THE EARLY MILLER YEARS 



113 



officials were very concerned about the safety factor of Titan III fly- 

 overs. So Teague ordered his subcommittee to probe the whole issue 

 of range management at the projected Gemini and Apollo launch 

 facilities at Cape Canaveral. 



On March 29, 1962, Teague summoned Assistant Secretary of 

 Defense John H. Rubel and Dr. Seamans in an executive session before 

 the Manned Space Flight Subcommittee. Teague told Rubel : 



The main thing that troubles the committee is, we go to the Cape, for example, 

 we talked with some of your responsible people there, we talked with some of 

 Dr. Seamans' responsible people and we came away confused, frustrated, disturbed, 

 and thev don't agree on this overflight matter, and they don't agree to a Titan sitting 

 next to a Saturn * * *. We have some questions we are going to submit to you, 

 Mr. Rubel and Dr. Seamans, which we want answered for the record. 



Gen. B. A. "Benny" Schriever, head of the Air Force Systems Command, 

 came up to lobby Teague in his office, but Teague pronounced: "I want 

 NASA to administer the land and its launch center." 



It took another NASA-DOD agreement, signed by Webb and 

 Secretary of Defense McNamara, to establish that NASA was more 

 than a tenant but could freely plan its own operations on the 87,000- 

 acre Merritt Island launch area. 



The average congressional committee would have received testi- 

 mony from the responsible top officials, and tried to resolve any 

 disputes at the very top. The Science and Astronautics Committee and 

 its subcommittees, given free rein by Chairman Miller, went out to 

 the contractors, the NASA centers throughout the country, sought 

 the advice of independent experts, talked to the workers in the plants 

 and their foremen, and had a real understanding of what was going 

 on in every program. 



Teague describes the efforts of the Air Force to prevent NASA 

 from establishing a machine shop to repair minor parts needed at the 

 Cape. "They would assign a bunch of bright young Air Force colonels 

 to lobby the committee," Teague recalls. "They did everything on 

 Earth to try * * * to get control of the space program." At one of 

 the subcommittee parties at the Cape, an Air Force officer at Patrick 

 Air Force Base was describing to one Science Committee member that 

 his machine shop wasn't very busy, and that it would be a waste of 

 money to set up a separate NASA shop. As Teague describes it: 



The next morning, I got up early, and went by cab to the machine shop. There 

 was a major in charge. I told him who I was, and that I just wanted to go through. 



I asked him how busy they were. They were so busy they couldn't even begin 

 to keep up. They would be running 24 hours a day. They could not do any more work. 



Teague relayed the word to the Air Force officer at the base in no 

 uncertain terms that "you say one more [deleted] word to my commit- 



