Technology: A Place in Space

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Sprinting along the fringes of space, 21 miles above the earth, NASA Test Pilot Joe Walker last week gunned his rocket-powered X-15 to the greatest speed any airplane has ever achieved—an imagination-defying 3.920 m.p.h. In the nose of the X-15, a grapefruit-sized electronic wizard familiarly known as “the Q-ball” gauged the basic critical factors—direction, sideslip, friction—and told Joe Walker that he could safely press for the record. Said Walker, with affection: “The Q-ball is a go-no-go item. Only if she checks O.K. do we go.”

Off Cape Canaveral last week, the nation’s newest and biggest Polaris submarine, the Ethan Allen, slipped into the Atlantic to test-shoot its first missile. Shortly before firing time. Captain Paul Lacy took the Ethan Allen up to periscope depth to check the relative positions of his sub and its target by means of a remarkable celestial-navigation system that can shoot the stars, by day as well as by night, in any kind of weather. From a small Datico testing computer plugged into the Polaris itself came the signal that every one of the missile’s million-odd parts was in sound firing order. With that, the missile was sent splashing up out of the sea, arced 1,100 miles downrange and landed square in the target area.

The feats of the X-15 and the Ethan Allen were gratifying to thousands of Americans who made them possible. Few could take such personal satisfaction as a trimly handsome man who makes his contribution to U.S. defense from a paneled penthouse office overlooking Wilshire Boulevard in Beverly Hills, Calif. As president of the Northrop Corp., Thomas Victor Jones, 41, heads the crackerjack industrial team that makes the Q-ball, the Datico, the Polaris star-tracker—and the bodies, brains, eyes and nervous systems of scores of other devices to carry men, or the alert instruments of men, off the earth. Many of its competitors are bigger than Northrop (which, with assets of $128 million, ranks seventh in size among the old-line independent airframe companies), and some have more widely publicized products. But none has a better reputation with the men who manage the U.S. space program, and only a handful can match Tom Jones’s boast: “Hardly a thing goes into space these days without something from Northrop aboard.”

The Heaviest Responsibility. At an age when most successful executives are hopefully eying a vice-presidency, personable Tom Jones has rocketed to the top of an industry that bears the heaviest responsibilities ever imposed upon any branch of private enterprise. A curious conglomeration of aircraft companies, automakers, electronics firms and appliance manufacturers, the industry that has come to be called “aerospace” has as its prime immediate assignment the development and production of the weapons upon which the U.S. rests its hopes of maintaining its power and freedom. Beyond these here-and-now military needs lies another historic assignment—the creation of devices that will end man’s age-old confinement to the earth and its atmosphere, and open up to human exploration the far corners of the universe.

Already, with the age of aerospace barely begun, the 200-year-old Industrial Revolution has given way to a Technological Revolution that is working profound changes on U.S. society and the U.S. economy. In less than a decade, aerospace has grown into a $14 billion-a-year industry serviced by 50,000 suppliers who employ men and materials from, just about every city, village and hamlet in the nation. Newspapers bulge with want ads for stress analysts, aerothermodynamicists, flutter and vibration specialists. New plants are being built not where the rivers or railroads are, but where the brains are. Around Boston, a bustling aerospace hub has risen where only pig farms were a few years ago. For Florida, aerospace is doing today what oil did for Texas in Spindletop days. Aerospace also underwrites the economy of southern California, has created new manufacturing bases in Denver and Dallas, Phoenix and Minneapolis.

Aerospace is a cerebral industry where Saturn stands for a product as well as a target; where “Aeronutronic” is not a nervous disorder but a new branch of the Ford Motor Co.; where one week’s output from a major factory can be shipped in the tail end of a station wagon, and a cupful of sensitive components, such as microwave diodes, is worth $150,000. It makes men talk in superlatives. Says E. V. Huggins, executive committee chairman of Westinghouse Electric Corp.: “The aerospace business is the most mind-stretching, imagination-producing, forward-looking activity a company can engage in.”

The Ultimate Sophistication. It makes extraordinary demands upon management. “We have experienced a tremendous explosion of technology,” says Northrop’s Tom Jones, “and the country’s need now is to perfect the management skills to handle it.” The job of the managers is to convert the demands of the generals and the discoveries of the scientists into working hardware—and none has done it better than Tom Jones himself. In the eyes of the Pentagon, Jones is the bright young star of the aerospace industry.

