[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] That was really by chance. I was at University of California, San Diego, teaching a physics course. It was spring of 1999. Lou Dobbs retired from CNN [Cable News Network] and announced out of the blue that he was starting Space.com.\n\n I was fascinated with the idea and talked to him find out more about it. He said, “If you’re interested, and you want to hear more about it, why don’t you come meet with me next time you’re in New York, [New York].”\n\n I did. As it turned out, I was going to New York three or four weeks later. The more that I talked to him, the more I liked the idea behind it. The vision at the time was to create a website that catered to everyone who had an interest in space—for whatever reason. It would be fore kids interested in the space program, people who loved science fiction, the commercial aerospace community—everyone who had an interest.\n\n I loved the idea of it because I knew, living out in California, how hard it was to find out what was going on back in Houston and back at KSC [Kennedy Space Center, Florida]. Just try to do that reading your local newspaper! You just can’t keep up with the space program. So, having a website where you can just log on and get all the information about where was the Shuttle on its way to the pad, or what were the astronauts doing in orbit that day, seemed like a really good idea to me. He basically convinced me to join the company.

[Assistant] How long were you with the company?

[User] I was with the company for about a year and a half. I didn’t move to New York. I was commuting—staying in a hotel during the week to work there. I joined the Board of Directors right away and was initially the Executive Vice President for Strategic Planning. Shortly thereafter, I became the president of the company.

[Assistant] That’s quite a difference of strategic planning for NASA. Now you’re doing it for a website.

[User] It was quite different.

[Assistant] Put some of that same strategy into the strategic planning.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I was with the company for about a year and a half. I didn’t move to New York. I was commuting—staying in a hotel during the week to work there. I joined the Board of Directors right away and was initially the Executive Vice President for Strategic Planning. Shortly thereafter, I became the president of the company.

[Assistant] That’s quite a difference of strategic planning for NASA. Now you’re doing it for a website.

[User] It was quite different.

[Assistant] Put some of that same strategy into the strategic planning.

[User] Exactly.

[Assistant] Why did you leave?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] It was quite different.

[Assistant] Put some of that same strategy into the strategic planning.

[User] Exactly.

[Assistant] Why did you leave?

[User] I left for a variety of reasons, actually. One was that I had only taken temporary leave from the university and wanted to get back to it. (I had retained my position at the university.) Also, New York City is a long way from San Diego, where I live; I did not want to move from San Diego! I was doing a lot of commuting, and did not want to move to New York. And it was pretty clear that Space.com was not going to be opening a West Coast office anytime soon.\n\n I had wanted to get back to teaching and research, but the last couple months that I was there, I started thinking more and more about doing something that was focused more on girls and education than Space.com was. I started talking with my friends and several of us decided to form Imaginary Lines, Inc. That became part of the impetus to leave Space.com to get back out to California and start up Imaginary Lines.

[Assistant] Tell us about Imaginary Lines. We’re all very interested in how that moved from an idea into the reality that it is today.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] The timing was right. There wasn’t any one specific thing that triggered it. Maybe I had just lived long enough. I thought that this was something that was really worth using my name and using the visibility that I could bring to it. It felt worthwhile. When we started seeing the reaction of girls and their parents to our programs, it started feeding on itself, and we drew our energy and encouragement from them.\n\n When we started the company, there were a lot of people that we talked to, a lot of people who said, “This is not a business. There aren’t any girls interested in math and science. Where are you going to find people to come to your festivals? Where are you going to find these girls? All you need to do is look around the workforce. There aren’t very many women in engineering, so there can’t be many girls who are interested in math.”\n\n We said, “That’s not right. We know that’s wrong.” So we’ve taken some pleasure in proving them wrong.

[Assistant] And you’ve given them a tangible person to touch, whereas before it was just an image. So they can do that. It’s got to be very rewarding for you to be able to feel the excitement from those girls.

[User] It’s very rewarding to feel their excitement and to see their reaction to the women professionals we bring to the festivals. One of the things we’re trying to do is raise the visibility of other women scientists and engineers on a local, personal level for these girls, and then on regional and national levels, too. We want to make the world in general, and twelve-year-old girls in particular, aware of the women who are actively involved in science and engineering.

[Assistant] Your life certainly is full of balancing education and advancement and enrichment for young girls, and it sure keeps you busy from moment to moment.

[User] A little too busy.

[Assistant] And what a challenge, from talking to students on a college level, with physics, and then coming back and talking to elementary school students on a level that they can talk, too.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] It’s very rewarding to feel their excitement and to see their reaction to the women professionals we bring to the festivals. One of the things we’re trying to do is raise the visibility of other women scientists and engineers on a local, personal level for these girls, and then on regional and national levels, too. We want to make the world in general, and twelve-year-old girls in particular, aware of the women who are actively involved in science and engineering.

[Assistant] Your life certainly is full of balancing education and advancement and enrichment for young girls, and it sure keeps you busy from moment to moment.

[User] A little too busy.

[Assistant] And what a challenge, from talking to students on a college level, with physics, and then coming back and talking to elementary school students on a level that they can talk, too.

[User] You’d be surprised. [Laughter]

[Assistant]
Before we finish today, I was going to ask Sandra and Jennifer if they had any other questions that we hadn’t had a chance to ask you while we had you in these sessions.

I had a question. When you went out to Headquarters, what was it like working out there? And could tell us how different it was from working at JSC? Can you make some comparisons between the two?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] A little too busy.

[Assistant] And what a challenge, from talking to students on a college level, with physics, and then coming back and talking to elementary school students on a level that they can talk, too.

[User] You’d be surprised. [Laughter]

[Assistant]
Before we finish today, I was going to ask Sandra and Jennifer if they had any other questions that we hadn’t had a chance to ask you while we had you in these sessions.

I had a question. When you went out to Headquarters, what was it like working out there? And could tell us how different it was from working at JSC? Can you make some comparisons between the two?

[User] Not on tape. [Laughter]

[Assistant] Maybe a different question. We were talking with an astronaut earlier this week who kept referring to how the astronaut corps changed over time, from when he started in 1978. He was talking about how, in the beginning of the Space Shuttle program, astronauts, in particular, were very involved in all the different processes, and working with the contractors. I’m wondering if it changed at all by the time that you had gone up on your second mission, and [if] you could talk about that.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Are you kidding? [Laughter] No, I think I’d only add one thing that I don’t think we touched on this last time. There was one person who was very important to me at JSC, and it was Carolyn [L.] Huntoon. When I was going through the application process, Carolyn was on the selection committee. At the time, she was a Ph.D. biochemist in charge of a small group, but was the highest-ranking technical woman at JSC—therefore deemed to be the expert on everything related to women at JSC. She was the only woman on the selection committee, and it was a large selection committee. Once we arrived, she became almost the de facto liaison to all of the women astronauts; she became a very good friend to all of us and a very important person—especially in helping us steer our way through the first couple of years that we were there.\n\n If we ever had any problems, we all knew that we could call Carolyn, and we did! This was even as she was rising up through the ranks at JSC and becoming a more and more important person. She was always the person that we could call, and she would always help us solve any problem, no matter how small.\n\n So she’s one of the very few people, that I think I owe my career to. She had a long and distinguished career at NASA that had an unfortunate end. If you haven’t talked to her yet, you definitely should.

[Assistant] We have, and she’s mentioned as well that—we were talking about the selection committee and her opportunity to be on there when women were made part of the system.

[User] I would hate to think what it would have been like for the six women in our class if she hadn’t been there before us, been part of the selection committee, and then been there for us once we arrived. She made our lives much, much easier.

[Assistant] That’s good. I’m sure she’ll be glad to hear that as well.

[User] Good.

[Assistant] We’ll conclude for the day. Thank you so much, again, for taking the time.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes. Ed was in my branch. What you call a character.

[Assistant] He was certainly an interesting guy to talk to.

[User] One of a kind.

[Assistant] I’m struck by how many one-of-a-kind characters there were in flight operations.

[User] Yes. It attracted people like that. It attracted very strong-willed people. Gene Kranz used to tell us that one thing about this job is you can’t fade into the woodwork. You’ve got to get out there and get it done. So people like Ed, who didn’t mind—Ed was very competent as well, but didn’t mind standing up and getting things done, excelled at this work. He was a little bit of a character.\n\n Did you talk the John [S.] Llewellyn any?

[Assistant] Yes, we did, several times.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] One of a kind.

[Assistant] I’m struck by how many one-of-a-kind characters there were in flight operations.

[User] Yes. It attracted people like that. It attracted very strong-willed people. Gene Kranz used to tell us that one thing about this job is you can’t fade into the woodwork. You’ve got to get out there and get it done. So people like Ed, who didn’t mind—Ed was very competent as well, but didn’t mind standing up and getting things done, excelled at this work. He was a little bit of a character.\n\n Did you talk the John [S.] Llewellyn any?

[Assistant] Yes, we did, several times.

[User] He’s a whole lot of a character. [Laughs] We all hope they throw away the mold when they make them like him. He’s the guy that hollered “Liftoff” on that Gemini when it hadn’t lifted off and got everybody thinking we had liftoff. But John’s a character.

