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

[User] Yes, a map of Metro. We were going to restaurants and bars, generally in two and threes. Generally you don't go out alone. I actually felt safer in Moscow than I would in downtown Houston at night alone, as an example. We know a lot more people there now. There are a lot more Americans, a lot bigger infrastructure, as well. There are a lot more places to eat. The overall economy over there, I think, just from the surface, seems better. Every time I fly into the airport I see more signs in English. I see more things being advertised. I see more stuff in stores. So it's not the same place at all. It's not at all the same as it was when I first there.

[Assistant] In just a short amount of time.

[User] Just a short amount of time, five years or so. The ruble has changed by a factor of twenty or so since I first went there.

[Assistant] How long were you there when you stayed? Did it vary?

[User] It varied. Typically it was about ten days. Then this past February and March, I was there for a month. We started doing a little longer rotations, where we actually put flight directors over there for a month at a time. Mark Krishish [phonetic] went for the first one in January. I went in February. Mark Farring [phonetic] went after I did. Then Bill Reeves was the last one. Right now John Curry's in Moscow, another retroactive flight director. He was there for a different job, now he's a flight director. So he at least has the title right now. We're going to keep people there for probably several more months. John's coming back, I think, in the next week or so.

[Assistant] How was it from just staying a few days to a month?


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

[User] You make it home. That's the transition you have. I enjoyed Moscow. Moscow's a nice place to visit. It's a fascinating city. There's an enormous amount of culture in Moscow. There's a lot of things to do. It's only problem is, it's not here. Friends and family are still here. And, okay, you make new friends, but you still have more friends here than you do in Moscow and you still have all your family here, of course.

[Assistant] Was there winter and summer?

[User] I've not been there in the real heat of the summer. I have been there in the dead of the winter, twice. I've been there in spring and fall, when it was moderately cold. I have not been there in some of the 90-degree days that they had. Last week they had some really scorcher days. Except unlike Houston, Moscow doesn't have any air-conditioning, so it really gets kind of miserable, but it doesn't last very long.

[Assistant] That's the good news.

[User] Miserable while it happens.

[Assistant] Well, your new duties, or maybe I should say your current duties, will take you into the International Space Station, Phase Two. You feel your experience with Shuttle-Mir and Phase One Program has been beneficial to lead you into that?


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

[User] Yes, Victor's got a deputy, a recently assigned deputy, about a year and a half ago, Alexander Kotov [phonetic]. Before that, his deputy was the cosmonaut Sergei Krikalev. Sergei, I think, is clearly being groomed. He's a very, very smart man. I expect him to take either Blagov's place or Soloviev's place, quite frankly. Wouldn't be surprised to see that happen. So they're grooming people. They also just hired a whole bunch of new people to help support the Mir Program and the Station Program. That's been one of my major worries. I see them grooming someone to replace Victor or Vladimir. I didn't see that they were grooming anyone to replace the replacements. So is there a pipeline of people here or not? But I think there are a couple of people being groomed, yes, to take some of these top jobs.

[Assistant] They're not five years younger than the guy who's getting ready to retire? [Laughter]

[User] No, but they're probably--I'd have to look it up--Kotov's in his forties. Victor is sixty-two.

[Assistant] I figured they're not young men.

[User] No, they're not twenty-year-olds. But Kotov's got another ten or fifteen years, certainly, in front of him. And Victor's sixty-two. Now, how long Victor keep going, I don't know. He appears to be in excellent health, and I suspect he will keep going quite a while.

[Assistant] We met with some of the Russians in Florida, so that's why we know something about it. That's why I sort of light up when you talk about these--


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

[User] No, but they're probably--I'd have to look it up--Kotov's in his forties. Victor is sixty-two.

[Assistant] I figured they're not young men.

[User] No, they're not twenty-year-olds. But Kotov's got another ten or fifteen years, certainly, in front of him. And Victor's sixty-two. Now, how long Victor keep going, I don't know. He appears to be in excellent health, and I suspect he will keep going quite a while.