As much a thinker as a manager, sophisticated Tom Jones can design airplanes, speak fluent Portuguese, pick his way knowledgeably among Burgundy vintages, and discourse easily on modern French paintings (which he collects) or the problems that man will run into on the moon. He is also a down-to-earth executive. Rising in just 5½ Years from a $15,000-a-year engineer to chief executive officer with a current annual income of $135,000. Jones has reshaped Northrop from a lagging prime contractor to a broad-based “supplier of suppliers,” whose profit rate of 3.2% on last year’s sales of $267 million was the best among airframe makers. Where Northrop just a few years ago had only two major projects—one plane and one missile—it now works on more than 70, ranging from missile launchers to devices to make a man comfortable in space flight and to bring him back alive.

It is Jones who has done most to bring economy and simplicity to the intricate and expensive field of aerospace. “That’s not only good business, but it is good science,” he says. “We must make our new technology the liberator of our resources rather than a ravenous consumer. We must recognize the power and value of technical simplicity as distinguished from the complexity that we too often regard as sophistication. We have tended to ignore something that the best Paris dress designers—and Sir Isaac Newton—never forgot: the ultimate of sophistication is simplicity itself.”

Fascination in Failure. Tom Jones’s father, a California accountant, gave him a practical guide early in life. “Always try,” he said, “to understand what is behind this, what is at the bottom of that—always look for the key, and then build detail around it.” Jones was an honor student at Stanford University, where he studied aeronautical engineering on a scholarship and stretched out his slender savings by waiting on tables at a sorority house.

After Stanford (B.A., ’42), he worked as a wartime plane engineer for Douglas Aircraft Co., and there he came to the conclusion that the U.S. was misapplying the basic resources of time and brainpower. “The military men,” Jones recalls, “wanted the highest possible performance —more speed, more altitude, more pay-load—and the manufacturer thought that delivering anything short of that was unpatriotic. This not only made for sizable technical risks, but it stretched out the lead time to three years. For slightly less speed and slightly less range, we could have cut it down to one year. And what would have been the result if we had pushed the state of the art less hard and had thereby tripled our Pacific Fleet bomb load about two years earlier? Somehow, there wasn’t any equation between what was needed and the cost—not just in dollars but in time.”

By war’s end. Jones had made such a reputation as a champion of cutting costs and stretching resources that aeronautical experts recommended him to the Brazilian government, which was seeking a handful of U.S. advisers to help build up Brazil’s then primitive civil and military air fleets. Says Jones: “When they began asking me how to get a better use of their resource in order to accomplish their total national objective, I knew that I wanted the job.” With his new bride, Ruth—the daughter of onetime Screen Idol Conrad Nagel—Jones flew down to Rio. where, at 27, he helped to write budgets and civil air codes, chose airport locations, taught pilots, and primed local industries to supply spare parts. After four exhilarating years, fearful of becoming an expatriate, Jones returned to California and signed on with Rand Corp., the Air Force’s private brain factory. There he wrote a classic study which demonstrated that jet power would make massive military airlift economically feasible.

In the midst of the study, in 1953, Jones got a call from a onetime Stanford classmate, Bill Ballhouse, then Northrop’s deputy chief engineer (and now its executive vice president). Ballhouse wanted to recruit him for Northrop. “I don’t want to be a key on somebody’s typewriter,” Jones answered. “I want to work on basic problems.” Ballhouse replied that Northrop had a very basic problem—it was on the road to ruin. “You know,” Jones replied, “this is beginning to sound very interesting.” Seven months later, against the advice of most of his friends in the industry, he joined faltering Northrop on the condition that, regardless of his title, he was to have a voice in the company’s management.

Nipped by the Snark. Like many another airframe company, Northrop had been started on a shoestring by a self-schooled plane designer, and was in danger of ending on one. A veteran of Douglas and Lockheed, John Knudsen Northrop had designed the Lockheed Vega used by Wiley Post and Amelia Earhart, and in 1939 he set up his own company. World War II made it big—the Northrop-designed P-61 Black Widow gained fame as the first genuine night fighter, and Northrop rolled them out in droves. Peacetime threatened to kill the company.

In one budget-whacking day in 1949, the Air Force cut off $90 million worth of Northrop orders. By the time Tom Jones came on the scene, Northrop had only two projects of size, both precariously experimental: the F89 fighter and the winged Snark, the nation’s first intercontinental missile, which was exploding so regularly that birdmen joked wryly about “the Snark-infested waters off Cape Canaveral.” Time and again, Air Force procurement officers threatened to cancel the Snark if it failed just once more, and to scrap the F89 if it turned up just one more bug.

