Joseph Francis Shea

Shea died on February 14, 1999, at his home in Weston, Massachusetts. He was survived by his wife Carol, six daughters, and one son.

In February 1993, NASA administrator Daniel Goldin appointed Shea to the chairmanship of a technical review board convened to oversee the redesign of the troubled International Space Station. However, Shea was hospitalized shortly after his appointment. By April he was well enough to attend a meeting where the design team formally presented the preliminary results of its studies, but his behavior at the meeting again called his capacities into question. As The Washington Post reported:

In 1968, Shea took a position at Raytheon in Lexington, Massachusetts. He would remain with the company until his retirement in 1990, serving as Senior Vice President for Engineering from 1981 through 1990. After leaving Raytheon, Shea became an adjunct professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT.

Deeply involved in the investigation of the 1967 Apollo 1 fire, Shea suffered from stress. He was moved to an alternative position in Washington and left NASA shortly afterwards. From 1968 until 1990 he worked as a senior manager at Raytheon in Lexington, Massachusetts, and thereafter became an adjunct professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. While Shea served as a consultant for NASA on the redesign of the International Space Station in 1993, he was forced to resign from the position due to health issues.

On January 25, 1967, the Apollo 1 crew began a series of countdown tests in the spacecraft on the pad at Cape Kennedy. Although Shea had ordered his staff to direct North American to take action on the issue of flammable materials in the cabin, he had not supervised the issue directly, and little if any action had been taken. During pad testing, the spacecraft suffered a number of technical problems, including broken and static-filled communications. Wally Schirra, the backup commander for the mission, suggested to Shea that Shea should go through the countdown test in the spacecraft with the crew in order to experience first-hand the issues that they were facing. Although he seriously considered the idea, it proved to be unworkable because of the difficulties of hooking up a fourth communications loop for Shea. The hatch would have to be left open in order to run the extra wires out, and leaving the hatch open would make it impossible to run the emergency egress test that had been scheduled for the end of the day on the 27th. As Shea later told the press, joining the crew for the test would have been "highly irregular".

Problems with the Apollo command module continued through the testing phase. The review meeting for the first spacecraft intended for a manned mission took place on August 19, 1966. One issue of concern was the amount of Velcro in the cabin, a potential fire hazard in the pure-oxygen atmosphere of the spacecraft, if there were to be a spark. As Shea later recounted:

During his time at the OMSF, Shea helped to resolve many of the other inevitable engineering debates and conflicts that cropped up during the development of the Apollo spacecraft. In May 1963, he formed a Panel Review Board, bringing together representatives of the many committees that aimed to coordinate work between NASA centers. Under Shea's leadership, this coordination became far more efficient.

In October 1963, Shea became the new manager of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office (ASPO) in Houston. Although technically a demotion, this new position gave Shea the responsibility for managing the design and construction of the Apollo command and lunar modules. Of particular concern to Shea was the performance of North American Aviation, the contractor responsible for the command module. As he later recounted:

The friction between Shea and Marshall, which had begun when Shea was at OMSF, continued after he moved to his new position. He became deeply involved in supporting George Mueller's effort to impose the idea of "all up" testing of the Saturn V rocket on the unwilling engineers at Marshall. Von Braun's approach to engineering was a conservative one, emphasizing the incremental testing of components. But the tight schedule of the Apollo program did not allow for this slow and careful process. What Mueller and Shea proposed was to test the Saturn V as one unit on its very first flight, and Marshall only reluctantly came to accept this approach in late 1963. When later asked how he and Mueller had managed to sell the idea to von Braun, Shea responded that "we just told him that's the way it's going to be, finally."

When Shea was hired by NASA, President John F. Kennedy's commitment to landing men on the Moon was still only seven months old, and many of the major decisions that shaped the Apollo program were yet to be made. Foremost among these was the mode that NASA would use to land on the Moon. When Shea first began to consider the issue in 1962, most NASA engineers and managers—including Wernher von Braun, the director of the Marshall Space Flight Center—favored either an approach called direct ascent, where the Apollo spacecraft would land on the Moon and return to the Earth as one unit, or Earth orbit rendezvous, where the spacecraft would be assembled while still in orbit around the Earth. However, dissenters such as John Houbolt, a Langley engineer, favored an approach that was then considered to be more risky: lunar orbit rendezvous, in which two spacecraft would be used. A command/service module (CSM) would remain in orbit around the Moon, while a lunar module would land on the Moon and return to dock with the CSM in lunar orbit, then be discarded.

Shea's task now became to shepherd NASA to a firm decision on the issue. This task was complicated by the fact that he had to build consensus between NASA's different centers—most notably the Manned Spacecraft Center in Houston headed by Robert Gilruth, and the Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, headed by Wernher von Braun. Relations between the centers were not good, and it was a major milestone in the progress of the Apollo program when von Braun and his team finally came to accept the superiority of the LOR concept. NASA announced its decision at a press conference on July 11, 1962, only six months after Shea had joined NASA. Space historian James Hansen concludes that Shea "played a major role in supporting Houbolt's ideas and making the ... decision in favor of LOR", while his former colleague George Mueller writes that "it is a tribute to Joe's logic and leadership that he was able to build a consensus within the centers at a time when they were autonomous."

