George Mueller, Engineer Who Helped Put Man on Moon, Dies at 97
By
SAM ROBERTSOCT. 19, 2015
Photo
George Mueller, center in glasses, in 1969. Credit NASA
George Mueller, a career space engineer who dauntlessly helped fulfill President John F. Kennedy’s vision in 1961 of sending an American astronaut to the
moon before the end of the decade, died on Oct. 12 at his home in Irvine, Calif. He was 97.
The cause was congestive heart failure, said Arthur L. Slotkin, a spokesman for the family and the author of “Doing the Impossible: George E. Mueller and the Management of
NASA’s Human Spaceflight Program.”
“This day man’s oldest dream is made a reality — this day the ancient bonds tying him to the earth have been broken,” Dr. Mueller (pronounced Miller)
wrote in The New York Times on July 21, 1969, the day after Neil Armstrong took his giant leap for mankind on the lunar surface.
Three days later, when the Apollo 11 astronauts returned safely, Dr. Mueller declared, “Today at 11:49 a.m. Houston time, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, we conclusively proved that man is no longer bound to the limits of the planet on which for so long he has lived.”
Dr. Mueller, who had been a science fiction and model airplane buff as a boy, was sworn in as deputy associate administrator for manned spaceflight of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration less than three months before Kennedy was assassinated in 1963.
He met the president’s deadline for a moon landing — beating the Soviet Union in the space race of the decade — by daringly revamping testing procedures and by consolidating control over separate NASA centers in Alabama, Florida and Texas.
He also pushed for the Skylab space station to test telescopes and other instruments and the effects of weightlessness, and urged the development of a reusable
space shuttle.
Dr. Mueller envisioned both the space program’s engineering potential in just getting to the moon and beyond and the scientific value of what might be discovered there. And he performed a promotional role, publicizing the application of those advances to public health and other everyday purposes.
“The stimulus of the space program has already produced more new knowledge and more innovations in all aspects of our lives than any previous endeavor, even including a major war,” he wrote in The Times.
In 1971, President Richard M. Nixon awarded Dr. Mueller the National Medal of Science for “his many individual contributions” to the Apollo system.
“Without his tough-minded management of the
Apollo program,” John M. Logsdon, professor emeritus at George Washington University’s Space Policy Institute, said in an email, “it is doubtful that NASA could have achieved President Kennedy’s goal of a lunar landing ‘before this decade is out.’ ”
George Edwin Mueller (the family changed the pronunciation during World War I) was born in St. Louis on July 16, 1918. His father, Edwin, who never got beyond grade school, became an electrician and superintendent of a motor repair shop. His mother, the former Ella Bosch, was a secretary.
His affinity for model airplanes steered him toward aeronautical engineering, but the subject was not taught at the college his family could afford, the Missouri School of Mines and Metallurgy (now Missouri University of Science and Technology). He enrolled in mechanical engineering, then switched to electrical engineering and graduated in 1939.
His marriage to Maude Rosenbaum ended in divorce. He is survived by his wife, the former Darla Hix Schwartzman; children and stepchildren, including Jean Porter, Karen Hyvonen, Wendy Schwartzman and Bill Schwartzman; 13 grandchildren; and 13 great-grandchildren.
He received a master’s degree from Purdue University; worked on microwave tubes, television and radar at Bell Laboratories; and taught at Ohio State University while completing his doctorate in physics.
He was vice president of Space Technology Laboratories in Los Angeles when he was hired by James E. Webb, NASA’s administrator, to lead the Apollo and Gemini programs through the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston (now the Johnson Space Center), the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Ala., and the Kennedy Space Center in Florida.
Dr. Mueller’s reputation was so solid that he survived the repercussions from an explosive fire that killed three astronauts in their spacecraft on a launching pad in 1967. He was able to persuade even the rocket inventor Wernher von Braun to embrace an expedited “all up” testing of a completed spacecraft instead of a more prolonged process of testing individual components, like each stage of a rocket, piecemeal.
Before Dr. Mueller launched Apollo 8 to orbit the moon in 1968, the rocket that lifted it into space had flown only twice.
“I spent about four months that summer looking at every possible way that it could fail, and convinced myself that it wasn’t going to fail,” he told the Smithsonian Institution’s Air & Space magazine in 2011.
Yet too many people involved in spaceflight believe in trying to achieve absolute safety, he said.
“If you designed your program to be absolutely safe,” he told Air & Space, “you’d also be sure you’d absolutely never fly.”
Dr. Mueller left NASA in December 1969 to return to private industry. He worked first at General Dynamics, then farmed jojoba shrubs as a substitute for sperm whale oil, which is used as a lubricant, and later joined Kistler Aerospace in Kirkland, Wash.
“It’s clear that you have a limited time of effectiveness in Washington if you really are doing anything,” he said in a 1998 oral history for NASA. “If you’re not doing anything, you can stay there indefinitely.”
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What a lying piece of crap, he probably spent his time sitting around at NASA, eating donuts, and laughing at how gullible the American people are.
Obviously as most normal people would also gauge from the video.....although you put it far nicer than I did. 