[Assistant] Yes, we certainly get a little bit of sense of this personality in here, but we’ve heard a lot of stories about him.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes. It attracted people like that. It attracted very strong-willed people. Gene Kranz used to tell us that one thing about this job is you can’t fade into the woodwork. You’ve got to get out there and get it done. So people like Ed, who didn’t mind—Ed was very competent as well, but didn’t mind standing up and getting things done, excelled at this work. He was a little bit of a character.\n\n Did you talk the John [S.] Llewellyn any?

[Assistant] Yes, we did, several times.

[User] He’s a whole lot of a character. [Laughs] We all hope they throw away the mold when they make them like him. He’s the guy that hollered “Liftoff” on that Gemini when it hadn’t lifted off and got everybody thinking we had liftoff. But John’s a character.

[Assistant] Yes, we certainly get a little bit of sense of this personality in here, but we’ve heard a lot of stories about him.

[User] Yes. Right.

[Assistant] As the assistant flight director, you had a chance to work with a lot of the different flight directors very closely. So I was wondering if you could comment on some of their different personalities and styles in terms of how they ran the missions and the shifts, and just provide some sort of comparison for us.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Well, I went back to my day job. [Laughter] I was the general manager of the astronautics in St. Louis. We had the headquarters of the astronautics in Huntington Beach because they had a little more activity at the time, and we worked on the Skylab, setting that thing up, worked on the Harpoon missile. We went to the Navy and got a good start on the Tomahawk missiles and things like that, but not too much space.

[Assistant] So someone from NASA came to you and asked you to—

[User] Yes. The someones were the administrator, Jim [James C.] Fletcher, the deputy administrator, George [M.] Low, and Rocco [A.] Petrone. They twisted my arm to come to Washington and have dinner with them and put it to me. Actually, they sent out a guy who I knew that was one of their headhunters, and he came to me with the guise that he was looking for somebody and who did I think would be good and all that stuff. I saw through him pretty easy. [Laughter] So that's how I got into it, and, you know, it was an easy decision, because, gosh, I took a salary cut from about—I don't remember the details, but $85,000 a year plus promotions, to $37,000 a year.

[Assistant] Wow.

[User] Which was the maximum pay at that time with the government channels.

[Assistant] So what could have caused you to take that kind of salary cut?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I didn’t really. I didn’t decide where I wanted to go to college for quite a long time after that, because we changed—my mother had no idea what she wanted to do in life. We kept moving around the country, and I changed schools 17 times before I graduated from high school.\n\n I really lost confidence in the Oklahoma City [Oklahoma] schools because a woman took my IQ [intelligence quotient], and then she was in the back room for quite some time evaluating what it was. She came out, and she was all excited, and she said, “You just got the highest IQ we’ve ever measured.” Which I don’t think is really right, because I’ve known a lot of very smart people, and a lot of people who do more contributing to my ideas than I do to theirs. I didn’t really believe that. I just lost confidence in the Oklahoma City schools, because if I was the smartest one there’s something wrong there.

[Assistant] You impressed them, anyway. You eventually went to MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge].

[User] Yes. I finally did eventually go to MIT.

[Assistant] After you graduated from MIT you went to Douglas Aircraft [Company] control systems?

[User] Yes, that’s right, I did. I was looking for somewhere that I could go to school where I wouldn’t be drafted and could contribute, and that’s why I went to Douglas Aircraft Company, primarily because of the drafting. I had known what had happened in the Korean War and I wanted no part of wars if I could avoid it, so that was one way of doing something useful without getting drafted.

[Assistant] It looks like you stayed there a couple years.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes. I finally did eventually go to MIT.

[Assistant] After you graduated from MIT you went to Douglas Aircraft [Company] control systems?

[User] Yes, that’s right, I did. I was looking for somewhere that I could go to school where I wouldn’t be drafted and could contribute, and that’s why I went to Douglas Aircraft Company, primarily because of the drafting. I had known what had happened in the Korean War and I wanted no part of wars if I could avoid it, so that was one way of doing something useful without getting drafted.

[Assistant] It looks like you stayed there a couple years.

[User] I did, yes.

[Assistant] Then you went to MIT for graduate work at that point?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes, that’s right, I did. I was looking for somewhere that I could go to school where I wouldn’t be drafted and could contribute, and that’s why I went to Douglas Aircraft Company, primarily because of the drafting. I had known what had happened in the Korean War and I wanted no part of wars if I could avoid it, so that was one way of doing something useful without getting drafted.

[Assistant] It looks like you stayed there a couple years.

[User] I did, yes.

[Assistant] Then you went to MIT for graduate work at that point?

[User] That’s right, I did, yes.

[Assistant] Did you have an idea what you wanted to do and where you wanted to go after that graduate work?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I did, yes.

[Assistant] Then you went to MIT for graduate work at that point?

[User] That’s right, I did, yes.

[Assistant] Did you have an idea what you wanted to do and where you wanted to go after that graduate work?

[User] I was always thinking that I wanted to go where the action was. That’s why I got back into going to MIT.

[Assistant] The action at that point was the space program. Did you feel like that was going to be where the action was?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] That’s right, I did, yes.

[Assistant] Did you have an idea what you wanted to do and where you wanted to go after that graduate work?

[User] I was always thinking that I wanted to go where the action was. That’s why I got back into going to MIT.

[Assistant] The action at that point was the space program. Did you feel like that was going to be where the action was?

[User] Yes, I did. So I was extremely lucky that I had gotten into that, but lucky mostly that not one of the people that I ever worked with ever caused a mission failure. I worked for 44 years in missions to the Moon, and missions to Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, and robotic missions in the group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They were all robotic missions, no human missions. Not one of the missions that I worked on failed. I can’t claim credit for that, because if anybody had failed on a mission that I had been working on, it would have failed. Since nobody failed, not one of the missions I worked on failed, which is really remarkable when you consider how many missions actually did fail.

[Assistant] Yes, that’s true. Sputnik [Russian satellite] happened in 1957. Were you still at Douglas, or were you at MIT when that happened? Do you remember where you were?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I was always thinking that I wanted to go where the action was. That’s why I got back into going to MIT.

[Assistant] The action at that point was the space program. Did you feel like that was going to be where the action was?

[User] Yes, I did. So I was extremely lucky that I had gotten into that, but lucky mostly that not one of the people that I ever worked with ever caused a mission failure. I worked for 44 years in missions to the Moon, and missions to Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, and robotic missions in the group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They were all robotic missions, no human missions. Not one of the missions that I worked on failed. I can’t claim credit for that, because if anybody had failed on a mission that I had been working on, it would have failed. Since nobody failed, not one of the missions I worked on failed, which is really remarkable when you consider how many missions actually did fail.

[Assistant] Yes, that’s true. Sputnik [Russian satellite] happened in 1957. Were you still at Douglas, or were you at MIT when that happened? Do you remember where you were?

[User] I think I was back at MIT.

[Assistant] Do you remember the reaction at that time at MIT? You said you wanted to go where the action was. Do you remember thinking “That’s it, that’s what I want to do”?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes, I did. So I was extremely lucky that I had gotten into that, but lucky mostly that not one of the people that I ever worked with ever caused a mission failure. I worked for 44 years in missions to the Moon, and missions to Venus, Earth, Mars, Jupiter, and Saturn, and robotic missions in the group at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. They were all robotic missions, no human missions. Not one of the missions that I worked on failed. I can’t claim credit for that, because if anybody had failed on a mission that I had been working on, it would have failed. Since nobody failed, not one of the missions I worked on failed, which is really remarkable when you consider how many missions actually did fail.

[Assistant] Yes, that’s true. Sputnik [Russian satellite] happened in 1957. Were you still at Douglas, or were you at MIT when that happened? Do you remember where you were?

[User] I think I was back at MIT.

[Assistant] Do you remember the reaction at that time at MIT? You said you wanted to go where the action was. Do you remember thinking “That’s it, that’s what I want to do”?

[User] Yes, I remember that I had to have a secret clearance. I did work for a laboratory where they were doing some military work, even at MIT. That’s when I found out, when I had to have secret clearance, that my name on the birth certificate was different than what my mother had told me my name was, so I had to straighten that out.

[Assistant] That’s interesting. Right around that time of Sputnik, you were at MIT, and then you went to JPL, to the analytical design group, in 1959.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I think I was back at MIT.

[Assistant] Do you remember the reaction at that time at MIT? You said you wanted to go where the action was. Do you remember thinking “That’s it, that’s what I want to do”?

[User] Yes, I remember that I had to have a secret clearance. I did work for a laboratory where they were doing some military work, even at MIT. That’s when I found out, when I had to have secret clearance, that my name on the birth certificate was different than what my mother had told me my name was, so I had to straighten that out.

[Assistant] That’s interesting. Right around that time of Sputnik, you were at MIT, and then you went to JPL, to the analytical design group, in 1959.

[User] That’s right, I did. That’s right.

[Assistant] What made you decide to take a job at JPL?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes, I remember that I had to have a secret clearance. I did work for a laboratory where they were doing some military work, even at MIT. That’s when I found out, when I had to have secret clearance, that my name on the birth certificate was different than what my mother had told me my name was, so I had to straighten that out.

[Assistant] That’s interesting. Right around that time of Sputnik, you were at MIT, and then you went to JPL, to the analytical design group, in 1959.

