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

[User] I guess our eyes were too big for the budget there. I had a lot to do with Prospector.\n\n …It seemed like the Saturn V had no application after Apollo. So I thought, "Well, let's use it to put some real substantial payloads on [the Moon]."\n\n We [also] had a design [Voyager] that would use the Saturn V to launch payloads, one on top of the other, in a single mission to Mars. …It looked like a big Viking. I mean, it just had a lot more to it. And it was very expensive, and there were no other uses for Saturn V that anyone was really interested in. So Saturn V died and Prospector [and Voyager] died.\n\n There was a money crunch at the time. We were lucky to get the money to do Viking, and that was a struggle. And that cost, what, almost a billion dollars, certainly three-quarters of a billion dollars for the Viking.

[Assistant] And then there was Voyager.

[User] The same deal. Voyager was to be a—the original Voyager was—what was that going to fly on? Atlas-Centaur. Then we upgraded that to have a big Voyager on Saturn V. All of the Saturn V payloads died before they were born.

[Assistant] And the Voyager was going to be a Saturn V payload, also, you think?

[User] I think.

[Assistant] I couldn't find a lot on that.


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

[User] The same deal. Voyager was to be a—the original Voyager was—what was that going to fly on? Atlas-Centaur. Then we upgraded that to have a big Voyager on Saturn V. All of the Saturn V payloads died before they were born.

[Assistant] And the Voyager was going to be a Saturn V payload, also, you think?

[User] I think.

[Assistant] I couldn't find a lot on that.

[User] They were first trimester abortions, is what they were. We did a lot of work on it, but they didn't get too far. Incidentally, JPL never liked the big approach. They always argued against it. I probably was the leading proponent in using the Saturn V, and I lost. Probably very wise that I lost.

[Assistant] Well, it turns out that what I'm about to talk about you didn't lose, because in '62 our researchers revealed that you and Dr. von Braun had differing opinions regarding the Centaur program. He wasn't comfortable with the—


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

[User] Everybody but me. I didn't think it could be done that fast, and I didn't think anyone knew how long it would take to do it. I don't think we could do it in ten years today, to be honest with you. That's one of my negatives on this. Our operations today have become so bogged down.\n\n We started a fighter plane at Lockheed my last year there, the preliminary work on what's now the F-22. Are you familiar with that?

[Assistant] Oh, yes, sir.

[User] They call it the Raptor. We had really talked the Air Force into including a very stealthy spec. The first fighter spec had very little stealth. It was like one square meter, or half a square meter. That's not stealthy. It either has to be this big or it might as well be that big. But I think we played a key role in convincing them to rewrite the spec. After the commanding general retired, his deputy became commander, and he rewrote the spec and put stealth in. So that complicated it a little bit.\n\n But that's been fifteen years, and all we have is two of the first—they're not prototypes, but they're more the proof test models, the ten or eleven they built to ring out before heavy production. There are only a couple of those flying. They're behind in their flight test program. That's fifteen years. We went to the moon in ten, knowing nothing, almost nothing when we started. There were no rockets like the Saturn V. It took the imagination of people like von Braun and Silverstein to do that, and you've got to give those guys tremendous credit for even imagining they could do it.

[Assistant] Yes, sir. Well, Centaur turned out to be pretty successful.

[User] It's still in use.

[Assistant] The RL-10 engine is the workhorse.


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

[User] They call it the Raptor. We had really talked the Air Force into including a very stealthy spec. The first fighter spec had very little stealth. It was like one square meter, or half a square meter. That's not stealthy. It either has to be this big or it might as well be that big. But I think we played a key role in convincing them to rewrite the spec. After the commanding general retired, his deputy became commander, and he rewrote the spec and put stealth in. So that complicated it a little bit.\n\n But that's been fifteen years, and all we have is two of the first—they're not prototypes, but they're more the proof test models, the ten or eleven they built to ring out before heavy production. There are only a couple of those flying. They're behind in their flight test program. That's fifteen years. We went to the moon in ten, knowing nothing, almost nothing when we started. There were no rockets like the Saturn V. It took the imagination of people like von Braun and Silverstein to do that, and you've got to give those guys tremendous credit for even imagining they could do it.

[Assistant] Yes, sir. Well, Centaur turned out to be pretty successful.

[User] It's still in use.

[Assistant] The RL-10 engine is the workhorse.

[User] Centaur's still a workhorse. That was a good decision. By the way, that rocket blew up the other day wasn't the Centaur. It wasn't the upper stage, was it?

[Assistant] No, sir, it was not.


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

[User] It's still in use.

[Assistant] The RL-10 engine is the workhorse.

[User] Centaur's still a workhorse. That was a good decision. By the way, that rocket blew up the other day wasn't the Centaur. It wasn't the upper stage, was it?

[Assistant] No, sir, it was not.

[User] It was the Titan?

[Assistant] They thought it was a gas path problem.


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

[User] Centaur's still a workhorse. That was a good decision. By the way, that rocket blew up the other day wasn't the Centaur. It wasn't the upper stage, was it?

[Assistant] No, sir, it was not.

[User] It was the Titan?

[Assistant] They thought it was a gas path problem.

[User] In the solids again?

[Assistant] In the solids.


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

[User] It was the Titan?

[Assistant] They thought it was a gas path problem.

[User] In the solids again?

[Assistant] In the solids.

[User] Oh, gee. That's sad.

[Assistant] We're taking a look, and we think we're okay.


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

[User] In the solids again?

[Assistant] In the solids.

[User] Oh, gee. That's sad.

[Assistant] We're taking a look, and we think we're okay.

[User] Now, you say "we."

[Assistant] NASA. They're very similar in construction to the Shuttle's SRVs.


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

[User] Oh, gee. That's sad.

[Assistant] We're taking a look, and we think we're okay.

[User] Now, you say "we."

[Assistant] NASA. They're very similar in construction to the Shuttle's SRVs.

[User] Oh, okay. See, I got involved in that on the Challenger. I was by then retired from Lockheed, and I was working on a Shuttle Safety Advisory Board. And, of course, after the accident, we went through it all, also. It was repetitious.\n\n When's your plane, by the way? I mean, I don't talk much, but once you get me talking, I'll talk.

[Assistant] We have all day. Our time is your time.\n\n In June of '66, right after the flight of Gemini IX, Deputy Administrator Robert Seamans didn't like the way the mission went and the results, and he established the Gemini Mission Review Board. James [C.] Elms was the chairman, and you were on that board. Can you tell us something about that?


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

[User] Now, you say "we."

[Assistant] NASA. They're very similar in construction to the Shuttle's SRVs.

[User] Oh, okay. See, I got involved in that on the Challenger. I was by then retired from Lockheed, and I was working on a Shuttle Safety Advisory Board. And, of course, after the accident, we went through it all, also. It was repetitious.\n\n When's your plane, by the way? I mean, I don't talk much, but once you get me talking, I'll talk.

[Assistant] We have all day. Our time is your time.\n\n In June of '66, right after the flight of Gemini IX, Deputy Administrator Robert Seamans didn't like the way the mission went and the results, and he established the Gemini Mission Review Board. James [C.] Elms was the chairman, and you were on that board. Can you tell us something about that?

[User] No, I don't remember anything about it.

[Assistant] Oh, okay. Chuck [Charles W.] Mathews of the Manned Spacecraft Center [MSC] was on there.


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

[User] Oh, okay. See, I got involved in that on the Challenger. I was by then retired from Lockheed, and I was working on a Shuttle Safety Advisory Board. And, of course, after the accident, we went through it all, also. It was repetitious.\n\n When's your plane, by the way? I mean, I don't talk much, but once you get me talking, I'll talk.

[Assistant] We have all day. Our time is your time.\n\n In June of '66, right after the flight of Gemini IX, Deputy Administrator Robert Seamans didn't like the way the mission went and the results, and he established the Gemini Mission Review Board. James [C.] Elms was the chairman, and you were on that board. Can you tell us something about that?

[User] No, I don't remember anything about it.

[Assistant] Oh, okay. Chuck [Charles W.] Mathews of the Manned Spacecraft Center [MSC] was on there.

[User] I vaguely recall it, but it's very vague. As I said, I have trouble with yesterday. That was a long time ago.

[Assistant] That was '66. That was a long time ago. You've been doing great so far. That's the first one you didn't remember.\n\n Let's try two years later, '68. Joe [Joseph F.] Shea, I guess, who was the Apollo Program Manager, and was the Deputy AA for Manned Space Flight, and then you came in and took his place for a year, a couple of years.


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

[User] No, I don't remember anything about it.

[Assistant] Oh, okay. Chuck [Charles W.] Mathews of the Manned Spacecraft Center [MSC] was on there.

[User] I vaguely recall it, but it's very vague. As I said, I have trouble with yesterday. That was a long time ago.

[Assistant] That was '66. That was a long time ago. You've been doing great so far. That's the first one you didn't remember.\n\n Let's try two years later, '68. Joe [Joseph F.] Shea, I guess, who was the Apollo Program Manager, and was the Deputy AA for Manned Space Flight, and then you came in and took his place for a year, a couple of years.

[User] A year.

[Assistant] Your friend, Mr. Hansen, quoted you in the book that, when you came in to take the job, you said, "It's awfully hard to come into Apollo and make much of an impact." What did you mean by that?


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

[User] I vaguely recall it, but it's very vague. As I said, I have trouble with yesterday. That was a long time ago.