[Assistant] We met with some of the Russians in Florida, so that's why we know something about it. That's why I sort of light up when you talk about these--

[User] Well, Blagov was there for the launch, because he came up here after the launch.

[Assistant] We did get to meet him and did interview him. He had wonderful things to say about the American flight directors. So we'll have to share that with you at another time, when you've got more time.


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

[User] Ask away. None of this is scripted, so I’m winging it here.

[Assistant] A lot of really interesting insights from your experience. You talked about those four guiding concepts you put in the original COTS Announcement: 1) intellectual property, 2) not so much government supervision, 3) long contract runway, 4) no equity. Did you also work on the [COTS Round 2] Announcement when some of the remaining funding from RpK was eventually awarded to Orbital?

[User] I did.

[Assistant] Were there any adjustments that you made to that Announcement based on things you may have learned from that first round?

[User] That’s a good question. Nothing really jumps out. I really think it was just an opportunity for the COTS team to reinforce the four guiding concepts that we’d previously written down. And when RpK didn’t work out —we had to use the planned off ramp. This happens in Silicon Valley all the time. You fund three things and one of them doesn’t work. You need to be able to pull that funding. People can’t be shocked by that. You need to put the money into a company that is working.\n\n It was a reinforcement for the COTS team that oh, this wasn’t just a theoretical situation. That things sometimes fail. It was real, it failed. We had the provision in place to go out and reallocate that money to a different company. We lost nine months or so because we had to go through the re-selection process, but I don’t remember that second contract as being that difficult or that much of a change. It was basically just a reinforcement of the four guiding concepts we had the first time around. Again, it’s been six years so my memory may not be perfect. I’m happy to have Alan or Valin or Mike or Dennis correct me if I’m remembering wrongly, but that’s what I recall.

[Assistant] That’s interesting, because in The Innovator’s Dilemma he talks about having to be willing to accept risk. Invest small amounts, but then have reserves to contribute to the more successful ventures.


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

[User] I did.

[Assistant] Were there any adjustments that you made to that Announcement based on things you may have learned from that first round?

[User] That’s a good question. Nothing really jumps out. I really think it was just an opportunity for the COTS team to reinforce the four guiding concepts that we’d previously written down. And when RpK didn’t work out —we had to use the planned off ramp. This happens in Silicon Valley all the time. You fund three things and one of them doesn’t work. You need to be able to pull that funding. People can’t be shocked by that. You need to put the money into a company that is working.\n\n It was a reinforcement for the COTS team that oh, this wasn’t just a theoretical situation. That things sometimes fail. It was real, it failed. We had the provision in place to go out and reallocate that money to a different company. We lost nine months or so because we had to go through the re-selection process, but I don’t remember that second contract as being that difficult or that much of a change. It was basically just a reinforcement of the four guiding concepts we had the first time around. Again, it’s been six years so my memory may not be perfect. I’m happy to have Alan or Valin or Mike or Dennis correct me if I’m remembering wrongly, but that’s what I recall.

[Assistant] That’s interesting, because in The Innovator’s Dilemma he talks about having to be willing to accept risk. Invest small amounts, but then have reserves to contribute to the more successful ventures.

[User] Actually I’ve seen Clayton a couple times, but I’ve never told him this story. He was also a White House Fellow. I think he would enjoy hearing how his book was used in a very effective way.

[Assistant] Going back to the question of markets, one of the other things Clayton said was that disruptive technology markets are not only unknown, but unknowable. I’m curious to know more specifically what types of markets have opened up, even some that maybe the companies had no idea others were looking for these types of services.


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

[User] That was a hint. So I showed up. So it was not unusual to get these calls about what time the team was going to meet, and so the day that they made the announcements, I get a message from Mr. Abbey, and I called back, not knowing which way it’s going to go, and he said, “How would you like to move your office down the hall?”\n\n I knew immediately what that meant, and I said, “Yes, sir, that sounds like a good move.” And that’s how I found out.