Premature Palsy. What Northrop was suffering from was a premature case of the palsy soon to afflict all airframe companies in the age of aerospace. Fast disappearing were the World War II days of mass production of aircraft with relatively little emphasis on quality control. In the swiftest industrial sequence in history, the U.S. was shifting from piston-engine planes to jets, from jets to missiles, and on beyond to the incredibly precise devices required for space exploration. Between 1953 and 1961, Pentagon purchases of manned aircraft plummeted from 9,000 to 1,500 per year, while Government spending on missiles, rockets and related research soared 600%, from $1 billion to $7 billion.

The shiftover called for many skills alien to the old airframe makers. Each successive generation of planes relied more heavily on electronics—a science pioneered by such ground-based giants as A.T. & T., General Electric Co. and RCA. And with the advent of missiles, where guidance and propulsion are more important than the “tin can,” the planemakers found themselves losing more and more defense dollars to previously ground-bound companies that did not know a vertical stabilizer from a hole in the wall but were expert in automatic control systems or chemical fuels.

Planemakers’ sales and profits plunged downward at a speed faster than light. Republic Aviation, which stubbornly clung to the airplane and currently relies on its hot F-IO5 fighter-bomber for 98% of its business, has seen its sales dip from $547 million in 1955 to $215 million last year. The three big companies that winged into the commercial jet market were also hard hit: Boeing, Douglas and Convair spent some $700 million to develop their big jets, and only Boeing is in sight of the break-even point.

Fighting against this trend, some major airframe makers tried diversification—turning to everything from hydrofoil boats to garbage disposal plants. Famed old Glenn L. Martin Co. retired altogether from the airframe business, prospered by putting its chips on missiles and space, and lately has branched into such solid civilian products as cement. In time, most of the major planemakers went over to missiles and space. Today, General Dynamics has its Atlas, Boeing Airplane Co. its Dyna-Soar and Minuteman, Douglas its Skybolt, and McDonnell Aircraft Corp. its Mercury capsule. Lockheed Aircraft Corp., which is the prime contractor for the Discoverer, Midas and Samos satellites, gets more than half its sales from missilery and space. So does the company that has built more planes than any other in the past—giant North American Aviation, now working on projects running from rocket propulsion to inertial guidance. Altogether, eleven old-line plane companies are bidding for a prime contract on Project Apollo, which is calculated to land an American on the moon by 1969.

The Benefits of Fallout. Conspicuously missing from the list of prime contract bidders on Project Apollo is Tom Jones’s Northrop Corp. But no matter who wins it, Northrop stands to pick up fat sub contracts.

This happy state of affairs is the consequence of the novel notions that Jones began to urge on Northrop almost from the day he joined the company. Within months after he was hired, Jones was invited by Northrop’s late President Whitley Collins to help him reshape Northrop’s whole way of doing business. Characteristically, scholarly Tom Jones began by combing through innumerable speeches by top U.S. Government officials, and detected a subtle but profound change in defense spending policy. Says Jones: “We came to the conclusion—it seems simple now, but remember that was the mid-1950s—that the dollar sign had been put into the military-technical equation. Up until that time, it hadn’t been necessary to be a good defense contractor. The military had said. ‘Don’t worry about cost, because this is an emergency.’ Well, now we were at last going to have orderly procurement. On top of that, the advancement of technology had shot costs way up.”

Even then, Jones foresaw sharply increased Pentagon pressure for higher performance, and sharply increased competition among companies for the defense dollar. How could relatively small Northrop prosper? One answer, Jones concluded, was to concentrate on making selected parts rather than entire systems: “Whatever we could do exceedingly well, we would exploit; whatever we were second best in, we would drop.”

Operating on the Jones philosophy, Northrop had to make some harsh choices. It scrapped a program to build a costly Mach 3 interceptor, elected instead to develop a bargain-basement ($550,000) jet trainer. “Some people thought we were damned fools, because the Air Force was planning to buy 500 of these interceptors at $5,000,000 apiece,” recalls Jones. “But it was clear to me that there were some tough decisions ahead that the Defense Department hadn’t owned up to. With money being poured into long-range missiles, a program for a long-range fighter-interceptor looked like a first-class candidate for cancellation.”