[Assistant] That was '66. That was a long time ago. You've been doing great so far. That's the first one you didn't remember.\n\n Let's try two years later, '68. Joe [Joseph F.] Shea, I guess, who was the Apollo Program Manager, and was the Deputy AA for Manned Space Flight, and then you came in and took his place for a year, a couple of years.

[User] A year.

[Assistant] Your friend, Mr. Hansen, quoted you in the book that, when you came in to take the job, you said, "It's awfully hard to come into Apollo and make much of an impact." What did you mean by that?

[User] It was almost done.

[Assistant] It was rolling up by that time.


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

[User] The Skylab initially was to be launched full of fuel, and after the fuel was burned out, it was to be shut down and vented. And then we were to go up with another mission and open it up and go in and make that tank into a lab.\n\n Well, I opposed that, and I argued against it. I don't know how much weight I had to carry on it, but it didn't get done. They launched it properly, completely outfitted on the ground beforehand. I thought that was a crazy idea. It added tremendous work and some risk for no obvious gain. You'd end up probably with not as good a facility and my never get it to work. So I did that before I left.\n\n I didn't do a whole lot. I did the best I could under the circumstances. You didn't know George Mueller, or did you?

[Assistant] No, sir.

[User] Well, George is a very, very dynamic leader, and a stylish one. By that I mean he has his own style, and it doesn't really need—I mean, a deputy is sort of nice to have, categorically. The people who really got the work assignments were the Apollo Program Manager, Sam [Samuel C.] Phillips, and the Project Manager, George Low, after Joe Shea, and the Gilruths and the von Brauns, and George's deputy was a high-level helper, and it didn't turn me on very much. That's all I meant by that. I found a few interesting things to do, but when Langley came along, I was very happy to get it.

[Assistant] That's a good place to take a break, because we're just about out of tape right here.

[User] I'd like to make a phone call to see if my wife—

[Assistant] Let's talk about the Viking. The Viking program was run a little differently than other programs, and there was some contentiousness about the way it was run. Do you want to talk about some of that, regarding who the work force was and the relative sizes of them?


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

[User] Worked as advertised.

[Assistant] Well, about the general same time frame—

[User] You asked me a question at the beginning. I didn't totally answer it. We had internal—we had struggles. There were people who didn't like the project, never liked it being here, and still don't think it was a good idea and that it had a bad impact on the Center. And some good people. These are not fly-brains. These are very good research people, whom I like and respect highly, who think that project never should have come here. So there was that much contention about it.

[Assistant] I want to got back and ask you a question that I almost missed, and this is about Apollo 13. Apollo 13 was classified as a successful failure. I made a note here that that's an oxymoron if there was one, a successful failure.

[User] I never said that.

[Assistant] No, you never did. Why is it classified as a successful failure?


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

[User] You asked me a question at the beginning. I didn't totally answer it. We had internal—we had struggles. There were people who didn't like the project, never liked it being here, and still don't think it was a good idea and that it had a bad impact on the Center. And some good people. These are not fly-brains. These are very good research people, whom I like and respect highly, who think that project never should have come here. So there was that much contention about it.

[Assistant] I want to got back and ask you a question that I almost missed, and this is about Apollo 13. Apollo 13 was classified as a successful failure. I made a note here that that's an oxymoron if there was one, a successful failure.

[User] I never said that.

[Assistant] No, you never did. Why is it classified as a successful failure?

[User] Nobody got hurt. That's all you can say about it.

[Assistant] You wound up being the chairman of the Apollo 13 Review Board. We mentioned earlier, I think off line, that you kept that report. Can you tell us something about that in a Readers Digest version? One of the things I wanted to specifically ask you about that, you determined that the root causes were obsolete thermostatic switches and improvised ground test procedures. Since I work safety these days, I'd kind of like to know what was learned from the test procedures.


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

[User] I thought it was very good. The only technical flaws that I saw were cosmetic. You know, when the explosion occurred and when they were changing attitude, everything was always shaking and turning violently. You can't make spacecraft move that fast with the little rockets you have on them to change attitude control. That was done for the public.\n\n I don't know about the explosion itself. That certainly could have jarred the guys, and probably did, because that was a big release of fluid. But initially, it was released into a large cavity, and then it blew the side of the Command Module off. But that still probably would have given quite a bit of impetus to move them. But later on, when they were trying to do a final burn behind the moon or something and they were trying to find the sun or something to get an attitude reference, and everything was moving and like this and guys were shaking, that was hokey. But in general, it was very good; I thought very good. I liked it.\n\n But I couldn't stand sitting through what was the original one on the Mercury astronauts? The Right Stuff. I wanted to throw up. I walked out halfway through that. That was awful.

[Assistant] So you liked Apollo 13 a lot better, and Tom Hanks.

[User] The other one was awful. Did you see it?

[Assistant] Yes, sir.

[User] Did you like it?

[Assistant] I was young and impressionable when I saw that.


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

[User] The other one was awful. Did you see it?

[Assistant] Yes, sir.

[User] Did you like it?

[Assistant] I was young and impressionable when I saw that.

[User] I have a lot of friends who liked it. I thought it made some very good people look like—I won't use the word in front of a lady, but you know what it is. The only people who looked halfway normal were the astronauts, and they were only halfway normal. They were either chasing skirts, which they did some of, but they looked like super guys. But the scientists looked like jerks, and the doctors looked worse than jerks. It just made fun of people who worked very hard and were very good, and I resented it, so I wouldn't watch it. You don't use that, please.

[Assistant] I found the list at Johnson Space Center of the ten worst things wrong with Apollo 13 by the technogeeks of Johnson Space Center, and one of the ones they came up with—a good one, too—Jim [James A.] Lovell's Corvette, the '65 Corvette that he was driving, had 1995 plates on it in the movie.


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

[User] Did you like it?

[Assistant] I was young and impressionable when I saw that.

[User] I have a lot of friends who liked it. I thought it made some very good people look like—I won't use the word in front of a lady, but you know what it is. The only people who looked halfway normal were the astronauts, and they were only halfway normal. They were either chasing skirts, which they did some of, but they looked like super guys. But the scientists looked like jerks, and the doctors looked worse than jerks. It just made fun of people who worked very hard and were very good, and I resented it, so I wouldn't watch it. You don't use that, please.

[Assistant] I found the list at Johnson Space Center of the ten worst things wrong with Apollo 13 by the technogeeks of Johnson Space Center, and one of the ones they came up with—a good one, too—Jim [James A.] Lovell's Corvette, the '65 Corvette that he was driving, had 1995 plates on it in the movie.

[User] That's cute.

[Assistant] Let me ask you a couple of opinion questions, and you can not answer or give me your opinion. It's about, when you instituted those sweeping changes here at Langley when you took over as the Director, how much freedom did a Center Director have then during those years to steer his group in the direction he saw fit? What was the relationship with Headquarters as contrasted to the last twenty years of evolution?


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

[User] It's my pleasure.

[Assistant] To begin with, if you could just tell us about how you became interested in aviation aerospace, what kind of guided your career and led you towards NASA.

[User] As a very young boy, my father always encouraged me to get into engineering. At that point in my life I had no idea what engineering was, but I always remembered that he encouraged me to do that. He was a very mechanically inclined person, so he, my father, was my main encourager to go in that direction. As it turned out, when I got older, my interests in math and through high school and into college, math and science supported that.\n\n So when I graduated from high school, I looked for a college that I could go to where I could study aerospace engineering. It was called aeronautical engineering when I began, but as I went through school, the curriculum changed and they added courses and it became aerospace engineering. So my father was really my main supporter and inspiration.

[Assistant] It's good to have that family support.

[User] It was.

[Assistant] How did you then learn about the opportunity at NASA? Did you move right into that after college?


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

[User] As a very young boy, my father always encouraged me to get into engineering. At that point in my life I had no idea what engineering was, but I always remembered that he encouraged me to do that. He was a very mechanically inclined person, so he, my father, was my main encourager to go in that direction. As it turned out, when I got older, my interests in math and through high school and into college, math and science supported that.\n\n So when I graduated from high school, I looked for a college that I could go to where I could study aerospace engineering. It was called aeronautical engineering when I began, but as I went through school, the curriculum changed and they added courses and it became aerospace engineering. So my father was really my main supporter and inspiration.

[Assistant] It's good to have that family support.

[User] It was.

[Assistant] How did you then learn about the opportunity at NASA? Did you move right into that after college?

[User] It was my first job straight out of college, and I guess, you know, President [John F.] Kennedy had inspired the country, and that was sort of like a star that was shining. I was not smart enough to know at the time that that's exactly what I wanted to do, but it was like a dream. When I came to time for graduation from college, it really was a seller's market at that time. I received like thirteen job offers, and the very last one I got, very late, was from NASA, and it was very lowest paying. I didn't hesitate, I accepted it, because, for one, I'm a native Houstonian. I sort of liked to come back to the Houston area. But number two, I was, of course, interested in NASA. Again, it was like a dream that I wanted to fulfill. So it all worked out.

[Assistant] Certainly seems to have.


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

[User] It was.

[Assistant] How did you then learn about the opportunity at NASA? Did you move right into that after college?

[User] It was my first job straight out of college, and I guess, you know, President [John F.] Kennedy had inspired the country, and that was sort of like a star that was shining. I was not smart enough to know at the time that that's exactly what I wanted to do, but it was like a dream. When I came to time for graduation from college, it really was a seller's market at that time. I received like thirteen job offers, and the very last one I got, very late, was from NASA, and it was very lowest paying. I didn't hesitate, I accepted it, because, for one, I'm a native Houstonian. I sort of liked to come back to the Houston area. But number two, I was, of course, interested in NASA. Again, it was like a dream that I wanted to fulfill. So it all worked out.