[Assistant] When you told your family, what was their reaction?

[User] Very excited. Very excited. My parents have been supportive of everything I’ve done. They were supportive of all of us. They just wanted us to turn out to be good citizens, to do the best job we could, and be productive. So the fact that I was able to do something I wanted to do was exciting to them. They’ve always been supportive.

[Assistant] Was there any sort of interest in your small Washington town over the fact that you were selected as an astronaut?

[User] Oh yes. Oh yes. There was a lot of press interest, but I didn’t really go back there in any kind of official capacity until after my first flight, and then I got to lead a parade. [Laughs]

[Assistant] That’s pretty big.


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

[User] Very excited. Very excited. My parents have been supportive of everything I’ve done. They were supportive of all of us. They just wanted us to turn out to be good citizens, to do the best job we could, and be productive. So the fact that I was able to do something I wanted to do was exciting to them. They’ve always been supportive.

[Assistant] Was there any sort of interest in your small Washington town over the fact that you were selected as an astronaut?

[User] Oh yes. Oh yes. There was a lot of press interest, but I didn’t really go back there in any kind of official capacity until after my first flight, and then I got to lead a parade. [Laughs]

[Assistant] That’s pretty big.

[User] It’s a small town, you know, so it’s one street up and one street down. It didn’t take very long.

[Assistant] Can you tell us a little bit about the training that you underwent during your AsCan [Astronaut Candidate] days?


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

[User] It was very high, but not for always the right reasons. [Laughs] We always try to promote the research we do in space, but press in any country, depending on how articulate they are, don’t always understand that aspect of it, so they then focus on the other sides, the personal part of it, and of course, the personalities of the German crew members were very much in the news and so forth. I’ll never forget my first crew press conference, and probably some of those crew members remember it as well. I had an interviewer, a reporter in [West] Germany, ask me what I thought of Dallas, and I said, “Well, you know, I’ve only visited once or twice, but I hear it’s a pretty city.” Well, I did not know that the most popular show in [West] Germany in 1984 was Dallas with what’s-his-name, T. J., whatever.

[Assistant] I just remember J. R. Ewing.

[User] J. R. Ewing. So he looks at me. He says, “No, no, I mean the TV show.”\n\n And I said, “I’ve never seen it.” And he couldn’t believe that, coming from America, I had never watched Dallas with J. R. Ewing. But, you know, I was busy. [Laughs]

[Assistant] Busy traveling all over Europe.

[User] Right.

[Assistant] Well, I’m wondering, would you like to talk a little bit about the mission, or should we wait to talk about the mission till next time?


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

[User] J. R. Ewing. So he looks at me. He says, “No, no, I mean the TV show.”\n\n And I said, “I’ve never seen it.” And he couldn’t believe that, coming from America, I had never watched Dallas with J. R. Ewing. But, you know, I was busy. [Laughs]

[Assistant] Busy traveling all over Europe.

[User] Right.

[Assistant] Well, I’m wondering, would you like to talk a little bit about the mission, or should we wait to talk about the mission till next time?

[User] Why don’t we go ahead and wait, just because my voice is getting a little—

[Assistant] Sure. Sure. Well, thank you for coming by today.


