became convinced LOR was an option worth considering.
Shea's task now became to shepherd NASA to a firm decision on the issue. This task was complicated by the fact that he had to build consensus between NASA's different centersmost notably the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston headed by Robert Gilruth, and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, headed by Wernher von Braun. Relations between the two centers were not good, and it was a major milestone in the progress of the Apollo program when von Braun and his team finally came to accept the superiority of the LOR concept. NASA announced its decision at a press conference on July 11, 1962, only six months after Shea had joined NASA. Space historian James Hansen concludes Shea "played a major role in supporting Houbolt's ideas and making the ... decision in favor of LOR", while his former colleague George Mueller writes "it is a tribute to Joe's logic and leadership that he was able to build a consensus within the centers at a time when they were autonomous."
During his time at the OMSF, Shea helped resolve many of the other inevitable engineering debates and conflicts that cropped up during the development of the Apollo spacecraft. In May 1963, he formed a Panel Review Board, bringing together representatives of the many committees that aimed to coordinate work between NASA centers. Under Shea's leadership, this coordination became far more efficient.
Program manager In October 1963, Shea became the new manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office (ASPO) in Houston. Although technically a demotion, this new position gave Shea the responsibility for managing the design and construction of the Apollo command and lunar modules. Of particular concern to Shea was the performance of North American Aviation, the contractor responsible for the command module. He later recounted:
I do not have a high opinion of North American and their motives in the early days. Their first program manager was a first-class jerk. ... There were spots of good guys, but it was just an ineffective organization. They had no discipline, no concept of change control.
It was Shea's job to bring engineering to NASA's management of its contractors. Any change to the design of the Apollo spacecraft would need to receive approval from him. He oversaw and ran the program using a management tool he had devised—a 100+ page looseleaf notebook, which was put together for him every week, summarizing all the important things that had taken place and decisions that needed to be made. Presented with the notebook on Thursday evenings, Shea would study and annotate it over the weekend with questions, instructions, and decisions. This tool allowed him to keep track of a complex and ever-expanding program.
Shea's relationship with the engineers at North American was a difficult one. While Shea blamed North American's management for the continuing difficulties in the development of the command module, project leader Harrison Storms felt NASA itself was far from blameless. It had delayed making key design decisions, and persisted in making significant changes to the design once construction had begun. While Shea did his part in attempting to control the change requests, Storms felt Shea did not understand or sympathize with the inevitable problems involved in the day-to-day work of manufacturing.
Shea was a controversial figure even at the Manned Spacecraft Center. Not having been at Langley with the Space Task Group, he was considered an "outsider" by officials such as flight director Chris Kraft, who recalled "the animosity between my people and Shea's was intense". Relations between Shea and other NASA centers were even more uneasy. As the deputy director of OMSF, Shea had sought to extend the authority of NASA Headquarters over the fiercely independent NASA centers. This was particularly problematic when it came to the Marshall Space Flight Center, which had developed its own culture under Wernher von Braun. Von Braun's philosophy of engineering differed from Shea's, taking a consensual rather than top-down approach. As one historian recounts, von Braun felt "Shea had 'bitten off' too much work and was going to 'wreck' the centers engineering capabilities."
The friction between Shea and Marshall, which had begun when Shea was at OMSF, continued after he moved to his new position. He became deeply involved in supporting George Mueller's effort to impose the idea of "all up" testing of the Saturn V rocket on the unwilling engineers at Marshall. Von Braun's approach to engineering was a conservative one, emphasizing the incremental testing of components. But the tight schedule of the Apollo program did not allow for this slow and careful process. What Mueller and Shea proposed was to test the Saturn V as one unit on its very first flight, and Marshall only reluctantly came to accept this approach in late 1963. When later asked how he and Mueller had managed to sell the idea to von Braun, Shea responded "we just told him that's the way it's going to be, finally."