[Assistant] Certainly seems to have.

[User] It was wonderful, and it was such a right time, too. I could not have known it at the time, but it was a very glorious time to get into the space business. It was my first job, so I had nothing to compare it with, and I would go to work every day and do things that people would say, "Wow! What are you doing out there?" And I just thought that's what everybody did. I didn't know any better.

[Assistant] That certainly seems to—It's a similar story to what we've heard before, even though it was a low offer and didn't know the extent of how challenging it was, or was going to get over time. What was then your first job that you moved into when you came to them?


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

[User] It was different. And there weren't any ladies in our environment back then. I think it was early—well, let's see. I'm not sure of the exact year, but I remember the first lady that was in our control center was named Poppy Northcut [phonetic]. She was back in one of our staff support rooms. Probably, I mean, everyone had a pretty important job that worked in the control center, but in the grand scheme of things, you know, it was an average support room job. But since it was so unique that it was the first lady flight controller, there was a lot of notoriety and pictures in the paper and pictures with the mayor of Houston. You know John. You've met John Llewellyn.

[Assistant] Yes.

[User] John was a little miffed when he saw the pictures of Poppy in the paper. He didn't see anything real special that she did. But, of course, she was breaking new ground in the control center.\n\n Now, when I retired, we had, I don't know if it was 50 percent, but I mean, there were lady engineers and other tasks in the whole organization. It was not unique at all. But there was a high period of evolution in the work force there. I don't know if that was just in our environment or whether that was everywhere, but it was extremely unusual to have anyone other than a secretary as a female worker for probably the first ten or twelve years that I worked for NASA.

[Assistant] You certainly saw many changes like that from the composition of the work force to the computers, as you had mentioned earlier. Those changed immensely from when you first came in with Gemini until by the time you retired in the nineties.

[User] Right.

[Assistant] If you could reflect a little bit on those changes and the differences.


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

[User] I believe it did come off of Mir.

[Assistant] Was that the first time that they’d actually put something out there specifically to collect the particles? Like you were talking about the Palapa and the EURECA—those were just impacts?

[User] Those were impacts on either equipment that they had removed and replaced or insulation blankets that kept the spacecraft cool. But this project with Aerogel was to collect samples because we had been testing the Aerogel here at JSC and other places, shooting different types of material at six kilometers per second into different types of material. Aerogel continued to slow it down and left particles along the track and at the end of the track. It worked and it was truly an exciting time for the collection of space debris. Now other NASA locations could have been trying other stuff that I was not aware of.

[Assistant] On those earlier projects, did you actually collect any substances? Or was it only the impacts that you saw?

[User] Like I said, I was responsible for scanning, coring and sending it out to scientists. If there was any substance, it was minimal. Most of the impacts decompressed so quickly that they turned to gas and did not leave anything there for us to pick up with the Electron Microscope studies. But yes, there was slight material left from some impacts.

[Assistant] You were talking about how many you were finding on the LDEF. Was that a surprise to people that that many impacts could be seen?


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

[User] Those were impacts on either equipment that they had removed and replaced or insulation blankets that kept the spacecraft cool. But this project with Aerogel was to collect samples because we had been testing the Aerogel here at JSC and other places, shooting different types of material at six kilometers per second into different types of material. Aerogel continued to slow it down and left particles along the track and at the end of the track. It worked and it was truly an exciting time for the collection of space debris. Now other NASA locations could have been trying other stuff that I was not aware of.

[Assistant] On those earlier projects, did you actually collect any substances? Or was it only the impacts that you saw?

[User] Like I said, I was responsible for scanning, coring and sending it out to scientists. If there was any substance, it was minimal. Most of the impacts decompressed so quickly that they turned to gas and did not leave anything there for us to pick up with the Electron Microscope studies. But yes, there was slight material left from some impacts.

[Assistant] You were talking about how many you were finding on the LDEF. Was that a surprise to people that that many impacts could be seen?

[User] I think it threw off their calculations to formulas that had been derived and they had to be redone. After the recalculations of scientific data, I think they had a better idea of what was coming in and from what directions, most was from material that we have put up in orbit [satellites, rockets, and spacecraft].

[Assistant] It seems like an awful lot of impacts.


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

[User] Like I said, I was responsible for scanning, coring and sending it out to scientists. If there was any substance, it was minimal. Most of the impacts decompressed so quickly that they turned to gas and did not leave anything there for us to pick up with the Electron Microscope studies. But yes, there was slight material left from some impacts.

[Assistant] You were talking about how many you were finding on the LDEF. Was that a surprise to people that that many impacts could be seen?

[User] I think it threw off their calculations to formulas that had been derived and they had to be redone. After the recalculations of scientific data, I think they had a better idea of what was coming in and from what directions, most was from material that we have put up in orbit [satellites, rockets, and spacecraft].

[Assistant] It seems like an awful lot of impacts.

[User] Well, that could have been the leading edge that we saw, but we realized that when we started on this one particular plate that we were trying to document all impacts. We could get craters all the way down to 20-microns in size with the eyepieces and the X factor that we were using. This is a magnification that we decided to use, and we could see 20-micron impacts pretty easily.

[Assistant] Then you mentioned the Aerogel—if you want to go on and talk about that with the Stardust Program and how that was used.


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

[User] Well, I was born in Louisiana, actually, and I grew up in New Orleans, actually. It was a state university and my folks had a little money and were able to get me what they called NYA [National Youth Administration] scholarship, which paid for a part of my education, so I had to work while I went to college. It was the cheapest place you could go to get a college education at the time, and not too far away from New Orleans.

[Assistant] I understand that you had a roommate who also went on to have a storied career in the space program.

[User] Yes, it took me four and a half years to graduate because of my job. I had one required course in chemical engineering that I was unable to schedule. It was only taught at one time during the week, and that conflicted with my work schedule, so I had to go to summer school and then to go an extra semester.\n\n See, originally all the other time I was in military, and I always roomed in the military barracks at the university. Max was not in advanced military, [Maxime A.] Faget. I don't know why, he and I got to talking and decided to room together during that one summer session, so we lived together during that summer session and then continued to live together until mid-term when I graduated that year, 1943, January of '43. I don't know, we were two similar students. We got along pretty good.\n\n I used to visit his home. His father was in the [U.S.] Public Health Service. In fact, he found a cure for leprosy. He lived in a leper colony thirty-five miles south of Baton Rouge, and we'd go there sometimes on the weekends. It was nice because all of the Public Health doctors had a small golf course and swimming pool and tennis courts, so it was fairly nice.

[Assistant] Sounds like an interesting experience for a college student, to be able to go to leper colony and have these types of activities there.

[User] It was.

[Assistant] Do you remember any particular stories or events from your college experience, with or without Max, that you think were typical of your time there?


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

[User] It was.

[Assistant] Do you remember any particular stories or events from your college experience, with or without Max, that you think were typical of your time there?

[User] Stories with or without Max. Well, I don't know of any particular stories. We were just kind of normal students in school, and I don't think either of us were honor students at all. Both of us were very good, I think, in our major courses, but the rest of the stuff we didn't pay much attention to. I never studied very hard, for some reason or other. I've said to a lot of folks, I was born lazy, and I always look for the easy way of doing things, so I had decent grades in school. Better than average, but certainly not what they expect people to have in order to get hired at NASA these days.

[Assistant] That's true, but you seem to have done very well for yourself regardless.

[User] Well, the insistence on hiring straight-A students sometimes misses an awful lot of good folks, like Bob Gilruth and Max and me. [Laughter]

[Assistant] I wouldn't argue with that at all. So when you graduated you went into the Army?


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

[User] Well, we did have an inadvertent firing where it worked great.

[Assistant] That's true.

[User] Out at White Sands, as I recall, I believe, on one of the Big Joes, I think. We had a Big Joe came apart, I believe, and the launch escape system worked like it was supposed to.\n\n You know, that's another system, too, by the way, that has to work all the time. It can't work when you don't want it to work. It has to work all the time. If you don't get it off, you lost the whole thing, the crew and everybody. So pyrotechnic device is something that you have to be real careful with.

[Assistant] Well, it's interesting because on Gemini they didn't have the launch escape rocket.

[User] That's because Chamberlin didn't want one and he got his way.

[Assistant] Could you tell us about that story?


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

[User] Out at White Sands, as I recall, I believe, on one of the Big Joes, I think. We had a Big Joe came apart, I believe, and the launch escape system worked like it was supposed to.\n\n You know, that's another system, too, by the way, that has to work all the time. It can't work when you don't want it to work. It has to work all the time. If you don't get it off, you lost the whole thing, the crew and everybody. So pyrotechnic device is something that you have to be real careful with.

[Assistant] Well, it's interesting because on Gemini they didn't have the launch escape rocket.

[User] That's because Chamberlin didn't want one and he got his way.

[Assistant] Could you tell us about that story?

[User] Well, I don't know the whole story. All I know is Jim wasn't buying into a launch escape system, though, and I think he—I'm not sure whether they—I think they had ejection seats on Gemini. Yes. He's an old aircraft type, you see, and all the things he designed had ejection seats. I'd rather take my chances with the launch escape rocket, but Chamberlin's the one who insisted it be that way. And he was program manager, I guess, at the time, so he got his way on that one. Fortunately, never had to use any of them. I just don't think I'd like to have to bail out of that thing with one of those. Jim's the one that—that's why Gemini had ejection seats.