Having brought in the project on time and on budget, Shea established a reputation in the aerospace community. In 1961 he was offered and accepted a position with Space Technology Laboratories, a division of TRW Inc., where he continued to work on ballistic missile systems.

In December 1961, NASA invited Shea to interview for the position of deputy director of the Office of Manned Space Flight (OMSF). D. Brainerd Holmes, Director of the OMSF, had been searching for a deputy who could offer expertise in systems engineering, someone with the technical abilities to supervise the Apollo program as a whole. Shea was recommended by one of Holmes' advisors, who had worked with him at Bell Labs. Although Shea had worked at Space Technology Labs for less than a year, he was captivated by the challenge offered by the NASA position. "I could see they needed good people in the space program," he later said, "and I was kind of cocky in those days."

In November 1961, John Houbolt had sent a paper advocating lunar orbit rendezvous (LOR) to Robert Seamans, the deputy administrator of NASA. As Shea remembered, "Seamans gave a copy of Houbolt's letter to Brainerd Holmes [the director of OMSF]. Holmes put the letter on my desk and said: Figure it out." Shea became involved in the lunar orbit rendezvous decision as a result of this letter. While he began with a mild preference for earth orbit rendezvous, Shea "prided himself", according to space historians Murray and Cox, "on going wherever the data took him". In this case, the data took him to NASA's Langley Research Center in Hampton, Virginia, where he met with John Houbolt and with the Space Task Group, and became convinced that LOR was an option worth considering.

Shea's role in resolving differences within NASA, and between NASA and its contractors, placed him in a position where criticism was inevitable. However, even Shea's critics could not help but respect his engineering and management skills. Everyone who knew Shea considered him to be a brilliant engineer, and his time as manager at ASPO only served to solidify a reputation that had been formed during his time on the Titan project. Of Shea's work in the mid-1960s, Murray and Cox write that "these were Joe Shea's glory days, and whatever the swirl of opinions about this gifted, enigmatic man, he was taking an effort that had been foundering and driving it forward." Shea's work also won wider attention, bringing him public recognition that approached that accorded to Wernher von Braun or Chris Kraft. Kraft had appeared on the cover of Time in 1965; Time planned to offer Shea the same honor in February 1967, the month in which the first manned Apollo mission was scheduled to occur.

After receiving his doctorate, Shea took a position at Bell Labs in Whippany, New Jersey. There he first worked as systems engineer on the radio guidance system of the Titan I intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) and then as the development and program manager on the inertial guidance system of the Titan II ICBM. Shea's specialty was systems engineering, a new type of engineering developed in the 1950s that focused on the management and integration of large-scale projects, turning the work of engineers and contractors into one functioning whole. He played a significant role in the Titan I project; as George Mueller writes, "[H]e contributed a considerable amount of engineering innovation and project management skill and was directly responsible for the successful development of this pioneering guidance system." In addition to Shea's technical abilities, it quickly became obvious that he was also an excellent manager of people. Known for his quick intellect, he also endeared himself to his subordinates through small eccentricities such as his fondness for bad puns and habit of wearing red socks to important meetings. During the critical days of the Titan project Shea moved into the plant, sleeping on a cot in his office so as to be available at all hours if he was needed.

On graduating in 1943, Shea enlisted in the U.S. Navy and enrolled in a program that would put him through college. He began his studies at Dartmouth College, later moving to MIT and finally to the University of Michigan, where he would remain until he earned his Doctorate in 1955. In 1946, he was commissioned as an Ensign in the Navy and received a Bachelor of Science degree in Mathematics. Shea went on to earn a MSc (1950) and a Ph.D. (1955) in Engineering Mechanics from the University of Michigan. While obtaining his doctorate, Shea found the time to teach at the university and to hold down a job at Bell Labs.

Joseph Francis Shea (September 5, 1925 – February 14, 1999) was an American aerospace engineer and NASA manager. Born in the New York City borough of the Bronx, he was educated at the University of Michigan, receiving a Ph.D. in Engineering Mechanics in 1955. After working for Bell Labs on the radio inertial guidance system of the Titan I intercontinental ballistic missile, he was hired by NASA in 1961. As Deputy Director of NASA's Office of Manned Space Flight, and later as head of the Apollo Spacecraft Program Office, Shea played a key role in shaping the course of the Apollo program, helping to lead NASA to the decision in favor of lunar orbit rendezvous and supporting "all up" testing of the Saturn V rocket. While sometimes causing controversy within the agency, Shea was remembered by his former colleague George Mueller as "one of the greatest systems engineers of our time".

Shea was born September 5, 1925, and grew up in the Bronx, the eldest son in a working-class Irish Catholic family. His father worked as a mechanic on the New York City Subway. As a child, Shea had no interest in engineering; he was a good runner and hoped to become a professional athlete. He attended a Catholic high school and graduated when he was only sixteen.