[User] That’s right, I did. That’s right.

[Assistant] What made you decide to take a job at JPL?

[User] Because Dick Morris [phonetic] from JPL had interviewed me and offered me a job, which looked like a very good job, and did not involve making weapon systems. I did not want to contribute to weapon systems, considering what had happened during Vietnam [War]. During Vietnam the newspapers were full of headlines which said that there were 30,000 Vietcong killed yesterday in Vietnam. How did they know? These were killed mostly—the strafing from airplanes. I decided right then and there that I was never going to contribute to a weapon system program. I knew darn good and well that they had no idea how many of the 30,000 were Vietcong and how many were on the other side. Civilians on the other side. But they just quoted these wildly incorrect data as if it was all true, and I knew damn well it wasn’t true at all. I decided at that time I was never going to contribute to another weapon system program.

[Assistant] It was a good decision. Talk about when you first went to JPL. Do you remember some of the projects you were working on?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] That’s right, I did. That’s right.

[Assistant] What made you decide to take a job at JPL?

[User] Because Dick Morris [phonetic] from JPL had interviewed me and offered me a job, which looked like a very good job, and did not involve making weapon systems. I did not want to contribute to weapon systems, considering what had happened during Vietnam [War]. During Vietnam the newspapers were full of headlines which said that there were 30,000 Vietcong killed yesterday in Vietnam. How did they know? These were killed mostly—the strafing from airplanes. I decided right then and there that I was never going to contribute to a weapon system program. I knew darn good and well that they had no idea how many of the 30,000 were Vietcong and how many were on the other side. Civilians on the other side. But they just quoted these wildly incorrect data as if it was all true, and I knew damn well it wasn’t true at all. I decided at that time I was never going to contribute to another weapon system program.

[Assistant] It was a good decision. Talk about when you first went to JPL. Do you remember some of the projects you were working on?

[User] I was working on the project [Mariner 2] for flying past Venus and taking pictures of Venus by the spacecraft that went by them, and I designed the control system for scanning Venus when it went by. It turned out that that scan did get pictures of Venus, so that worked.

[Assistant] Were you working on the Ranger Program also?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Because Dick Morris [phonetic] from JPL had interviewed me and offered me a job, which looked like a very good job, and did not involve making weapon systems. I did not want to contribute to weapon systems, considering what had happened during Vietnam [War]. During Vietnam the newspapers were full of headlines which said that there were 30,000 Vietcong killed yesterday in Vietnam. How did they know? These were killed mostly—the strafing from airplanes. I decided right then and there that I was never going to contribute to a weapon system program. I knew darn good and well that they had no idea how many of the 30,000 were Vietcong and how many were on the other side. Civilians on the other side. But they just quoted these wildly incorrect data as if it was all true, and I knew damn well it wasn’t true at all. I decided at that time I was never going to contribute to another weapon system program.

[Assistant] It was a good decision. Talk about when you first went to JPL. Do you remember some of the projects you were working on?

[User] I was working on the project [Mariner 2] for flying past Venus and taking pictures of Venus by the spacecraft that went by them, and I designed the control system for scanning Venus when it went by. It turned out that that scan did get pictures of Venus, so that worked.

[Assistant] Were you working on the Ranger Program also?

[User] Yes, I was.

[Assistant] That was really the first unmanned spacecraft ever sent to photograph the Moon. At that time period that was quite an accomplishment. They were sending images back to Earth from that. Do you remember seeing images? What did you think when you saw those images?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I was working on the project [Mariner 2] for flying past Venus and taking pictures of Venus by the spacecraft that went by them, and I designed the control system for scanning Venus when it went by. It turned out that that scan did get pictures of Venus, so that worked.

[Assistant] Were you working on the Ranger Program also?

[User] Yes, I was.

[Assistant] That was really the first unmanned spacecraft ever sent to photograph the Moon. At that time period that was quite an accomplishment. They were sending images back to Earth from that. Do you remember seeing images? What did you think when you saw those images?

[User] I don’t really remember, but you should know that there was an earlier mission to land a spacecraft on [the Moon]. It was called the Surveyor spacecraft. It actually landed on the Moon, with a soft landing. The reason for that program was to make sure that the dust from the Moon did not just all blow away from the engine, and that the spacecraft could land successfully. Because if it couldn’t land successfully, you couldn’t have landed the Apollo missions on the Moon. Everything did work right with that mission. I contributed a little bit to that mission, but not very much.

[Assistant] In 1960 you actually went to [NASA] Langley [Research Center, Hampton, Virginia] and worked with Don [Donald C.] Cheatham and Bob [Robert G.] Chilton in the Space Task Group.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes, I was.

[Assistant] That was really the first unmanned spacecraft ever sent to photograph the Moon. At that time period that was quite an accomplishment. They were sending images back to Earth from that. Do you remember seeing images? What did you think when you saw those images?

[User] I don’t really remember, but you should know that there was an earlier mission to land a spacecraft on [the Moon]. It was called the Surveyor spacecraft. It actually landed on the Moon, with a soft landing. The reason for that program was to make sure that the dust from the Moon did not just all blow away from the engine, and that the spacecraft could land successfully. Because if it couldn’t land successfully, you couldn’t have landed the Apollo missions on the Moon. Everything did work right with that mission. I contributed a little bit to that mission, but not very much.

[Assistant] In 1960 you actually went to [NASA] Langley [Research Center, Hampton, Virginia] and worked with Don [Donald C.] Cheatham and Bob [Robert G.] Chilton in the Space Task Group.

[User] I sure do remember that.

[Assistant] The proposal evaluation team. Can you talk about that team and what you were looking at at that time?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I don’t really remember, but you should know that there was an earlier mission to land a spacecraft on [the Moon]. It was called the Surveyor spacecraft. It actually landed on the Moon, with a soft landing. The reason for that program was to make sure that the dust from the Moon did not just all blow away from the engine, and that the spacecraft could land successfully. Because if it couldn’t land successfully, you couldn’t have landed the Apollo missions on the Moon. Everything did work right with that mission. I contributed a little bit to that mission, but not very much.

[Assistant] In 1960 you actually went to [NASA] Langley [Research Center, Hampton, Virginia] and worked with Don [Donald C.] Cheatham and Bob [Robert G.] Chilton in the Space Task Group.

[User] I sure do remember that.

[Assistant] The proposal evaluation team. Can you talk about that team and what you were looking at at that time?

[User] I was reading the industry proposals for what was going to happen in missions to the Moon. There were something like 50 different industry proposals, something like that. There were many dozens of ones that we examined and evaluated as to how good they were. But it was mostly Chilton and Cheatham who did the evaluation, and the rest of us just summarized what we got out of the proposals.

[Assistant] How did you get picked to go on that team?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I sure do remember that.

[Assistant] The proposal evaluation team. Can you talk about that team and what you were looking at at that time?

[User] I was reading the industry proposals for what was going to happen in missions to the Moon. There were something like 50 different industry proposals, something like that. There were many dozens of ones that we examined and evaluated as to how good they were. But it was mostly Chilton and Cheatham who did the evaluation, and the rest of us just summarized what we got out of the proposals.

[Assistant] How did you get picked to go on that team?

[User] Because the person who’d hired me at JPL, he was asked to go. He didn’t want to interrupt his family life and go there, and I agreed to do that for a short time because I thought it was where the action was.

[Assistant] Do you remember some of the proposals? What was the process? Did they just come in and give their proposal over a period of time?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I was reading the industry proposals for what was going to happen in missions to the Moon. There were something like 50 different industry proposals, something like that. There were many dozens of ones that we examined and evaluated as to how good they were. But it was mostly Chilton and Cheatham who did the evaluation, and the rest of us just summarized what we got out of the proposals.

[Assistant] How did you get picked to go on that team?

[User] Because the person who’d hired me at JPL, he was asked to go. He didn’t want to interrupt his family life and go there, and I agreed to do that for a short time because I thought it was where the action was.

[Assistant] Do you remember some of the proposals? What was the process? Did they just come in and give their proposal over a period of time?

[User] No, they were all written, and we just had to read the proposals and evaluate them. I don’t remember that the evaluation was too useful, but it was mostly just summarizing what was in the proposals. That’s what we really did.

[Assistant] Was NASA thinking of using industry more than what they ended up using them as partners? At that point were they just looking for ideas from everywhere, just to figure out what they were going to do?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Because the person who’d hired me at JPL, he was asked to go. He didn’t want to interrupt his family life and go there, and I agreed to do that for a short time because I thought it was where the action was.

[Assistant] Do you remember some of the proposals? What was the process? Did they just come in and give their proposal over a period of time?

[User] No, they were all written, and we just had to read the proposals and evaluate them. I don’t remember that the evaluation was too useful, but it was mostly just summarizing what was in the proposals. That’s what we really did.

[Assistant] Was NASA thinking of using industry more than what they ended up using them as partners? At that point were they just looking for ideas from everywhere, just to figure out what they were going to do?

[User] Yes, I think the latter. They were really just looking for ideas from anywhere about what could be done.