[Assistant] Did you have a lot of involvement with Gemini in general?


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

[User] Yes, I was in the viewing room over in Mission Control. I had a lot of folks living over there. I had some reporters living over at my house, the spillover there, asked us if we could furnish a room for some of them, I guess. Me and my wife had a lot of guests over there, I guess, relatives who wanted to be close to the action. I don't know. [Laughter] But I was in the viewing room when Apollo 11 landed.

[Assistant] What were your feelings at the time?

[User] Well, I was just happy as hell. I mean, why not?

[Assistant] Sure.

[User] We finally did it, you know. Gilruth said after 11 he wanted to can the program. He was finished with it. He said, "It's all just a waste of time and money to keep on going back to the moon." He might be right, I don't know, you know.

[Assistant] Did you sense that there might be some waning interest in Apollo after the first landing?


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

[User] It can’t be. If you knew how things worked, pre-launch, it’s just not possible. If a guy’s not absolutely stone-cold sober, nobody’s going to put him in a spacecraft, and no other crewmen would fly with him. Your life depends on it, for heaven’s sakes. You got to go through a lot of checks. The doctors look at you and everything, and their jobs depend on signing off on you being ready to fly, so it’s physically not possible for that to happen. That’s just incredible.\n\n I enjoyed Ralph [M.] Hall at the congressional hearings. Ralph, bless his heart, I love that man. He was an old Navy pilot, World War II. In the congressional hearing, he’d basically interrupted and said, “You know, this is all bullshit.”\n\n Everybody’s going, “This is a congressional hearing; you’re not supposed to talk like that.”\n\n He said, “That’s the dumbest thing I ever heard.”\n\n We’re going, “Yay, somebody’s said the right thing.” Bless his heart. That was a disappointing episode.

[Assistant] Those seemed to all happen back-to-back, as well.

[User] I noticed that. First year was very quiet and very enjoyable, and then all hell broke loose.

[Assistant] Calm before that storm.

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] Well speaking of storms, I thought next time we can talk about Hurricane Ike, and we’ve got some more to talk about, about Shuttle and COTS [Commercial Orbital Transportation Services]. There’s quite a bit more to talk about, so if you wouldn’t mind having us back.


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

[User] It was flight training, of course, flying T-38s, which was a great thrill, a very enjoyable thing to do. It’s a fine airplane. And a lot of classroom work, the very preliminary stages of simulation in part-task trainers and that sort of thing, a lot of lectures, hundreds of hours of lectures on various systems on the Space Shuttle and things like geology and oceanography and things that astronauts need to be aware of in order to do their job properly in space.\n\n We were broken down into two teams. We had essentially a red team and a blue team. Rick [Frederick H.] Hauck and I were the senior astronauts in my class, and so Rick was kind of the leader of one team and I was kind of the leader of the other team. There were no responsibilities that went with that. [Laughs] It was just that somebody had to be the person that George Abbey called if there was a problem, and so Rick and I handled those tasks.

[Assistant] Was that something you stepped up to do, or was that something that George Abbey had asked you to do?

[User] I don’t remember, as a matter of fact. I really don’t remember exactly how it happened, but we were the two oldest, and in our military ranks we were the senior military people in the class. And the civilians were mostly much younger, so I guess it was just natural that the two old fogies would be tasked with this. There were no rewards and very few responsibilities, so it really wasn’t a big deal.

[Assistant] Your class called themselves the Thirty-Five New Guys.

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] Do you recall how that phrase came about?


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

[User] I don’t remember, as a matter of fact. I really don’t remember exactly how it happened, but we were the two oldest, and in our military ranks we were the senior military people in the class. And the civilians were mostly much younger, so I guess it was just natural that the two old fogies would be tasked with this. There were no rewards and very few responsibilities, so it really wasn’t a big deal.

[Assistant] Your class called themselves the Thirty-Five New Guys.

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] Do you recall how that phrase came about?

[User] I don’t remember exactly, but I know Judy [Judith A.] Resnik had something to do with it. Of course, it didn’t really stand for thirty-five new guys, but that’s close enough. That’s close enough.\n\n And we had this wonderful t-shirt with this logo with thirty-five astronauts crawling around in space all over the Space Shuttle. It was cleverly done, and I know that Judy was involved in it. I would guess probably Hoot [Robert L.] Gibson was involved in it, too. But it was kind of presented to me as a done deal; they said, “Look. Look what we’ve done,” and it was well done.

[Assistant] Tell us about the camaraderie between this class.


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

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] Do you recall how that phrase came about?

[User] I don’t remember exactly, but I know Judy [Judith A.] Resnik had something to do with it. Of course, it didn’t really stand for thirty-five new guys, but that’s close enough. That’s close enough.\n\n And we had this wonderful t-shirt with this logo with thirty-five astronauts crawling around in space all over the Space Shuttle. It was cleverly done, and I know that Judy was involved in it. I would guess probably Hoot [Robert L.] Gibson was involved in it, too. But it was kind of presented to me as a done deal; they said, “Look. Look what we’ve done,” and it was well done.

[Assistant] Tell us about the camaraderie between this class.

[User] We got to know the people that were in our group. See, we broke in two parts because the classroom didn’t hold the thirty-five people, and so you got to know the people that were in your class much better, in reality, than you got to know the people that were in the other class, particularly in the first three or four months. But what we found out very quickly was that all of these people, whether they were the youngest in the group or the oldest in the group, they were all extraordinarily bright, extraordinarily capable, and very, very eager to succeed in what it was that they were doing. So we didn’t have any dim bulbs in the group.\n\n At the same time, I will tell you that in any group, doesn’t matter how fine it is, there’s always going to be a dim bulb, okay? But it appears that way only because it is a comparison with the others. This was an extraordinarily talented group of people that we were working with.

[Assistant] As you mentioned, Vance Brand was sort of your big brother.


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

[User] I don’t remember exactly, but I know Judy [Judith A.] Resnik had something to do with it. Of course, it didn’t really stand for thirty-five new guys, but that’s close enough. That’s close enough.\n\n And we had this wonderful t-shirt with this logo with thirty-five astronauts crawling around in space all over the Space Shuttle. It was cleverly done, and I know that Judy was involved in it. I would guess probably Hoot [Robert L.] Gibson was involved in it, too. But it was kind of presented to me as a done deal; they said, “Look. Look what we’ve done,” and it was well done.

[Assistant] Tell us about the camaraderie between this class.

[User] We got to know the people that were in our group. See, we broke in two parts because the classroom didn’t hold the thirty-five people, and so you got to know the people that were in your class much better, in reality, than you got to know the people that were in the other class, particularly in the first three or four months. But what we found out very quickly was that all of these people, whether they were the youngest in the group or the oldest in the group, they were all extraordinarily bright, extraordinarily capable, and very, very eager to succeed in what it was that they were doing. So we didn’t have any dim bulbs in the group.\n\n At the same time, I will tell you that in any group, doesn’t matter how fine it is, there’s always going to be a dim bulb, okay? But it appears that way only because it is a comparison with the others. This was an extraordinarily talented group of people that we were working with.

[Assistant] As you mentioned, Vance Brand was sort of your big brother.

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] You did some on-the-job training with him. What were some of the tasks that you worked on while working under him?


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

[User] It was usually trying to get the team oriented in such a way that they understood precisely what a problem was and what the options were in order to resolve that problem and then get a course of action laid out. And I say that because we had the NASA team from the Johnson Space Center, the Rockwell team from California, the Canadian contractor team, and the Canadian government team. Oftentimes we would have the Kennedy Space Center [Florida] people, because they were ultimately responsible for integrating the arm onto the Shuttle. And from time to time we would have this Air Force interest coming from The Aerospace Corporation, and trying to get all of those people to come to an agreement on what course of action was appropriate and then get it started—any big project, that’s always your biggest problem. It’s always a matter of getting a coordinated effort.

[Assistant] And the RMS proved to work quite well on STS-2?

[User] Yes, it did. In fact, I think the RMS has worked wonders on all of the flights. It’s really a great piece of equipment. We’ve never had one of those really dangerous runaway-arm type of malfunctions that we worried about, but of course those failure modes are still there.\n\n And the Canadians have gone on to design an arm now for the International Space Station, so they have gotten a big return out of their early investment in developing these electromechanical systems.

[Assistant] Some of the other positions you held--you served as head of the Astronaut Operations Groups.

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] Can you tell us about that?


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

[User] Yes, it did. In fact, I think the RMS has worked wonders on all of the flights. It’s really a great piece of equipment. We’ve never had one of those really dangerous runaway-arm type of malfunctions that we worried about, but of course those failure modes are still there.\n\n And the Canadians have gone on to design an arm now for the International Space Station, so they have gotten a big return out of their early investment in developing these electromechanical systems.

[Assistant] Some of the other positions you held--you served as head of the Astronaut Operations Groups.

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] Can you tell us about that?

[User] Well, it included a number of things. It included training, and it included the flight data file that the crew carries all of their various checklists. And it included some assessment of upcoming payloads that we were going to fly on the Shuttle and any unique problems that were associated with those. It was an important job.

[Assistant] Who else worked on this project with you?


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

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] Can you tell us about that?

[User] Well, it included a number of things. It included training, and it included the flight data file that the crew carries all of their various checklists. And it included some assessment of upcoming payloads that we were going to fly on the Shuttle and any unique problems that were associated with those. It was an important job.

