Managing the Unmanageable: Apollo, Space Age Management, and American Social Problems

There are numerous beliefs about the ability of the federal government to accomplish positive results in social transformations that have become a part of American culture using space program management practices. The most obvious of these is the now trite question, "If we can put a man on the Moon, why can't we ... ?" But in the middle part of the 1960s NASA Administrator James E. Webb asked this same question in a more concrete manner; if we can accomplish Apollo "why can't we do something for grandma with Medicare?" This perception led to efforts by Webb and others at NASA to export the management practices that enabled the successful lunar landing program toward solving the myriad of social problems taken up by the Lyndon B. Johnson presidential administration and its successors in the United States. The application of these ideas to city administration, public health, entitlement programs such as Social Security and Medicare, energy, and veteran's affairs offers a case study in seeking to control what ultimately proved uncontrollable. Webb's 1969 book, Space Age Management: The Large-Scale Approach, was based on a set of lectures at the McKinsey Foundation that for a time became the darling of the management community. It emphasized the authority of unelected experts to implement well-executed plans for managing any difficult task. It outlined a strategy for the application of systems management techniques to tackle virtually any challenge imaginable. The linkage of space policy and social policy may seem tenuous at first, but both celebrate the power of the federal government and the state system to affect in fundamental ways the lives of citizens. This chapter explores those linkages, the relationship among the authority of experts and political leaders, and the manner in which management practices successful at NASA may have been applied with varying success to other governmental organizations.