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

[User] Yes, there was a Test Division that tested hardware, and there was an Operations Group that did all the planning; where do we need the ships, how many ships, what kind of support do you need here, make arrangements for the helicopters and the aircraft and that sort of thing. That was a branch in itself.\n\n My branch, that I was in the whole time I was in Landing and Recovery, had kind of bits and pieces of Hardware and bits and pieces of the Operations, and, because we were probably, in most cases, the youngest guys, we got the ship duty more than other people. So it was an organization of Systems, Operations, and Test, and then there was one Training Branch that their responsibilities was to take all this information and turn it into manuals that you could hand to a Navy guy that was going to handle the spacecraft on board the ship, and say, “Here’s the things you need to know to stay safe.” So that’s kind of how we were organized.\n\n The Division Chief at that time was Jerry [Jerome B.] Hammack. Jerry—interesting, interesting history. He’s one of the people that had his name on the patent for both the Mercury and Gemini spacecraft, and Jerry was a very interesting man to know. The reason I kind of singled him out, he and I have crossed paths over the years multiple times. He’s in his eighties today, and he taught me a lot of things when I came to work for NASA, and I’m teaching him to fly model airplanes now, so it’s kind of an interesting cycle of life here.

[Assistant] Get to teach the teacher.

[User] That’s right.

[Assistant] Well, you mentioned the ADDRS, the drift recovery system.

[User] Aircraft Deployed Drift Reduction System.

[Assistant] Reduction System—as one of the pieces of hardware that you worked on. Were there other types of hardware that you can recall that you’d like to share some information about?


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

[User] That’s right.

[Assistant] Well, you mentioned the ADDRS, the drift recovery system.

[User] Aircraft Deployed Drift Reduction System.

[Assistant] Reduction System—as one of the pieces of hardware that you worked on. Were there other types of hardware that you can recall that you’d like to share some information about?

[User] On the hardware I actually worked on, that grapple fixture that went with the ADDRS, and then the parachute system and the line system, all of that together is an integrated system I worked on. But, there were even some less glamorous things, like the sewer system on the Mobile Quarantine Facility. How do you drain the travel trailer tanks and protect the outside environment? We designed a set of holding tanks that had very specialized filters on it. We could pump the waste out of the trailer into these holding tanks, and then we shipped the whole thing, these holding tanks, back to Houston. They stayed in quarantine with the trailer until everything was released, and then they were dumped just like you would dump a travel trailer at a station.\n\n So I worked on those. I worked on the power system for the Mobile Quarantine Facility, integrating the diesel generators into the electrical system of the trailer, and then doing the integration of the other transformer devices that took these different voltages. So I worked on that. What other hardware? That was principally the hardware that I actually had a design hand in. A lot of little things associated with the trailer that once we took delivery of it, it didn’t work exactly like it ought to work, and so we did a lot of interim design and fix on the trailers before we ever used them on Apollo 11 and 12.

[Assistant] Was that done on site, those changes?


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

[User] When I first moved here, I had a cousin who lived here in Houston. He lived about at Broadway [Street], I guess. I stayed with he and his wife for a week or so, trying to figure out where I wanted to live. I got down here a week before I was supposed to report. Naïvely, I drove around where my cousin said all the nice apartments were, and there was one that says “ten minutes from NASA,” and it was really a cool-looking apartment complex. It was right at the end of Park Place on Texas [Highway] 3. If you’re familiar with the area, that’s about fourteen miles or thirteen miles up the road, and you could might be able to make it to NASA in ten minutes at a hundred miles an hour.\n\n But, I believed them. I didn’t drive out there. So the first day I said, “Well, I’m going to give myself a little extra time,” and I left thirty minutes early, because I was supposed to be at Ellington. That’s where the administrative offices were was at Ellington Air Force Base, and that’s where you checked in and got your badge and all of that stuff. Well, I’m sure glad I left thirty minutes early, because I just barely made it to my check-in time.\n\n I lived in that apartment complex for six months, and then I moved to the Balboa [apartment complex] in Nassau Bay [Texas]. Then I eventually bought a house in Clear Lake City [Texas] after I got married, in ’71, I guess.

[Assistant] Well, we’ve been going for a couple of hours.

[User] Oh, have we?

[Assistant] Do you want to break for today?

[User] Yes, I probably ought to.

[Assistant] Okay. We can pick up there and talk a little bit more about those early days and the other missions that you worked on.