[Assistant] Who else worked on this project with you?

[User] At various times different people. Judy and I, for example, laid out – one of the things we did was to lay out the roles and responsibilities for the Mission Specialist, going to carry three Mission Specialists up, what are their roles and responsibilities, generically, so you don’t have to reinvent a training program every time you name a crew.\n\n So we came up with a scheme in which MS [Mission Specialist] 1 has overall responsibility for payloads and experiments in orbit, and a Mission Specialist 2 has primary responsibility for flight engineering and helping the Pilot and Commander during ascent and entry and backup for payloads. And Mission Specialist 3 really had responsibilities for independent experiments and also an EVA [Extravehicular Activity] responsibility. So that’s kind of the way we laid it out.\n\n MS 3 would be typically the most junior and the lowest training requirement but heavy on EVA. MS 1 would have the largest overall responsibility and, in principle, ought to be the most experienced member of the astronaut Mission Specialist crew. And MS 2 had the most simulation time, spent an enormous amount of time in the simulator.\n\n That’s why we split it that way. We split it that way in order to recognize the fact that the flight engineering role was the dominant training requirement for one of the Mission Specialists, and therefore that person shouldn’t be burdened with overall responsibility for the satellites.

[Assistant] Now, early on in the Space Shuttle Program, the flight manifest was rearranged many, many times. What impact did that have on your career?


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

[User] I did.

[Assistant] Can you share with us the details of that organization?

[User] After it became clear that I was only going to fly two flights, I told George that he needed to find somebody else to fill the two slots that I had been selected to fill. And his payback was to put me in charge of the Payload Specialist Office. It needed somebody at the time, and I was only going to be around for a couple of three months before I was reassigned to the Pentagon [Washington, D.C.], so I wasn’t going to be around for a great deal of time. And it was something that needed to be done. It would not have been my first choice of things to go do, but at the same time, it did give me the opportunity to meet some really interesting and nice people who were over there at the time and are not with us anymore.

[Assistant] And where was the Payload Specialist Office placed on site?

[User] Do you know where the large vacuum tank is, the old large vacuum chamber from the Apollo days, which is –

[Assistant] The SESL [Space Environment Simulation Laboratory]?


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

[User] After it became clear that I was only going to fly two flights, I told George that he needed to find somebody else to fill the two slots that I had been selected to fill. And his payback was to put me in charge of the Payload Specialist Office. It needed somebody at the time, and I was only going to be around for a couple of three months before I was reassigned to the Pentagon [Washington, D.C.], so I wasn’t going to be around for a great deal of time. And it was something that needed to be done. It would not have been my first choice of things to go do, but at the same time, it did give me the opportunity to meet some really interesting and nice people who were over there at the time and are not with us anymore.

[Assistant] And where was the Payload Specialist Office placed on site?

[User] Do you know where the large vacuum tank is, the old large vacuum chamber from the Apollo days, which is –

[Assistant] The SESL [Space Environment Simulation Laboratory]?

[User] —kind of down there by the cafeteria? It was right there, right there in that building.

[Assistant] What were some of the challenges that you had to face while setting up this office?


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

[User] Do you know where the large vacuum tank is, the old large vacuum chamber from the Apollo days, which is –

[Assistant] The SESL [Space Environment Simulation Laboratory]?

[User] —kind of down there by the cafeteria? It was right there, right there in that building.

[Assistant] What were some of the challenges that you had to face while setting up this office?

[User] Not many. Not many. It was like anything which is just getting started, there are startup issues associated with it, but we had a good basic staff that was assigned to the office. Trying to orient people that are coming into the Payload Specialist Program and making sure that they understood what it was that they were about to do and why they were going to do it was something that was important.\n\n And it hadn’t been done, really. We had already had several people in the Payload Specialist Program before that time, but we didn’t have an office, so we didn’t have anybody who was trying to coordinate their activities. Handling things like press and handling things like training load and so forth, the basic logistical support for these folks, was something that was needed. So that was something that George asked me to do.

[Assistant] I also understand you were a team member assigned to develop policies and requirements for life science experiments.


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

[User] Yes, because they had the cages. They were their cages and their design. And in spite of their best efforts, it did not contain the material that it should have contained.

[Assistant] Let’s talk about some of the missions. Let’s talk about STS-1. What were some of your requirements or duties for this flight?

[User] Zero. I was desperately concerned about my career at NASA when STS-1 went off, because I was the only member of the Class of ’78 that did not have a task. I had no responsibility to do anything on STS-1, and I interpreted that to mean bad things. I mean, when you’re the only member of the group that is not working on a flight, when that flight launches and lands and you haven’t done anything at all to support it and you’re a member of the Astronaut Office, well, that’s not a very good indicator.\n\n Then I looked around at the other people who were not asked to do anything in support of the flight, and there were a couple of people from the olden days still in the Astronaut Office who were also not asked to participate, and their reputation within the Astronaut Office was not too great. So I figured that mine was right with them. [Laughs]\n\n I didn’t do anything on STS-1. I was still working on the robotic arm, and apparently that was the right thing, because in spite of all that, I got to fly first in my class. But that’s not what I was thinking when STS-1 went off. I thought, I must be at the very bottom of the heap.

[Assistant] So where were you when STS-1 launched?

[User] I was sitting in Building Four listening to it on the speaker system and watching the TV like the American public.

[Assistant] Any thoughts from that day or any thoughts about the landing?


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

[User] She was delighted. Yes, she was delighted. Donna worked at NASA. She started as a paraprofessional, para-engineer, and by the time I flew STS-7, she was working in the Mission Control Center in one of the back rooms. So, she was part of the team. She was part of working on the program. And yes, she was delighted to have me fly.\n\n And I think she was also delighted with the people that I flew with. The STS-7 crew was a really great crew. Crippen was the epitome of the great astronaut, so it was a great pleasure to fly with him, and she knew that. She knew reputations as well as I did. So you like seeing your spouse fly with people of great reputation. [Laughs]

[Assistant] Can you tell us a little bit about the relationship between the crew members on this flight?

[User] Uniformly good, except we did have a blip when Norm Thagard joined, and I guess that’s to be expected. We trained as a crew of four, and then relatively late in the program, Norm came on, and we tried really hard to integrate Norm into the rest of the crew activities. Sally, for example, was lead on our electrophoresis experiment, doing some fluid work, trying to get some very pure substances out of this process. And I was the lead on doing the deployment and the retrieval using the remote manipulator system. But Sally was going to do essentially as much of that as I was.\n\n But remember, Norm Thagard was the third member working with Bill Lenoir on the RMS, so he was no stranger to this system. So we worked hard to try to find a way to work Norm into that, and we ended up having him do one of the retrievals without it being written in the checklist that way.

[Assistant] That’s nice.

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] In 1982, NASA informed the public that Sally Ride was going to be the first American woman to fly in space. What sort of impact did that have on the crew and training?


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

[User] Oh, just like a dream, just like in the simulator. When you’re coming into very close proximity to the satellite and you’re going to retrieve it—this thing’s fifty feet long, and of course, it has some flexibility, and you can see it moving out there in a way that you’re really not commanding. So you’ve got to integrate into your thought process the commands that you put in relative to what you’re seeing out there on the end.\n\n It’s easy with a dynamic system to get into an unstable situation, where you’re trying to input a correction and, in fact, you just end up overdoing it. But that’s where the simulators came in handy, because we had seen that same type of thing, without quite the magnitude, in the simulations that we had done in Canada. The simulations that we did here didn’t pick that up, but the one that we did in Canada did.

[Assistant] Were there any suggestions that you or Sally made when you came back from the flight, any sort of changes that you suggested?

[User] Well, we suggested that they change the training on those switches on the PAMs. [Laughs] But not in terms of RMS, no. Somebody else came up with the solution to eliminate the tension on the snare wires before opening them, to stop the transfer of momentum. It wasn’t our suggestion. Somebody else did that.

[Assistant] Actually, your mission was responsible for the agency’s first full photo of the Orbiter in space.

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] Can you tell us about taking that photo?


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

[User] Well, we suggested that they change the training on those switches on the PAMs. [Laughs] But not in terms of RMS, no. Somebody else came up with the solution to eliminate the tension on the snare wires before opening them, to stop the transfer of momentum. It wasn’t our suggestion. Somebody else did that.

[Assistant] Actually, your mission was responsible for the agency’s first full photo of the Orbiter in space.

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] Can you tell us about taking that photo?

[User] We worked hard on that. We really worked hard on that, and we got a lot of help. We worked out the position, the arm in the shape of a seven for the seventh flight. And we didn’t tell anybody about this, of course. We had this on kind of a back-of-our-hand type of procedure, what angles each joint had to be in order for it to look like that.\n\n And then we had worked on the timing so that we could catch the Space Shuttle against that black sky with the horizon down below. That was the picture we most wanted. We most wanted the Shuttle against the black sky and the Earth’s horizon down below.\n\n Now, we got a lot of nice pictures, a lot of good pictures, against the cloud background and against the total black sky. Essentially, what we’re doing is we’re orienting this camera, which is on the SPAS. It had just a whole battery of cameras. It had a still camera. It had a TV camera. It had a motion picture camera. And so we’re running these various cameras by remote as we fly the Shuttle around it so that we can get the Shuttle in various types of positions.\n\n Yes, I was real proud of that. I was real proud of the work that Sally and I and Crip had done on getting that ready to go. Because it did. It gave you a really strong indication that, you know, this is a spaceship we’re talking about here.

