The article raises some good points, but they're lost in the gallons of hogwash.
Von Braun's "management style" was characterized by a dirty-hands approach to management and a conservative approach to engineering. The lack of dirty-hands management in NASA today is seen as the greatest single impediment to its success. Managers have become bureaucrats separated from the actual engineering. Von Braun, on the other hand, understood what his engineers faced because he was there facing it with them. His conservative "margin for margin's sake" style of engineering is appropriate for manned and experimental space flight, whereas the military's "don't fix it if it ain't broke" approach to rocketry works for ICBMs but not space exploration. Much of what is wrong with space exploration today can be attributed to von Braun's management approach having "gone out of style."
He was not "overruled" on key Apollo technology. He simply required the merits to be shown to him before he accepted them. This is part of the conservative approach, and was an attitude shared by many in the Apollo program. The problem with a lot of engineering management today is the immediate acceptance of "whiz-bang" ideas without proper design studies. So you see companies dump a couple million dollars and two years down the crapper just because one person got the boss excited about some buzzword that turns out to be a turkey.
It seems this article's author chooses to completely disregard the political aspect of why certain technology and methods persisted and why others fell by the wayside.
|