To the Moon and Back

Joseph G. Gavin Jr. '37
Helped the U.S. Fulfill Its Lunar Dream.

by Stan Wedeking

Joseph G. Gavin Jr. '37 is at least partially responsible for the phrase, "they can put a man on the moon, but they can't ..." No, he didn't come up with the clichZ¹ - he actually helped put men on the moon. As director of the Lunar Module Program at Grumman Aerospace Corporation from 1963 to 1972, Gavin oversaw the design, testing and manufacture of all 12 lunar modules - six of which went to the moon.

Gavin traveled a long road to that moment at Mission Control when he and the rest of the world watched the first Lunar Module reach the moon and descend to its target on the surface. But, in retrospect, he traveled a surprisingly straight line. His time at Boston Latin School helped set him on the path. "Boston Latin School provided an educational base that was more significant than I realized at the time," says Gavin. "Later, when I went to MIT and spent a lot of time in the world of science and technology, the broad, classical education I received from Latin School gave me a foundation that turned out to be extraordinarily valuable."

For a man who became such a gifted engineer, Gavin had a hard time with math. "I struggled," he admits. "It did not come naturally."

The hard-working student received encouragement from his parents, as well as his Latin School teachers. "My parents believed in getting the best education one could. My father had to leave school in ninth grade to support his family after his father was killed in an industrial accident. So he felt very strongly that I should take advantage of whatever educational opportunities existed."

The opportunities became even more important since Gavin, born in Somerville in 1920, came of age during the Depression. "I think all of us who lived through the Depression in younger years came through later life with a very different view of the value of both money and property - because there never was that much to go around."

Lack of money did not stop Gavin from attending MIT after his graduation from Latin School in 1937. His parents helped him financially during his freshman year. From then on, a combination of scholarships and loans paid for his education - until his fifth year, which, Gavin says, MIT gave him "on the house." By the time he earned his bachelor's and master's degrees from MIT in 1942, the other great defining event of Gavin's generation was raging: World War II. Gavin served his country in the U.S. Navy from 1942 until his discharge in 1946.

With his degrees in aeronautics, Gavin's time in the services was spent in the Navy's Bureau of Aeronautics. His tenure there turned out to be an important step on his career path. "I had a lot of responsibility for my age," Gavin says. "I was the Navy's project officer on their very first jet airplane. I think they figured a fresh young grad might understand jet propulsion better than some of the old-timers." Gavin adds that he tried very hard not to disillusion them.

Even with his responsibilities in the Navy, young Gavin found time to marry his longtime sweetheart, Dorothy Dunklee, in 1943. Gavin says meeting his wife was "all the fault of the 4-H Club." While a teenager at 4-H summer camp, he met Dorothy's older brother, who later introduced Gavin to Dorothy. "It was close enough to love at first sight," says Gavin.

Within 10 days of leaving the Navy in 1946, Gavin had a job at the Grumman Corporation. He started at the bottom, making engineering design drawings. Over the years, he worked his way to the top of the company to become president and chief operating officer.

Before Gavin and Grumman made the Apollo Lunar Module happen, there was the manufacture of aircraft. The strict standards of aircraft design served Gavin well when the time came for Grumman to compete for the Apollo moon project. Grumman engineers employed the philosophy that there was no such thing as a random failure. Every aspect of a machine was engineered and tested to cope with every conceivable difficulty.

The concept of space travel was not new to Gavin: In 1945, while still in the Navy, he helped draft a report for a commission set up by President Truman on possible future directions for the Navy. "One sentence we got into the report was that the Navy should take an interest in navigation outside the atmosphere. So we were thinking about this before Sputnik, but of course that stimulated everyone's interest."

After getting the contract for Orbiting Astronomical Observatory - the first major telescopic device put into orbit - Grumman got a chance to bid on Apollo, ultimately winning the contract to build the Lunar Module. The Lunar Module changed Grumman and the lives of all who were involved in the project - including Gavin's. In 1962, Gavin was promoted to vice president at Grumman and was assigned the direction of the Lunar Module program. Under Gavin's engineering leadership, the Grumman team embarked on 10 years of extraordinary effort against unique and daunting challenges. For example, because the Lunar Module was specifically designed to operate in space and within the gravity field of the moon, there was no chance for a test flight before an actual mission.

Nothing like Apollo had ever been attempted, so there were no past examples for Gavin's team to use as a guide. The only statistics available were from the aircraft industry and were, as Gavin puts it, "not promising. They only proved that Apollo couldn't work."

But of course it could work, and it did work. The Lunar Module functioned perfectly on every Apollo mission. "The tensest time for us was during Apollo 13," Gavin says. During that ill-fated mission, an oxygen tank exploded in the Service Module, disabling it and making a lunar landing impossible. Getting the crew back safely involved emergency procedures that had never been tried before - such as shutting down the navigation system to save battery power. Finally, the astronauts, with advice from mission control, were able to improvise new procedures that - together with the Lunar Module - brought them back safely. "The Lunar Module was the lifeboat that got them back to earth," says Gavin. "It saved the day." NASA honored Gavin with its Distinguished Public Service Medal in 1971. His direction of the Lunar Module project may have been his greatest engineering achievement, but his corporate career had not yet reached its pinnacle. That came in 1976, when he was elected president and chief operating officer of Grumman Corporation.

During Gavin's tenure at Grumman, the corporation employed the same strict standards of design, whether the project they tackled was moon-bound or earthbound. In the 1970s Grumman was one of three companies that the U.S. Postal Service asked to submit truck prototypes for manufacture consideration. To compare the different vehicles, professional drivers ran the trucks night and day on a test track in Laredo, Texas. The requirement was that the vehicles run for 24,000 miles under these conditions. "Our background in flight engineering gave us an attention to fatigue-levels that other companies didn't understand," Gavin explains.

That attention paid off. "The two competitors dropped out - in pieces - after 12,000 miles," Gavin recalls. "Ours was the only one that lasted the full 24,000. The Postal Service didn't know what to do, since there was only one bidder left!" Postal Service representatives eventually figured out what to do, and Grumman went on to build more than 300,000 trucks.

Gavin retired from his post at Grumman in 1985, although he continued to serve on the company's board and as a consultant until 1990. Since then, the company has changed its name to Northrup Grumman. Today he enjoys the retirement that allows him - after all those years of travel and long hours - to spend time with his wife. Joseph and Dorothy Gavin have three children - all of whom stayed far away from careers in engineering. "I think my kids looked at me and decided there had to be a better way to earn a living," he chuckles. •

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