Managing the unmanageable: Apollo, space age management and American social problems

There are numerous beliefs about the ability of the federal government to accomplish positive results in social transformation using space program management practices that have become a part of American culture. In the middle of the 1960s, NASA Administrator James E. Webb asked why, if the USA could accomplish Apollo, “can’t we do something for grandma with Medicare”?. This led to efforts by Webb and others at NASA to export the management practices that enabled the successful lunar landing program toward solving the myriad social problems taken up by the Johnson administration and its successors in the USA. The application of these ideas to city administration, public health, welfare programs, energy, and veterans’ affairs offers a case study in seeking to control what ultimately proved uncontrollable. The linkage of space policy and social policy may seem tenuous at first, but both celebrate the power of the federal government and the state system to affect in fundamental ways the lives of citizens. This article explores those linkages, the relationship between the authority of experts and political leaders, and the manner in which management practices successful at NASA may have been applied with varying success to other governmental organizations.