[Assistant] Did you participate in any of Norm Thagard’s experiments?


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

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] Can you tell us about taking that photo?

[User] We worked hard on that. We really worked hard on that, and we got a lot of help. We worked out the position, the arm in the shape of a seven for the seventh flight. And we didn’t tell anybody about this, of course. We had this on kind of a back-of-our-hand type of procedure, what angles each joint had to be in order for it to look like that.\n\n And then we had worked on the timing so that we could catch the Space Shuttle against that black sky with the horizon down below. That was the picture we most wanted. We most wanted the Shuttle against the black sky and the Earth’s horizon down below.\n\n Now, we got a lot of nice pictures, a lot of good pictures, against the cloud background and against the total black sky. Essentially, what we’re doing is we’re orienting this camera, which is on the SPAS. It had just a whole battery of cameras. It had a still camera. It had a TV camera. It had a motion picture camera. And so we’re running these various cameras by remote as we fly the Shuttle around it so that we can get the Shuttle in various types of positions.\n\n Yes, I was real proud of that. I was real proud of the work that Sally and I and Crip had done on getting that ready to go. Because it did. It gave you a really strong indication that, you know, this is a spaceship we’re talking about here.

[Assistant] Did you participate in any of Norm Thagard’s experiments?

[User] I did.

[Assistant] Could you tell me about those?


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

[User] We were hit on the windshield by a small fleck of paint, and it made a hole about the size of a lima bean halfway through the outer of two panes of glass. We found out after the flight that it was one thickness of paint the size of a pinhead that had hit us. And it hits you with such enormous velocity that the kinetic energy associated with that small fleck of paint is enough to blast out that kind of a crater.\n\n So when you think about what a meteor would do hitting the Earth, here’s an example of—you know. The results are so much larger than the event itself that it’s staggering.\n\n Now, Crippen decided not to tell the ground that we’d been hit, and it didn’t come up until after the flight. And his rationale for that, I assume, was that there wasn’t anything that the ground could do to help us. The event had already occurred. We were perfectly safe. They would worry a lot. And so he elected not to say anything.\n\n I think after the flight he was—someone said something about that doing, but I think it was the right decision. I think that it clearly was something that was stable, and there wasn’t anything at all that the ground could do. We took some photographs of it to make sure that it was documented and so forth.

[Assistant] You mentioned that by the time you flew on this mission your wife was working in one of the back rooms.

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] Did you get a chance to speak with her at all while you were in flight?

[User] No. No. No, I didn’t. I enjoyed getting away for a few days. [Laughter]

[Assistant] If you had to look back and pick what one event or what experience was the highlight of that mission, what do you think that would be?


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

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] Did you get a chance to speak with her at all while you were in flight?

[User] No. No. No, I didn’t. I enjoyed getting away for a few days. [Laughter]

[Assistant] If you had to look back and pick what one event or what experience was the highlight of that mission, what do you think that would be?

[User] Well, it’s hard to say anything other than landing. I mean, landing is such a great event. And of course, nothing else matters. Anything that was done right before, if the landing isn’t done right, then nothing else really matters.\n\n And I was not concerned about the landing, but I still think that it’s—it’s such a highlight. It’s what the Pilot and the Commander spend 90 percent of their waking moments before flight worrying about the landing, and it’s such a thrill to see it done and to see it done right and see it done well. And I know it means a great deal to them.\n\n They do a thousand of these things, so it’s going to work out all right, but there’ve been one or two landings that haven’t been perfect, and so it’s really nice to see a perfect landing.

[Assistant] What did you and your other crew members do during your free time while you were in space?


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

[User] I don’t think Sally ever had to go out, except to do the hometowner type things, without some support. But the hometowner type things, you know, that’s not a big deal. But Sally in New York or Sally in Washington, D.C., she was a huge target. I mean, she really was a huge target.\n\n I think we would really be concerned about it today. If we were going through that experience in today’s political and terrorist environment, I think we would have reason to really be concerned about it. But fortunately, at the time all we had to worry about was Norm getting knocked into the wall. [Laughter]

[Assistant] Poor guy. We need to take a break for a second and change out our tape.

[User] Okay. Fine.\n\n [Tape change]

[Assistant] Okay. So let’s talk about STS 51-G . Do you recall when you were told about this flight?

[User] No, I really don’t. It wasn’t long after STS-7, maybe six months, but I don’t have any recollection of a meeting or a call or anything else. It must have been not a big deal, been there, done that.

[Assistant] Well, tell us about training. Did it differ at all from your first mission?


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

[User] Yes. Yes, it really does.

[Assistant] —spoke so unhighly of.

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] Let me go back and ask you a couple of questions about the flight and actually before the flight. What did NASA astronauts think about this policy of allowing Payload Specialists to fly?

[User] Different people felt different ways. I had no objection to it. In fact, I was in favor of it. I wanted to see the Air Force Payload Specialists fly with their satellites. I had worked with those people and with their satellites, and I could see a real rationale for their being on board. I felt like the Shuttle was giving us the capability to expand the flight environment to non-career people and that we ought to take advantage of that, certainly on the Spacelab missions. That was one of the things that we could do very well and did. And so a lot of people looked at it different ways.\n\n There were and will always be people who worry about what it meant in terms, or what it could mean, in terms of their own job security. That’s a perspective that you no doubt have already heard, but I didn’t feel that way. I felt that the—maybe that’s why George put me over there. [Laughs]

[Assistant] Were you close with any of the Payload Specialists?


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

[User] Yes.

[Assistant] Let me go back and ask you a couple of questions about the flight and actually before the flight. What did NASA astronauts think about this policy of allowing Payload Specialists to fly?

[User] Different people felt different ways. I had no objection to it. In fact, I was in favor of it. I wanted to see the Air Force Payload Specialists fly with their satellites. I had worked with those people and with their satellites, and I could see a real rationale for their being on board. I felt like the Shuttle was giving us the capability to expand the flight environment to non-career people and that we ought to take advantage of that, certainly on the Spacelab missions. That was one of the things that we could do very well and did. And so a lot of people looked at it different ways.\n\n There were and will always be people who worry about what it meant in terms, or what it could mean, in terms of their own job security. That’s a perspective that you no doubt have already heard, but I didn’t feel that way. I felt that the—maybe that’s why George put me over there. [Laughs]

[Assistant] Were you close with any of the Payload Specialists?

[User] No, not particularly. Other than the two that I flew with, I wasn’t particularly close to them.

[Assistant] You mentioned that you had a crew member from France and then one from Saudi Arabia. Did you participate in any sort of cultural training activities before the flight?


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

[User] It was supposed to fly on Challenger in January of 1986. It was supposed to fly right when Challenger flew and we lost it. But by the time I flew my second flight, it had been delayed, it had been delayed into the summer or early fall of 1986.\n\n And the other flight that I was supposed to fly on was the Galileo flight, and that was supposed to come after the Spacelab Sciences flight. But by the time I left, the Spacelab Life Sciences had slipped yet further, and the Galileo flight would have occurred first.

[Assistant] Now, I read in the Roundup that you planned to leave NASA in the near future when you stepped down from your last flight, which was 61-G. What were you thinking about doing at that point? This was in the fall of ’85.

[User] Fifty-one-G.

[Assistant] I’m sorry, 61-G.

[User] I didn’t fly 61-G

[Assistant] No. This was a flight you had been assigned to but didn’t wind up flying.


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

[User] Fifty-one-G.

[Assistant] I’m sorry, 61-G.

[User] I didn’t fly 61-G

[Assistant] No. This was a flight you had been assigned to but didn’t wind up flying.

[User] Oh, and I said what?

[Assistant] You had told Public Affairs that you planned on leaving NASA at some point and you were stepping down from the flight. Did you have any idea what you might be doing at that point?


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

[User] I didn’t fly 61-G

[Assistant] No. This was a flight you had been assigned to but didn’t wind up flying.

[User] Oh, and I said what?

[Assistant] You had told Public Affairs that you planned on leaving NASA at some point and you were stepping down from the flight. Did you have any idea what you might be doing at that point?

[User] I don’t know about the source of that. I don’t remember saying that. I don’t remember saying that.\n\n I was looking for a job. My wife told me that my marriage had a two-flight limit, and I believed her, and so I was in the process of looking for a job. But one thing for sure was I wasn’t going to stay here. There was no way that I could bring myself to stay and work at the Space Center and not be an astronaut. I mean, that would send a lot of wrong signals to people. I know it’s been done a lot of times since but not under the same kind of circumstance.\n\n So I was looking for a job, and I was talking to major contractors, and I was talking with the Air Force, and I was talking with the University of Washington about a teaching job and so forth. I was literally looking for a job.\n\n But the rationale for leaving was all the same. It wasn’t that I was looking for a job or wanted to go do something else. I was going to go do something because I couldn’t continue to do this.

[Assistant] And you ended up taking a job with the Air Force.


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

[User] Oh, and I said what?

[Assistant] You had told Public Affairs that you planned on leaving NASA at some point and you were stepping down from the flight. Did you have any idea what you might be doing at that point?

[User] I don’t know about the source of that. I don’t remember saying that. I don’t remember saying that.\n\n I was looking for a job. My wife told me that my marriage had a two-flight limit, and I believed her, and so I was in the process of looking for a job. But one thing for sure was I wasn’t going to stay here. There was no way that I could bring myself to stay and work at the Space Center and not be an astronaut. I mean, that would send a lot of wrong signals to people. I know it’s been done a lot of times since but not under the same kind of circumstance.\n\n So I was looking for a job, and I was talking to major contractors, and I was talking with the Air Force, and I was talking with the University of Washington about a teaching job and so forth. I was literally looking for a job.\n\n But the rationale for leaving was all the same. It wasn’t that I was looking for a job or wanted to go do something else. I was going to go do something because I couldn’t continue to do this.