[Assistant] That was in 1960. But the President [John F. “Jack” Kennedy] announced in May of ’61 that he wanted Congress to divert funds to get a man on the Moon by the end of the decade. That was quite an amazing announcement.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] No, they were all written, and we just had to read the proposals and evaluate them. I don’t remember that the evaluation was too useful, but it was mostly just summarizing what was in the proposals. That’s what we really did.

[Assistant] Was NASA thinking of using industry more than what they ended up using them as partners? At that point were they just looking for ideas from everywhere, just to figure out what they were going to do?

[User] Yes, I think the latter. They were really just looking for ideas from anywhere about what could be done.

[Assistant] That was in 1960. But the President [John F. “Jack” Kennedy] announced in May of ’61 that he wanted Congress to divert funds to get a man on the Moon by the end of the decade. That was quite an amazing announcement.

[User] It was.

[Assistant] I know a lot of people, it took them by surprise that that was going to happen. What were your thoughts?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes, I think the latter. They were really just looking for ideas from anywhere about what could be done.

[Assistant] That was in 1960. But the President [John F. “Jack” Kennedy] announced in May of ’61 that he wanted Congress to divert funds to get a man on the Moon by the end of the decade. That was quite an amazing announcement.

[User] It was.

[Assistant] I know a lot of people, it took them by surprise that that was going to happen. What were your thoughts?

[User] It was amazing that we had made a commitment to do that. Right after that happened, I was asked to serve as part of the [Systems Support] Group at NASA Headquarters [Washington, DC]. The JPL had a team there that was doing that work there, and I became part of that team.\n\n I was very interested in, primarily concerned about, the reliability of flying to the Moon and back. I did an analysis when I was at NASA Headquarters, based on the known reliability of the ballistic missile program, to compute—there were three different ways of going to the Moon.\n\n There was direct flight to the Moon, which was the most expensive, but the safest. There was an intermediate mission, which was never really considered very long, which was Earth-orbit rendezvous. Then there was lunar orbit rendezvous, which was easily the most dangerous. The ballistic missile analysis that I did, based on our ballistic missile reliability, was if we choose the lunar orbit rendezvous, there was only a 10 percent chance of any mission getting all the way to the surface of the Moon and back to Earth, considering how many operations had to be done at the Moon.\n\n It was just an enormous difference. There was about 1 chance in 10 based on the calculations that any one mission would get there to the Moon and all the way back to the Earth. But that was the cheapest way to do it, and NASA settled for the cheapest, even though I voted against it.

[Assistant] Did anyone else vote with you?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] It was.

[Assistant] I know a lot of people, it took them by surprise that that was going to happen. What were your thoughts?

[User] It was amazing that we had made a commitment to do that. Right after that happened, I was asked to serve as part of the [Systems Support] Group at NASA Headquarters [Washington, DC]. The JPL had a team there that was doing that work there, and I became part of that team.\n\n I was very interested in, primarily concerned about, the reliability of flying to the Moon and back. I did an analysis when I was at NASA Headquarters, based on the known reliability of the ballistic missile program, to compute—there were three different ways of going to the Moon.\n\n There was direct flight to the Moon, which was the most expensive, but the safest. There was an intermediate mission, which was never really considered very long, which was Earth-orbit rendezvous. Then there was lunar orbit rendezvous, which was easily the most dangerous. The ballistic missile analysis that I did, based on our ballistic missile reliability, was if we choose the lunar orbit rendezvous, there was only a 10 percent chance of any mission getting all the way to the surface of the Moon and back to Earth, considering how many operations had to be done at the Moon.\n\n It was just an enormous difference. There was about 1 chance in 10 based on the calculations that any one mission would get there to the Moon and all the way back to the Earth. But that was the cheapest way to do it, and NASA settled for the cheapest, even though I voted against it.

[Assistant] Did anyone else vote with you?

[User] I don’t remember whether anybody else did or not, but that was what was chosen.

[Assistant] Do you remember how many people were on that team? Or about how many different people? Was it a large group?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] It was amazing that we had made a commitment to do that. Right after that happened, I was asked to serve as part of the [Systems Support] Group at NASA Headquarters [Washington, DC]. The JPL had a team there that was doing that work there, and I became part of that team.\n\n I was very interested in, primarily concerned about, the reliability of flying to the Moon and back. I did an analysis when I was at NASA Headquarters, based on the known reliability of the ballistic missile program, to compute—there were three different ways of going to the Moon.\n\n There was direct flight to the Moon, which was the most expensive, but the safest. There was an intermediate mission, which was never really considered very long, which was Earth-orbit rendezvous. Then there was lunar orbit rendezvous, which was easily the most dangerous. The ballistic missile analysis that I did, based on our ballistic missile reliability, was if we choose the lunar orbit rendezvous, there was only a 10 percent chance of any mission getting all the way to the surface of the Moon and back to Earth, considering how many operations had to be done at the Moon.\n\n It was just an enormous difference. There was about 1 chance in 10 based on the calculations that any one mission would get there to the Moon and all the way back to the Earth. But that was the cheapest way to do it, and NASA settled for the cheapest, even though I voted against it.

[Assistant] Did anyone else vote with you?

[User] I don’t remember whether anybody else did or not, but that was what was chosen.

[Assistant] Do you remember how many people were on that team? Or about how many different people? Was it a large group?

[User] About 10 or 12 of us who were working on that.

[Assistant] Joe [Joseph F.] Shea, was leading it?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I don’t remember whether anybody else did or not, but that was what was chosen.

[Assistant] Do you remember how many people were on that team? Or about how many different people? Was it a large group?

[User] About 10 or 12 of us who were working on that.

[Assistant] Joe [Joseph F.] Shea, was leading it?

[User] Yes, Joe Shea was very prominent in that.

[Assistant] I was reading in one of the books—I don’t know if you remember this instance, but at Headquarters you saw a presentation. There were two slide projectors at once, and you were talking about how impressed you were at the technology at that point.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] About 10 or 12 of us who were working on that.

[Assistant] Joe [Joseph F.] Shea, was leading it?

[User] Yes, Joe Shea was very prominent in that.

[Assistant] I was reading in one of the books—I don’t know if you remember this instance, but at Headquarters you saw a presentation. There were two slide projectors at once, and you were talking about how impressed you were at the technology at that point.

[User] I was impressed primarily by how little it was possible—the percentage of what you could remember by having two people with two projectors at once, and you’re listening to two people talk at once. You have to look at two different screens and follow two different lines of thought at once, and that was impossible.

[Assistant] Maybe not the best way to get their point across. That’s interesting just because the way technology has changed. When you go back and look at that time period, when you were deciding something really important, and it had people’s lives in the balance. Like you said, it was the least safe as far as you were concerned.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes, Joe Shea was very prominent in that.

[Assistant] I was reading in one of the books—I don’t know if you remember this instance, but at Headquarters you saw a presentation. There were two slide projectors at once, and you were talking about how impressed you were at the technology at that point.

[User] I was impressed primarily by how little it was possible—the percentage of what you could remember by having two people with two projectors at once, and you’re listening to two people talk at once. You have to look at two different screens and follow two different lines of thought at once, and that was impossible.

[Assistant] Maybe not the best way to get their point across. That’s interesting just because the way technology has changed. When you go back and look at that time period, when you were deciding something really important, and it had people’s lives in the balance. Like you said, it was the least safe as far as you were concerned.

[User] It was the least safe, yes, it was the least safe.

[Assistant] As a group, did everyone feel that you could get past that? You said there was a 10 percent chance that it would be safe.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I was impressed primarily by how little it was possible—the percentage of what you could remember by having two people with two projectors at once, and you’re listening to two people talk at once. You have to look at two different screens and follow two different lines of thought at once, and that was impossible.

[Assistant] Maybe not the best way to get their point across. That’s interesting just because the way technology has changed. When you go back and look at that time period, when you were deciding something really important, and it had people’s lives in the balance. Like you said, it was the least safe as far as you were concerned.

[User] It was the least safe, yes, it was the least safe.

[Assistant] As a group, did everyone feel that you could get past that? You said there was a 10 percent chance that it would be safe.

[User] For any one mission there was only a 10 percent chance that you’d get all the way to the surface of the Moon and back to Earth, on any one mission.

[Assistant] But they felt that that was okay? That percentage was worth trying?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] It was the least safe, yes, it was the least safe.

[Assistant] As a group, did everyone feel that you could get past that? You said there was a 10 percent chance that it would be safe.

[User] For any one mission there was only a 10 percent chance that you’d get all the way to the surface of the Moon and back to Earth, on any one mission.

[Assistant] But they felt that that was okay? That percentage was worth trying?

[User] They thought that they could improve the safety of it.

[Assistant] They were confident that that could be improved.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] They thought that they could improve the safety of it.

[Assistant] They were confident that that could be improved.