Before long, the Pentagon proved Jones right by scrubbing the fighter-interceptor program. By contrast, Northrop’s backlog for its supersonic T-38 Talon trainer now stands at $101 million.

Jones chose to regard Northrop not as a collection of product lines but as a storehouse of skills. Though its F89 and Snark rapidly became obsolete, Northrop, in building them, had become expert in the fields of guidance, communications, fire control and optics. Tom Jones, steadily moving up through the Northrop hierarchy, recommended sweeping changes to exploit the company’s spectrum of esoteric knowledge. By the time he took over the presidency from Collins in 1959, Northrop had become subcontractor to the whole space age, had even erased the word “Aircraft” from its corporate title. “It made much more sense,” says Jones, “to group ourselves around our special skills, and thus to take advantage of the technological fallout that followed.”

Bailing Out Astronauts. Most fruitful fallout came from the Snark. A refinement of the Snark’s star-tracking guidance system now helps to guide the Polaris-firing submarines and the Air Force’s air-to-ground Skybolt missile; it will also ride on the Project Ranger moon shoot and the Project Mariner probes to Mercury and Venus. “Ultimately,” says Jones, “the same technology will serve on long-distance airliners and ocean liners.” Work on the Snark also convinced Jones of the need for a pulse-taking computer to run a continuous inspection on every missile. From that experience Northrop developed its intelligent Datico, which checks out not only the Polaris but half a dozen Army missiles as well as the flight-control and radar-identification systems on Air Force planes.

From planes, Northrop made a short jump into recoverable Mach 2 target missiles for ack-ack training. The target drones, of which Northrop is the world’s largest builder, float down to earth on parachutes after the shoot is finished—and they gave Northrop expertise in high-altitude landing systems. The eventual result: the Northrop-built recovery system for the Mercury capsule, including its 63-ft.-wide parachute, which brought Astronauts Alan Shepard and Virgil Grissom down from space.

Algae for Lunch? To school unskilled workers in assembling complex electronic components, Northrop devised a system that teaches by color slides and tape recordings. Northrop has marketed the system to other aerospace companies (Lockheed, North American, Aerojet-General Corp., etc.) and to the U.S. Navy, which credits it with greatly speeding the training of missilemen. Such companies as Boeing, General Electric and United Aircraft Corp. have bought a management evaluation system called PACE, a statistical measure of production and quality control, also developed by Northrop in gearing itself for aerospace competition.

All this is only prelude. Northrop technicians have already built bone-shaking space simulators that duplicate the conditions of celestial flight. Now, in their glass-walled labs, they are designing orbital “gas stations” for in-flight refueling of space vehicles, rescue satellites to aid spacemen in trouble, and space platforms from which to launch lunar vehicles. They are even experimenting with algae growths to feed space travelers during their voyages. The men of aerospace may dreamboat, but they have a way of making their dreamboats seaworthy. “I have quit saying things won’t happen,” grins Cramer LaPierre, General Electric’s executive vice president. “When it comes to forecasting, the science, fiction authors have a much better record than anyone.” Adds General Bernard Schriever, the Air Force’s space chief: “In the past, we’ve always tended to underestimate what we could do over the long term.”

Problems of Performance. Aerospace, like any fast-growth industry, has its share of faults, abuses and failures. Partly because so many specialties are needed, partly because Congressmen besiege the Pentagon for plums for their home districts, all manner of companies have leaped into the field, and more than a few are fly-by-night loft operators. “Frankly, it’s awfully hard to lose money in this business,” says Westinghouse Space Chief Huggins. “The risk isn’t as great as it should be. The Government doesn’t have the means of judging good performance and poor performance, and penalizing it accordingly.”

Other aerospacemen complain that many an unready company tries to buy its way into the business by submitting below-cost bids, or lobbying hard in the Pentagon to snare noncompetitive awards. “Too many outfits,” says Jones, “concentrate on winning a lot of contracts, without first knowing precisely how to cope with the work.” To him, this is bad for the country, and bad for the company. “What does winning a contract mean? It means you have to be able to do something better, and if you can’t do it better, then you are out of business, even if you have the fattest contract in history, because sooner or later you won’t be able to deliver the goods.”

