232 HISTORY OF THE COMMITTEE ON SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY 



Frank R. Hammill, Jr. staffed the Ranger hearings. 



Karth immediately asked Webb for the Hilburn report and bristled 

 when it was denied to him. The Karth subcommittee a year earlier had 

 already been highly critical of the management problems in the rela- 

 tionship between NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). In 

 1963, when the Karth subcommittee slashed the authorization for 

 Ranger from $90 million down to $65 million, Karth had observed that 

 there were "grave doubts" about the "adequacy of the management 

 of this project, both by NASA headquarters and the Jet Propulsion 

 Laboratory * * *. The subcommittee feels that in view of the poor 

 record of Ranger to date, Congress should be given reasonable assurance 

 of success before going forward full speed with more spacecraft." 



On the eve of the opening of the Karth oversight hearings, both 

 NASA and JPL headquarters were thrown into a turmoil by differing 

 opinions on the severity of the Hilburn report. Oran W. Nicks, NASA's 

 Director of Lunar and Planetary Programs protested that "If the only 

 purpose of the investigation had been to establish a basis for a critical 

 letter to Congress, we in the program office were naively misled 

 initially into supporting it as a constructive endeavor." Nicks wanted 

 to forward to Congress a rebuttal of the Hilburn charges. Personnel 

 at both the Office of Space Science and JPL were infuriated that Webb 

 had sent Chairman Miller a summary of the Hilburn charges without 

 giving them a chance to refute them. In an attempt to soften opposition 

 within his own headquarters, Webb at a news conference confessed 

 there had been an administrative error in signing the March 31 letter 

 to Miller which he thought had been cleared in the Space Science 

 Office. 



Webb tried to deal with the revolt within his own headquarters 

 and JPL, as well as to cope with the rising indignation of Karth who 

 was demanding the Hilburn report. The Los Angeles Times ran an 

 angry editorial on April 8, charging that if NASA wanted to separate 

 JPL from Caltech, "it could do this without first resorting to a cam- 

 paign of defamation, which not only damages JPL but reflects unfavor- 

 ably on one of the country's very great schools of science and tech- 

 nology." 



But Webb did not fully succeed in pacifying Karth. In a letter 

 written for Webb's signature, but actually signed in his absence by 

 Associate Administrator Dryden, Webb reiterated to Karth on April 

 22 that "the report represents the views of an internal NASA review 

 group, but it is only one working document. It is not a definitive 

 agency position * * *. For these reasons, the Ranger VI Report 

 should not become a basis for either conclusion or action by the Sub- 

 committee on NASA Oversight and should not be made available 

 publicly." 