[User] Yes. It turned out that that was correct. I think that the big thing that happened during the interim was that digital computers got to be far more reliable and far more capable than they were at the time that I did those calculations. I think the digital computer industry came through with big margins.\n\n In fact, the first computer we had doing all of our work for us at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory, commonly known as MIT/IL, was a Honeywell [Inc. H-]1800 computer. My wife and I lived next door to a person who worked for Honeywell. I had put in, in my simulation for the descent guidance checking, on the correctness of the things that were computed by the Honeywell 1800 computer. They were getting wrong answers all the time. Any time that you saw lightning out the window of the lab [laboratory], this Honeywell 1800 computer was likely to stop. With my simulations at least, because I was checking the correctness of their data, it was failing tests all the time.\n\n But the person that lived next to us worked for Honeywell, and I asked him, “What about the safety of your computers, the reliability of your computers? They’re making mistakes all the time.”\n\n He said, “Tell me about it. Honeywell is in the process of paying off a farmer who raises hundreds of chickens in the Midwest, because they were using our computer to compute the optimum diet for the chickens and he wound up with 5,000 dwarf chickens.” So the Honeywell was soon moved off and replaced by an IBM 360 [Model] 75 which was self-checking, and that was the end of my program finding errors. Never again did my program stop.

[Assistant] You mentioned you went back to the Instrumentation Lab at MIT in 1963. What made you decide to go back there when you were working for NASA before that?

[User] Primarily I liked the challenge of being involved in a manned program.

[Assistant] Had it already been decided that they would be working on the software at that point?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Primarily I liked the challenge of being involved in a manned program.

[Assistant] Had it already been decided that they would be working on the software at that point?

[User] Yes, it had been decided. That’s why I went back there. I never returned from NASA Headquarters to JPL, I just applied to the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory and was hired there.

[Assistant] Let’s talk about some of those early days and couple years at Instrumentation Lab.

[User] Yes, and I’m prepared to. I had already concluded that one of the things I wanted to talk about was women’s role in that, because we had something like 300 engineers, all men, who were doing all the work on that. I thought that that was not right. Then somehow a woman named Margaret [H.] Hamilton was hired. She was brilliant, and within a year she was my boss’s boss, Margaret Hamilton. If you go to Central Square, Cambridge today and just look at the organizations that are situated in Central Square today you’ll find that there’s a Hamilton [Technologies, Inc.] computer engineering company there.

[Assistant] And that’s her.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes, it had been decided. That’s why I went back there. I never returned from NASA Headquarters to JPL, I just applied to the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory and was hired there.

[Assistant] Let’s talk about some of those early days and couple years at Instrumentation Lab.

[User] Yes, and I’m prepared to. I had already concluded that one of the things I wanted to talk about was women’s role in that, because we had something like 300 engineers, all men, who were doing all the work on that. I thought that that was not right. Then somehow a woman named Margaret [H.] Hamilton was hired. She was brilliant, and within a year she was my boss’s boss, Margaret Hamilton. If you go to Central Square, Cambridge today and just look at the organizations that are situated in Central Square today you’ll find that there’s a Hamilton [Technologies, Inc.] computer engineering company there.

[Assistant] And that’s her.

[User] And that’s her. The only fault I find with that is that she’s done the reverse. All the people that work there are women.

[Assistant] Kind of giving a leg up to the female side?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes, and I’m prepared to. I had already concluded that one of the things I wanted to talk about was women’s role in that, because we had something like 300 engineers, all men, who were doing all the work on that. I thought that that was not right. Then somehow a woman named Margaret [H.] Hamilton was hired. She was brilliant, and within a year she was my boss’s boss, Margaret Hamilton. If you go to Central Square, Cambridge today and just look at the organizations that are situated in Central Square today you’ll find that there’s a Hamilton [Technologies, Inc.] computer engineering company there.

[Assistant] And that’s her.

[User] And that’s her. The only fault I find with that is that she’s done the reverse. All the people that work there are women.

[Assistant] Kind of giving a leg up to the female side?

[User] Yes. Meanwhile, even though when I graduated from MIT they had only 50 women at MIT, now it’s about half-and-half. I think that women have advanced properly.

[Assistant] Yes, at least there’s a lot more now than there used to be. That’s very true.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] And that’s her. The only fault I find with that is that she’s done the reverse. All the people that work there are women.

[Assistant] Kind of giving a leg up to the female side?

[User] Yes. Meanwhile, even though when I graduated from MIT they had only 50 women at MIT, now it’s about half-and-half. I think that women have advanced properly.

[Assistant] Yes, at least there’s a lot more now than there used to be. That’s very true.

[User] I think that in most colleges there is about half-and-half nowadays, and that’s the way it should be.

[Assistant] When Margaret Hamilton came to the Instrumentation Lab, what was the reaction of people you worked with? Were there men that said, “No, I don’t want to work with a woman”?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes. Meanwhile, even though when I graduated from MIT they had only 50 women at MIT, now it’s about half-and-half. I think that women have advanced properly.

[Assistant] Yes, at least there’s a lot more now than there used to be. That’s very true.

[User] I think that in most colleges there is about half-and-half nowadays, and that’s the way it should be.

[Assistant] When Margaret Hamilton came to the Instrumentation Lab, what was the reaction of people you worked with? Were there men that said, “No, I don’t want to work with a woman”?

[User] I don’t remember that there were. In general, people were trying to be fair about things at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory. Not only about the relationship there, but also about the difference between Christian and Jewish religions. The holiday season was called the yule season, so it wasn’t either Christian or Jewish.

[Assistant] Yes, it was very forward thinking at the time, wasn’t it?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I think that in most colleges there is about half-and-half nowadays, and that’s the way it should be.

[Assistant] When Margaret Hamilton came to the Instrumentation Lab, what was the reaction of people you worked with? Were there men that said, “No, I don’t want to work with a woman”?

[User] I don’t remember that there were. In general, people were trying to be fair about things at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory. Not only about the relationship there, but also about the difference between Christian and Jewish religions. The holiday season was called the yule season, so it wasn’t either Christian or Jewish.

[Assistant] Yes, it was very forward thinking at the time, wasn’t it?

[User] I think it was, yes. I like that way of thinking.

[Assistant] Seems like it was a good place to work at that point in time.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I don’t remember that there were. In general, people were trying to be fair about things at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory. Not only about the relationship there, but also about the difference between Christian and Jewish religions. The holiday season was called the yule season, so it wasn’t either Christian or Jewish.

[Assistant] Yes, it was very forward thinking at the time, wasn’t it?

[User] I think it was, yes. I like that way of thinking.

[Assistant] Seems like it was a good place to work at that point in time.

[User] It was, yes. There wasn’t any doubt about it.

[Assistant] When you were there at the beginning, I was reading that you worked on a pen-and-ink drawing of the simulations of what the views of the lunar surface would look like outside of the LM [lunar module] cockpit for the astronauts to train.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I think it was, yes. I like that way of thinking.

[Assistant] Seems like it was a good place to work at that point in time.

[User] It was, yes. There wasn’t any doubt about it.

[Assistant] When you were there at the beginning, I was reading that you worked on a pen-and-ink drawing of the simulations of what the views of the lunar surface would look like outside of the LM [lunar module] cockpit for the astronauts to train.

[User] That’s right, I did. That’s what I was assigned to do actually. I allowed the people who used the simulator to specify what craters were on the Moon in the vicinity of the landing spot and what they looked like. I would draw pictures of what the craters would look like as you came down into a proposed landing site, where you could specify. I actually made a movie of it. It was very coarse in time, where I every two seconds during the descent drew a picture of what the craters would look like at that point. That was a pretty crude movie, but it seemed to catch the attention of an awful lot of people.

[Assistant] Did that allow you to be assigned to other projects because of that?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] It was, yes. There wasn’t any doubt about it.

[Assistant] When you were there at the beginning, I was reading that you worked on a pen-and-ink drawing of the simulations of what the views of the lunar surface would look like outside of the LM [lunar module] cockpit for the astronauts to train.

[User] That’s right, I did. That’s what I was assigned to do actually. I allowed the people who used the simulator to specify what craters were on the Moon in the vicinity of the landing spot and what they looked like. I would draw pictures of what the craters would look like as you came down into a proposed landing site, where you could specify. I actually made a movie of it. It was very coarse in time, where I every two seconds during the descent drew a picture of what the craters would look like at that point. That was a pretty crude movie, but it seemed to catch the attention of an awful lot of people.

[Assistant] Did that allow you to be assigned to other projects because of that?

[User] That was just part of what I was doing on the lunar descent. You might be interested in Don [Donald] Eyles. You’ve heard of Don Eyles and his book [Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir].

[Assistant] Right. I was reading some excerpts from things that he had written, too.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] That’s right, I did. That’s what I was assigned to do actually. I allowed the people who used the simulator to specify what craters were on the Moon in the vicinity of the landing spot and what they looked like. I would draw pictures of what the craters would look like as you came down into a proposed landing site, where you could specify. I actually made a movie of it. It was very coarse in time, where I every two seconds during the descent drew a picture of what the craters would look like at that point. That was a pretty crude movie, but it seemed to catch the attention of an awful lot of people.

[Assistant] Did that allow you to be assigned to other projects because of that?

[User] That was just part of what I was doing on the lunar descent. You might be interested in Don [Donald] Eyles. You’ve heard of Don Eyles and his book [Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir].

[Assistant] Right. I was reading some excerpts from things that he had written, too.

[User] That is an excellent book. I’m still in the process of reading it actually because I’ve still been working on this project, but it’s an excellent book. But Don Eyles, you might want to know—are you interested in things that are primarily amusing?

