FIGURE 25.- Aerial view of the NASA-Ames Research Center near Mountain View, California. The large, horn-shaped structure at the left side is the new, full-scale wind tunnel.

helicopter and vertical take-off and landing machines (V/TOL) technology center of NASA. The mission development diagram for Ames is shown in figure 26, which shows how the logical connection from one to the other came about. Once again, the internal workings of the institution in the field shaped the decisions that were later made (or perhaps ratified is a better word) at NASA Headquarters in Washington. The case of the helicopter development evolution is sufficiently interesting that it will be described in detail in the next section.

A Case Study: The NASA Helicopter Program

For NASA, the problem of devising a policy for evaluating its laboratories was different from that facing DOD or AEC. During the past twenty years the number of NASA centers, including the Jet Propulsion Laboratory but excluding supporting facilities, has fluctuated between eight and ten. For NASA management, the problem has been to strengthen each center's sense of its own mission while making its

resources available to the rest of the agency. Where, as mentioned earlier, several centers are working in aeronautics or supporting research and technology, it becomes that much more difficult to avoid a certain degree of duplication. Although never made explicit in a single policy document, NASA has proceeded on the assumption that all but the smallest centers should combine open-ended and discrete projects.* NASA's one attempt to organize a facility around a technical discipline -- the Electronics Research Center failed. Instead, since the early 1970s, NASA has adopted an "area of emphasis" philosophy, that is, assigning work to each center based on the existing facilities and expertise at the center. An account of the consolidation of NASA's helicopter program at the Ames Research Center at Moffett Field, California, will show how this philosophy affected one center. More important, the helicopter program consolidation is a textbook study in demonstrating how one research laboratory adjusted to shrinking budgets, how Headquarters' need to spread work around dovetailed with the center's need for new clients, and the importance of the center's taking an active role to ensure its survival (ref. 67).

The Ames Research Center was established by the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics in 1939, primarily to test and design high-speed fighter aircraft. The tradition of high-speed aerodynamics that began with this enterprise continued until the laboratory became a center for the development of: first, subsonic jets, rocket and Scout launches at Wallops Island, Virginia; subsequently of atmospheric entry systems; and more recently still, of planetary entry probes. Another kind of mission grew out of the need to develop very sensitive controls for high-speed aircraft. These efforts led to work in flight simulation and the life sciences, since it was necessary to establish physiologically that flight simulators did, in fact, accurately mock up flight conditions. This, in turn, generated strong interest in computers, since high-fidelity flight simulators require very high-speed computational devices to drive them. The work in the life sciences expanded to include space biology after the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics became the core of NASA in 1958.

An important and independent set of missions emerged in the 1950s around large-scale test facilities originally designed for flight aircraft. It transpired that helicopters and V/TOLS required full-scale testing before they could be flown reliably, owing to the very complex interactions between aerodynamics and vehicle structure. These interactions simply could not be scaled and, thus, full-scale testing was essential. The same

* The Kennedy Space Center at Cape Canaveral, Florida, is an exception, since its mission is to support all of NASA's launches, except for the sounding rocket and Scout launches at Wallops Island, Virginia.

40-by 80-foot wind tunnel originally designed to test fighter aircraft during the Second World War was used later in the design of the most modern helicopters and V/TOL machines.

At Ames, work on rotorcraft research and technology began in 1954, when the Air Force requested tests of two advanced rotorcraft (the McDonnell XV-1 compound helicopter and the Bell XV-3 tilt-rotor airplane) in the 40-by 80-foot tunnel. From this point onward, Ames's involvement in rotorcraft technology increased: In 1956, a rotary-wing research group was formed; in 1958, testing of the Bell XV-3 began; and in the early 1960s, Ames carried out an important series of tests on the UH-1 and H-34 rotor systems. But the key event in Ames's rotorcraft program was the establishment by the Army, in 1965, of an aeronautical research laboratory at the center. In NASA's estimate, the creation of the Army laboratory had significant benefits for both agencies: It led to the refurbishing of an inactive 7-by 10-foot tunnel for small-scale testing alongside the full-scale testing capabilities of the 40-by 80-foot tunnel; to the development of capabilities in noise research and rotor dynamics; to the creation of other Joint Army Research Groups at the Lewis and Langley Research Centers; and above all, to the creation of the Army Air Mobility Research and Development Laboratory in 1970, with headquarters at Ames. This, in turn, caused a rapid expansion of rotary-wing research at Ames; in 1971 a joint NASA-Army agreement to develop a tilt-rotor research aircraft was signed. Thus Ames acquired another sponsor, one that could buffer funding cutbacks in the parent agency.

