Ernest Graves
Earlier he'd been down there as the district engineer of the Canaveral District when
they were building the vertical assembly building. When he was the deputy director of
Military Construction, he was the focal point for the direction of the work that the
Corps was doing for NASA.
By the time I arrived, the work at Canaveral was pretty well completed. In fact, we
faced the issue of closing the Canaveral District and having that work taken over, as I
recall, by Jacksonville.
Canaveral had been a separate district, but it had shrunk to fewer than 50 people.
Maintaining its separate status really didn't make any sense unless there were plans for
doing a lot more work in the future. We determined in consultation with NASA that
that was unlikely.
NASA had some more work ahead. But by that stage, rather than relying on the Corps,
they were going to do it under their own management.
The other big issue concerned the construction of a research center in Massachusetts,
a big building in Cambridge, for NASA. The building was fairly far along, but they still
had not decided on all the internal utilities. There was one floor--or two--that was
going to have a lot of utilities because it was going to be used for laboratory work. I
remember going up to Boston to try to help resolve exactly what the requirements were
to be because there was a lead time on getting all the material for this special laboratory
work.
Right in the midst of all this, NASA decided to discontinue the project because of
money. They decided to finish the building without any of this special stuff and turn the
building over to GSA [General Services Administration], which would use it for offices.
These two examples illustrate that the NASA thing was phasing down during the time
that I was there.
Q:
So it was more a question of the program coming to a conclusion than NASA wanting
to do its own work?
A:
Yes, it was more that it was coming to a conclusion. It was one thing when the volume
was very high and they could turn over a big chunk of it to the Corps. But by that stage
where there were just isolated projects, it didn't make sense for the Corps to maintain
a big organization to do the work for NASA. So we phased it out.
Q:
How would you characterize relations with NASA in those days? Were there a lot of
complaints about high overhead?
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