[Assistant] We always like good stories, yes.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] That was just part of what I was doing on the lunar descent. You might be interested in Don [Donald] Eyles. You’ve heard of Don Eyles and his book [Sunburst and Luminary: An Apollo Memoir].

[Assistant] Right. I was reading some excerpts from things that he had written, too.

[User] That is an excellent book. I’m still in the process of reading it actually because I’ve still been working on this project, but it’s an excellent book. But Don Eyles, you might want to know—are you interested in things that are primarily amusing?

[Assistant] We always like good stories, yes.

[User] Don Eyles at one point—he was a member of my team. So he was translating everything that I did in a higher order language. He was translating that to the language of the Apollo guidance computer. At one point he and I had a difference of opinion about something that I thought should be in his translation that wasn’t there.\n\n I asked him to put it there, and we had a back-and-forth argument about it. He didn’t want to put it there, but eventually he did. But he put it in a box. The box surrounded the new code and had an explanation at the top of the box, “The code in this box was added at the demand of a Byzantine dodo bird.”\n\n In later years, he forgot he ever had that in there. It disappeared after not very long. It was there for a short time, but there was a Byzantine dodo bird in that box, referring to me. Byzantine means in the 15th century.

[Assistant] He was pretty young when he was recruited, from what I read.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] They wouldn’t have been able to land, because the switch—the communication went like this. “Houston, the abort switch is on again.” “Well, turn it off.” After that happened for quite a few times, it became clear that it was failing. It took 17 minutes to go down. It was failing once every minute or two, so the probability of landing was very close to zero. If he hadn’t figured out a procedure that they could follow—so Don Eyles actually saved Apollo 14. But I claim I saved Apollo 14 indirectly by having Don Eyles still there.

[Assistant] That’s right, you kept him from being fired, so you deserve that award too. I was reading that what he did would normally take a week or so to figure out, and he did it in such a short period of time.

[User] He had the mental strength to do something that very few people did.

[Assistant] It’s pretty impressive.

[User] Yes, it was. No doubt about it.

[Assistant] Talk about when you were with the Instrumentation Lab and you were working on that descent guidance and the LM steering systems. At NASA, at Johnson [Space Center, JSC], there was the Mission Planning and Analysis Division.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] He had the mental strength to do something that very few people did.

[Assistant] It’s pretty impressive.

[User] Yes, it was. No doubt about it.

[Assistant] Talk about when you were with the Instrumentation Lab and you were working on that descent guidance and the LM steering systems. At NASA, at Johnson [Space Center, JSC], there was the Mission Planning and Analysis Division.

[User] MPAD, yes.

[Assistant] MPAD, they were working on that. Talk about the relationship between MPAD and the IL where you were, and how that relationship worked. Did you work with anyone at JSC or at NASA at that time?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I did, yes, I worked with Jim [James H.] Alphin primarily at JSC. I also worked with other people at JSC too, one of whom had come up with a scheme for the descent guidance which would improve the performance in terms of how much fuel it would take to do the landings. One of the JSC people did come up with an improvement to that and I supported him on the improvement.\n\n But the person who had to make the decision on it, Bill [Howard Wilson] Tindall [Jr.]. You’ve probably heard of him. He’s not living anymore, I understand. But he decided against the improvements that the JSC fellow had made, because it didn’t make enough difference. It reduced the fuel consumption but not by enough to really matter, and Tindall decided that it wasn’t worth changing everything around for such a small improvement.\n\n I must say I think that Tindall was the best manager I ever worked with. He was just absolutely right on everything that he decided should go. I thought he was even right on turning down that reworking the descent guidance to the extent that would be necessary if you actually adopted that improvement. There was no doubt it was an improvement, but not enough to be worth the cost of overthrowing everything that was there already in order to make such a small improvement.\n\n I thought that Bill Tindall was the best manager I ever had worked with. There wasn’t one thing I ever saw him decide that I didn’t think was right.

[Assistant] We’ve heard from a lot of people about him. That he was able to listen in a meeting to everybody’s information and ideas, and then take that information and condense it down into the right decision.

[User] Exactly. Yes, that is true. I think that he deserves to be remembered for the quality of his management, which was absolutely superb.

[Assistant] I know he was famous at JSC for his “Tindallgrams” [memoranda].

[User] Exactly.

[Assistant] Did you get those, too?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Exactly. Yes, that is true. I think that he deserves to be remembered for the quality of his management, which was absolutely superb.

[Assistant] I know he was famous at JSC for his “Tindallgrams” [memoranda].

[User] Exactly.

[Assistant] Did you get those, too?

[User] They’re still being circulated actually. They’re still being circulated. People that go to the luncheons, those of us who did so much work on Apollo, are still speaking about Tindallgrams decades later.

[Assistant] It’s an amazing legacy.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Exactly.

[Assistant] Did you get those, too?

[User] They’re still being circulated actually. They’re still being circulated. People that go to the luncheons, those of us who did so much work on Apollo, are still speaking about Tindallgrams decades later.

[Assistant] It’s an amazing legacy.

[User] Yes, it is. It’s an amazing legacy just to have worked with so many people, not one of whom ever failed to the point that we lost any missions.

[Assistant] I was reading, and it was attributed to you, that you said, about Apollo, that the task was a daunting one because there was no possibility you could ever try again. I thought that was interesting. When you first started working on this, you were very aware that it had to work. The software had to work. Sometimes when we talk to people they’re so focused on what they’re doing, the technical part of it, the realization of what they were really working on and what it meant to the entire nation—they didn’t really see that until after it was over. But it sounds like you were aware that it was extremely important when you were working on it. Did you have any idea about the way the world would react once you helped accomplish that?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I had programmed that the crew could specify where they were landing by manipulating a stick, like the joystick on an airplane. Each time you moved the stick forward or aft it would respecify where the landing site was, either forward or aft, according to the direction you moved it. Or left and right, it would do the same thing left and right. That was very soon adopted as being the way that it was going to work.\n\n The only thing that I did differently than the way that it actually did work in flight was that I had it so that it would move the landing site, where it was located, left or right by about the same amount in terms of the length. The astronauts decided that they would rather have it move by the same angle, whether it was forward or aft or whatever. So that’s what actually flew.

[Assistant] Was that the landing point designator?

[User] LPD, yes, that’s right. That’s the way that worked. That was my idea. Except for changing the constants involved, it worked the way that it was supposed to.

[Assistant] That gave the commander, as they were landing, the ability to manually make those last-minute changes in case the computer had designated a place that wasn’t necessarily a good place to land.

[User] Yes, for instance on a pile of rocks or something like that. You could always change where the landing site was by moving this control stick. It turned out that I wasn’t the only one who thought of that. There was another person who did think of that some years earlier. Phil [Philip G.] Felleman had thought of that earlier. I don’t know whether you know of Phil Felleman or not. He’s no longer here, he died quite a few years ago. But he said, “We had that running years ago.” I have no way of verifying or denying it, so I will just allow that to stand.

[Assistant] That was a little different though. With other spaceflight that came before Apollo, they didn’t give that much control to the astronauts. So this was a little different. It was a hybrid between allowing the computer to do it, and then letting them control what they were going to do.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] LPD, yes, that’s right. That’s the way that worked. That was my idea. Except for changing the constants involved, it worked the way that it was supposed to.

[Assistant] That gave the commander, as they were landing, the ability to manually make those last-minute changes in case the computer had designated a place that wasn’t necessarily a good place to land.

[User] Yes, for instance on a pile of rocks or something like that. You could always change where the landing site was by moving this control stick. It turned out that I wasn’t the only one who thought of that. There was another person who did think of that some years earlier. Phil [Philip G.] Felleman had thought of that earlier. I don’t know whether you know of Phil Felleman or not. He’s no longer here, he died quite a few years ago. But he said, “We had that running years ago.” I have no way of verifying or denying it, so I will just allow that to stand.

[Assistant] That was a little different though. With other spaceflight that came before Apollo, they didn’t give that much control to the astronauts. So this was a little different. It was a hybrid between allowing the computer to do it, and then letting them control what they were going to do.

[User] That’s right.

[Assistant] It definitely came in handy on Apollo 11.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes, for instance on a pile of rocks or something like that. You could always change where the landing site was by moving this control stick. It turned out that I wasn’t the only one who thought of that. There was another person who did think of that some years earlier. Phil [Philip G.] Felleman had thought of that earlier. I don’t know whether you know of Phil Felleman or not. He’s no longer here, he died quite a few years ago. But he said, “We had that running years ago.” I have no way of verifying or denying it, so I will just allow that to stand.

[Assistant] That was a little different though. With other spaceflight that came before Apollo, they didn’t give that much control to the astronauts. So this was a little different. It was a hybrid between allowing the computer to do it, and then letting them control what they were going to do.

[User] That’s right.

[Assistant] It definitely came in handy on Apollo 11.

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] Talk about some of the work leading up to Apollo 11. You mentioned sleeping on the couch during Apollo 14, but also working up until that first landing you were spending a lot of hours at the lab. What were your days like? How often did you get to come home?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes. It was really amazing how that crew training went off, because the commander of Apollo 12 was by far the most capable of the commanders.

[Assistant] Pete [Charles] Conrad [Jr.]?