[Assistant] And you ended up taking a job with the Air Force.

[User] I did.

[Assistant] Can you tell us about that position?


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

[User] I was right here. I was taking my annual physical. I was in the Flight Medicine Clinic, and somebody came down and said, “Wasn’t that a beautiful launch?” I mean, I knew the launch was going. And what had happened was Claudette – I don’t know if you ever knew her, Claudette [A.] Gage. She was a Chief Nurse at that Flight Medicine Clinic. She had been there just long enough to see it go up, clear the tower, start its roll, and so forth, but she had work to do so she came down.\n\n She said, “Oh that was a beautiful, beautiful launch.” And about ten seconds later, someone came into the room and said, “John, you’d better come.” So I went upstairs to the video and saw—of course, I knew immediately that it was an accident. I always considered Judy Resnik my best friend in the Astronaut Corps, of course she was on that, and I’d just been working with the Payload Specialist the month before. I’d gone to Washington, I’d reported in for work, but my annual physical was due, and so I came back down here to do the physical, and I happened to be here at that time.

[Assistant] And how was it that you were appointed to the investigative staff?

[User] I was there. I was in Washington. The President had already announced the people who were going to be members of the commission. Sally was one of those people, and of course, I knew and respected and had worked well with Sally in the past.\n\n They were looking for experienced people to be on the staff of the commission, and I was asked to go over and talk with the Staff Director, who immediately put in a call to the Pentagon and had me assigned temporarily to work on the study.

[Assistant] And how long did you work on the study?

[User] Until the middle of June of the same year, about five months.

[Assistant] And what were your duties as a member of the staff?


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

[User] I was there. I was in Washington. The President had already announced the people who were going to be members of the commission. Sally was one of those people, and of course, I knew and respected and had worked well with Sally in the past.\n\n They were looking for experienced people to be on the staff of the commission, and I was asked to go over and talk with the Staff Director, who immediately put in a call to the Pentagon and had me assigned temporarily to work on the study.

[Assistant] And how long did you work on the study?

[User] Until the middle of June of the same year, about five months.

[Assistant] And what were your duties as a member of the staff?

[User] NASA’s safety program, mission operations, pressures on the system, kind of the things that we’ve talked about. I wrote the chapter on the Silent Safety Program, which is a part of that, and, with Sally, wrote three of the other chapters.

[Assistant] Let’s see. In 1987 you left work with the Air Force, and you went to work for ANSER [Analytic Services Inc.]


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

[User] Until the middle of June of the same year, about five months.

[Assistant] And what were your duties as a member of the staff?

[User] NASA’s safety program, mission operations, pressures on the system, kind of the things that we’ve talked about. I wrote the chapter on the Silent Safety Program, which is a part of that, and, with Sally, wrote three of the other chapters.

[Assistant] Let’s see. In 1987 you left work with the Air Force, and you went to work for ANSER [Analytic Services Inc.]

[User] I did.

[Assistant] Can you tell us about that?


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

[User] NASA’s safety program, mission operations, pressures on the system, kind of the things that we’ve talked about. I wrote the chapter on the Silent Safety Program, which is a part of that, and, with Sally, wrote three of the other chapters.

[Assistant] Let’s see. In 1987 you left work with the Air Force, and you went to work for ANSER [Analytic Services Inc.]

[User] I did.

[Assistant] Can you tell us about that?

[User] ANSER is a public service research institute. It’s a non-profit, 501(c)(3), tax exempt research organization. It does work mostly for the federal government, in the past mostly for the Air Force and the Department of Defense but more recently for the Department of Homeland Security.\n\n I went there as the Vice President for Space Systems. I had been there about a year and a half when I was asked if I would consider moving up to Executive Vice President, with the thought being I would become the CEO [Chief Executive Officer]. Much to the surprise of some of the other Vice Presidents, I said yes. [Laughs] And then I stayed on as CEO for seven years before retiring and moving west.\n\n Good company, great people. It’s a kind of company where you can get the valedictorian out of MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts] or Caltech [California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California] or Ohio State [University, Columbus, Ohio] or [University of] Michigan [Ann Arbor, Michigan]. I worked with them, young kids, teaching them, you know, what’s going on with these huge projects. They work with you two years, three years, sometimes four or five, and then they go on to do other things but with a much better understanding of how the government works and how decisions are made in Washington and so on and so forth. A good company, and I think a real challenging type of a role, because you’re not the government so you don’t get to make the decisions, but at the same time, a lot of the weight of those decisions rests with you.

[Assistant] And now you’re retired and living back in Washington state?


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

[User] I did.

[Assistant] Can you tell us about that?

[User] ANSER is a public service research institute. It’s a non-profit, 501(c)(3), tax exempt research organization. It does work mostly for the federal government, in the past mostly for the Air Force and the Department of Defense but more recently for the Department of Homeland Security.\n\n I went there as the Vice President for Space Systems. I had been there about a year and a half when I was asked if I would consider moving up to Executive Vice President, with the thought being I would become the CEO [Chief Executive Officer]. Much to the surprise of some of the other Vice Presidents, I said yes. [Laughs] And then I stayed on as CEO for seven years before retiring and moving west.\n\n Good company, great people. It’s a kind of company where you can get the valedictorian out of MIT [Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, Massachusetts] or Caltech [California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California] or Ohio State [University, Columbus, Ohio] or [University of] Michigan [Ann Arbor, Michigan]. I worked with them, young kids, teaching them, you know, what’s going on with these huge projects. They work with you two years, three years, sometimes four or five, and then they go on to do other things but with a much better understanding of how the government works and how decisions are made in Washington and so on and so forth. A good company, and I think a real challenging type of a role, because you’re not the government so you don’t get to make the decisions, but at the same time, a lot of the weight of those decisions rests with you.

[Assistant] And now you’re retired and living back in Washington state?

[User] Yes, yes, yes.

[Assistant] And do you have any contact with NASA, do any sort of contracting work?


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

[User] Yes, yes, yes.

[Assistant] And do you have any contact with NASA, do any sort of contracting work?

[User] I go to the Visitors Complex at the Kennedy Space Center three or four times a year, and I’m the Astronaut of the Day. They keep somebody there every day, including Christmas. Always an astronaut on duty, and so they pay my expenses to fly there and stay there, and they give me a stipend for being there which is more than generous. So yes, it’s a neat thing to do.

[Assistant] What do people most frequently ask you down out at KSC?

[User] “Were you scared when you launched?” One way or another they ask that question. “Have you seen any UFOs up there?” I love that. “How do you go to the bathroom in space?” Those are some of the favorite questions. “What do you have to do to be an astronaut?” That’s one you get both more from parents than from kids.

[Assistant] Do you stay in contact with any of the members of your previous crews?


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

[User] I go to the Visitors Complex at the Kennedy Space Center three or four times a year, and I’m the Astronaut of the Day. They keep somebody there every day, including Christmas. Always an astronaut on duty, and so they pay my expenses to fly there and stay there, and they give me a stipend for being there which is more than generous. So yes, it’s a neat thing to do.

[Assistant] What do people most frequently ask you down out at KSC?

[User] “Were you scared when you launched?” One way or another they ask that question. “Have you seen any UFOs up there?” I love that. “How do you go to the bathroom in space?” Those are some of the favorite questions. “What do you have to do to be an astronaut?” That’s one you get both more from parents than from kids.

[Assistant] Do you stay in contact with any of the members of your previous crews?

[User] Not regularly, no. I hear from them from time to time, but we don’t have any regular contact. Like Shannon, we just exchanged e-mail addresses. I always stop by her office and leave her a message if she’s not there. [Whispering] She’s seldom there.

[Assistant] She’s probably pretty busy.


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

[User] “Were you scared when you launched?” One way or another they ask that question. “Have you seen any UFOs up there?” I love that. “How do you go to the bathroom in space?” Those are some of the favorite questions. “What do you have to do to be an astronaut?” That’s one you get both more from parents than from kids.

[Assistant] Do you stay in contact with any of the members of your previous crews?

[User] Not regularly, no. I hear from them from time to time, but we don’t have any regular contact. Like Shannon, we just exchanged e-mail addresses. I always stop by her office and leave her a message if she’s not there. [Whispering] She’s seldom there.

[Assistant] She’s probably pretty busy.

[User] Yes. Yes. She’s CapCom-ing right now as a matter of fact.

[Assistant] That’s good to know.\n\n I just have a couple of general questions for you, then I’m going to ask Sandra if she had any for you. If you had to look back over your time at JSC, what do you think would be your most challenging milestone?


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

[User] Not regularly, no. I hear from them from time to time, but we don’t have any regular contact. Like Shannon, we just exchanged e-mail addresses. I always stop by her office and leave her a message if she’s not there. [Whispering] She’s seldom there.

[Assistant] She’s probably pretty busy.

[User] Yes. Yes. She’s CapCom-ing right now as a matter of fact.

[Assistant] That’s good to know.\n\n I just have a couple of general questions for you, then I’m going to ask Sandra if she had any for you. If you had to look back over your time at JSC, what do you think would be your most challenging milestone?