Key scientific developments have all been based on the principle of conservation of energy, says Jones. He believes that the organizational problems of the space age must be solved by a similar key—conservation of resources. And he cheers the Pentagon’s new-found concern with fewer, multiple-purpose weapons and space devices. A sharp increase in the scant 40% of aerospace contracts now let through competitive bidding would, he contends, help remind both the military and the industry that money, too, is a resource to be conserved. Says he: “It is completely out of gear to say that a scientist strives for the best regardless of cost. Our job is to get simplified, less costly solutions to defense problems. Defense depends not only on the performance of each unit, but on the number of units that the Government can afford to put in the field.”

Time for Thinking. Carrying his case for competition and cost-consciousness across the land, Jones in the past year logged 112,687 miles on commercial planes alone; he uses the flight time to catch up on his reading (currently: Protracted Conflict: A Challenging Study of Communist Strategy). When he is at home base, Jones’s workday begins when he awakens at 6:30 a.m. In his ten-room, $150,000 ranch house, Jones starts each day simply by “lying in bed and just thinking for half an hour—it’s a time when my objectivity is at its best.” Then he plunges into a furious round of keep-fit exercises (25 pushups, 25 knee bends, ten laps in the pool), downs his standard breakfast (half a grapefruit, five strips of bacon, tea), slips into an Ivy League grey suit (sometimes flashing it up with his gold cuff links that are shaped like tiny T-38 jets), and pilots a company Cadillac to headquarters.

For the next eleven hours, Jones pores over contracts and proposals, fidgets through conferences—in conversation, he is a habitual shadowboxer, leg crosser and finger tapper—with a steady stream of generals, vice presidents, scientists and budgeteers. After hours, his social life is relaxed and seldom formal. Despite his appreciation of good food and wine, he eats and drinks sparingly. His house lacks a bomb shelter but boasts a wine vault.

What Price Discovery? Cost-conscious Tom Jones may be, but critics outside the industry outdo him in questioning increasingly the utility of the nonmilitary goals of his trade. Grumbling that the space race with Russia is a meaningless weight-lifting contest, they would rather spend money on schools or cancer research than on shooting the moon. The usual answer is that to be left behind in space is to risk survival. A secondary answer is that aerospace has already begun to pay unusual dividends, and promises more. Space probes in the last four years have taught scientists more about the nature of the universe than they had learned in the previous three centuries. Satellites now spot hurricanes, help to predict weather and may in time contribute to controlling it—a possibility with tremendous implications for every farmer, fisherman or merchant. Communications satellites, the first of which will be launched within the next year by A.T. & T. and RCA, will ultimately enable nations to see and speak with each other through the medium of global television.

No one is certain what the aerospace-men will bring back from the moon and the planets. Perhaps only rocks, perhaps exotic new minerals. But history’s lesson is that explorers seldom find the expected. An eloquent case for aerospace is made by top Avco Corp. Researcher Dr. Arthur Kantrowitz: “To characterize aerospace as a growth industry is to take a narrow view. It is more like the discovery of America—a new opportunity for mankind. I keep telling my children that I wouldn’t be surprised if their children lived in some brave new world in space, just as we came to America from the old countries. It might be another opportunity to start all over. You’ve got to do that periodically if you want to make great advances.”

The Coming Shake-Out. “Mr. Khrushchev has hitherto made the market for the aerospace business,” says Martin Co.’s Chairman George Bunker, “but now it is here to stay.” Even if the cold war were to end next week, the U.S. would almost surely find itself committed to expanding its exploration of space.

The aerospace industry is destined to grow, and is bound to change. It will attract steadily more investment, perhaps as much as $18 billion yearly by 1966. It will need more people—fewer unskilled workers, more scientists and technicians. The rapid forward tumble of progress will make for quicker obsolescence, shorter production runs. Today’s wide variety of experimental space vehicles will shake down to a few reliable systems. And there will be more incestuous relations among the aerospace suppliers—being top contractors on one project, subcontractors on another.

“The future evolution of the industry,” says nimbus-maned Lee Atwood, president of North American Aviation, “will separate the lucky from the unlucky, the thoughtful from the compulsive—the men, as it were, from the boys.” A shakeout of companies is inevitable, as it has been in the maturing stages of every major U.S. industry, from autos to appliances. But for the lean and the resourceful, the sky is no limit. Says Tom Jones: “Space vehicles can and must be built, operated and maintained at a minimum cost without sacrificing performance or reliability. The race will be won by those companies that learn to use the new technology to provide solutions at a cost that the nation can afford.” And he adds, with a gleam in his eye: “We are going to have a Henry Ford in space—I’m sure of it.”