[User] Pete Conrad, yes. He was absolutely amazing. He asked all of us who had written anything about what we had been doing—he asked to get copies of anything we had written, and he was absolutely unbelievable in terms of what he could understand.\n\n When we were doing the crew training—supposedly we were doing the crew training. When we were talking about various technical details, often after we had described one of the details of it, he would speak up and say, “Don’t you mean such and such?” and describe it. No matter who he was talking to, the answer was always, “You’re right, Pete, that’s the way it should be described.” He was amazing in his ability to understand things and make corrections if necessary. The rate at which he thought, the way that he got the answers right so fast that you just couldn’t believe that he could think that fast.\n\n After Apollo 12 had flown to the Moon and back I happened to be at Houston for something else. I forget what it was, but I was in one of the hangars in Houston and he walks in. Just being around somebody who had actually walked on the Moon was exciting to me. I said, “Pete, you’re not going to tell me you’ve actually walked on the Moon, are you?” His answer was, “No, it was a trick we did with mirrors.” Repeating what the public had been led by some people to believe, that there had never been an Apollo mission to the Moon.

[Assistant] He did have a good sense of humor from what we hear.

[User] He did. He was a real joy to work with, at the level of Bill Tindall. Bill Tindall and Pete Conrad were two of a kind in terms of their intelligence and their ability to knock down the right answer that fast.

[Assistant] When you were doing that training, was that in Houston? The crew training on the GSOP?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] He did. He was a real joy to work with, at the level of Bill Tindall. Bill Tindall and Pete Conrad were two of a kind in terms of their intelligence and their ability to knock down the right answer that fast.

[Assistant] When you were doing that training, was that in Houston? The crew training on the GSOP?

[User] It took place in various places, I think both at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory and in Houston. But it hardly mattered where it took place, because as far as Conrad was concerned he was always on top of it.

[Assistant] Were all the Apollo astronauts trained at the same time or was it by crew?

[User] There were groups of astronauts. I don’t know whether it was all of them at the same time, but nobody ignored what Tindall or Conrad said.

[Assistant] Talk about for a minute that GSOP. That was a documentation of the software for the systems that they would be working with. It was large, from what I read. It was pretty wieldy and large. Documentation though is important. Can you talk about the need for accurate documentation?\n\n Plus you were very specialized in what you did. You were a computer programmer, software developer, engineer, and you were talking to pilots. Very smart pilots obviously, very intelligent and capable. But you were also teaching them things that wasn’t their specialty. Maybe talk about teaching them those programs and things that they would have to understand?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] It took place in various places, I think both at the MIT Instrumentation Laboratory and in Houston. But it hardly mattered where it took place, because as far as Conrad was concerned he was always on top of it.

[Assistant] Were all the Apollo astronauts trained at the same time or was it by crew?

[User] There were groups of astronauts. I don’t know whether it was all of them at the same time, but nobody ignored what Tindall or Conrad said.

[Assistant] Talk about for a minute that GSOP. That was a documentation of the software for the systems that they would be working with. It was large, from what I read. It was pretty wieldy and large. Documentation though is important. Can you talk about the need for accurate documentation?\n\n Plus you were very specialized in what you did. You were a computer programmer, software developer, engineer, and you were talking to pilots. Very smart pilots obviously, very intelligent and capable. But you were also teaching them things that wasn’t their specialty. Maybe talk about teaching them those programs and things that they would have to understand?

[User] What happened with two of the candidates for becoming astronauts was that they asked me, and probably other people, to send them copies of what we had written. I did, and I suspect they probably got them from other people, too. Both of them have walked on the Moon now. They both made it.

[Assistant] That was quite an experience, getting to teach them the things that they would need to know to do that. Let’s talk about some of the programs that you were writing during that time. I noticed some of the names were interesting. The one on Apollo 5, I was reading the program’s name was SUNBURST, and then Apollo 9 it was SUNDANCE. And then Apollo 11, I think by that time the program had evolved and it became LUMINARY. Those were some of the program names, which I thought was interesting. Where did the names come from, do you remember?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] What happened with two of the candidates for becoming astronauts was that they asked me, and probably other people, to send them copies of what we had written. I did, and I suspect they probably got them from other people, too. Both of them have walked on the Moon now. They both made it.

[Assistant] That was quite an experience, getting to teach them the things that they would need to know to do that. Let’s talk about some of the programs that you were writing during that time. I noticed some of the names were interesting. The one on Apollo 5, I was reading the program’s name was SUNBURST, and then Apollo 9 it was SUNDANCE. And then Apollo 11, I think by that time the program had evolved and it became LUMINARY. Those were some of the program names, which I thought was interesting. Where did the names come from, do you remember?

[User] I don’t know. I do know what the version numbers were. LUMINARY 130 flew on Apollo 12, and was about to be repeated on Apollo 13 when I got authorization to release the one that corrected the errors from Apollo 11. So that was 131. If you want to think of it in terms of the number 13—which stupidly is considered to be a bad luck number—that’s 13 going and coming, and so LUMINARY 131 did fly on Apollo 13.

[Assistant] As we know even today, computer programs are constantly being improved. As you were working through all these, all the way up to Apollo 11 these programs were being changed, evaluated, simulated, and everything was moving forward for Apollo 11.

[User] That’s true.

[Assistant] So you had different revisions even as you went through the program itself. On Apollo 11, let’s talk about the launch. You got to go see the launch, is that correct?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I don’t know. I do know what the version numbers were. LUMINARY 130 flew on Apollo 12, and was about to be repeated on Apollo 13 when I got authorization to release the one that corrected the errors from Apollo 11. So that was 131. If you want to think of it in terms of the number 13—which stupidly is considered to be a bad luck number—that’s 13 going and coming, and so LUMINARY 131 did fly on Apollo 13.

[Assistant] As we know even today, computer programs are constantly being improved. As you were working through all these, all the way up to Apollo 11 these programs were being changed, evaluated, simulated, and everything was moving forward for Apollo 11.

[User] That’s true.

[Assistant] So you had different revisions even as you went through the program itself. On Apollo 11, let’s talk about the launch. You got to go see the launch, is that correct?

[User] That is correct, yes. Anybody who had made a major contribution, NASA invited them to go to Florida to watch the liftoff of Apollo 11. That included my wife and me. None of our children did, but Sue and I both did.

[Assistant] That’s quite a perk for all the hours you put in though.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] That’s true.

[Assistant] So you had different revisions even as you went through the program itself. On Apollo 11, let’s talk about the launch. You got to go see the launch, is that correct?

[User] That is correct, yes. Anybody who had made a major contribution, NASA invited them to go to Florida to watch the liftoff of Apollo 11. That included my wife and me. None of our children did, but Sue and I both did.

[Assistant] That’s quite a perk for all the hours you put in though.

[User] Yes. I did put in quite a bit few more hours than I was paid for, but to be able to participate in something as important as that was well worth it.

[Assistant] Can you talk about that experience of seeing the launch and how you felt seeing it?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] That is correct, yes. Anybody who had made a major contribution, NASA invited them to go to Florida to watch the liftoff of Apollo 11. That included my wife and me. None of our children did, but Sue and I both did.

[Assistant] That’s quite a perk for all the hours you put in though.

[User] Yes. I did put in quite a bit few more hours than I was paid for, but to be able to participate in something as important as that was well worth it.

[Assistant] Can you talk about that experience of seeing the launch and how you felt seeing it?

[User] We were in like the grandstand surrounding a football field, and we could all see and hear the launch take place. Seeing that was very exciting, and hearing it—it was making such an enormous amount of noise that it was practically ear-shattering to watch Apollo 11 take off for the Moon. That was really quite an experience. It was just like the bleachers of a football field. There must have been 100,000 people there or something.

[Assistant] The roadways, everybody was just pulled over and camping. The photos are amazing, when you look at the photos of the roads and everything around there. Quite an accomplishment.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Yes. I did put in quite a bit few more hours than I was paid for, but to be able to participate in something as important as that was well worth it.

[Assistant] Can you talk about that experience of seeing the launch and how you felt seeing it?

[User] We were in like the grandstand surrounding a football field, and we could all see and hear the launch take place. Seeing that was very exciting, and hearing it—it was making such an enormous amount of noise that it was practically ear-shattering to watch Apollo 11 take off for the Moon. That was really quite an experience. It was just like the bleachers of a football field. There must have been 100,000 people there or something.

[Assistant] The roadways, everybody was just pulled over and camping. The photos are amazing, when you look at the photos of the roads and everything around there. Quite an accomplishment.

[User] I think that we got there using an Avis rental car. It landed in Orlando, Florida, and we drove there. But I had already established a reputation at Avis, because several times actually earlier I had stopped at Orlando on my way to something that was going on at NASA. The first time I used Avis was an interesting experience, because the Avis rental car people never forgot me after that first trip that I used one of their cars.\n\n The reason why was that when I first got in the car and I had driven a few miles down the road, I noticed that the water temperature had gone up and it shouldn’t have gone up. I figured that the radiator must have been not filled. They must have given me a car that didn’t have the radiator full, and that’s the reason why it was going up. I had just come down from Boston, and I had in my bladder enough to finish filling the radiator, I thought. So I finished filling the radiator, parked next to the road.

