It didn’t make sense to Gershon. Would all these numbers really determine the final outcome? If you could reduce decision making to a mechanical process, the day would come when a computer could run an outfit like NASA.
In this bidding war, for instance, it was pretty obvious to Gershon that Columbia had the most plausible strategy. NASA, with the bigger players, had pissed away the best part of a decade on studies and proposals and evaluations of ever more exotic Mars landers, without ever really getting to the point. Lee’s people had come in fresh and had cut through all that crap, and presented something that looked as if it could be up and flying in a couple of years.
The trouble was, the scoring didn’t back up that intuition. Even though its technical pitch was well received — and the human factors stuff seemed particularly well thought through — Columbia was penalized by its status as a small experimental outfit. It just didn’t look as if Columbia was capable of delivering a complete spacecraft.
When the first-cut summary sheets came in, the overall totals gave Rockwell first place, with Boeing and McDonnell tied for second, and Columbia a distant last.
Gershon argued against the scoring in the final plenary sessions. “Damn it, you’ve got the results of the sims. I bust my balls trying to get a biconic to fly. We have to pick the bidder with the best chance of building something that will work…”
He got some sympathy from Joe Muldoon. The scores went through a rethink which helped Columbia a little.
But in the end Muldoon’s final report to Tim Josephson followed the scoring conclusions: “Rockwell International is considered the outstanding source as the Mars Excursion Module prime contractor…”
His assignment completed, Gershon went off to work at the Cape on the first of the Ares A-class missions, an unmanned proving flight of the upgraded Saturn VB.
In a couple of days he was called back to JSC to put his pawprint to the final MEM report. Gershon turned up, pretty pissed with the whole thing.
Muldoon caught him up.
“Where are you going?”
“It’s over, isn’t it? Oh, come on, Joe. You know as well as I do that Columbia was the only outfit with a real chance of building something in the time frame.. And now we’re dumping them.”
“Of course I know that. But it’s not over yet.”
“Are you kidding me? We’ve just signed off the final report, for Christ’s sake. Columbia never had a chance.”
“You’re learning fast, Ralph, but you’ve got a long way to go. In this game, a signed-off, final report is just the start of the negotiations.”
“What do you mean?”
“I want you to do something for me.”
A couple of days after that, a long telegram landed on JK Lee’s gunmetal desk.
He called in Jack Morgan and flipped the telegram across the desk at him.
Morgan read through the thing carefully, but he kept one eye on Lee as he did so.
The telegram had come from Ralph Gershon, one of the astronauts on the evaluation board. It was basically a list of questions about the Columbia bid. A lot of them were brutal, and the first was a doozie: translated from corporate speak it was, How can a pissant bunch of amateurs like Columbia handle the development of a major spacecraft like the MEM?
“Well, I guess this is it,” Morgan said, studying Lee. “We’re dead.”
Morgan had never seen Lee so low as in the last couple of months, since the MEM presentation. The release of tension, the sleep deficit, and all the rest of it had dumped Lee into a deep, deep trough of depression. And Lee’s overspend on the proposal had finally come out into the open, and there was a lot of muttering against him within Columbia. During the MEM exercise Morgan had become genuinely worried about what Lee was doing to himself. Not to mention his family. With the MEM thing being over, Morgan knew he was going to have to broach the health thing with Lee, somehow. Maybe he’d try to work through Jennine.
But just then Lee, sitting back in his chair, seemed bright, alert, and his eyes had that slightly glazed, almost high look in them that Morgan had come to associate with Lee’s major bursts of activity.
“Hell, no,” Lee said vehemently. “Don’t you get it? This damn note means we’re still in the running. They wouldn’t be asking us these questions otherwise.”
“What are you going to do?”
“Get the answers, of course.” Lee stabbed at his intercom. “Bella. I want you to start putting out calls. Get the MEM team leaders in here as soon as you can. And book a flight for us all, out to Houston, for — let me think — two days’ time.”
“But that’s a Sunday, JK.”
“Here you go again with your but but but,” Lee said. “I’ve told you about that before.”
“Yes, sir, JK.”
Morgan was aghast. “You’re not serious. It’s unheard of for a bidder to make a personal visit during an evaluation process.”
“What is that, a rule?”
“An unwritten one, I guess.”
Lee arched his eyebrows. “Imagine my concern.”
After the visit of the Columbia people to JSC, the scoring was revised again, and the senior people on the evaluation board took the proposal to Tim Josephson in Washington.
Muldoon’s people recommended Rockwell on the basis of the scoring system, with Columbia finally showing up at third.
The Administrator listened carefully.
Then Josephson thanked the board, and he asked Joe Muldoon, Ralph Gershon, and a couple of others to stay behind.
“Tell me the truth.” His tone sounded to Gershon typically dry and bureaucratic. “Are there any factors, other than those presented by the evaluation board, which I ought to take into account in this decision?”
Joe Muldoon spoke up. “Hell, yes. You have to look again at the Columbia bid, Tim.”
“Why so?”
“Because in my opinion it’s the most technically plausible. It’s shallow in some areas, but overall it was the most coherent of the bids. With the support of good subcontractors, the small organizational weight of Columbia won’t be a handicap…”
Gershon tried not to grin. As he’d watched Muldoon and Josephson and the rest work in the last few days, he’d come to believe that running an organization had a lot in common with flying a plane. You had to use your instruments, sure, but raw data, however well interpreted and analyzed, was only one input; in the end — when you had to make the decisions that could save you or kill you — there was no substitute for the mysterious internal processing that amalgamated data and experience and the feel of a ship in your hands.
It was just what Tim Josephson and Joe Muldoon were doing, he thought. The Columbia bid felt right, and that might swing it for JK Lee, even yet.
Still, it was going to be difficult for Josephson to set aside the conclusions of his formal evaluation. Two decades earlier Jim Webb had done that, when he’d plumped for Rockwell to build Apollo. And there had been muttering about corruption and backhand deals ever since.
When Gershon left to take a plane to the Cape, the decision still hung in the balance.
Lee was getting steadily more depressed. Even though his unorthodox visit to Houston had gone well, the rumors coming out of Washington were strong and consistent: that Rockwell had the MEM contract wrapped up. Hell, he thought, they always did. Who was I ever trying to kid?
At 10 A.M. on the day after getting back from Houston he found himself staring out of his office window. He was thinking of going home. He could spend some time with Jennine. And his son, Bert, was playing baseball that evening for his high-school team. Maybe it would be good for Lee to show up, for once.
Then Joe Muldoon called.
“Can you come back over to Houston today?”