For reasons that have already been described, it was also true that by 1970 Ames needed all the outside support it could get. When NASA was created, Ames had taken on important new assignments in life sciences and space science. In the early 1960s, NASA built a life sciences research facility at Ames, and assigned responsibility to the center for systems management of the Pioneer series of interplanetary probes. But by their nature, these programs were not likely to grow. There were seldom more than one hundred professional employees working full-time on Pioneer and the early returns on life sciences research for example, the Biosatellite program for investigating the effects of weightlessness on various organisms were inconclusive. Also, Ames, in common with other NASA centers, was beginning to feel the pinch of funding cutbacks and layoffs. In mid-1967, there were 2 176 government employees at Ames; three years later, that number had fallen to just under 2 000 — a drop of about 11 percent (ref. 68). Without new programs or sponsors, Ames was in danger of closing or, at best, losing that critical mass of engineers and scientists, without which innovation could not occur.

What permitted Ames to survive was the decision by the center's leadership to concentrate on those areas where it was both strong and

likely to attract support from other funding agencies as well as NASA. When one of the authors (Mark) became the Ames Center director in 1969, there were already proposals to shut Ames down. Something had to be done immediately; and one of the author's first acts as director was to establish a Strategy and Tactics Committee consisting of rank-and-file employees as well as managers to work out Ames' view of its mission. In essence, the committee selected certain areas of emphasis for the center to concentrate on: computational fluid mechanics, V/TOL, flight simulation, airborne sciences, and life sciences. What these areas had in common were a high degree of interdependence and the availability of unique test facilities, such as the 40-by 80-foot tunnel, the Flight Simulator for Advanced Aircraft, and later the ILLIAC IV supercomputer, to support them; the rapid growth of rotorcraft technology for civil and military applications; and the existence of sponsors outside as well as within NASA. Thus Ames used the Army to get funds for V/TOL research and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to procure the ILLIAC IV, operated jointly by DOD and NASA and capable of performing 300 million calculations a second and storing one trillion bits of information at a time (ref. 69). Ames' areas of emphasis were, in a sense, the best horses to ride. New uses for helicopters were being identified in areas as diverse as energy exploration, logging, shipping, and heavy construction; and the Army was considering using the helicopter as an offensive weapon in addition to its traditional support role. As DOD funds became available in the early 1970s, Ames management planned to develop its rotary-wing research capability in ways described in an internal NASA paper as "explosive": repowering the 40-by 80-foot tunnel to increase its maximum speed from 200 to 300 knots, putting the vertical motion simulator into operation, and accepting delivery of an advanced tilt-rotor experimental aircraft.

There was, then, at least as much "push" from Ames as there was "pull" from NASA Headquarters for the center to chart its own course. Indeed, Ames had a long-range strategy in place two years before NASA began an "institutional assessment" of its centers. As it happened, Ames's strategy fitted in well with NASA's strategy of consolidating aeronautics and space technology around areas of emphasis. In late 1975, NASA officials decided to consolidate long-haul aviation at the Langley Research Center in Virginia and short-haul aviation at Ames. From Headquarters' point of view, consolidation would enable the agency to tap Ames's unique test facilities, exploit its contacts with the Army and the Federal Aviation Administration for example, supporting the latter's air traffic control simulation project - and bring about a division of NASA aeronautical research among the Ames, Langley, and Lewis Research Centers. NASA recommended a consolidation in three phases, beginning with the incorporation of Langley programs for which Ames.