[Assistant] That’s one way to do it.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] It was most frightening because the slight changes of the trajectory were using more fuel than what people counted on. When they finally touched down they had only 30 seconds left of fuel in the tanks for a roughly 17-minute descent. Thirty seconds left. Nobody likes to drive a car that close. He finally did do the final descent himself.

[Assistant] I know it was pretty frightening for the people in Mission Control, so I imagine listening to it where you were at MIT it was pretty frightening there, too.\n\n One of the things I read in one of the articles that Don Eyles had written, that it really bothered him—because after the landing, everything was okay, but the media was portraying it as a computer error. It really bothered him that that was happening because it wasn’t a computer error, as you explained. Do you remember that, or being bothered by that, too?

[User] I never was bothered by obviously wrong reports. So I was not bothered by that.

[Assistant] Because you knew—well, you found out eventually—the true reason. But you went for 25 years without really knowing what the actual cause was. What did you think during that time before you talked to Russ Larson, in that 25-year period what did you think the problem was?

[User] Unexplained.

[Assistant] You just weren’t sure.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Ooh, it is raining, isn’t it?

[Assistant] Yes, it looks like it.

[User] It’s hard to say. I think what we in particular started trying to do is really—especially as I became the more senior Army guy, I tried to really maintain a close connection with both the Army and with West Point [United States Military Academy, New York] to try to really leverage our potential to be a positive image for the Army, not as much outside the Army, but within the Army. I went up to West Point generally once a year to lecture. A West Point classmate of mine, Bill Fox, was on the permanent faculty in the math department. I would go up and give a lecture to the sophomores taking probability and statistics and talk about how we used tools like that to assess the risk of flying in space.\n\n We would go to the Association of the United States Army annual convention and have a little booth there where we would sign autographs for servicemen and women or children that would come visit. We would do the same thing with the Army Aviation Association of America annual convention. We tried to be pretty visible within the Army family.

[Assistant] One of the questions I like to ask people is to talk about that first Monday morning meeting in the Astronaut Office. Can you talk about that and your memories?

[User] Gosh, I think it just blends in with every other Monday morning meeting. We always were in awe listening to whatever John [W.] Young had to say. What I remember during that time is just how happy I was to come to work every day. That was for the first year, and then you started becoming anxious because you were waiting for your first flight assignment.

[Assistant] Would you talk to us a bit about your training? All the classes participate in training.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Now I admit I occasionally went to McDonald’s in Russia, but why go to an American fast food restaurant? It’s always nice, a little taste of home. The Russian drivers that transported us around, they loved it. They loved for us to go there. We’d maybe buy them an ???? ? ??? ????? (obed s Big Makom [or lunch with Big Mac]). It’s a Big Mac [value meal]. That’s like a number one on the menu or whatever it is. It was a lot more fun to go to see something that was more Russian, traditional. Although I’m not sure that we really saw Russian traditional so much as something that tried to be a little more western with Russian food—I’m not sure there is Russian cuisine, but whatever cuisine that they brought in from the republics.

[Assistant] Nothing like borscht or something like that?

[User] Oh, borscht, sure. The borscht on board Space Station was just outstanding; it was really good. I remember as a kid seeing some cartoon. The implication was that borscht was awful, and it’s not. It’s really good.

[Assistant] Yes, well, it’s cabbage I guess.

[User] Cabbage and they generally have some pork or some meat in it. It’s well seasoned—well, it’s seasoned.

[Assistant] One of the things astronauts do is they get assigned technical assignments. What was your first technical assignment after you became an astronaut?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] Oh, borscht, sure. The borscht on board Space Station was just outstanding; it was really good. I remember as a kid seeing some cartoon. The implication was that borscht was awful, and it’s not. It’s really good.

[Assistant] Yes, well, it’s cabbage I guess.

[User] Cabbage and they generally have some pork or some meat in it. It’s well seasoned—well, it’s seasoned.

[Assistant] One of the things astronauts do is they get assigned technical assignments. What was your first technical assignment after you became an astronaut?

[User] This is great. My first technical assignment was the Motor Mother.

[Assistant] The Motor Mother?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I think it was STS-50.

[Assistant] Anything notable during that flight? Were you on the planning [shift], on orbit [shift]?

[User] I may have been. I remember doing [STS]-46, 47, 50. I’m just trying to remember if we had them out of sequence at that time. I think it was STS-50 because I’m pretty sure that Dick [Richard N.] Richards was the CDR [commander]. Let me see. There’s no telling. I do remember there was some issue about the potty on board. Gap [Granville] Pennington was the flight director. Dick Richards, he got really annoyed with me because I asked the crew some question about the trouble they were having with the potty, and he thought that was not the kind of thing that should have been.

[Assistant] On air-to-ground.

[User] That should [not] have been on air-to-ground radio.

[Assistant] You were able to obviously get that fixed, and everything went fine.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I may have been. I remember doing [STS]-46, 47, 50. I’m just trying to remember if we had them out of sequence at that time. I think it was STS-50 because I’m pretty sure that Dick [Richard N.] Richards was the CDR [commander]. Let me see. There’s no telling. I do remember there was some issue about the potty on board. Gap [Granville] Pennington was the flight director. Dick Richards, he got really annoyed with me because I asked the crew some question about the trouble they were having with the potty, and he thought that was not the kind of thing that should have been.

[Assistant] On air-to-ground.

[User] That should [not] have been on air-to-ground radio.

[Assistant] You were able to obviously get that fixed, and everything went fine.

[User] I don’t know [if] we ever had a Shuttle mission which the toilet completely broke. On my first mission we had a lot of problems with it for the first couple days. But there are backup supplies. I think it would just make your time on orbit very unpleasant.

[Assistant] We’ve heard from several members of the crew of [STS]-41D who used bags and socks. It doesn’t sound [like] something that I would want to do.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] That should [not] have been on air-to-ground radio.

[Assistant] You were able to obviously get that fixed, and everything went fine.

[User] I don’t know [if] we ever had a Shuttle mission which the toilet completely broke. On my first mission we had a lot of problems with it for the first couple days. But there are backup supplies. I think it would just make your time on orbit very unpleasant.

[Assistant] We’ve heard from several members of the crew of [STS]-41D who used bags and socks. It doesn’t sound [like] something that I would want to do.

[User] If we put a crew on EM [Exploration Mission]-1, if we can’t develop a potty in time to do that, I just said, “Well, carry up a lot of diapers and Apollo bags.”

[Assistant] They still make those Apollo bags?


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I don’t know [if] we ever had a Shuttle mission which the toilet completely broke. On my first mission we had a lot of problems with it for the first couple days. But there are backup supplies. I think it would just make your time on orbit very unpleasant.

[Assistant] We’ve heard from several members of the crew of [STS]-41D who used bags and socks. It doesn’t sound [like] something that I would want to do.

[User] If we put a crew on EM [Exploration Mission]-1, if we can’t develop a potty in time to do that, I just said, “Well, carry up a lot of diapers and Apollo bags.”

[Assistant] They still make those Apollo bags?

[User] I’m sure someone would be happy to start making them again.

[Assistant] I believe you were also a Cape Crusader at one point.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] If we put a crew on EM [Exploration Mission]-1, if we can’t develop a potty in time to do that, I just said, “Well, carry up a lot of diapers and Apollo bags.”

[Assistant] They still make those Apollo bags?

[User] I’m sure someone would be happy to start making them again.

[Assistant] I believe you were also a Cape Crusader at one point.

[User] No, I was not. I was not, they worked for me. I think it was called the Flight Support Branch. I was the Flight Support Branch Chief. The CapComs and the Cape Crusaders worked for me. I coordinated their activities.

[Assistant] I was looking at your biosheet, and it said you were in prelaunch Shuttle processing and launch and landing operations. So I assumed that was code for Cape Crusader.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] I’m sure someone would be happy to start making them again.

[Assistant] I believe you were also a Cape Crusader at one point.

[User] No, I was not. I was not, they worked for me. I think it was called the Flight Support Branch. I was the Flight Support Branch Chief. The CapComs and the Cape Crusaders worked for me. I coordinated their activities.

[Assistant] I was looking at your biosheet, and it said you were in prelaunch Shuttle processing and launch and landing operations. So I assumed that was code for Cape Crusader.

[User] That was during the VITT Office.

[Assistant] That was during the VITT.


[System] Act as an information elicitation agent for oral history.

[User] No, I was not. I was not, they worked for me. I think it was called the Flight Support Branch. I was the Flight Support Branch Chief. The CapComs and the Cape Crusaders worked for me. I coordinated their activities.

[Assistant] I was looking at your biosheet, and it said you were in prelaunch Shuttle processing and launch and landing operations. So I assumed that was code for Cape Crusader.

[User] That was during the VITT Office.

[Assistant] That was during the VITT.

[User] I sometimes thought I never got to be a Cape Crusader because they looked and they said, “Well, you did that as a VITT person, so we want you to do other things to broaden your [experience].” Once I became a CapCom—I had a few crews come back, and they were just very positive about the work I did as a CapCom. I always thought it was because I spoke slowly with a distinct Southern accent. It gave me credibility. They figure someone who speaks like that can’t be smart enough to deceive us.

[Assistant] Would you tell us about finding out you were assigned finally to a flight?