[User] Well, that’s a good question. I don’t think I’ve ever had it asked.\n\n You know, I think that when you come into a group like that, a group that is so highly selective, you don’t come into it with a lack of appreciation of your own talents and abilities, and you don’t come into it with a lot of self-doubt about what it is that you can do or might be capable of doing. But those thoughts are challenged. They’re challenged by the very nature of the people that you’re now involved with. And somehow, through the process of working with these people and working within the system and so forth, you need to come to an appreciation that your original thoughts are probably right, you do have capabilities, and you do have things to contribute, and so forth.\n\n But that’s not an easy decision to make when you see the greatness of the people that are around you. I think that that adjustment hits everybody who comes into the Astronaut Corps, because no one who comes into the Astronaut Corps has ever been a slacker, you know?

[Assistant] What do you think was your most significant accomplishment while working in the Astronaut Office?


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

[User] We were in a Columbia ETV project from February 1965 to January 1967.

[Assistant] Okay. So can you tell me a little bit about what your, you know, a little bit about your present day? You know, your family, where you currently reside, any interests you have?

[User] All right. Sure, I'd be glad to. I live in Lawrenceville, Georgia, which is outside of Atlanta, Georgia. Although I am certainly not a Georgian, I'm a New Yorker raised in Chicago. I met my husband in the Peace Corps. We were in the same project, worked together for two years and married after we got home a couple of months later. We now have, of course, it's 42 years later and we now have two children and four grandchildren, three granddaughters in Boston and one lovely little grandson here in Georgia with us. It's wonderful having a local grandchild. And I've had a checkered past in my career. I taught school for about 13 years and I had my own interior decorating business for about 13 years, and I did a lot of volunteer work and then the rest of my career years were spent in different kinds of offices, different kinds of office management. I was always on the office machines and learned the computer when we lived in Vienna, Virginia, and I worked for a manufacturing corporation and I worked. My latest job, I'm 73 years old now and I retired about, or I didn't really retire, my job disappeared out from under me. I was working for a criminal defense attorney right here in Lawrenceville, and that was a fascinating job. Absolutely fascinating.

[Assistant] Wow.

[User] It's very nice. It was very nice. But they were, you know, they were expanding and they wanted all younger people doing everything, you know, so.

[Assistant] So thinking back to the year before you went into the Peace Corps, tell us a little bit about your childhood and your education and just other experiences. The year before.


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

[User] No, no, no. He was born in 1906, died in 1994. And he married my mother's sister, who was a tad older than he, as was my mother. One year and three years. And she saved my life. If he hadn't married by the time. See, we were alone and I was doing the house for my whole teenage years from seventh grade to junior in high school. And if he hadn't have married, I would have been the little Italian girl staying home, you know, with a mustache taking care of her father, you know? It would have been rough.

[Assistant] Would you have been able to go into the Peace Corps?

[User] Oh, I wouldn't have been able to go to college. I wouldn't have gone. I wouldn't have gotten away from home, you know. I'm sure I'm sure I wouldn't have. I'm sure I wouldn't have. So and I probably would not have, you know, the mentality of that. I wouldn't have wanted to. I might have wanted to, but I wouldn't have thought it was my place to, you know. I was, you know, I did go to Catholic schools all the time. And when you're brought up with the nuns, you do what you're told, you know. That's something you can't break away from. So I don't think I would have done it to him and left him alone. So it was wonderful. It was wonderful.

[Assistant] Can you tell me a little bit more about the project that you said Brother Ryan had at Marquette University? What was it? What kind of preparation for Peace Corps was it?

[User] Oh, it was fierce.

[Assistant] Was it just preparing people for that one country?


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

[User] Yes. And Grover was, Grover was so insulted.

[Assistant] Oh my God, I can't believe they would even ask.

[User] Oh they did.

[Assistant] Maybe because they were thinking about the commitment that the two of you had.

[User] I doubt it. But this was 1965 this was, this was probably '64. So poor Grover, he never got over that. So that was funny, when they started asking questions about you right in the neighborhood, you know. And then you got the paper that, uh, and you know, you really just had to believe this paperwork. You couldn't get on the phone and talk to anybody, you know? So we were all, it was all set that I would go, so they give you a list of what to bring. And we bought a trunk and I gave up my room at the boarding, you know, at the Gass' house, Celeste Gass. And I guess I came home. But my mother was not one for, um. First of all, they had a little house and they didn't have a basement, and there wasn't much for storage, storing things. And so, you know, she didn't want my boots there. So I moved away with just everything I owned with me and I gave. I was living in an apartment. That's not true that I left at. I was living in an apartment alone in Menominee Falls, Wisconsin, where I was teaching. That's true, I guess. And I did have to give some furniture away. I gave some beautiful tables I had to a girlfriend of mine to keep for me till I got back. And that was a little tacky, but she didn't want them back.

[Assistant] Of course not.


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

[User] No, these were dentists. They would send us all of us, all the volunteers in who had fillings, and they'd take them out and redo them.

[Assistant] So they'd redo them.

[User] Yeah, they take out your fillings and redo them. So 20 years later, the enamel on my teeth all fell off and I had to have crowns. Eight hundred dollars crowns they started at, and now there are seventeen hundred dollars and I feel like billing the government for those because they really were the cause of the problem. So on some days we went to the dentist. And then of course, we got all the shots, gamma globulin, and we got all of that, according to weight, how much we weighed. And we really had a wonderful time. We had a wonderful, wonderful time.

[Assistant] How long was that?

[User] It was three months, it was three months. It was from January, February, March and April. And then we went a fourth month in Puerto Rico. Utilization went to Puerto Rico. The teachers went to Puerto Rico to work with the school system. And it was, the whole thing was a wonderful experience, we met marvelous people, we made good friends. The, uh, you know, there were a couple of black people. There were a lot of Jews because, you know, they're all interested in this thing. And of course, Vietnam was looming and there were a couple of draft people in there. But uh, they were all wonderful people.

[Assistant] People who wanted to dodge the draft?


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

[User] Yeah, they take out your fillings and redo them. So 20 years later, the enamel on my teeth all fell off and I had to have crowns. Eight hundred dollars crowns they started at, and now there are seventeen hundred dollars and I feel like billing the government for those because they really were the cause of the problem. So on some days we went to the dentist. And then of course, we got all the shots, gamma globulin, and we got all of that, according to weight, how much we weighed. And we really had a wonderful time. We had a wonderful, wonderful time.

[Assistant] How long was that?

[User] It was three months, it was three months. It was from January, February, March and April. And then we went a fourth month in Puerto Rico. Utilization went to Puerto Rico. The teachers went to Puerto Rico to work with the school system. And it was, the whole thing was a wonderful experience, we met marvelous people, we made good friends. The, uh, you know, there were a couple of black people. There were a lot of Jews because, you know, they're all interested in this thing. And of course, Vietnam was looming and there were a couple of draft people in there. But uh, they were all wonderful people.

[Assistant] People who wanted to dodge the draft?

[User] Well, yeah, either dodge it or prolong it, you know?

[Assistant] Yeah. Wow. So you were in Puerto Rico for a month learning about the school system and obviously using your Spanish?


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

[User] Well, yeah, either dodge it or prolong it, you know?

[Assistant] Yeah. Wow. So you were in Puerto Rico for a month learning about the school system and obviously using your Spanish?

[User] Oh, sure, we lived with. Peggy and I, whom I see all the time, and Corky. Oh, was Corky with us? No, Peggy and I were there. We lived with two other girls, but it was two American girls who were doing some other kind of missionary work there, some kind of missionary work. But we worked with the school board and the school teachers, and we did our practice run really there and we made friends with the Department of Education, you know?

[Assistant] Yeah.

[User] But we had our practice run there. That's where we got. And then on the 31st of May, we flew out of Puerto Rico into. Oh no, no, you know what we did? We, um, you know, I don't remember. We got a home leave in there. I think maybe after Puerto Rico, we went home.

[Assistant] Mm hmm. For how long?


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

[User] But we had our practice run there. That's where we got. And then on the 31st of May, we flew out of Puerto Rico into. Oh no, no, you know what we did? We, um, you know, I don't remember. We got a home leave in there. I think maybe after Puerto Rico, we went home.

[Assistant] Mm hmm. For how long?

[User] I don't know, maybe a week. What's that, your phone?

[Assistant] Yeah.

[User] We went home to pack, you know, to get our trunk ready and put our sneakers in. And, you know, we were told what we would need.

[Assistant] You didn't take that to Los Angeles with you?


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

[User] I don't know, maybe a week. What's that, your phone?

[Assistant] Yeah.

[User] We went home to pack, you know, to get our trunk ready and put our sneakers in. And, you know, we were told what we would need.

[Assistant] You didn't take that to Los Angeles with you?

[User] Oh, no, no, no. We just took what we needed for three months.

[Assistant] So it was like homely for roughly about a week.


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

[User] We went home to pack, you know, to get our trunk ready and put our sneakers in. And, you know, we were told what we would need.

[Assistant] You didn't take that to Los Angeles with you?

[User] Oh, no, no, no. We just took what we needed for three months.

[Assistant] So it was like homely for roughly about a week.

[User] A week, yeah. And to say goodbye to people and everything.

[Assistant] Was there anybody who didn't go after they went home?


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

[User] A week, yeah. And to say goodbye to people and everything.

[Assistant] Was there anybody who didn't go after they went home?

[User] No.

[Assistant] Oh, OK.

[User] I don't remember that.

[Assistant] So tell us a little bit about specifically what you did. Where were you located in Colombia and what was your specific job? What would you do on a daily basis?